Status Updates From When We Fell Apart: 'Truly ...

him. I wanted to leave a wound that would fester and scar, forever remind him of what he'd done to me, what he'd done to our family.
Knees trembling, ankles weak, I stumbled to the netting that surrounded us, and my mind went blank. I gasped for the air I did not want, stars swirling, the lights of Incheon blinking in and out.
So-ra would never, I thought. She would never.

I found myself shaking my head. It wasn't for anyone but me. It represented an alternate ending, a parallel existence, one I'd never know, but I still wanted the reminder, the spirit of it. It was a memento of what I could do, what I could be. In the course of my meticulously charted life, it was the only thing I'd ever done, ever made, that truly mattered to me.

He must have been convinced it showed his daughter in a poor light. How wrong he was. Min would bring the Minister what he'd been after all this time. He'd show him the gifted and creative woman he'd pressured and stifled. He'd show him what kind of daughter he might have killed.

There was the way she always handed me my menu first when we sat down at a restaurant, the way she seemed to shift our conversations back to a time before Min. Even when she glossed over something Min said, diminishing it ever so slightly, I knew he couldn't sense any derision or animosity. But I knew it was there; I could feel it.

Beneath the unrelenting brightness of the gym lights, I saw her in a new way: at war with everything around her. She fed off op-position. She found identity in the contrasts, the differences. Her at-titude, her aura, even her sexuality was defined against something. I

Misaki spoke slowly. "In Korea, they call it Han. It's a feeling of sorts. A kind of collective despair in response to being conquered and oppressed for long periods of time, over generations. To choose your own destiny—that's what an individual, a nation, craves most. Han is a result of that most basic desire being crushed."

I wanted to ask more details about her nights out. Was she club-bing? Sleeping around? Nothing would surprise me. But I resisted, let my curiosity die. If she confided in me, told me anything, I'd have to return the favor, something I was unwilling to do. I drank my sake. Smiled.

Bit by bit we nudged her from our lives … she was part of the equation, a requirement … someone I was forced to treat like a friend but keep at arms length ..,

They regarded each other like politicians on a debate stage, guarded smiles, politeness painted across their faces. Absent were the knowing glances between them, references to some past intimacy I could never know. Were they just each other's ladders now, steps to power and fortune?

All of it was simultaneously glamorous and crude, overwhelming my senses. Fresh colors had been splashed across my palette, and I saw just how bland and boring my life in Gyeryong had been. But that was all going to change now, I thought, with So-ra alongside me. With her, I'd experience it all. She was my guide, my light, my flare.

The ocean dazzled before us like shattered glass. Blinded, we squinted and walked down the beach, doling out tidbits of information about ourselves, rationing, making sure we didn't run out of anything to say.

His parents' separation was just another oddity, another peculiarity pushing him into a place without a name, a place where you split your holidays between households, where you were the conduit through which your parents spoke, where you took the sharpest thing you could find and split your love in two, no matter how un-evenly. Min didn't think it was a place at all; it was simply the absence of something whole.