When Sunny and Kibum had first met, they were both small children. Sunny was all wide eyes and curious questions. She was mature beyond her five year-old body. She had to be; an immature kid couldn’t follow around Jinkyu and Eunkyu, her two older sisters who were already old enough to experiment with boys and make-up (two things her daddy always said she couldn’t touch, even if she was as old as her siblings). On the other hand, Kibum was shy glances and quiet phrases. He was short for his age and barely met his mother’s waist. He never let go of the leg of his mother’s pants, and he sucked his thumb until he was three. Sunny never left home without her confidence and pig tails, and Kibum always his Buzz Lightyear toy tucked under his arm.
Sunny pulled Kibum’s hair as soon as she met him, but it was only because he didn’t share. He cried for the next fifteen minutes until she showed him how to fold paper crane with colorful paper. She didn’t tell him that her sisters taught her how though. “I just knew,” she told him as she held up the crane that stopped his blubbering.
They were friends after that.
Kibum lived on the next floor up from her, and her daddy showed her how to use the elevator when she was old enough. She played with Kibum whenever she wanted. Sunny wasn’t good at counting, but they must have folded a thousand different technicolor cranes. Kibum still kept the first.
Sunny went to the all-girl’s school, and Kibum the boy’s. By the time he turned sixteen, Kibum was sneaking Sunny onto his campus to do more than just fold paper cranes. They got caught once in the winter when Principal Lee followed their footprints out to the gymnasium in the fresh winter snows. Kibum hid Sunny in the equipment closet and talked his way out of expulsion. It’s funny, Sunny thought as she tossed a tennis ball against the wall as she waited for Kibum to come pick her up, how Kibum has all the words she no longer does.
Kibum’s eighteen birthday came with a love interest that he didn’t really love and an expensive camera for his photography. Sunny sent a fake positive pregnancy test to get her Kibum back, laughing all the while as he breathed into a paper bag. She hadn’t meant to cause him to hyperventilate. Sunny didn’t think her Photoshop skills were that good. She won the words back that she always had. After all, she was the poet, not the photographer.
They closed for an apartment together on Sunny’s twentieth birthday. It was close to their college and not nice at all, but Sunny took Kibum to the craft store and taught him how to sew. Kibum folded a paper crane to place on the shelves of poetry that surrounded their bed, and Sunny snapped a picture to remember forever.
