in every season
🧡 taglist here 🧡
pairing: joshua x (f) reader
summary: there is a version of this story that starts the day you helped a stranger in a pharmacy and thought nothing of it. that version belongs to him. yours starts later: a bus stop in april, a shared route home, a man who remembers things you've long forgotten and loves you in the specific language of going back to the store twice.
joshua stays. in every sense of the word.
genre: strangers to lovers, mutual pining, slow burn, light angst, hurt/comfort, fluff, slice of life
additional tags & warnings: mentions of illness, grief, caretaking roles, brief mention of hospitals here and there, some melancholy but it isn't heavy (at least i don't think it is)
word count: 12.9k
a/n: this one took a long time to feel right but i'm so glad i let it. i wanted to write joshua the way i see him: quiet, never performing warmth, just genuinely good in a way that sneaks up on you. he happened to be my bias wrecker this way because my very first bias was actually jihoon 🩷 i also wanted to write a reader who isn't defined by her softness, but by her endurance. someone who has been holding things together for so long that being held feels almost foreign. her learning to receive care felt just as important to me as the love story itself.
if you are someone who takes care of others and forgets to let anyone take care of you; this one is for you.
i also wanted to thank everyone who sent me their well wishes since i last posted! health-wise, i am slowly recovering! this one shot will be my last for a short while. i honestly feel like this isn't my best work, but i still wanted to give my lovely readers something small and soft before i go. thank you for waiting all this time. 🩷
sending love to my taglist 💐 @deathby-lost @chocolate-cake-enthusiast
spring: encountering
The first thing Joshua Hong notices about Seoul is that it smells like something he can't name.
It isn't unpleasant, not really. It's layered the way old cities tend to be, like the air itself has collected memory. Street food and exhaust and rain-damp concrete and something floral underneath all of it. He stands outside Incheon Airport with his single large luggage and his carry-on backpack and his completely inadequate Korean. He breathes it in like he's trying to recognize it.
He doesn't. At least not yet.
He takes the train into the city alone, watching the Han River appear and then stretch wide and silver outside the window and he feels the particular loneliness of arriving somewhere new. He chose this: the alone part. His friends had offered to come, his mom had offered to come, and he'd said no to all of them gently and without fully being able to explain why. This was something he needed to do on his own. He needed to be no one's companion, no one's obligation, no one's something to worry about. He needed to just be here.
He is here because of her.
His halmoni—his grandmother—passed in January. She passed quietly, the way she had apparently lived: without fuss, without demanding anything of anyone. He had never met her in person. He'd grown up in Los Angeles knowing she existed the way you know a star exists: present, distant, real, maybe unreachable. His mother had left South Korea before Joshua was born and the distance had calcified slowly over years into something neither of them had known how to undo. Phone calls on holidays. Photographs sent in envelopes. A voice on a crackling connection saying his name in a way no one else said it, the syllables sounded differently, Jisoo-ya, and him not knowing enough Korean to say back what he wanted to say.
He had been planning to come for three years, always the year after next, always when things settled, always soon. And then it was January and the phone call came and soon was gone.
So here he is in April instead, standing in the city she grew up in, breathing in the air she breathed for seventy-eight years, trying to find her in a place he's never been. It is grief and it is guilt and it is something else too. Something quieter and more stubborn and a need to know the part of himself that came from her. He is Korean American and the Korean part has always felt like a door he stood in front of without opening. He is here to open it even if he's late, even if she isn't here to let him in anymore.
His Korean is functional in the way a bicycle with one flat tire is functional. He can read Hangul slowly, sounding it out the way a child does, lips moving. He knows the basics—annyeong haseyo, gamsahamnida, igeo eolmayeyo—and a handful of words his mother taught him when he was small. He downloaded three different apps before coming here. He bought a phrasebook at the airport bookstore and has already dog-eared half of it. He is trying earnestly and with the full sincerity that characterizes everything he does and he is still spectacularly lost approximately forty percent of the time.
The neighborhood he's rented a relatively spacious room in is in Mapo-gu—residential and still, it’s the kind of neighborhood that has a market and a laundromat and a row of small restaurants that don't need signs because everyone already knows they're there. His room is on the third floor of a narrow building, clean, with a window that looks out over a courtyard where someone has arranged potted plants in a way that suggests some type of affection. He likes it immediately. He sets his bags down and sits on the edge of the bed and says out loud, to no one, to the room, to maybe her: "I made it, halmoni."
Joshua doesn't cry. He will later, in private, more than once. But right now he just sits with it.
Joshua is two and a half weeks into Seoul when he gets a cold.
It is the ordinary result of new weather and a new city and the specific vulnerability of a human body adjusting to a life it doesn't recognize yet. His throat scratches. His nose runs. He wakes up on a Tuesday morning feeling like something has gently sat on his head overnight and decided to stay.
He needs cold medicine.
He looks for the nearest pharmacy on his map, pulls his jacket on, and walks the four minutes there with the confidence of a person who has purchased cold medicine many times before. The pharmacy is clean and organized and completely, entirely in Korean. This is of course correct and expected but it still manages to catch him off guard every time.
He finds the aisle he thinks he wants and stands in front of it.
The boxes stare back at him.
There are no fewer than fourteen different options and they are all in Korean and the Hangul is small and the hanja on some of them is completely beyond him and he has his phone out translating as fast as it will go but the translations keep coming back slightly strange—"for heavenly nasal passage," one of the boxes says, which he is quite certain is not right—and he is now squinting at a box that has a cartoon nose on it when he becomes aware that someone has appeared beside him.
He doesn't notice you right away. You’re just a presence in his peripheral vision also looking at the shelves. He inches to the left slightly to give you more room and goes back to his phone.
He hears you ask quietly in careful but almost perfect English: "Are you looking for something specific?"
Joshua turns.
You are looking at the shelves, not at him, like the question was directed generally into the air between you and he is just welcome to answer it if he chooses. You’re holding a paper bag loosely in one hand, pharmacy-branded, already filled, and your other hand is in the pocket of a pale green jacket that looks soft enough to have been washed many times. Your ash brown hair is pulled back. Joshua thinks you look like someone who has been very tired for a very long time and has learned to carry it so naturally that most people wouldn't notice.
But Joshua notices.
He also notices that your eyes are slightly puffy. The puffiness is the kind that takes hours to develop. It’s the residue of something earlier in the day that is none of his business and that he thinks about anyway without meaning to.
"Yeah," he responds and his voice comes out a little rougher than usual, the cold making itself known. "I have—" he gestures vaguely at his face, "—all of this going on. A cold, I think. Or allergies. Probably cold."
You nod once and step forward, your eyes move over the shelf in a way that is efficient. You pick up one box, read the back, put it down. Pick up another. Read. Your Korean is quiet, your lips moving slightly.
"Do you have a fever?" you ask.
"I don't think so. Just the nose and throat thing."
You pick up a box: blue and white, nothing like the confident cartoon nose one, and hold it toward him without quite handing it over, giving him the chance to look at it himself. "This one. It's a general cold formula. It’s not too strong. No drowsiness either."
He takes it and looks at it and then looks at you. "How did you—I was standing here for like ten minutes."
The corner of your mouth moves. It’s not quite a smile but in the likes of one. "You were translating the wrong part," you said. "The front is the brand name. The ingredients are on the back."
"That's…" he says hesitantly, "incredibly useful information that I wish I'd had ten minutes ago."
This time you do smile, even though it’s brief. You turn back to the shelf, already retreating, the exchange clearly complete in your mind.
He looks at the box in his hand and then back at you. You’re reaching for something on a lower shelf now and there is something in the way you move that suggests a person accustomed to errand-running, to managing the logistics of someone else's needs. The paper bag. The efficiency.
"Thank you," he says and he means it the way he means most things: fully.
You glance back at him over your shoulder. "Feel better," you say and turn away.
Joshua stands there holding the cold medicine for a moment longer than is necessary.
Joshua does feel better by the following week. The blue and white box works exactly as advertised, which matters because he spends most of his days walking, learning the neighborhood through patient and unhurried accumulation. He has a small notebook he carries everywhere and he writes down words he encounters, things he wants to look up later, small observations about the streets. His halmoni's address is written on the first page. He hasn't gone yet. He's working up to it.
On Thursday he is standing at the bus stop attempting to understand the route map.
The routes are color-coded and numbered and there is a legend and he understands approximately sixty percent of it, which is not enough apparently. He’s tracing a line with his finger, lips moving, when he hears the sound of someone setting a bag down on the bench beside him and he looks up.
It takes you a second.
He watches you register him and then your expression settles into something neutral and not unwelcoming. "Oh," you utter.
"Hi," he says and smiles. It's the easy kind of smile, the one that just lives on his face when he's not thinking about it. "Pharmacy girl."
You raise an eyebrow to the faintest possible degree.
"Sorry," he says immediately, still smiling. "That was—I don't actually know your name. So in my head that's just been—anyway. Hi. I'm Joshua."
You look at him for a moment with an expression he can't really read—it’s not unfriendly, just considering, like you’re deciding something. "YN," you then say.
"YN," he repeats and the way he says it is careful. "Are you waiting for the bus?"
"Yes."
"Which one?" He gestures at the route map with perhaps more helplessness than he intended.
But you’re also quite perceptive. You look at the route map. "Where are you trying to go?"
He tells you. You point to a number on the map without hesitating and say when it comes and where to get off and he takes a photo of the relevant section with his phone because he is a person who has learned his lessons. "I'm going the same way," you add, almost like an afterthought, and then you pick up your bag again and look out at the street.
He takes this as the end of the conversation and takes it gracefully. He puts his phone away and stands beside you and says nothing, which he is actually good at. Silence doesn't make him nervous nor does it make him want to fill it. He stands with his hands in his pockets and watches the street and is just there and if you notice that he is very deliberately not making demands of you, you give no indication either.
The bus arrives and it is full in the way Seoul buses are full at this hour—bodies arranged in the quiet compromise of people who do this every day. You and Joshua board and he follows you toward the back where there is standing room and you end up side by side at a pole near the rear doors, each with one hand on the rail.
You are looking out the window. He is looking at the city moving past and also, occasionally, not looking at you.
You’re wearing a different jacket today, it’s darker and charcoal, and you have your bag on one shoulder. You have earphones in but you’re not playing anything through, he notices, because he could see the earphone jack is connected to nothing. The earphones are armor, he thinks. A way of being unavailable that doesn't require explaining. He understands this. He respects it.
The bus moves through the neighborhood and at the third stop a wave of passengers exit, then at the fourth stop a couple near the front gets off too, and suddenly there is rearranging happening, space shifting, and two seats open simultaneously near the back.
You and Joshua look at the seats and then the seats are just there and it would be strange to keep standing when there's somewhere to sit, so you both sit, and now you are closer than you were at the pole.
Joshua doesn't say anything immediately.
Then, because he is who he is and the silence has been comfortable enough to speak into: "Is it always this busy in the morning?"
You glance at him briefly. He notices you removing your earphones. "Depends on the line. This one, yes."
"I've been taking the subway mostly but I got turned around yesterday and ended up on the bus by accident and I thought…might as well figure it out properly."
"How long have you been here?"
"About three weeks." He pauses. "Almost four, actually. Time is strange."
You don’t respond to that right away but you’re listening. Outside, a street he half-recognizes passes by. He has been learning the city in fragments, little by little, until they come easily to him as breathing. Hopefully.
"You speak English," he says, then almost immediately: "Obviously. I just mean…your English is really good."
"I studied it for a long time," you said. A pause. "You're American?"
"Korean American. LA." He says it the way he always says it, the two parts held together without hierarchy. "My Korean is—" he tilts his head, "—let's call it improving."
Something passes across your face. He thinks it’s amusement but the suppressed kind. "It's a difficult language."
"My grandmother would probably disagree with you about that. She seemed to do it effortlessly." He says it lightly, the way he's learned to, the easiness of the tone not quite matching the weight underneath but sitting with it peacefully.
You look at him for a moment and don't ask the follow-up question, the one most people ask, and he is grateful in a way he doesn't completely expect. You just nod once, a small acknowledgment, and look back out the window.
The bus moves through two more stops. He watches a woman outside walking a very small and very serious-looking dog. He watches a man unlocking the grill of a small restaurant. He watches the city do the ordinary things: opening up, beginning again. He thinks about how strange it is to be new somewhere, how everything that is invisible to locals is vivid to him, how he is reading Seoul like a text he doesn't have the full vocabulary for but is beginning to understand.
"It's interesting," he says, half to himself, "learning a city. Like… there are all these rhythms you can't see at first and then slowly you start to feel them."
You are quiet for a moment. Then: "How does it feel? Seoul."
The question surprises him a little, not because it's strange but because it's genuine. You asked because you wanted to know.
"Like something I half-remember," he says. "Which doesn't make any sense because I've never been here. But it feels like…you know when you read a book someone loved and you can feel that they loved it because it has a lot of annotations? It feels like that."
You are looking at him now and he can't read your expression but there is something in it that is less guarded than before. Then the bus slows and the recorded announcement says the stop name and you straighten slightly and look out the window and say: "This is us."
This is us. He notices it—the casual plural—and says nothing about it and follows you off the bus.
You and Joshua stand on the pavement in the mild April morning and the bus pulls away and you are in the neighborhood, their neighborhood apparently, the one they have somehow both ended up in.
"Thank you," he says, "again. For the bus thing. And the pharmacy thing."
"It wasn't anything," you say as pick up your bag on your shoulder in that way you have- the gesture that means you are about to go.
"It was, though," he says with ease and without pressure. "To me it was."
You pause, look at him for a moment with that expression he is becoming familiar with: considering and the faintest hint of something you’re deciding whether to let show.
"Feel better," you say, an echo of the week before. Then you turn and walk in the direction of whatever comes next for you and he watches you go the way he watched you the first time: a beat too long, two beats, before he puts his hands back in his pockets and turns the other way.
He doesn't know your last name. He doesn't know what you do or how long you’ve lived here or why you looked like you’d been crying in the pharmacy. He knows your name and your bus stop and that you read medicine labels from the back and that you asked him how Seoul feels with real curiosity.
He walks home in the April morning and the city smells like something he is starting, maybe, to recognize.
summer: circling
You see him before he sees you.
This is how it usually goes, you've noticed: you tend to clock your surroundings with the specific vigilance of someone who has learned that the world requires managing and Joshua Hong moves through his with the specific unhurriedness of a person who isn’t bracing for anything. He's at the convenience store on the corner of your street, standing in front of the refrigerated section with his head tilted slightly, studying the canned coffee options with what can only be described as serious deliberation.
You almost leave. You came for one thing: ramyeon and maybe something cold to drink and the store is small and you are tired in the way you are always tired now. Your mother had a difficult night. You were at the hospital until almost eleven and you have work in the morning and the last thing you have room for right now is a conversation.
You get your ramyeon. You are nearly at the refrigerator when he turns and sees you and his face does the thing his face does: opens, brightens, like encountering you is just really good news.
"YN."
He says your name like he practiced it. You don't know why you notice that.
"Joshua," you say.
"Do you have strong feelings about canned coffee?" he asks and gestures at the rows in front of him with helplessness. "Because there are so many and I've been trying them in order but I'm starting to think I've been doing it wrong."
You look at the shelf. You reach past him; he steps back to give you room without being asked and you take one from the second row. The blue one. You hand it to him.
"This one," you say.
He looks at it and then at you. "That's it? No explanation?"
You shrug. "It's the best one."
"See, I need to know why though—"
"It just is."
He laughs. It's a quiet laugh and you are already moving toward the register because you don't have time for this and also because the laugh does something small and inconvenient to the tired feeling in your chest and you would prefer not to examine that.
You hear him behind you, still lightly amused: "Okay. Noted. Thank you."
You nod without turning around. You pay and you leave and you walk back to your apartment and you eat your ramyeon standing over the sink because sitting down feels like a commitment you can't make tonight.
You don't think about him. You are very busy not thinking about him.
Joshua sees you for the second time that week on Wednesday evening.
He is coming back from the park. He has started going in the evenings, a habit that formed over time, his guitar left at home because he’s still not certain of the etiquette—and you are coming from the direction of the main road, walking with your head slightly down, bag on your shoulder, and you look tired in a way that is becoming familiar to him.
He falls into step beside you without planning to, matching your pace, because you are going the same direction anyway.
You glance at him.
"Hello," he says.
"Hi," you respond.
You and Joshua walk. The evening is warm in that early summer way and the neighborhood is doing its evening things: the smell of someone cooking, a child being called in, a convenience store spilling yellow light onto the pavement. He walks with his hands in his pockets and you walk with your bag on your shoulder and the silence is comfortable in a way he has stopped being surprised by.
"Long day?" he asks eventually.
A pause. "They're all long," you say, which is not really an answer and also somehow is.
Joshua nods and doesn't push. You both walk another half block in silence. A cat sits on top of a parked car and watches you pass with profound indifference and interest at the same time.
"There's a cat," he says.
"I see it."
"It's judging us."
You look at the cat and then look back at the pavement but the corner of your mouth moves and he counts it.
At the point where your paths diverge—Joshua goes right, you go straight—he stops and you stop too, half-turning.
"I'll see you around," he says and it's easy and undemanding because that is all this is and he is careful not to make it more than you’ve offered.
"Probably," you say and there is something almost dry in it. It’s an acknowledgment of the frequency with which you both keep appearing in each other's lives and it is the closest thing to a joke you have made in front of him and he carries it home like it's something.
You learn things about him the way you learn things about a place.
Joshua is a musician. You find this out because one evening you are passing his building. You aren't seeking him out, you just happened to pass by a few times—and there is a guitar sound coming from a third floor window and it takes you two full days to confirm that the third floor is his. The playing is good. It’s the kind that exists for the player, not the listener.
Joshua knows the woman who runs the small market on the main road. You discover this when you're buying vegetables one Saturday morning and you hear her laughing and you look up and it's Joshua saying something you can't hear and the market woman is waving her hand at him in the way old women wave at boys they've decided to adopt. He is carrying a basket and he has apparently bought the wrong kind of sesame oil and she is explaining this to him with enormous satisfaction and he is nodding with the earnest expression of someone taking extensive mental notes.
Joshua reads. You see him at the bus stop with a book more than once: Korean novels, you notice, which must be slow going for him and which he’s doing anyway.
Joshua smiles at strangers. He has a face that rests in openness, an expression that defaults to gentle, and people respond to it without quite knowing why. You have watched this happen and you understand it and you still cannot quite account for it. It is not a facade. It is just who he is.
This bothers you more than it should.
It's the third week of June when he sits beside you on the park bench.
You are there most evenings. This is your place: the bench near the small fountain where you come to decompress after the hospital, after work, after the specific performance of holding yourself together in public. You have your earphones in, not playing anything. You have your eyes half-closed. You are simply existing, which is all you can manage tonight.
You hear him before you see him. Footsteps, then the familiar cadence of his presence. He moves differently than most people. It’s without the urgency the city tends to install in everyone. Before you know it, he’s standing at the end of your bench looking not at you but at the fountain, his hands in his pockets.
"Is this bench taken by anyone other than you?"
"No," you say.
He sits. Not close; he leaves space. He has his own something to drink but it’s not the canned coffee. It’s a convenience store cup of something iced and he stretches his legs out slightly and looks at the fountain and says nothing.
You sit beside him and say nothing.
This lasts perhaps five minutes, which is a very long time to sit in silence with someone who isn’t a stranger anymore but isn't exactly anything else either.
"Bad day?" you ask and you're not sure why you ask it, only that the angle of his shoulders is slightly different tonight.
He is quiet for a moment. "Not bad," he says. "Just…one of those days where everything is fine and you still feel a little lost. You know?"
You know. You know exactly. "Hm," you mutter.
He nods like you've confirmed something. He doesn't elaborate and you don't ask him to. You sit in the comfortable space of two people who have mutually agreed that tonight words are not the main thing.
A child runs past chasing something. The fountain runs its small sound beneath the noise of the evening. Somewhere close by someone is playing music from a phone and Joshua tilts his head slightly when it reaches you both like he's listening for something in it.
"Do you come here a lot?" he asks eventually.
"Most evenings."
"I've been coming here too. I must have just missed you."
"Or I missed you," you say and then hear yourself say it and look at the fountain.
"Or that," he agrees and there is something quiet in his voice that you don't dare analyze.
You stay until the light goes fully and then you both leave separately without making a plan to do this again. But you both know you will.
The phone call happens on a Tuesday.
Joshua is there for it without meaning to be. You are both at the park bench again and you are in the middle of saying something about something inconsequential when your phone goes and you look at the screen and your face does what it does when it's the hospital.
"I have to—" you start.
"Go," he says.
You stand and walk several feet away and answer and your voice shifts into the register you keep for medical staff: clear, composed, asking the right questions in the right order. You have had a lot of practice. Your mother's condition. A change in her levels. The doctor wants to discuss adjusting her medication. You say yes and when and thank you and hang up.
You stand for a moment with your back to him, trying to collect yourself back into the shape required. Then you turn around.
Joshua is looking at you with an expression that is careful and clear and completely without pity, which is the only kind of looking you can tolerate right now and he says nothing which is exactly right.
"I have to go," you say.
"Okay," he says. "I hope everything’s alright."
You nod and pick up your bag and go and you do not look back. If you had you would have seen him watching after you with an expression he doesn't bother to moderate when there's no one to see it: worry and something older than worry and the particular helplessness of caring about someone who hasn't asked you to yet.
July arrives and with it the real heat.
Joshua has stopped pretending the convenience store visits are about coffee.
He roughly knows your schedule not because he has studied it but because he has simply paid attention the way he pays attention to everything and you move through the neighborhood in patterns that have become familiar to him. He knows you go to the market on Saturday mornings. He knows you passed the park around seven on weekdays. He knows that when you have earphones in with nothing playing, you have had a hard day, and when you don't bother with them at all it's been a manageable one.
He knows you take your coffee without sugar, straight from the blue can, because you said it just is and he believed you and tried it and you were right.
He knows that you laugh quietly, like the laugh is for you rather than the room, and that when something genuinely catches you off guard it arrives before you can decide whether to let it.
He knows that there is something you’re carrying and it’s something serious. He knows that you carry it with a discipline that is both impressive and a little heartbreaking and that you will tell him when you’re ready or you won't and either way he will still be here on the bench at seven o'clock.
Joshua knows that he’s in a considerable amount of trouble.
He sits with this thought on a hot July night, alone in his apartment, guitar in his lap, and plays the same chord progression he's been working on for a week. It doesn't resolve. He keeps returning to it anyway, turning it over, looking for the note that makes it make sense.
He hasn't found it yet. He thinks maybe he's not supposed to yet.
The last week of July, you are at the bench when he arrives and you have bought two canned coffees and you hold one out to him when he sits down without saying anything about it.
He takes it and looks at it and looks at you.
You look at the fountain.
"Thank you," he says.
"It's just coffee," you say.
"I know," he says and opens it and you both know it isn't just coffee and neither of you say so and the summer evening settles around you and this—this small ordinary thing—is how everything starts to tip.
autumn: opening
The city changes before you're ready for it.
Seoul in autumn doesn’t transition so much—one morning the air is different, carrying something crisp and faintly sweet underneath the usual city smell and the trees along the main road have started their slow deliberate burning: amber and rust and gold appearing in the green. You notice it on your walk to the bus stop and you stop for a moment, just a moment, bag on your shoulder and the morning doing its morning things around you and you breathe it in.
You have always loved autumn. You used to tell your mother this every year without fail—eomma, it's here, it's finally here—and she would look up from whatever she was doing and smile in that way because your enthusiasm was one of her favorite things about you. You haven't said it out loud to anyone in two years.
You say it quietly now to no one in particular. "It's finally here."
Then you pick your bag up again and keep walking.
The long walk happens on a Saturday.
It doesn't start as a long walk, honestly. It starts as a coincidence: you are both at the market at the same time, which is not unusual anymore, and when you leave Joshua is leaving too and you are going the same direction so you walk together, which is also not unusual anymore.
What is unusual is that neither of you stops.
The market is behind you and then the main road is behind you and then somehow you are in a part of the neighborhood you don't usually walk through: a stretch of quieter streets where the buildings are older and there are persimmon trees in some of the small front gardens. He points one out with the delight of someone encountering something new and real.
"What is that?"
"Persimmon."
"Can you just—they're just growing there? In someone's garden?"
"People grow them everywhere here."
He stops walking to look at it properly and you stop too because the way he looks at things has a quality that makes you want to see what he's seeing. He’s quiet for a moment, head slightly tilted, and then he says: "My halmoni had a persimmon tree. My mom told me once. In the garden of the house she grew up in."
You look at him. It's the most he's said about his grandmother since the first bus ride. He says it the way he says things that cost him something: lightly, easily but with a weight underneath that he isn't hiding so much.
"Tell me about her," you say and you mean it. You’re asking because you want to know, which is something you haven't done in a while—wanting to know someone.
He looks at you for a moment like he's checking that you mean it and then seems satisfied that you do. He starts walking again and you fall into step beside him and he talks.
Joshua tells you about a woman he never met in person but knew through photographs and phone calls and the mythology of an absent family. He tells you about her voice on the phone—the way she said his name, Jisoo-ya, softening the syllables in a way no one else did. He tells you about the plan to come, always the plan to come, always next year, and then January. He tells you he came here to find her in the only way still available to him and that some days it works. He'll turn a corner and something will catch: a smell or a sound or an old woman's hands at a market stall and some days it doesn't and on those days the not-knowing-her feels very large.
He says all of this without self-pity, without asking for anything. He talks about his loved one the way a person speaks when they've made a kind of peace with something that still hurts. His voice is even and warm and underneath it is grief that has been lived in long enough to become familiar.
You walk beside him and listen completely.
"I keep thinking," he says, "that if I learn the language properly, I'll find her somehow. Which I know doesn't make sense."
"It makes sense," you affirm.
He glances at you.
"Language is where people live," you say. "The real parts of them. If she lived in Korean then, yes. It makes sense."
He is quiet for a moment. The street turns and opens onto a small elevated path overlooking a pocket of the city, rooftops and the far glint of the Han river, and you both stop without discussion because it is the kind of view that requires stopping.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"Sure."
"The neighborhood market ajumma told me your family has lived here for a long time."
You raise an eyebrow. "You asked about me?"
"She volunteered it," he says with the specific dignity of someone being accurate. "I might have mentioned your name."
You look at the city below and you are doing the thing you do: deciding how much, deciding whether, and then the autumn air moves through the space between you and you think about your mother and you think about how long you have been rationing yourself, how carefully you have been filtering out what you give to people and you think that maybe, just maybe, you are very tired of it.
"My mother grew up here," you say. "I grew up here. It's always just been us."
A pause. He waits.
"She's sick," you say. "Has been for a while. It's manageable, mostly. Some days less so."
You say it looking at the city because it is easier that way. You have told very few people. There is something about saying it out loud that makes it more real and you have been trying, for a long time, to keep it at a manageable level of reality.
He doesn't say I'm sorry first, which is what most people do, the reflexive condolence that is kind and true and also somehow closes the door. Instead, he says: "Is it you? Taking care of her?"
"Yes."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
He slowly nods once.
"That's a lot to carry," he says. Simply. Without making it a question or a diagnosis.
"It is," you say, which is the first time you have said that out loud to anyone.
You stand there a little longer than makes practical sense, looking at the city. Then you walk back, the long way, and by the time you reach your street the afternoon has gone and the evening has arrived and you realize you have been walking for almost two hours without noticing.
"Same time next week?" he says at the point where you part.
It’s the first time he has ever suggested something forward, the first time he has extended a hand into the future.
You look at him. The autumn evening is golden behind him and he is waiting with that expression he has: open, warm, entirely without pressure.
"Same time," you agree.
Autumn deepens and you keep your Saturdays.
You walk and you talk and you learn each other in the way the season seems designed for, the city golden and cooling around you, everything in the process of becoming something different.
You learn that Joshua is meticulous about small things: his notebook, his guitar strings, the way he folds receipts. You learn that his sense of humor is dry and quiet and tends to arrive without announcement. You learn that he calls his mom every Sunday, that he has two close friends back in LA who send him voice messages that he plays while cooking, that he misses the ocean.
Joshua learns you too. He learns that you know this neighborhood down to the bone, every shortcut and old building and which restaurants have been here twenty years. He learns that you are funnier than you let on, that the dry observations you make mostly to yourself are very funny if he's paying attention, which he always is. He learns that you become slightly more yourself when you're walking than any other time and he files this away with everything else he's filed away about you.
He does not tell you he remembers. Not yet. He keeps waiting for the right shape of moment and it keeps not arriving or maybe he keeps not letting it arrive, because there is something frightening about it; not the telling itself but what it means, that he has been carrying you with him since April and that this is not something a person can un-know once it's known.
Joshua finds out your birthday in the second week of October.
You are talking about the cold arriving and you say, offhand, that you've never minded cold weather because you were born in it and he asks when and you tell him.
One night he was on his phone for a long time.
He starts with a simple search: Korean birthday traditions and then the search leads him to miyeok-guk and he reads about it for longer than he expected to, sitting on his floor with his back against the bed and the lamp on. He reads about the seaweed, the broth, the tradition of mothers making it for their children every year on their birthday, the connection to birth and to being remembered and to the particular love that says you were here, you arrived, I have not forgotten the day the world had you in it.
He reads it and thinks about your mother in the hospital and thinks about you carrying everything alone and thinks about the small exact way your face changed when you said it's always just been us.
He puts his phone down. Then he picks it up again and looks up where to buy the right kind of dried miyeok.
He gets it wrong the first time. The woman at the specialty grocery store tries to help him with hand gestures and basic English and he buys what he thinks is the right thing and takes it home and looks it up again and it is not the right thing. He goes back. He is not embarrassed about this or rather he is but it doesn't matter. There are things worth being mildly embarrassed for.
He watches two video tutorials and pauses them repeatedly to take notes in his small notebook. He calls his halmoni's old neighbor, a woman his mom helped him find months ago, who speaks some English, and asks her to confirm he has the right ingredients. She asks why he's making it. He tells her it's for a friend's birthday. There is a pause and then she says, in Korean and then English both: "You're a good man."
He makes it the evening before your birthday. The apartment smells like the sea and like something warm and old and specific, a smell he has encountered in small wafts from restaurant kitchens and market stalls and once from a stranger's open window, and he stands over the pot and stirs it and thinks that maybe this is one of the ways a person finds someone they've lost: in the doing of the things they did, in the learning of what they once knew.
Halmoni, he thinks. I think I'm getting it right.
Joshua brings the miyeok-guk to you in a container he bought specifically. It’s not a takeout box but a proper one made of stainless steel with a lid that seals.
You open your door and he is standing there in the early evening of your birthday and you almost didn't think about it being your birthday because there has been a lot today: a hospital visit in the morning and work and more hospital and the day has been its own particular weight. You had forgotten or tried to.
He holds the container out with both hands, slightly formal, the way you hold something you want the other person to know you carried carefully.
"Happy birthday," he says.
You look at the container. "What is this?"
"Miyeok-guk," he says and his pronunciation is careful, practiced. "I looked it up. I know it's supposed to be… I know it's traditionally from your mother and I know she can't right now and I just —" he stops, lets out a small breath. Starts again. "I probably made it wrong. I watched a lot of videos and I went back to the store twice and I called someone who knew my grandmother to check but I've never made it before so—"
"Joshua," you say.
He stops and his yes was small.
You are looking at the container and your throat is doing something you are trying to manage. The last time you had miyeok-guk on your birthday your mother made it in this kitchen, standing right where you are standing now. That was four years ago, before the diagnosis, before everything shifted into before and after. Four years ago and you can still smell it: the same smell that is coming from this container right now, held out to you in both hands by a person who went back to the store twice.
You take it with both hands. It is still warm.
You look up at him. He is watching you with that expression—it’s careful and clear— and there is something in his eyes that isn’t new, you realize. It has been there all along, patient and warm and very sure of itself, and you have been not-examining it for months and you cannot quite not-examine it right now.
"Come in," you say. "Have some with me."
Joshua smiles and comes in.
You heat it on the stove together, him standing slightly behind your shoulder asking questions about your apartment because he's never been inside before, pointing at the plants on your windowsill with curiosity, noticing the books on your shelf in that way he has, storing everything away. You tell him the soup needs a little more time. He says okay and sits at your small table and looks at home there in a way that does something to you that you tuck away carefully to examine later.
You sit across from him and eat miyeok-guk on your birthday and outside the autumn evening presses soft and gold against your window and he tells you about going back to the store twice and the expression on the woman's face and you laugh, actually laugh the full kind, and he looks at you like he has been waiting for exactly that.
Later, after he goes, you stand at your kitchen window and hold your own elbows and look out at the dark courtyard below.
You are in trouble, you think.
You have been trying not to want things for so long that you'd almost forgotten what it felt like. You had put it away. You had decided, without quite deciding, that your life had a shape that did not have room for this.
And yet.
You look at the stainless steel container with a lid that seals, clean now, sitting on your counter. He brought it with both hands. He went back to the store twice. He called someone who knew his grandmother.
Happy birthday, he said.
You stay at the window for a long time after.
winter: aching
The cold arrives the way grief does: gradually and then all at once.
You wake up one morning in late November and the courtyard outside your window is different. The potted plants huddled under their covers, the air through the gap in your window blowing a new kind of sharpness that reaches your face before you're fully awake. You lie there for a moment and register it and then your phone goes and it is the hospital and you are up before the second ring.
Your mother's levels have dropped again. More significantly this time. The doctor speaks in the measured cadence of someone delivering news they have delivered before and you sit on the edge of your bed with your feet on the cold floor and you listen and you ask the right questions and you say you'll be there by nine.
You hang up and sit for a moment in the early winter silence of your apartment. Then you wash your face, make coffee you won't finish, and go.
Joshua notices immediately.
Not that day. He doesn't see you that day but the Saturday after when you don't come to the market at your usual time and he waits longer than he means to before accepting that you aren't coming. And the week after that, when you appear at the park bench briefly and there is something behind your eyes that is different from tired. This is something older. This is a person who has gone back behind the glass.
He gives you space. This is a conscious choice and it costs him and he makes it anyway because it is what you need, or what you seem to need, and he’s not going to be one more thing requiring management in a life that is already full of things requiring management.
But he adjusts. He leaves a coffee on the bench on Wednesday evening when he knows you might pass and it is gone when he checks Thursday morning, which tells him nothing definitive and still makes him feel a bit better. He stops at the market and mentions your name to the ajumma and she tells him you came by Tuesday, you looked thin, she gave you extra, and he says good and means it deeply.
He goes home and sits with his guitar and the chord progression that resolves now. He found the note, somewhere in October, and now it goes somewhere and he plays it through and the going-somewhere feeling is both better and worse than the not-resolving was.
He doesn’t text you anything demanding. He sends one message on a Tuesday night that says: hope you're okay. no need to reply.
You read it standing in the hospital corridor, your coat still on, waiting for the elevator, and you press your phone against your chest for a moment like you're trying to keep something from getting out.
You don't reply. You meant to. The days close over it. But that night while waiting for the elevator, your eyes feel a kind of burn you haven’t allowed yourself in a very long while.
December arrives grey and resolute.
You haven’t seen him properly in three weeks. This is not a decision so much as a consequence. The hospital visits have increased, the paperwork has multiplied, your mother's care has expanded to fill every available hour and then some.
You think about Joshua in the margins. In the elevator at the hospital, in the queue at the bus stop, in the ten minutes before sleep when your defenses are down and things you've been managing all day arrive uninvited. You think about the miyeok-guk. You think about sitting across from him at your small table and laughing the full kind of laugh.
You think about how long it has been since you let yourself want something and how efficiently you are currently dismantling the small careful thing you had started to build.
You know this about yourself. This isn’t new–this retreat. When things get hard you go inward and you become very small and very contained and you survive. It has worked. It has always worked. The problem now is that it’s beginning to feel less like surviving and more like something else, something with less air in it, and you are not sure when that changed.
Joshua sees you on a Wednesday evening in the second week of December.
He is coming back from the small grocery on the main road, bag in both hands, and you’re coming from the direction of the hospital—he knows this because he knows which direction the hospital is, he has quietly learned the geography of your life the way he has learned everything about you—and you don’t see him until you’re almost level with him.
You stop.
Joshua thinks you look like someone who has been standing up for a very long time and is tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch. There are shadows under your eyes that weren't there in autumn and your coat is buttoned wrong, one button off at the bottom, and you haven’t noticed, and for some reason this detail is the one that gets him.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi," you say and there is something in your voice that is both relieved and slightly pained, the way a person sounds when they've been avoiding something and have run out of reasons to avoid it.
He doesn't say I haven't seen you or where have you been or any of the things that would be true and would also be a kind of pressure. He looks at you for a moment and then he says, quietly: "Have you eaten?"
You open your mouth and close it.
"Come on," he says and adjusts his bag and tips his head in the direction of his building, easy and uncomplicated, leaving the door open without pushing you through it.
You come. He isn't sure you decide to so much as run out of energy not to but you come and he takes it.
Joshua’s apartment is warm and smells like whatever he was cooking earlier. You stand in the doorway for a moment taking it in: the guitar against the wall, the notebook on the table, the small collection of Korean novels on the shelf with handwritten vocabulary notes tucked between them.
He’s already in the kitchen, setting his bag down, moving with the competence of someone who knows their own space.
"Please sit," he softly offers. "I have ingredients. This won't take long."
You sit at his table and you put your bag on the floor and you look at your hands. Your coat is still on. You realize after a moment that he hasn't asked you to take it off, hasn't assumed you're staying, has left that choice to you.
You take it off.
He glances over from the kitchen as you remove your coat and says nothing and cooks the food and you sit in his warm apartment and listen to the small sounds of someone taking care of something, the quiet industry of it, and something in your chest that has been clenched for weeks begins to release ever so slightly.
He sets a bowl in front of you a few minutes later and sits across with his own and doesn't make it a thing. He doesn't watch you with concern or ask how you're feeling or perform care in a way that would require you to perform gratitude back. He just eats and occasionally says something small, something easy, and lets you exist without demands.
You eat. You didn't realize how hungry you were.
Halfway through the bowl you say without fully planning to: "She's worse."
He puts his spoon down and gives you his full attention and waits.
"Her levels keep dropping and they've adjusted the medication twice and it's—" you stop. The clinical language runs out and underneath it is just the actual thing. "I'm scared," you say, which you have not said to anyone, ever. You’ve been too busy managing the situation to say the true thing about the situation and here in his warm kitchen with the street lamp outside making the window glow it comes out simple and plain. "I'm really scared."
"I know," he says quietly, directly, without softening it into something easier. "I know you are."
"I don't know how to—" you start and stop and press your lips together, look out the window.
"You don't have to know," he says. "Not right now. Right now you just have to eat."
It’s such a simple thing to say. It’s exactly the right thing to say. You look at him across the table in the warm kitchen and you think (not for the first time but more clearly than before) that this person is something you are not prepared for.
You finish eating. He makes tea without asking and sets it in front of you and you wrap both hands around the cup and feel the warmth travel up your arms.
"I'm sorry," you say. "I've been…I disappeared. I know I did."
"You were trying your best," he says. "That's allowed."
You look at the tea. "I was avoiding."
Joshua is quiet for a moment. Outside a car passes, its headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling. "I know," he says again and there is nothing accusatory in it, just honesty, the kind that trusts the other person to receive it.
"I do that," you say. "When things get hard I—I make myself very small. It's kept me going for a long time."
"It has," he says. "And it costs you."
You look up at him. He is watching you in that careful, clear way, not looking away, and there is something in his expression again. It has always been there, you realize. Since summer at least. Maybe longer. It’s an expression that’s patient and warm and very certain that has been waiting quietly this whole time.
"Joshua," you say and your voice is slightly unsteady.
"You don't have to say anything," he says. "Tonight you just be here. Okay? Just be here."
You nod. You don't trust your voice.
You stay for another hour. You move to the couch at some point and he sits beside you and puts something on low in the background, music, something instrumental, and you don't talk much after that. The warmth and the quiet and the weeks of running on nothing finally arrive all at once and your eyes are closing before you fully register it, your head finding the angle of his shoulder, and he goes very still.
Joshua stays very still.
You sleep for forty minutes while the winter street hums outside and he sits beside you and watches the lamp on the wall and thinks about nothing and everything and when you stir he is still there, exactly where you left him, because of course he is.
You don't talk about what you almost said that night. Or what he almost said back.
But something has been named, or nearly named, and you both know it, and the shape of things between you is different now in a way that cannot be undone.
You start coming back. Not all at once, though. You are still at the hospital, still managing, still carrying what you carry, but you text back. You appear at the park bench. You let him walk you home sometimes in the cold evening, shoulders close, your breath making small clouds in the winter air and it is the warmest thing in the world and it undoes you a little every time.
The almost-confession happens on a Sunday night in the third week of December.
You are at his apartment again. This has become a real thing. Dinner sometimes, or tea, or just sitting in the warm while the neighborhood is cold outside and you are laughing about something he said, the dry quiet kind of funny that arrives without announcement, and the laugh is the real one, the full one, and he is watching you laugh with an expression that is completely unguarded and you catch it, you catch him in it, and the laugh fades and you are looking at each other across the warm space of his living room.
Joshua opens his mouth to say something.
You feel it coming. You feel the shape of it in the air between you, something large and true and waiting to be said, and your heart is doing something complicated and you are very still.
"YN," he says and the way he says your name is different, the weight of it different, and you breathe in and—
His phone rings.
The sound is very loud in the quiet apartment. He closes his eyes briefly for a millisecond and then looks at the screen and his expression shifts into something apologetic. "It's my mom. Sunday call, I—I completely forgot—"
"Answer it," you say. Your voice is remarkably steady. "Of course. Answer it."
He answers it and steps toward the window and you pick up your cup and look at the guitar against the wall and breathe.
You stay for another twenty minutes while he talks to his mother, laughing at something the way he laughs and you sit with the thing that almost happened and you turn it over and examine it and you think that you are done being afraid of it.
You leave before he gets off the phone, with a small wave, and he mouths sorry and you shake your head and smile, you're fine, go, talk to your mom.
You walk home in the cold with your hands in your pockets and the winter city glittering around you and you make a decision somewhere between his door and yours.
You find Joshua on the quiet street.
Of course this is where he is—the street with the old buildings and the small front gardens, the one you wandered into together in October without meaning to, the one that gave you persimmon trees and his grandmother's garden and the first real thing he told you about himself.
You turn the corner and there he is, stopped in front of the same tree, hands in his pockets, looking up at the bare winter branches the way he looked at the full autumn ones: with that open unhurried attention he gives to everything that deserves it.
The tree is bare now. All the amber and gold gone, the branches reaching up into the grey winter evening. He doesn't hear you at first. You stop a few feet away and look at him looking at it.
Then he turns.
Something in his face settles when he sees you. It’s not surprise; it’s something quieter than that, something that looks like a person who has been waiting and is simply relieved the waiting is over. His expression doesn't ask anything of you. It never does.
"Hey you," he says.
"Hi…" you say.
A beat. The cold street hums quietly around you. Somewhere down the road a door closes, a light comes on in a window, the neighborhood doing its evening things entirely indifferent to the two of you standing here.
"I was just walking," he says. "I keep ending up here."
"I know," you say. "Me too."
He looks at you for a moment with that expression: patient, warm, reading something in your face that you haven't said yet. He doesn't push. He just stands there in the cold with his hands in his pockets and waits, the way he has always waited, like time is something he has plenty of and would spend all of it here if that's what you needed.
You look at the tree. You think about standing here in October with the persimmons hanging heavy and him saying my halmoni had a persimmon tree. You think about how long you have been standing at the edge of something, looking at it, deciding.
"I came to find you," you say to the tree more than to him.
A pause. "You found me," he says quietly.
You look at him then. He is already looking at you and something about the steadiness of it makes the thing you came to say feel suddenly very close to the surface.
"Give me a second," you say. "I've been rehearsing this for three days and now that I'm here I've forgotten all of it."
The corner of his mouth moves. "Take your time," he says.
"That's the problem," you say. "I've been taking my time. I've been taking my time for months."
Joshua goes very still.
You take a breath. The cold air fills your lungs and the lamplight is warm on the pavement and above you the persimmon tree holds out its bare patient branches and you think—now. It's now.
"I don't know how to do this," you say. "I want to say that first. I've spent a long time not letting myself want things and I'm out of practice and I'm probably going to be terrible at it."
Joshua is very still.
"But I think about you constantly," you say. "I have been thinking about you since summer and I've been telling myself it was, I don't know, manageable, something I could just…but it isn't. It isn't manageable. You brought me coffee and you remembered my birthday and you went back to the store twice and I can't—" you stop. Breathe.
"I don't know what to do with you," you say, honestly, helplessly. "I just know I don't want you to be something I’m too scared to reach for."
The street is very quiet.
Joshua looks at you for a long moment and his expression is doing something you have never seen before. It’s no longer the careful warmth and it’s not the patient sunshine. It’s something more open than that, something that has been kept below the surface and has finally, finally been let up.
"There's something I need to tell you," he says.
His voice is quiet in a different way.
"Okay," you say. You internally brace yourself for impact.
He glances once at the tree and then back at you. He's choosing this place deliberately. He wants this said here, in the place where it started becoming real. He looks at you and stays looking at you.
"The first day," he says. "The pharmacy."
You wait.
"It wasn't just a day for me. I wasn't just lost with a cold." He pauses. "I had just come from my halmoni's neighborhood. The house she grew up in. I'd finally gone and it was—it was a lot. More than I expected. I was having a hard time."
You are very still.
"And you helped me," he says. "With the medicine. And you were—you were carrying something yourself, I could see it, but you helped me anyway without thinking about it. And then you said feel better and you left." He looks at you. "I thought about you for days. The way you just…did that for me without asking for anything."
Above you the bare branches of the persimmon tree are very still in the cold evening air.
"And then you were at the bus stop," he says. "And I recognized you right away. You took a moment longer."
"Joshua," you say softly.
"I've been careful with you," he says, "because I already knew something about you before you knew anything about me. I knew that you were the kind of person who helps a stranger on one of their hardest days and doesn't even think twice. And I didn't want it to be strange or for you to feel like you owed me something for remembering. I just—" he stops. "I just never forgot. I tried to at first. And then you were here and I couldn't even try anymore."
You realize, somewhere in the middle of this, that your eyes are starting to burn that familiar burn you haven’t allowed yourself to let out for months.
You look at him in the winter lamplight of the quiet street and you think about a girl running on empty in a pharmacy, going through the motions, helping a stranger without thinking because it was just what you did, because your mother raised you to be someone who helps and it had become so automatic you didn't even register it. You think about the fact that this person—this warm, careful person—saw you in that automatic kindness of your worst seasonvand decided you were worth remembering.
"You remembered me," you say.
"I never stopped," he says.
Joshua closed the distance between you. He leans forward and you meet him halfway because of course he leans, because he has been meeting you halfway since a bus stop in April without ever once making you feel the distance you were making him cross.
His hand comes up to your face slowly, his palm cupping your jaw, his thumb at your cheekbone and he holds you like that for just a moment before his lips meet yours. He wanted to look at you one more time first because he needed to make sure you were real.
The kiss is soft. Warm in the way he is warm; it’s the kind of kiss that knows it has nowhere else to be. His other hand finds your waist and draws you in gently and you go, your arms coming around his neck, holding on.
He pulls back just slightly—barely an inch—and you feel him breathe, feel the exhale of it against your lips, and then he rests his forehead against yours and stays there. Eyes closed. The snow starts to fall around you both, with the bare tree above you and the lamplight making everything amber at the edges.
A long moment passes. Neither of you moves.
Then, quietly, so quietly it arrives like something he's been holding for a very long time: "I'm really glad you came to find me."
Something in your chest opens all the way.
"I know where you walk," you say just as quietly. "I've known for a while."
You feel him still. And then the smile moves through him slowly. He pulls you closer and tucks you against him properly, his chin coming to rest at the top of your head and you close your eyes and listen to the snow settling on everything it can reach.
spring again: arriving
The persimmon tree on the quiet street has new leaves.
You notice it on a Saturday morning in late March on the walk you have been taking together long enough now that your feet know the route without consulting your mind. Joshua is beside you holding one of your hands inside his jacket pocket and he is talking about something, something about the market ajumma trying to teach him a new word this morning and you are listening and also watching the tree and you stop walking without meaning to.
He stops too, the way he always matches you.
"The leaves," you say.
He looks. "It's the same one.”
Joshua looks at it for a long moment and you look at him looking at it and you think that you love him. You have been thinking about it in fragments for weeks.
You don't say it yet. You just stand beside him and let it be true.
"She would have liked this walk," he says softly.
"Tell me something else about her," you say.
He smiles the slow kind, the one that starts in his eyes. He has been telling you things about her in small installments since autumn, parceling her out in the careful way of someone who is learning to share a grief they've been private with, and each time he does you listen with everything you have because you understand, more than most, what it means to love someone you are trying not to lose.
"She used to sing while she cooked," he says. "My mom told me. Old trot songs mostly. Like the kitchen was a concert hall."
"I would have liked her," you say.
He looks at you. "She would have loved you," he says certainly and simply and you feel it land in your chest and stay there.
Your mother is better.
You have made a careful peace with the fact that better and fixed are different countries and she lives in the first one now, stably, the new medication doing what the doctors hoped it would, her levels holding. She sat up in bed last week and asked you to bring her a snack from the market near the hospital and you went immediately and came back and sat beside her while she ate it and she looked at you with those eyes she has and said you look different lately.
“How?” you asked.
She considered it. “Lighter,” she said.
“I'm okay, eomma,” you said. “I think I'm really okay.”
She patted your hand and finished her snack and you sat with her in the mild hospital afternoon and for the first time in a very long time the sitting was just sitting. Just a daughter beside her mother in the early spring light.
Joshua is teaching himself a new song.
You know this because you can hear it through the wall of his apartment sometimes when you arrive. One evening in early April you arrive and the music stops when you knock and he opens the door with the guitar still in his hand, a habit he's stopped apologizing for because you told him not to and you come in and take your shoes off and he sits back on the couch and picks up where he left off without ceremony.
You make tea. You have learned where he keeps everything: the mugs on the left, the tea in the small tin beside the kettle, the honey he takes in his because he thinks no one notices but you always notice and you make two cups and bring them and sit beside him and he plays.
It’s the song he has been working on. You have heard the pieces of it before but not the whole thing and now it moves all the way through, finding its way. You cannot say how or why but you recognize the shape of it, the warmth of it, the way it knows where it's going.
He reaches the end and lets the last note go and the apartment is quiet.
"That's the one," you say. "The one you've been working on."
He looks at you. "Since July," he says.
You look back at him. "July," you repeat.
"Give or take," he says and the corner of his mouth moves and you understand completely and say nothing and take a long sip of your tea while he tunes a string that doesn't need tuning.
"Does it have a name?" you ask.
He considers. "Same stop," he says.
You are very quiet for a moment. Outside the spring evening is blue and mild and somewhere below in the courtyard the potted plants have come back, tentative and green, and someone has added new ones for the season.
"Play it again," you say.
Joshua plays it again. You sit beside him with your tea and your eyes half closed and the music fills the small warm space and you think about a bus in April, standing room only, shoulders almost touching, and a voice saying this is us like it was nothing, like it was just geography, and you think about how long the world was quietly arranging things before either of you knew.
Your mother meets Joshua on a Sunday in the middle of April.
You don't make it a big thing. You bring him to the hospital and he brings flowers, the yellow kind, because he asked the market ajumma what would be appropriate and she told him with great authority and he listened.
Your mother looks at him for a long moment when you walk in and he smiles at her and says annyeonghaseyo in his careful Korean and she replies and says something that makes him look at you for translation.
"She says your pronunciation is improving," you say.
"She's heard me before?"
"I talk about you," you say, which you have never admitted directly and you watch what your words do to his face: the soft brightness of it, the way it moves through him and you think: there is the thing you fell in love with. The realness of him, the way nothing you give him gets wasted.
Your mother pats the chair beside her bed and he sits in it and she asks Joshua questions in Korean that you translate and he answers and she listens and at some point she switches to careful slow English just for him and he lights up at it.
Before you leave she holds your hand for a moment and says, "He looks at you like you're something he found."
Joshua’s residency status comes through on a Wednesday.
He calls you before he tells anyone else. You are at work and you step into the corridor to answer and he tells you and you lean against the wall of the corridor with your hand over your mouth and your eyes doing something embarrassing.
"You're staying," you say.
"I'm staying," he says.
He came here for his grandmother. He came to find her in the streets and the language and the air, and he did, in small increments, in the patient accumulation of a year of learning. He found her in the market ajumma's kitchen vocabulary and the persimmon tree on the quiet street and the smell of miyeok-guk on a birthday evening. He found her in the language he is still learning.
And he found something else. Something he didn't come looking for which is the way the best things tend to arrive.
"Joshua," you say.
"Yeah."
"I have to tell you something."
A pause. "Of course."
"I love you," you say in the corridor of your office building on a Wednesday afternoon with absolutely no ceremony because you have been carrying it since a persimmon tree in March and it has been patient long enough. "I just… I wanted you to know. As a separate thing from the residency, I mean you can just—that's just true regardless of any of it."
He is quiet for three full seconds.
Then he laughs. You can hear the smile in it and you feel it’s enormous and unguarded.
"YN-ah," he says.
"Hm?"
"I have loved you," he says, "since a very long time ago."
"December?" you say.
"Before December," he says. "Since a bus stop in April. Since the same stop and a name I didn't know yet."
You close your eyes in the corridor and you smile so wide it almost hurts.
Outside your office window the city is doing what it does in spring: beginning again, the cherry blossoms on the main road dropping their petals in the mild wind like they have somewhere to be. Somewhere across the neighborhood a man is learning the language of the city he has decided to stay in and somewhere in a hospital a woman is getting a little better and somewhere on a quiet street there is a persimmon tree putting out its new leaves again, patient as it has always been, asking nothing, giving everything.
You stay on the phone a little longer than you need to just to hear Joshua breathe.
