Meet Me in the Afterglow (Purinz/Chaewon x Yunjin)

Broken Promises

THEN.

Somehow, life goes on.

The world, as it turns out, doesn't stop just because your heart breaks. It may have come to an abrupt halt for Yunjin, but for everyone else it's still spinning on, the sun rising and setting, the moon waxing and waning.

So summer ends, Yunjin goes back to Tokyo, and life goes on.

Days pass. Then weeks. Then months.

Yunjin always feels like she's a little out of sync, drifting through the day untethered, just trying to breathe around the shrapnel lodged in her chest. The days blur together into a monotonous, desaturated routine: wake up, go to class, come home, study, go to sleep. Repeat.

There are so many gaps now, empty stretches of time that would have once been filled with Chaewon, with the sound of her voice through the phone's loudspeaker, FaceTiming her, watching some movie on Netflix with her, the familiar sound of her breathing slowly lulling Yunjin to sleep.

Now they're all just filled with silence.

It's worse at night. She can avoid thinking about Chaewon while she's awake but when she sleeps, Chaewon is there in her dreams, and Yunjin wakes up in the morning, disoriented and head still slow from sleep and reaching for the empty space beside her before she remembers all over again.

A full week after the break up, Yunjin finally manages to muster up the courage to scour her apartment for various photos and keepsakes and Chaewon's belongings that she left back in May, anything even remotely affiliated with Chaewon, and packs them all up into a cardboard box that she then shoves to the very back of her tiny hall closet and vows to never look at it again.

(At first, she hadn't dared touch anything, some delusional heartbroken part of her convinced that if Chaewon's belongings stayed where they were, scattered around Yunjin's apartment, then Chaewon would call her and tell her they made a mistake. But that never happened.)

She had thought it might help, might be cathartic or whatever self-help garbage Minjeong would tell her, might help her stop thinking about Chaewon approximately two thousand times per hour, but afterwards, all Yunjin can see are yet more gaps in her life that Chaewon once filled; an empty space in her drawer where one of Chaewon's hoodies and one of her tshirts once sat, a second empty toothbrush holder in the bathroom, the empty gap in the refrigerator where she had a leftover stash of the cherry soda that Chaewon likes.

Yunjin never quite manages to find the courage to just throw the box out, or mail it back to Korea, or give it to Sakura or Minjeong to pass on when they come to visit her in November and spend the entire time tiptoeing around saying Chaewon's name.

Maybe a tiny, masochistic part of her just doesn't want to erase the proof that Chaewon was once hers, that Chaewon was ever really here. Because how did it even happen? How did she go from telling Chaewon my future includes you and then telling Chaewon less than a year later what is there even left to fight for?

—

With each month that passes, Yunjin can't help but start to wonder if this is just how she's always going to feel from now on, like someone has punched a hole through her ribcage and ripped her heart out of her chest, because all of her attempts to get over Chaewon, none of them have worked.

Letting herself think about Chaewon in the hopes that it would eventually render her numb to the pain hasn't worked, and neither has actively trying to not think about Chaewon in an attempt to avoid the still-fresh pain. At night, she lies awake in her bed and rewinds and replays every memory she has of Chaewon until they all blur together into a silver haze, hoping that in the morning they'll have burned away entirely.