the quiet part

by corpus (balgeun)

Summary:

Saerom travels Europe.

The first time she realizes she hasn’t spoken in more than twelve hours is somewhere between Salzburg and Munich.

She watches the flatlands roll by, green and sheep-speckled. A toddler a few seats ahead shrieks, and a man with a very loud zipper keeps getting into his backpack. She thinks about her hostel in Vienna, where the door didn’t lock properly unless you kicked it just right. She had learned that on night two. Kicked it gently, like a memory. Then she had told no one. Not the Swedish girl with glitter under her eyes, not the couple from Manila who only spoke in soft, conspiratorial Filipino. She had made herself very small and very quiet and ate yogurt on the top bunk while they made plans for the opera.

She doesn’t remember the last time she told someone her name out loud.

It’s strange, because she’s never felt so much like herself. She keeps opening Google Maps with no intention of navigating. She just likes watching the blue dot pulse. She checks the time. Then the date. She tries to remember how many days it’s been. She thinks it’s nine. Or maybe ten. Hayoung texted on day three. Are you lonely yet? with a picture of her cat. She hadn’t replied, but she thought about it every time she passed a mother tugging a kid’s wrist too hard, or when she bought fruit in a language she couldn’t pronounce.

She likes buying fruit. It makes her feel functional.

The train hums. She thinks of Salzburg like a dream she half-slept through. Everything there had been Mozart and horses. Too polished. She liked Budapest better. There had been a woman selling honey in the rain who gave her a free sample and told her she looked like someone in a movie. She didn’t correct her. It felt nice to imagine she could be anyone.

She thinks about that a lot. Who she could be. She’s already been so many different versions of herself in these cities—silent museum girl, confused ticket machine girl, impulsive pretzel buyer, lonely canal-walker. So far from the person she was back in Seoul: idol, k-pop girl group leader, dancer, singer, model, almost a star. In Prague she sat on the Charles Bridge at 5 a.m. and cried for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand. She wrote a note in her phone that just said: You’re not sad, you’re expanding. She didn’t believe it then. Maybe she still doesn’t. But she liked the sound of it, like a good song lyric.

The train tilts. She almost drops her phone. There’s a woman across from her doing a crossword puzzle. They haven’t made eye contact the entire ride. This makes her feel safe for reasons she doesn’t try to name.

Sometimes she wonders if she’s running away. That would be the easiest to understand. To understand as the ending. Hasn’t it ended, anyway? Where else to go? Other times she thinks she’s running toward something, though she doesn’t know what that would be. Some enormous version of herself, maybe. Someone who isn’t scared of wrong trains or quiet dinners or standing in line at a bakery without knowing how to say the word for “cheese.” Someone who doesn’t whisper “sorry” to the world every time she takes up space and expects that space to still be there the morning after.

She looks out the window again. The green gives way to grey. Industrial outskirts, clusters of shipping containers. They must be near the station.

She presses her forehead against the glass. Sees herself reflected—blurry, half-transparent, hair pulled back with the red elastic that has forever been on her wrist since she departed from Incheon. And when was that?

She watches her own mouth move as she whispers, “Munich.”

Just to hear it.