Chapter Text
我只杀死我的悲伤，以及你的。
I am not a bad person.
I only kill...
My sadness.
And yours too.
I will bring you back whole.
That is my promise to you.
My heart is only yours,
even if you eat it.
Dream One · 一 · Mystery
· i ·
The insomnia began that night, and Jeung Yoonchae did not notice it beginning. She told herself it was only the exhaustion of the stage but when she finally closed her eyes, her consciousness flowed somewhere else entirely. She did not rest, she merely drifted off into judgement.
The first time was in early March, not yet four days after the incident.
The incident was, by any measure, unremarkable: after rehearsal the six of them had scattered through the break room, and Yoonchae was in the corner scrolling her phone when Megan passed by, stopped for no discernible reason, looked down at her, and smiled. Megan said, "Yoonchae, you danced well today," and walked away.
Just that. Nothing more than that.
And yet Yoonchae remained standing, feeling her heart beat out of her chest. She could not count how many times Megan had said something similar to her, how many times she had simply sat beside her when things were difficult and said nothing at all, only stayed. How troublesome that Megan was this way with everyone. Megan was generous toward the whole world; her warmth was even-handed, partial to no one. Yoonchae had no reason to consider herself different. And yet—
And yet her heart simply would not believe it.
This was Yoonchae's affliction: she did not know whether Megan loved her, and so she began to doubt everything, and so the things that had once been sweet began to taste bitter, and so each night, fear consumed her whole.
∅
· ii ·
There was no light at the beginning of the dream.
There were four walls, but no door, no window, and the walls were white, white of bone, the white of a color that has had all other color steamed out of it. Yoonchae stood in the center, barefoot on the floor. She was still in her practice clothes, sweat not yet dry. She knew she was dreaming, but knowing gave her no comfort, akin to knowing a blade is about to fall does not diminish the pain of its falling.
A table appeared, also white, appearing before her without explanation. On it sat a porcelain bowl, mouth facing upward, with something inside. Yoonchae drew closer, looked down, and felt her entire inside shuffle within itself.
It was meat.
Cut with precision, a few thin slices, their edges pink; the grain fine, threaded with a small amount of fat. Yoonchae recognized this meat though not for the reason you might think. She had never truly seen this before. She simply knew where it had come from. She simply knew in that same manner how one knows things in dreams without any process of deduction. It was the flesh from the inside of her own thigh. It was hers.
She raised her right hand and found a pair of chopsticks already in her palm. Bamboo, old, etched with fine cracks.
Yoonchae did not use the chopsticks at first. She only stood and looked at the meat in the bowl, feeling a sensation beyond revulsion move through her. It was an inexpressible longing, or more precisely, a sense of necessity, as though her body already knew what was about to happen and had already accepted it.
Then Megan appeared.
Not through any door, because there was no door. She was simply present on the other side of the table, as though this white room had always contained her and she had only just developed into visibility. She wore ordinary clothes and her face held nothing, which is not to say it was blank. It was merely… nothing. Megan had brows unfurrowed, eyes unblinking, simply watching.
She was watching Yoonchae.
Yoonchae's hand began to tremble, the chopsticks shivering between her fingers. She wanted to speak, but her mouth opened and produced nothing; she did not know what to say. She had too many things she wanted to ask Megan, and yet in the dream, in this white room, every question had thickened to paste and had spawned in her throat, blocking everything.
Megan stepped closer to the table, glanced once at the meat in the bowl, then raised her eyes back to Yoonchae. Her expression did not change—that stillness Yoonchae could never decipher, like the surface of calm water, depth unknown, no way to tell whether there were fish beneath, whether the stillness was genuine or deceptive.
"Won't you eat?" Megan said, in her normal voice. Yes, why wouldn't this be normal?
Yoonchae lifted the chopsticks and picked up a slice of meat. Her hand had stopped trembling without her noticing. The slice swayed slightly between the chopsticks, soft, still warm, and she could feel that warmth travel through the bamboo into her fingertips.
She put it in her mouth.
The taste was salt, a little iron. Yoonchae chewed, then swallowed. She watched Megan the entire time. Megan watched her back.
The moment it went down, she cried. Tears fell down one by one, staining the pure white tablecloth beneath her. It did not hurt. Why did it not hurt? To answer that question, Yoonchae understood that she cried for she was willing. She was willing to feed herself to Megan piece by piece, willing to sit at this white table and keep eating, keep eating until nothing of herself remained, if only Megan would continue to look at her that way, if only that gaze would hold even a thread of real love.
Chinese philosophy contains the word shénmì—mystery—but its original meaning is heavier than its contemporary usage. Shén is spirit, the unseen thing that dwells within the body's matter; mì is concealment, occlusion, the state of not being illuminated. Mystery is not something others forbid you to see—it is something that exists in darkness by its own nature, and the closer you approach, the more it blurs.
Yoonchae's feeling for Megan was exactly this.
She loved Megan—this she had known for a long time. It is like counting her own fingers, requiring no confirmation. However, what Megan felt toward her was an entire mystery. Megan was not hiding anything deliberately, no, no, that is not the case. Yoonchae herself lacked the courage to walk into it, to illuminate that darkness, because she was too afraid that if she cast light inside she would find nothing, only an empty room.
So she remained outside, waiting, and kept chewing over her own feelings, the way she had chewed that meat in the dream, eating it again and again until she no longer knew what she was eating.
Where Qi gathers, pain is born—Chinese medicine holds that stagnant Qi produces pain, that what does not flow does not flow without consequence. Yoonchae's Qi was blocked in her chest, blocked in that question she could not bring herself to speak aloud, and with each day it blocked a little more, the pain a little deeper.
· iii ·
The dream was not over. Yoonchae had eaten three slices and stopped, not because she was sated but because she suddenly noticed that across the table, Megan's eyes had gone red.
This detail stopped the chopsticks mid-air. Megan had always cried, with other members joking about needing to compose her. In this dream, in the dark, she only fell silent, pressing everything down. Tears were gathering along Megan's lower lids, only resting there as though waiting for a signal.
Yoonchae set down the chopsticks, stepped forward, reached out, wanting to touch Megan's face. But as her hand was about to reach it—
She woke.
5:04 in the morning. The dormitory ceiling. Yoonchae stared upward for a long time. She had not been allowed to touch that face, had not been allowed to see whether that drop would fall.
She placed her hand on her chest and felt her heartbeat. It was normal. She is alive. Her hands travel down her body. Her thighs were pristine.
And yet Yoonchae knew that something was consuming this heart piece by piece, and that something was what she herself had been feeding it.
∅
She closed her eyes, wanting to push the dream back into whatever place it had come from. It would not go. The white room persisted behind her eyelids, the bowl persisting, the meat persisting, and Megan's eyes with tears gathered but not fallen persisting most clearly of all, all too vividly. Yoonchae opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling held nothing, which helped slightly—only slightly.
There had been blood in it, she had eaten her own flesh, which should by rights have been disgusting, should have made her skin crawl, but waking she felt no such thing. Why does this feel like you are about to fall but that drop never comes? In the dream she had been willing, entirely and without coercion, even with something approaching devotion—and that was what truly pressed down on her. Because the feeling was not unfamiliar.
It was what she had been pressing down while awake. The dream had only shown it back to her.
· iv ·
Megan arrived for morning rehearsal early—earlier than Yoonchae, which was not remarkable. Megan was always this way. Still, when Yoonchae walked into the practice room, she found Megan at the mirror doing a slow stretch. Yoonchae stopped in the doorway and did not immediately go in.
Megan caught sight of her in the mirror, turned, the corners of her eyes creasing briefly, showing evident whisker dimples. "Morning."
"Morning." Yoonchae entered, put her bag in the corner, and began changing her shoes.
She did not look toward Megan, using the task of the shoes to consume all her attention. She knew Megan was still in the mirror; she knew those eyes might still be resting on her. She knew—or rather, she did not know, which was precisely the problem. She had never known what it meant when those eyes rested on her. Habit, maybe?
Done with her shoes, Yoonchae stood and went for her water bottle. Megan had turned back to the mirror and resumed her warm-up. Yoonchae took a sip of water, then went to stand beside Megan and began rotating her wrists. The two of them stood parallel, each casting a reflection, four shadows filling the lower half of the glass.
"Did you sleep well last night?" Megan asked suddenly—directed at the mirror's Yoonchae, not turning to ask.
Yoonchae's wrist stopped, just for a moment, then continued rotating. "Alright," she said.
Megan did not press further; she nodded and went back to rolling her shoulders. But just that—just the question "did you sleep well last night"—made Yoonchae's heartbeat stutter once. This was her predicament: Megan was so attentive it became impossible to determine whether that attentiveness was love or simply her nature. She asked everyone how they had slept; she remembered who needed their drinks hot and who preferred cold; she put away props after every rehearsal because she knew the next person would need to find them. Yoonchae had witnessed all of this firsthand, and so she could not isolate this particular question, could not perform any interpretation on it, could not allow it to serve as evidence of anything.
So she swallowed it, tucked it away with the meat from the dream, pressed it down into the stomach, and carried on.
During a break in rehearsal, Yoonchae sat on the floor against the wall, legs straight, eyes closed, letting her breathing slow. She did not know when she had started feeling this tired.
Megan sat down beside her. She said nothing, only sat with her phone in her hand, screen dark, not looking at it. Yoonchae opened her eyes, turned her face to glance at her, and looked back forward. In moments like this, what Yoonchae feared most and needed most was the same thing: for Megan to move closer of her own accord.
Presently, Megan's arm came to rest lightly against Yoonchae's shoulder. Yoonchae did not move. She wanted to cry but did not cry. She only closed her eyes and let the leaning continue, working not to think, not to ask the question she could never manage to voice.
Megan's shoulder was warm. That much was true.
But Yoonchae had already begun convincing herself that the warmth was only her own body temperature, acting up.
How does a person do this to themselves so efficiently? How does one take a warmth that is real and insist that it is a trick of the body? What strange and punishing machinery of the heart insists on subtracting itself from every equation, on assuming its absence even while it is present and leaning and breathing? Yoonchae was not unintelligent. And yet here she was, sitting beside the person she loved, receiving her warmth, and spending the entire time arguing herself out of it.
Yoonchae had let it take everything, piece by piece, all the way down to the heat of a living person beside her, and called the taking protection. What, then, was left? What does a person have left to give, when doubt has consumed everything she was given?
∅
The ancients said: suspicion breeds phantoms in the dark. Once doubt takes root in the heart, every shadow is a ghost.
But, alas, Yoonchae did not know this yet.
The first dream was only a beginning. The Qi had not yet dispersed; the pain had not yet reached its extreme.
She still had three dreams to dream.
Dream Two · 二 · Permanence
The river of ten thousand ages; a single thought turned to ash.
· i ·
Eleven days after the first dream, Yoonchae began keeping deliberate distance from Megan.
She stopped positioning herself beside Megan during rehearsals; at lunch she started taking the window seat, the one farthest from Megan at the table. When Megan reached out to hand her water she accepted it but immediately moved her eyes away, not lingering one extra second on that hand. When someone asked the two of them to stand together for a photo she stood, but did not lean her weight toward Megan's side, did not drift naturally close the way she once had.
She believed she was being subtle about it. She was right—the others did not notice.
Megan noticed.
Yoonchae knew Megan had noticed because once, as she was moving her eyes away, her peripheral vision caught Megan's profile, and though the face was still composed, there is no denying the hurt Yoonchae borne witness to.
She did not go over and ask Megan what was wrong. She was the source of the problem; she had no standing to ask.
Actually, even Yoonchae could not have articulated what she was hoping for as she retreated. Was she hoping Megan would give chase, come after her, forcibly close that distance, proving that the distance registered as real to Megan too—that it mattered, was intolerable? Or was she in fact conducting something crueler: a test, to see whether Megan would not chase at all, to let the not-chasing become an answer, to give herself permission to finally stop hoping? She did not know. She did not want to know.
∅
· ii ·
The night the second dream arrived, Los Angeles received one of its rare rains.
The rain hit the window glass in fragments, without rhythm, only falling because not falling would be stranger. Yoonchae fell asleep inside the rain. Then she was in that place.
There was no room in this instance. There was, however, a river—or more precisely, a riverbed nearly drained of water. She stood at its center, beneath her feet the cracked mud, the fissures mapping the face of eternity, each crack with its own direction and its own history. The reeds on both banks were gray. Above: no moon, no stars, only a dark ground tone.
Yoonchae looked at her left wrist. A cut ran across it, already open, clean and straight. Blood was flowing down freely. She stood and looked at the opening and felt no pain.
In her other hand she held a bone needle: fine, the fineness of something ground from a rib, the point sharp, threaded at the blunt end with a red string. The red string fell from her hand into a fissure in the riverbed, falling toward she knew not what, attached to she knew not what, only pulled full of tension, pulled by a weight on the other end.
She understood what she was going to do without being told, the way she had understood in the first dream that the bowl of meat was to be eaten. She pressed the needle against the skin beside the already-open cut and drew it downward. She pulled the flap of skin and muscle open, pinched it with her left hand to keep it from closing, and with the bone needle and its red string she began to sew.
To sew what?
A name.
She was embroidering Megan's name into her own flesh, writing it in its full traditional form—many strokes, each one requiring the needle to pass through living tissue, the red string pulled through, tightened, knotted, the stitches dense, the intervals between them nearly equal. Blood crept up along the string and made it redder; string and blood merged until neither could be distinguished from the other, until there was only a line of red in the flesh of her wrist, spelling out a name. She felt no pain.
∅
· iii ·
Then Megan arrived, out of the air as before, simply present on the opposite bank, the two of them separated by the cracks in the earth and by the red string hanging into the ground between them. Megan looked at her wrist; she did not open her mouth, did not say to stop, only watched. Yoonchae kept sewing.
She even raised her head and looked at Megan once—only once. She wanted to ask Megan: do you see? She was embedding Megan's name inside her own body, below skin and muscle, in a place no one else could see, because she was too afraid that name would live only in her own heart, too afraid it would receive no answer, and so she had chosen the most foolish method, the most painful method, to inscribe it somewhere she herself would always know.
Was this permanence?
Sewing a person's name into your own flesh—did that count as a kind of permanence? If she lost her memory one day, the scar would remain, the writing would remain, the scar would remember for her. Wouldn't it? But a scar remembers only shape, not feeling, not the trajectory of glances from the person whose name it carries when they turned in a doorway in the rain and looked back. So this was not permanence—it was only a false piece of evidence Yoonchae had manufactured from her own suffering, believing this would confirm something, when in fact it confirmed nothing.
Fixation is born from unwillingness to release; unwillingness to release is born from the fear of impermanence. Yoonchae clung to an answer she had not yet received, using that clinging to resist the possibility that the answer might not exist at all—and the clinging itself was the knife that was cutting her.
Megan stood across from her, neither approaching nor withdrawing. Her feet sank slightly into the mud of the riverbed, leaving two indentations; the mud was wet, wetter than it appeared, suggesting the river had not completely dried—only its surface was cracked; go deep enough and there was still water, still living things, only underground, only unseen. Yoonchae tied off the last stitch, bit through the excess string, the small severed piece falling into the cracked mud and disappearing as though it had never been. She let the flesh close over, watched the skin and muscle draw back together, the name concealing itself beneath the surface, vanishing, the exterior immaculate, whole, as though nothing had happened.
She raised her head. Megan was still there.
"Did you see?" she finally asked, and her voice was dry, what remained in a river nearly gone to nothing.
Megan did not answer. She only extended her hand, palm upward, toward Yoonchae.
Yoonchae looked at the hand and did not move. She looked down and found that the red string was still there, its other end still in the earth, still pulling at her ankle; every step forward pulled the string tighter, to the threshold of snapping without snapping. It was undeniably the worst threshold, because snapping would at least be clear, but not snapping left only suspension. Megan's hand stayed extended, waiting. Yoonchae stood where she was, unable to cross.
∅
· iv ·
When she woke the tears had already dried, but her cheeks burned with evaporated feeling. So she had cried; she had cried in the dream, and she did not remember the moment of crying, only remembered the bone needle and the red string and Megan's extended hand and the fact that she had not been able to reach it.
The curtain had been dampened by last night's rain, pressing flat against the glass. Yoonchae sat up, pulled her knees to her chest, rested her chin on her knees, and held herself in this position, feeling like some curled and unseen animal. Her left wrist held nothing, of course nothing, the skin unbroken, a little sticky from the previous night's lotion, perfectly ordinary, fully alive, entirely unrelated to that cut in the dream. Yoonchae pressed her right thumb into the skin, watched it pale, let go, watched the color return—normal, completely normal.
She thought: if the scar were real, maybe she would not have to be this uncertain.
Then she realized what she was thinking and pushed the thought down, breathed in, opened her eyes again. Today there was rehearsal. Today Megan would be there. Today they would stand before the same mirror and do the same movements and breathe the same air and then each go back separately, each sleep separately, each dream or not dream. She got up, washed her face, looked in the mirror—the person there had slightly swollen eyes; cold water pressed against them for a moment, better. She combed her hair, smoothed her fringe, and confirmed that she looked normal.
· v ·
In the practice room, Megan had arrived first—still first, always first. Yoonchae walked in, said good morning, set down her bag, changed her shoes with her eyes given to the floor, because the floor would not look at her. Megan came over, stopped beside her.
"Yoonchae," Megan said. Yoonchae looked up, met Megan's eyes for two seconds, then moved her gaze left, toward the mirror. "Mm?" she said—a dull response. Megan did not speak immediately; the silence lasted a moment. Then Megan asked: "Have you been alright lately?"
That question again. Still that question. Yoonchae nearly laughed—why do you have to ask something like this—do you know what it means when you ask that—of course she did not laugh, her mouth only pulled slightly upward. "Yeah, don't worry about me." Megan nodded, did not follow up, and turned back to her stretching. Yoonchae looked back down, and felt a fragment of her heart chip off.
Permanence—what is it? If a thing cannot continue, was it ever real? If the distance between two people can increase, does the original closeness even count? Yoonchae stood in the practice room, mirrors on every side, infinite versions of herself, infinite versions of Megan, each mirror offering a different angle, not one of them complete, not one capable of telling her the truth.
Where flow is blocked, pain arises; where pain arises, flow is further blocked. This is the cycle in Chinese medicine, the body's vicious repetition. Yoonchae's fixation and her fear fed each other: the more she feared not receiving an answer, the less she dared to ask; the less she dared to ask, the further the answer receded; the further it receded, the more afraid she became. No one came to break the cycle. Or rather, one person could break it, but Yoonchae was pushing that person further and further away, by every small means available to her, further and further, until she could barely feel the warmth of that person at all. She believed she was protecting herself. She did not know that what she was doing had another name: self-destruction.
Dream Three · 三 · Constancy
Water wears through stone not by force, but by persisting.
· i ·
By the week the third dream arrived, Yoonchae had become difficult to recognize—at least to herself.
She ate as usual, practiced as usual, smiled in front of cameras with enough conviction that she would sometimes pause after the smile fell and forget whether it had been hers or the person she was performing.
The distance between herself and Megan no longer required her active maintenance for it had already established itself, like a boundary no one built yet everyone recognized. Both of them felt it, neither of them named it. Megan still looked at her in that way only Yoonchae could receive though.
In that week, the third dream found her.
∅
· ii ·
The setting this time was a table. It was similar to the first dream's table but different. This one was old, the wood grain deep, the corners worn, a table used a long time. Yoonchae sat on one side; across from her was no one, only a bowl, dark-colored rather than white porcelain, coarse clay, containing a clear broth—pale, nearly transparent.
Yoonchae recognized that broth.
Her own bone: her third left rib, no longer inside her, removed at some point she had not witnessed, and now gone, though she felt no gap where it had been, the way the dreaming body is dishonest, permitting things to happen without providing the appropriate reactions. That rib had been placed in a pot, covered with water, slow heat applied for a very long time. Everything in the rib, all its marrow, all its minerals, passed into the water, and the water became broth, and the broth was now in the bowl on this old table in front of Yoonchae.
The bone itself was gone. Only the broth remained.
What is constancy? A bone extracted by water and time until its every quality has become another form, until its existence as a bone has dissolved, but what it has left behind persists. Is that a kind of constancy? The bone gone, the broth here still—does the bone still exist? In another form, does it still exist? Yoonchae did not know, but the question produced in her a grief more lucid than anything the dream had offered so far.
Megan appeared across the table in the same manner as before—out of nowhere, the dream granting her no need of doors. This time she was seated, both hands placed flat on the table surface, palms down. The gesture meant nothing in itself, but Yoonchae stared at those hands for a long time, because she was thinking of the second dream's hand—palm upward, the hand she had been unable to cross to. Now the palm was down as simply a presence, the presence of Megan being here.
Megan glanced at the broth, then raised her eyes to Yoonchae. This was her fate, the examination she had set for herself, with no answer key.
"Will you drink?" Megan asked.
Yoonchae looked at the bowl for a long time.
Then she lifted it and drank.
∅
· iii ·
The broth was warm. Of course it was familiar—it was drawn from her own bone, a part of her own body returning to her in another form, the complete closed loop of self-consumption, the paradox of drinking longing in and surviving from within that longing.
She drank the bowl empty.
She set the bowl down and felt, in the location of the rib that no longer existed, something like a heartbeat, the heartbeat of an absence, the gap proving it had once been there. She placed her hand over the location, through her practice shirt, through skin and subcutaneous fat, pressed once, found nothing abnormal—of course nothing; her ribs were all present, bones do not truly disappear in dreams.
Megan watched her from across the table, saying nothing.
This, Yoonchae thought, was the cruelest thing she had discovered tonight. This gaze had not changed in any way after Yoonchae had drunk the bone in—no warmer, no colder, no closer, no further, only continuing to be there, as it had always been there, as though it would continue regardless of anything Yoonchae did.
So to what degree did she need to drink herself before that gaze would hold an answer she could recognize?
The third rib was not enough—then the fourth? Simmer the fourth too, drink it down, digest it? And then? The fifth? The sixth? One by one, bowl by bowl, until the bones were gone, until she had been entirely consumed by herself in the form of broth—at that point, would there finally be one word in that gaze, saying I love you or I don't love you, letting her know what this prolonged self-extraction had been for, whether it was enough, whether it had arrived at the place she needed to reach?
You believe you have reached its boundary; the boundary beyond the boundary then reveals itself. You believe surviving one night will bring you to an end; tomorrow holds another night, the day after another, and the day after that. Constancy itself becomes a structure, one you inhabit without seeing the exit; you stop asking when it will end and only keep walking, because not walking is equally incomprehensible.
Better a brief sharp pain than a long dull one. People say this often. But for Yoonchae there was never the option of brief pain—there never had been. She had no way to speak the question on a given morning and trade that sharpness for a clear ending; she could only do this, a small mouthful at a time, consuming pieces of herself and pretending it was sustainable, pretending she still had enough bone to simmer, pretending the process itself was meaning, pretending consumption was the same thing as love.
Megan's eyes were open, still watching. Yoonchae looked down, away from that gaze, at the table surface, at the empty bowl, at the residue of broth at the bottom beginning to dry—which when dry would leave a pale stain, not visible unless you looked closely, easily mistaken for a water mark rather than what it actually was: the trace of something a girl had made from her own bone.
∅
· iv ·
This dream ended differently from the first two.
It did not freeze on a single image, did not cut away while Yoonchae was suspended in unresolved tension—this time it made her wait. The table remained, the bowl remained, Megan remained, and Yoonchae sat, waiting for something to happen, and nothing happened.
Megan across from her, sitting, watching. Yoonchae on this side, being watched, ground down by the watching, piece by piece, no blood, no trace, only growing thinner.
Then she woke.
∅
· v ·
Yoonchae lay on her side without moving. She felt her ribs—the third one on the left—felt whether it was still there.
It was. Of course it was.
Yet the sense of its absence was also there, the two sensations overlapping: it is present, it is also absent; the boundary between what was real and what the dream had been was blurrier in this moment than it should have been. Yoonchae breathed in, felt her chest expand, felt her ribs on both sides flare slightly with the breath, every one in place, no gap, no missing segment. She did not feel reassured even if the world handed her the best reassurances this way.
She got up twenty minutes early. Lying there had become more painful than moving. She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, washed her face, and the person in the mirror was a little more washed-out than yesterday's mirror person.
She slapped water on her face three times, woke up three times, woke both times into the same place—the same mirror, the same tiredness.
∅
· vi ·
That day's rehearsal was the full group, all six of them together, and there was no place to retreat to.
The choreography required the formation to stay tight; in several passages Yoonchae and Megan were within arm's reach, a distance that the movement's demands sometimes compressed further still, and she could feel the warm exhalation from Megan's breath cross her cheek. Yoonchae kept her eyes fixed on herself in the mirror directly ahead. She did not look at Megan for she already knew what would happen if she did: she would linger, would be caught again by whatever she could never finish reading in those eyes, would expend another portion of herself she could not afford today.
So she did not look, she only danced, let her body execute the choreography section by section, let muscle memory make the decisions, let movements trained into bone relieve her of the task—because her mind today she did not trust, it was too crowded in there, too disordered; trusting it might produce mistakes.
Nevertheless, at one intersection of movement, she and Megan made eye contact.
Under a second, the choreography's demanded sightline falling on the other's face—involuntary, arranged by the sequence itself. But in that under-a-second, Yoonchae saw that Megan's eyes, today, were different. It held sorrow no language could ever describe.
Yoonchae did not miss a step; she processed the moment and moved on, continued looking straight ahead. The image, however, had already been taken in, pressed into the place already straining against its capacity, together with the bone needle, the red string, the bowl of broth made from her own bone, all pressing on the boundary of that interior space.
When rehearsal ended, everyone scattered for water, towels, phones. Yoonchae walked to the corner, and sat down.
Constancy, when it comes to it, is a form of attrition.
The arm's reach in every rehearsal, the water passed each time, each time her name spoken aloud, each time those eyes resting on her and then her gaze moving away, each time this happening and her pressing it down and it happening again and her pressing it down again, day after day, week after week, all this constancy, all this attrition, all of it quietly shaving the thickness of some part of Yoonchae thinner.
Water benefits all things without competing with them, dwelling in the low places all others disdain. Water is generous to all things and contests nothing, willing to remain in the places everyone else avoids. But Yoonchae's longing was not water—it was water's opposite, it was thirst, dry, the thirst that only increases with drinking, the thirst that makes you drink knowing one mouthful is not enough, the thirst that persists after the bone has been simmered in. She was not flowing downward; she was sinking downward, sinking into a pit she had dug for herself, sinking into a depth she herself could not see the bottom of.
This was the third dimension of pain—constancy. An ember does not flash, does not leap, does not make a sound. It does, however, hold its temperature; it only refuses to go out; only, while no one is paying attention, burns through whatever is beneath your feet, layer by layer, slowly, all the way through.
Dream Four · 四 · Self-Blame
One who blames herself does not blame others;
she turns the blade inward instead,
believing this to be just,
not knowing that a blade has no eyes
and injures only the innocent self.
To indict oneself is the greatest courage in the world, and also its greatest folly.
· i ·
Before the fourth dream arrived, Yoonchae's temper broke down.
She became impatient with minor things. When someone in rehearsal misstepped on the count she bit her lip and said nothing, but her brow furrowed visibly, visible to everyone. When someone invited her out for late-night food she said "no," clean and unqualified, no explanation, no "next time"—just "no," and then looked away. She walked off in the middle of conversations because she had genuinely stopped processing the words; her attention had gone somewhere she did not know how to stop sending it, and so she simply left, and only after leaving realized it was poor behavior, but going back to explain would require energy she did not have.
The gracious term for this condition was exhausted in body and mind; the less gracious term was something she could not bring herself to articulate, because the least gracious version was she had driven herself here, and that particular truth was one of the ones she was least willing to look at directly.
Actually, it was not only small things. Once, it was Megan.
That afternoon after rehearsal everyone was drifting out, and Yoonchae was sitting on the floor adjusting her knee bands, and Megan came over and stood beside her for a moment, then crouched and picked up Yoonchae's water bottle from the floor and held it out to her. This was something Megan had done countless times; Yoonchae had accepted it every time and felt a small impact each time she did. This time, however, looking at the water bottle being offered, Yoonchae felt something she could not contain—the sensation of someone lightly pressing a place that has been in pain for too long.
She raised her head, held Megan's gaze for a moment too long. She then spoke, her voice flat enough to be cold: "I can get it myself."
Megan did not immediately withdraw her hand. She paused for two seconds—Yoonchae counted them, she counted all two seconds—then slowly set the water bottle back on the floor, stood, said nothing, and walked toward the door.
Yoonchae looked back down and resumed adjusting the knee bands, which she had finished adjusting long ago; she only needed somewhere to send her eyes. She heard the practice room door close carefully and quietly. To Yoonchae, that quietness was heavier than any sound could have been.
She did not go after her. She should have; she sat there knowing she should, but her legs did not move.
∅
· ii ·
That night, Yoonchae could not sleep. The mind refuses to stop, where closing your eyes is not in the service of rest but in the service of running something through again. She ran "I can get it myself" through her mind many times, until the words lost their sound and became lip movements, became air; then she ran through Megan's two-second pause before setting the bottle down many times, until she could reproduce the exact duration precisely; then she ran through the sound of the door closing many times, until she was no longer certain whether what she remembered was the actual sound or a version she had processed into something else.
Around two in the morning she finally slept. She was dragged under by exhaustion, no agency in it, only no longer able to hold on, sinking, and after sinking came the fourth dream.
This time: no room, no riverbed, no table.
A mirror. One large, freestanding mirror, without a wall to hang on, without a frame to contain it—only a mirror standing somewhere, that somewhere having no floor, no ceiling, only the mirror and Yoonchae, Yoonchae standing before it, the mirror showing her.
The figure in the mirror was not entirely the same as her: the outline was the same, the face the same, but she wore nothing, and she was open—literally open, her chest from collarbone to the lower edge of the ribs, from the sternum outward to both sides, the flesh already parted, like a book opened.
The skin was held back on either side by something keeping it from closing, everything inside visible: heart beating, lungs moving, liver the color of dark chestnut, stomach empty and contracted, each organ fulfilling its function, each in its proper place, nothing out of order, nothing wrong.
And yet looking at this open version of herself, Yoonchae felt something she had not felt in the previous three dreams—
Shame.
∅
· iii ·
How could you have let yourself become this way? Everything about her was honest and truly, it filled her with shame. That heart in particular, beating with a slightly irregular rhythm, the rhythm of her heart when she thought about Megan, familiar enough by now to identify those arrhythmic beats within the sea of normal ones. The mirror's heart had put this on display using that irregular rhythm to say: look, this is your truth; what you believed you were hiding is hidden in the most visible place of all, hidden in your own heartbeat.
Then Megan appeared, standing behind her, present also in the mirror, standing behind the mirror's Yoonchae, looking at the open chest.
Yoonchae wanted to turn, wanted to move that exposed chest out of Megan's sightline, but her body would not cooperate—the same way she had been unable to cross to Megan in the second dream, now she could not turn, could only face the mirror, could only watch in its surface as Megan watched everything inside her.
Megan's eyes rested on the heart—specifically on the heart, the heart with its irregular rhythm. Her brows did not lift, her mouth did not move—but Yoonchae felt that Megan already knew.
In that moment, the self-blame arrived.
She herself had brought this to its current state. Blame Megan? She could not. Megan had never done a single thing that could be called wrong—only been kind. Could she blame Megan for being so kind that judgement became impossible? This thought was cut off the moment it arose, because she heard how absurd it was; because she knew clearly that the problem was not Megan's, it was her own, that she had used the impossibility of judgement as a reason not to ask, had treated uncertainty as something she could hold indefinitely, had day by day taken something that one question could have resolved and fed it until it required four dreams to contain.
So: it was her fault.
Do you see now, do you see how you got yourself here, do you see how complex you have made something that could perhaps have been simple?
Yoonchae stood before the mirror, chest open, heart beating, Megan behind her, saying nothing.
Then Yoonchae's hand moved.
∅
· iv ·
She reached into her own open chest and found the heart, felt it beating in her palm—wet, hot, with an animal heat transcending all language and philosophy, the most primitive form of presence, the most bare proof that living was a real thing. She closed her hand gently around it, letting it continue beating in her palm at that irregular rhythm, letting it keep saying its secret through the contraction and release of muscle, saying it to herself, saying it to the mirror, saying it to the person standing behind her.
Then she took the heart out of the chest, held it in both cupped hands, and turned—for the first time in the series of dreams, she turned to face Megan rather than meeting her through a mirror.
Megan was right there, closer than Yoonchae had expected, close enough that she could read every detail in those eyes, which were wet now. Yoonchae extended both hands toward Megan, the heart still resting in them, beating clearer than before because it was out in the air now, because air was touching it, because nothing separated it from Megan anymore.
This was the closest thing to a confession Yoonchae could manage in a dream.
She said nothing—she could never say those things in dreams—but offering the heart said it more clearly than any language could have; it declared everything she had been keeping behind her ribs, declared the rhythm, declared the temperature, declared whose name caused those arrhythmic beats, declared what it meant that she was offering this.
Megan looked down at the heart and looked at it for a long time.
Then she raised both hands and cupped them beneath Yoonchae's hands, to hold Yoonchae's hands, to hold them along with the heart together.
Something blocked in Yoonchae's throat. She wanted to speak—for the first time in the dreams she truly wanted to speak—but—
She woke.
∅
· v ·
Yoonchae sat up and placed both hands on her knees, palms upward, empty—of course empty; but the emptiness produced a weightlessness she had no words for, the weightlessness of hands that a moment ago held something and are suddenly holding nothing, of the force of cradling still present in the skin but with no corresponding reality to match it.
She laced her fingers together, hands holding each other, and stayed like that.
She was thinking about yesterday's "I can get it myself"; she was thinking about the two seconds Megan paused before setting the bottle down; she was thinking about the sound of the door closing.
She had done that. The words were ones she had spoken. The reason for Megan's two-second pause was something she had caused. Not going after her when the door closed had been her decision, whether she made it actively or let exhaustion make it for her—the result was the same: she had not gone after her.
Self-blame is the easiest emotion to walk into and the hardest to walk out of, because its structure is circular—once inside, there is no exit, only a mirror, and the mirror reflects only yourself, so the more you look the more you believe it is all your fault, and the more you believe it the more you look, looking only at yourself round and round until you are trapped inside it, trapped into an isolated system increasingly disconnected from the world outside, trapped until even the original reason you walked in has blurred, leaving only you and the mirror and the self in it being endlessly examined.
To recognize error and correct it: this is the highest good.
To change required her to speak. To change required her to walk across to the place she had been unable to cross to in the second dream, walk to Megan, walk to that long-extended hand, say the thing out loud—the thing she had asked herself a hundred times and had never managed to voice—this time actually say it, using air, using her vocal cords, using a real sound, say it.
She was not ready.
However, not being ready, she still had to face Megan today, and tomorrow, and the day after—they lived in the same city, the same group, stood on the same floor, breathed the same air in the same practice room; this would not pause because she was not ready, the world had not granted her that right of pause, and so today she would have to go, and after going see that person, and then continue performing the role she had been practicing for a long time: the person to whom nothing had happened.
· vi ·
Megan had arrived to rehearsal first, as always—at the mirror, stretching, that same back, that same slightly undone hair, the same focus of someone who has shut out all external interference and left only body and music. Yoonchae stood in the doorway, and this was the first time she had stood there for a long time before entering.
She had never before felt so clearly the weight of the distance between stepping through this door and not stepping through it.
She stepped through. Said morning, put her bag down, changed her shoes. Megan caught her eye in the mirror and gave a small nod—no "morning" in return, only the nod, whose arc was almost imperceptibly small, perhaps only a muscle's movement—but Yoonchae understood it as a response, as Megan's version of an answer, as proof that the greeting had been received.
Yoonchae finished her shoes, stood, breathed in, walked to stand beside Megan and began to warm up, neither speaking, the two of them parallel, each reflected in the glass. This was the same as before, and yet today's silence had a different texture than all the previous silences.
Megan spoke first—not turning, addressing the mirror, voice low: "What you said yesterday. It's okay."
Yoonchae's wrist stopped mid-air. She looked at the side of Megan's face in the mirror and felt something surge up in her throat, which she pressed back down, held, and then spoke, her voice rougher than she had expected: "I'm sorry."
Megan then turned to look at her directly—only this once, facing her head-on—and Yoonchae did not move her gaze away. She had decided not to move it today, just this once, not move it, let those eyes look, let herself also look, let this eye contact that had never been permitted to happen now happen, even if only once, even if today could go no further than this.
Megan's eyes held many things; today Yoonchae saw more of them.
Yoonchae thought: if Megan said it today, would she have the strength to receive it?
But Megan did not say it; she held the look for two more seconds and then returned her gaze to the mirror and resumed stretching, as though "it's okay" and the eye contact were two things that had happened, finished, ready to be set down, the next thing being practice, so the next thing was practice.
Yoonchae resumed warming up—wrists, shoulders, neck, opening the body section by section. In her mind she returned the fourth dream's heart to its chest, closed the chest, let the ribs settle back into place, let the skin re-adhere, let everything look complete and healed and usable for another day.
When the four emblems are established, all things take shape. The four emblems give form to everything. The first three dreams gave her mystery, permanence, constancy; this fourth dream finally gave her a name: self-blame. Four dimensions, four walls, four directions of pain, and now she stood at the center having recognized all four walls, having mapped the shape of the space, knowing where she was, knowing how she had entered—and beginning, also, to see where the door was.
But how far was the distance between seeing the door and walking through it?
Yoonchae did not know.
Epilogue · 终 · To Open the Mouth
My heart is only yours,
even if you eat it.
· i ·
Megan also had something consuming her. Yoonchae simply did not know.
This was, for Megan, considerably unfair—though she would never say so herself.
Solidity is not without cost. The cost of solidity is that you digest all the unsolid things internally, prevent them from coming out, continue being solid, then digest again, then continue—until digesting becomes a conditioned reflex, until you can no longer clearly distinguish what has been genuinely processed and what is merely suppressed and what has been fermenting into something else altogether.
Yoonchae had started pulling away from her after those eleven days—Megan was completely clear on this. She remembered the shortening of Yoonchae's replies across that period, the quickening removal of her gaze, the decreasing frequency with which she came over of her own accord, remembered Yoonchae accepting the water bottle but no longer staying, remembered which side Yoonchae's weight leaned toward in photos, remembered that side was no longer her.
She had not asked. She should have. She had not because she cared too much, cared enough to be afraid to ask, afraid that the answer she would receive was one she could not hold. So the two of them went on in mutual silence, each treating the widening distance as scenery, performing the pretense that this was normal, that this required no handling.
But the distance, on Megan's side, was not scenery. Megan's was the pain of losing something, not of failing to obtain it but of once having it and then gradually not having it, the pain of temperature declining without a single identifiable moment when the cold began. Yoonchae was slowly leaving; Megan stood in place and felt the leaving every day, pressed it down every day, continued being solid, continued arriving first, continued handing water, continued saying her name, continued doing every last thing she was still permitted to do.
This too was a form of consumption. Only in the opposite direction from Yoonchae's.
∅
· ii ·
That evening's rehearsal was just the two of them.
Unfortunately, proximity was something neither of them had prepared for tonight.
They ran the first three sections cleanly enough; muscle memory covered most of it, the body knowing where to go without much intervention from the mind. But in the fourth section Yoonchae's step came in half a beat late. Megan adjusted, the lift did not complete, and both of them stopped.
"Again," Yoonchae said first, her voice even, the evenness of work mode, the evenness that carries no personal color, the evenness she had been using for weeks.
Megan did not return to her starting position. She said nothing, produced no "okay," did not move. She stood where she was, watching Yoonchae, letting the watching happen, letting it last, letting it go on longer than usual, until Yoonchae felt it and raised her head and met those eyes.
Tonight Megan's eyes held no calm.
The thing that had been pressed down too long could not be pressed down tonight.
"Yoonchae," she said, speaking her name only, nothing following it.
Yoonchae's brow tightened slightly but Megan caught it. "What?" Yoonchae said, her voice a little rough.
Megan breathed in, held it two seconds, breathed out—and the exhale carried with it something that had been supporting her solidity, so that when she spoke, the solidity was gone, something was exposed, something Yoonchae had never seen exposed in Megan before.
"You've been avoiding me."
Yoonchae's lips parted slightly—the "no" had formed, was ready, but did not come out; because today she knew it would be a lie, and today she no longer knew how to use that lie, it was stuck in her throat, it would neither go up nor go down.
∅
· iii ·
"I know you've been avoiding me," Megan continued, and now something in her voice had fractured slightly. "Since after those eleven days, you started, and I counted, I have been counting every day."
Yoonchae could not speak. She had not expected Megan to have been counting. She had believed Megan either did not know, or knew and did not care—but Megan had been counting, day by day, and this fact entering her mind collided with every piece of self-persuasion she had assembled around the idea that Megan is like this with everyone, and the collision opened a crack, a new crack, just now forming, and Yoonchae stood at the edge of that crack and looked into it and saw the inside was dark and she did not know how deep it went.
"I don't know what I did wrong," Megan's eyes had reddened, and she did not look down, did not conceal the redness, instead looked at Yoonchae more directly—you look, go ahead and look, this is what I am—"if I did something wrong, tell me, I'll change, I can change anything. But you don't tell me, you only move further away, one small step at a time, and I stand there, and I—"
She stopped. Not because she had run out of things to say but because she had too many and could not determine which one went first.
"I am hurting."
Three words. The simplest words Megan had spoken tonight, and also the heaviest, because Megan did not say such things—Megan was the kind of person who finished digesting before presenting herself to others, but tonight she had not finished digesting, tonight she had come out while it was still undigested, had come to stand in front of Yoonchae, had set it down here, on this practice room floor, before these eyes she had been watching for a long time.
Yoonchae's eyes went hot.
Megan was still watching her, those reddened eyes still watching, and Yoonchae understood that Megan could not wait anymore tonight.
∅
· iv ·
"Megan," Yoonchae spoke—her voice hoarse, the hoarseness of a throat that has kept too many words pressed down for too long, "it's not your fault."
"Then what—"
"It's mine," Yoonchae cut her off—the first time she had ever cut Megan off—"my problem, not yours." She breathed in, and the inhale carried a slight tremor going in; it was a little steadier coming out, only a little. "I had four dreams."
Megan stilled, her brow drawing together slightly, waiting.
"Strange dreams," Yoonchae continued, not looking at Megan's eyes. "where I kept… eating myself. In different ways, eating myself, and you were there watching. Every dream. The same. I know it sounds strange. But—"
"But what?" Megan's voice had softened; the red was still in her eyes but the tone had changed: I'm listening, go on.
Yoonchae finally looked directly into those eyes, directly this time, the second time today she had decided not to look away, decided to walk into the dark, to go inside and see what was actually there. "I didn't know if… you loved me," she said, and her voice cracked on that word—loved—only that word. "I didn't know, I have never known; you are kind to me, you are kind to everyone, I could not… figure it out, I could not be sure, and so I—I began eating myself and the more I ate the more I felt I had no right to ask, and the less right I felt the less I asked, and the less I asked the less certain I was, and on and on, all the way to those four dreams, all the way to today."
When she finished she breathed in and let the inhale fill her chest completely, felt it press the ribs outward, felt the third left rib still in place, genuinely still there, not simmered away. Then she exhaled, moved her eyes from Megan's face, lowered them. "I'm sorry," she said—the second time today, but the weight of this one was entirely different from the morning's, which had been an apology for a sentence; this was an apology for the entire span of time. "I should have asked you sooner. I am the one who made this into what it is."
The practice room was quiet enough that Yoonchae could hear her own heartbeat—that irregular rhythm, tonight in her own ears.
∅
· v ·
Megan did not speak immediately. Yoonchae waited, let the silence pass, let it deliver whatever it was going to deliver, regardless of what that was. She had said all there was to say, there was nothing left to conceal, so there she stood, waiting, open, exposed, slightly trembling, but waiting.
Then Megan walked toward her—two steps, real steps, not the stuck steps of the dream, real steps on the practice room floor, on the floor they had both stood on countless times, crossing the space, arriving in front of Yoonchae, arriving in front of Yoonchae's lowered head.
Yoonchae did not raise her head until Megan's hand came to rest under her chin, gently. You can lift now rather than you must lift now—and Yoonchae lifted, let that hand lead her face upward, met those eyes.
Megan was crying.
"I love you," Megan said—no preamble, no "actually," no "I want you to know"—just those three words, said directly.
She paused; her right hand was still cupping Yoonchae's face, and it did not release. "I thought I was expressing it clearly enough. I thought you knew. I thought everything I did each day—but you didn't know, you didn't know, and I hadn't said it aloud either, so this is also half mine to carry."
Yoonchae's tears came. The tears arrived before the mind had finished processing. Her hands went up and took hold of the hand Megan was holding her face with, the two hands overlapping, hers holding hers, and the warmth between their knuckles was real and it would not be gone when she woke.
"I love you too," Yoonchae said, "Megan, I love you so much, it was… eating me up inside."
Megan used the hand Yoonchae was holding, gently, to draw Yoonchae's face close.
"You're not allowed to eat yourself anymore," Megan said. "No eating anything. Only actual food."
Yoonchae laughed—the laugh came with a little snot, it was not pretty, but it was genuine. "Okay," she said.
∅
· vi ·
Afterward, they sat on the practice room floor for a long time. Megan's hand was in Yoonchae's hand, fingers laced; the second dream's hand that Megan had extended and Yoonchae could not reach had, tonight, been taken.
Yoonchae rested her head on Megan's shoulder. They did not speak; speaking was not needed. The necessary things had been said.
Nothing in the world is softer than water, yet for attacking what is hard and strong, nothing surpasses it. Yoonchae had spent four dreams wearing herself down, boiling her bones into broth, lifting her own heart out of her chest in both hands.
Longing does not need to be used to devour yourself.
It can be said aloud.
Said aloud, it ceases to be the longing that makes the limbs go numb, ceases to be the thirst that consumes you from the inside; it becomes something that can be caught by another person, something with a place to go, something both people now know and can carry together.
Megan's shoulder was still warm. This had always been true. Only tonight Yoonchae no longer needed to persuade herself that the warmth was her own temperature. The warmth was Megan's; it belonged to Megan; tonight Megan had given it to her, given it along with everything else—with the three words, with the hand that cradled her face, with these laced fingers, with this night of the two of them leaning against the mirror.
Yoonchae closed her eyes.
Tonight she would not dream.