if you can't see the blue sky, open up a blue umbrella.
that'll do, right?
Three months in, Jihyo learns that spills can occur even in a room where the gravitational force is zero. Her favorite shirt is now bearing a mark the size of a walnut, marring the threads where her breastbone meets the cotton. It'd been a last minute stowaway in her suitcase. A sort of good luck charm, something to keep her warm.
"Any luck?"
Mina had loaned her a stain removal pen, part of a pencil case full of miscellaneous items that vary in function but have seemed to be more for novelty's sake than practicality. A compass, a thimble, more space pens than Jihyo can count, a single die, and a key chain with a short piece of braided plastic dangling off it.
"It's only made the blotch, well, a bigger blotch," Jihyo chuckles, raising the piece of fabric up so Mina can see. She expects Mina to laugh with her, to put on a face that lights up just a little, but when Mina wears a frown that says dejection more than anything else, Jihyo realizes that no, expect isn't the right word. It's been too long and too - awkward for just expect.
"But you loved that shirt.. " Mina says with a low voice. She sighs and looks to the floor.
Jihyo had only met Mina in spurts before their trip together, and most of the time they'd just gone over daily plans and reporting schedules.
It's a joint-venture between South Korea and Japan, they said. Nine months riding the galaxy. Really it's more like an attempted leg-up on China and the U.S. before their larger, much more important, mission in 2 years time.
'Long enough to have a newborn!' the translator had joked while they shook hands and met each other's eyes for the first time, fire in the hearts of them. Neither Mina nor Jihyo had ever studied the other's respective language before the announcement about six months prior to the trip, and it's resulted in sporadic stumbling blocks of miscommunication.
Hello, good morning, good night, dinner is good today. A hopscotch of formalities too enforced to break. Although Jihyo thinks that Mina has never been one to be abundant with her words.
"It's okay," is all Jihyo can think to say. "It was my fault."
Mina leaves to write the daily report in the control center and Jihyo decides to fix herself a cup of chamomile tea, foraging for her favorite straw in her bag.
While she sips on the hot liquid and feels the wave of a sigh wash over her, Jihyo closes her eyes and breathes deeply. She can hear the faint trills of pushed buttons and resulting echoes of confirmation. Tell-tale signs of Mina with one of her late nights. It's kind of become a sort of lullaby for Jihyo and she's thinking now, or rather feeling, that expect is for strangers who haven't spent their days together, who haven't slept side by side, close enough to hear the swells of each other's slumbering chests. What Jihyo wants - is exactly that. Jihyo wants.
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Their table is small, hidden in a wall panel that's operated with a pulley. It's just the right size for two plates and two water pouches and not much else.
"Can I ask you something?" Jihyo tries.
Mina looks up mid-swallow and raises her brows slightly. They're having udon tonight.
A second passes, two. Jihyo waits.
"Okay," Mina says.
Jihyo hesitates. Then gathers waterfalls of broth into her mouth and hides behind the steam. Mina's smiling at her when Jihyo finally meets her eyes again.
"What is it?"
"Um," Jihyo braves, "why did you bring a compass here?"
Mina laughs. Jihyo's cheeks redden at the center. "I just felt like it," Mina says simply. "Is that it?"
"Then… do you knit?"
"No, but I've always wanted to." Mina picks up a few strands of noodles with her chopsticks and yoyos them before slurping them between her lips. "That case is just something I found in my desk at home. I didn't even look inside."
Jihyo tilts her head. "Why'd you decide to bring it then?"
"Mm. Just - in case."
"In case?"
Mina chews thoughtfully. "It can get kind of boring here," she says, pursing her lips, and then as if in a rush, "This is nice, though."
Jihyo wilts. It feels like a release, one that's been long overdue, although she hadn't realized it until now. She softens into a smile. "Yeah, it is."
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Eomma,
I couldn't find my blanket earlier, you know the one you made for me, and I was thinking about how you'd probably find it in a second, and how you'd probably just shake your head at me and then go back to washing the mushrooms for budae jigae.
It's things like that that make me miss you the most, I think.
I just wanted to tell you that, and that I love you.
Your Jihyo
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Sunday is cleaning day. The space station had supplied them with instruments of all kinds - ones that are specific to the shapes of the dials and knobs and others that are sensitive to the materials inside the shuttle. But Jihyo still prefers the old feather duster, worn and missing a few plumes that had fallen out over the years. Shaped to her own hands.
"Do you want this?" Mina hands her a pad of stationary paper. "I noticed that you write letters, too."
Jihyo accepts it with tentative fingers. "I do," she says, grazing over the surface of it. Soft pink with buttery yellow lines. The cardboard backing feels nice mooning into her palm. "Do you- do you ever feel a bit silly? Writing letters that can't be sent?"
"I did, at first." Mina smiles, with streetlights in her eyes. "But then I kept doing it, and after a while it just felt like talking to someone I love. Like I'm still close enough to tell them about my day, even from thousands of miles away."
And Jihyo's nodding, brushing her thumb across the parchment. She'll start using it tonight. "Thank you," she says, and she means it more than she has since the start of their exploration.
Mina returns to sweeping across the tiled walls with a microfiber cloth, but pauses to softly say, under her breath, "I hope it gives you the same comfort, Jihyo-sshi."
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Jihyo,
I want to get closer to you but I don't know how.
I heard you crying the other night. You sounded so sad and constrained. I don't know how to tell you that you don't have to try to hide it.
Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night and find my pillow wet, and it makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed, somehow, because the only evidence I leave behind can just be shoved further into my sleeping bag. It feels unfair to you.
I'm sorry. I've never been very good at these things.
Mina
☆彡☆彡☆彡
In the lull after dinner, when all is quiet:
Jihyo is rubbing at the base of her belly. Faintly considering one of the strawberry ice cream bars they've got stashed. "Who do you write to the most?"
"Mm," Mina begins. She does that, a lot Jihyo thinks, mm-ing, and Jihyo is never able to predict what follows. "I write to my mom a lot, and my dad and brother. Sometimes my dog. Sometimes my Korean teacher, for practice."
Jihyo smiles. A warm current flows through her. "I write to my mom a lot, too. And my best friend Nayeon."
Mina shifts in her seat, and lets the corners of her mouth pull up lazily. "What's she like?"
Jihyo's shoulders fall and settle, and she's mirroring Mihyo's expression, now. "She's a handful," she breathes, and it comes out with a fond chuckle.
The room, the shuttle, is toasty tonight. Jihyo and Mina stay up until the late hours talking, longer than they're supposed to. Mina will be tired in the morning according to their strict schedule, but that's okay. Jihyo smiles into her pillow that night, letting her eyes droop into sleep.
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Eomma,
Remember when halmeoni would tell us stories about halabeoji while he was off at war? How she kept telling them even after we got the notice of his passing? She spoke of him like he was still alive.
I was thinking about that earlier today.
Eomma, I’ve been here four months and I still have five more to go.
I miss you so much. It feels like an eternity before I can see you again.
Your Jihyo
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Jihyo starts workshopping her own daily reports to accompany Mina's formal logs. They'll all be scanned when they get back to Earth anyway, Jihyo reasons, and casual observations arguably have just as much validity as templatic recordings. Plus she'd gotten bored of just checking, checking, checking. Mina bears the responsibility of being assigned the primary figure-head for the mission, while Jihyo is the secondary. Jihyo can tell that it gets to her sometimes, the pressure, but Mina's been handling it quite well, and she's never been condescending toward Jihyo either. Jihyo admires that a lot about her.
The corners of the notepad have lifted slightly and the fibers have frayed and softened under lopsided stress. The effects of being wedged into her sleeping bag.
Jihyo's about halfway through the sheets and doesn't bother to separate the reports and letters. The material is nice to write on. It's easy for her mind to run astray when pen meets paper and Jihyo is always a little surprised at what she ends up staring at the next morning.
Note to self: translate the kanji watermarked on each page. Probably a brand.
Spam in space tastes the same as spam on Earth.
Mina is becoming paler every day.
It seems like there are extra stars in the galaxy tonight.
"Can I see the reports you've been writing?"
Jihyo holds back a laugh when she answers. "No." She almost breaks at the confused look on Mina's face. "Control group," she manages, her smile peeking through like the morning sun through the blinds.
Mina raises a brow and laughs. Tinkling with gums exposed. "Okay."
"I'll show you tomorrow night," Jihyo says, because she can't help herself. The ones that don't have Mina in them, although she'll find that those are far and few between.
"Okay," Mina says and goes back to reading the paperback she brought with her. Jihyo's peeked at the cover a few times. “The Woman Next Door” by Ha Seongnan. She hasn't read it herself, but Nayeon and a few other friends have recommended it to her. Jihyo wonders if Nayeon would have an easier time. Reaching out to Mina.
The temperature inside the shuttle is a little frosty, but Jihyo doesn't feel like getting up to throw on another layer. She permits herself to notice more tonight, to observe.
Mina's bare nails turning the pages one by one. The way her eyes glow every now and then, and she brings the book closer, so that her face is hidden from Jihyo's view. The curvature of Mina's left ear, mantling at its crown. The moles on her face, the amount of them Jihyo doesn't dare to count.
"Jihyo."
Jihyo's eyes bug out, and her face goes red. She might melt into the floor. "Huh," she says, pretending to look busy.
"Have you read this?" Mina asks, lifting the book in reference. Hopefully oblivious, Jihyo thinks.
"Uh, no," Jihyo answers. "But I heard that it's good."
"It is, it's interesting," Mina says, placing a bookmark delicately into its spine.
"What's it about?" Jihyo asks, although Nayeon's already given her a brief summary.
"It's a collection of short stories with mundane settings, but they're also all a bit morbid," Mina chuckles. "Reading about lifestyles in Korea is nice, too," she adds.
Jihyo smiles. Something about Mina saying it is different. "Recommend me something in Japanese."
"Mm, honestly I don't read as often as you probably think," Mina says. "But I'll think of something."
Jihyo gets an idea. She retreats to their sleeping quarters and fastens the curtain in the middle of the room to the hook on the floor. Then blindly grabs for the notepad underneath her pillow, grasping it just by the corner bends. The shuttle is small, but the nations still have their borders.
She decides to just rip a scrap off one of the used pages, a piece of her, so that it sits oblong in the back cover of “The Woman Next Door”.
☆彡☆彡☆彡
"Do you like gummy worms?" Mina asks, out of the blue.
Jihyo conquers her next pedal rotation before answering. "Yeah, they're yummy," Jihyo says. The words come out a bit strangled, but it still feels like a reward.
"I miss the rain," Mina says, as if there's an obvious connection between the two topics.
"Me too," Jihyo says, because she does. It comes out shy and small and a bit too close to the margins of a confession. Maybe it's being tired from the workout. Maybe it's something else, and even the smallest of flutters knocks at her defenses.
Sharing is a confession in a way, isn't it? And non-secrets are still secrets.
"We should go to the candy store when we get back to Earth," Jihyo proposes, sighing as she steps off the ergometer. "Just you and me."
Mina smiles at her, and Jihyo's heart goes giddy. "I'd like that," Mina says, then adds, "very much."
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Jihyo,
I found your note.
It made me smile a lot :)
And, me too.
Mina
☆彡☆彡☆彡
0000 and 1200. The assigned times for their tasked ventures out to space. They're slated to pilot small movements on a bimonthly basis, tracked by longitude and latitude. It's funny, Jihyo thinks, how her summer-long stint as a Kakao Taxi driver during uni had apparently been reason enough for the station to assign her as the official pilot of the mission. She used to tell time in stages by the view outside her window:
Light blue-gray and cloudless for the early commuters.
An almost blinding kind of yellow - the kind that made her squint - for the lunch rush. Two hours for the afternoon commuters that Jihyo mainly repressed, if she were to be honest.
Sunset (15 minutes).
Then, finally, the light of the corner liquor stores and 24/hr diners.
Jihyo has many stories. Maybe she'll tell them one day, when the blue of the sky is bright, and she's got someone by her side that's willing to listen.
"Do you want to go together this time?" Mina asks. Makes work of wiping down their helmets.
"Um, is that okay?" Jihyo asks, feeling a little uneasy. They've never done this before.
"We always communicate regardless, and our suits function perfectly on their own. We should be fine," Mina says, and throws a smile back to Jihyo before moving to check the oxygen levels in their tanks.
Jihyo's next breath comes out wobbly but, "okay," she says. Because she trusts Mina.
It's gorgeous out. Like it always is. Jihyo wonders if Mina ever spares a second to just - absorb it all. She's concentrating on the device in her hands with a heavy crease in her forehead.
Jihyo wants to smooth it out for her. She hops over. "Any changes?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary," Mina says. Jihyo tries to smile at her, but Mina isn't looking. "Oh - fuck. Fuck fuck fuck."
"What?" Jihyo asks. She hurries to peek at the small screen. It's full of digits, codes, that might read a little too familiar. "What's wrong?"
"These are the same numbers from the last time I was out," Mina rushes. "I forgot to reset it. Fuck, I'm such an idiot."
"You're not," Jihyo says, surprised at how strong her voice comes out. Even transmitted through a hazy speaker. "You're the smartest person I know."
Mina sighs. "I should go back. I need to- "
"Wait," Jihyo says. "Let's just - stay for a while." She reaches for Mina's hand, gloved. "We've still got some oxygen left."
Mina pauses. Then finally chuckles. "Okay," she says, turning to face the endless black with dotted sparks decorating it. "We can stay a while."
They take it in.
Jihyo's probably using up more oxygen than she's supposed to, but she doesn't really mind. It'll be fine. She thinks that she wouldn't want to share this moment with anyone else.
"Did you bring a dress?" Mina asks. She looks open, and her eyes are bright. Like the stars themselves. And like the stars, they're too far away for Jihyo to touch.
"I did." She made sure to, in case.
"We've been here 150 days," Mina says.
Jihyo beams. She's really using too much oxygen right now as she yells out, "ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DAYS!!" and Mina has to bring her closer. A tether to their shuttle. They laugh and laugh and laugh, rippling peals of it into the universe and filling the void.
They have dumplings for dinner, which isn't unusual for a Tuesday night, but seeing Mina in her navy blue dress, garnished with a pretty ivy brooch, more than made up for it. Jihyo wishes they could light candles.
☆彡☆彡☆彡
(Jihyo, in her mid-twenties, harbors little more knowledge about love than she did at the height of her toddler years, bouncing atop her halmeoni's lap. She'd practically grown up at the Naro Space Center, in the heart of Jeollanam-do. Her father had had a desk job at one of the testing facilities due to an unfortunate accident during his training years, resulting in a permanent case of paralyzed limbs and a wheelchair. Little Jihyo had been let to run amok in the center. She made it her daycare, her school, her home.
"Have I told you the story about halabeoji and I at the fish market, sonnyeo? And the lady who fought with us over the catfish?"
She has many times, Jihyo knows. The story always starts off the same, almost like a fairytale: it was very, very cold that morning and halabeoji and I were wrapped up in our winter coats, hiding in the collars to shield ourselves from the wind..
And Jihyo always let her go on, until the catfish turns into a swordfish or trout or mackerel halfway through. And then the invariable finish:
"Oh, I never remember what ended up happening with that bitter old woman," she would laugh and sigh. "Halabeoji will tell you when he gets back. It's the best part anyway."
Halmeoni had lots of days like that. It wasn't until a few years later that the doctors would give it a name. But on those chilly Autumn days where they'd have tea by the window, hearing the patter of rain and the crackle of the fireplace make music through the night, Jihyo had understood what missing someone really meant, how love lay in the space between.
Halmeoni always seemed like she was just - waiting for Halabeoji to come back. And that feeling of waiting, where time feels like it's passing slower than the turn of the season, is just the core of it. More than the cries at 2am, more than the clutching of forgotten sweaters, it's the soft smile that looks upon old photographs and the familiar scent of lived-in places, full of spoken and unspoken endearments.
Jihyo at 26 is learning a new definition.)
☆彡☆彡☆彡
"I remember when we first met," Mina says, picking at a loose thread in Jihyo's sweatpants. She's resting her head on the spread of Jihyo's thigh, wiggling into the joint. Somehow they've become like this. Come to a place that's easy. "You looked so nervous," she says softly, and Jihyo is glad that she didn't laugh, but -
She smacks her upside the head anyway. "Get off me," Jihyo says in a faux-stern voice, although her motions make no move to agree. She sifts her fingers through Mina's shoulder-length hair. It's grown a bit.
"Thank you," Mina says, and Jihyo thinks that she might fall asleep any second. "This mission has become much more important to me than I thought it would."
Jihyo is buzzing with white noise. "You're so dutiful with your tasks," she dodges. "Even without an objective."
"It matters to me," Mina says seriously.
"Oh- I didn't mean- I'm sorry- I didn't- "
Mina lets out a soft chuckle, too tired to do much else. "I was nervous too, Jihyo-ah," Mina says, whispers. Her hand has come to rest upon Jihyo's kneecap. "I still am."
Jihyo's heart stutters and pounds in her chest. She turns off the light. "Me too, Mina-chan."
☆彡☆彡☆彡
Eomma,
It's my last day here. I saved all the letters I wrote to you, just in case you wanted to receive them.
It's been fun here, almost like a dream. I've learned so much and experienced so much- I'll tell you all about it tomorrow. It’s not wishful thinking to hope for a hot meal when I come home, is it? Maybe blood sausage? Something I can smell before I even walk through the door?
Eoooommmmmmmmaaaaaa I'm so excited to see you!!!!!!!!! ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
Love you, love you, love you! Because I might not write it down for a while.
Your Jihyo
P.S. I want to introduce you to someone. I think you'll like her.