May 16, 2024
New York
"Loki."
Ji-pyeong perched his hands on his hips.
"Get out of the suitcase."
Two yellow eyes peered out from just above the edge of his luggage. Ji-pyeong reached inside and picked the black cat up despite a plaintive meow.
He folded him close to his chest.
"I know you hate it."
The black fur was velvet against Ji-pyeong's face.
"But just humor me for a second"
Loki immediately started squirming.
"Fine. But you won't see me for a while buddy."
Ji-pyeong placed Loki on the bed. And then he heard a low whine. Young-shil jumped onto the bed, sending the cat flying off of it. The hound pawed the air with a mournful expression. Ji-pyeong smiled sadly as he scratched between his ears. They flopped over in unequal proportions; usually giving the impression that Young-shil was asking a question. Today the question was somber.
"You know don't you, Young-shil?"
A cold wet nose pushed up into the palm of his hand.
"Yep, I'm leaving again."
Ji-pyeong's shoulders sagged. And then he sat down on the corner of the bed with a sigh. Young-shil's head immediately came to rest on his thigh.
"What the fuck am I doing, Young-shil?"
But just like Ji-pyeong, the dog did not have an explanation.
He had taken a red eye from Palo Alto this morning. By the time his cab fought the morning traffic into Manhattan, Mi-rae was already at her monthly partnership meeting. Ji-pyeong spent several hours in the office connecting with staff about his upcoming European investor meetings while Mi-rae walked clients from Tokyo through the results of a due diligence review. In just a few hours his flight would leave for Frankfurt for a three week trip. But he had to see her on this day.
"I met her a year ago today."
Ji-pyeong looked at the framed photograph of Mi-rae and him on her nightstand. Rocks and a small sliver of blue sky were behind their smiling faces. Just below was a Forbes magazine feature open to a photograph of him in a pinstripe suit on the rooftop of Birdhouse's Manhattan office.
She must have been reading it last night.
The juxtaposition of the two photographs irked him. One man was beaming with joy. The other projected confidence and command. He felt like neither of them. This Han Ji-pyeong was sitting on a bed listless and talking to his dog while packing for yet another trip that he was dreading.
Three weeks.
"I will be gone for as long as the time we spent together before we got married."
He looked down at Young-shil. The dog's eyebrows took turns shifting up and down in sympathy. Ji-pyeong gently rubbed the top of Young-shil's head. And then he grew lost in thought among the stacked dress shirts, piles of socks, and suits ensconced in crinkling plastic.
"I waited my whole life for a family. And now all I do is say goodbye."
Last week, Ji-pyeong turned thirty nine years old. The final birthday of his thirties had forced him to take stock of himself. He supposed most men would be thrilled to be a CEO of a half billion dollar company by age forty. And yet he found himself measuring his life against a different marker. The man who never had anyone with whom to share his birthday was finally side by side with his family on the seventh of May. But as he sat next to Mi-rae under the boughs of a willow tree that had dug its roots into his memory as much as the soil of Central Park, Ji-pyeong felt like crying. Because it was so rare to sit beside his beloved wife at all.
