Highway with Green Apples

by Bae Suah

I am one week away from my twenty-fifth birthday. I hate being that age. That age is neither as fresh and full of life as fifteen years nor as jaded as the afternoon of thirty-five years. I never know what the next day will bring, so I am always uneasy.

You don’t know, do you? How much I love you. My love for you will never change, even after an ocean of time has passed. How long is an ocean of time? Feelings as countless as grains of sand. Distances as far-flung as the sky. How much is that, I wonder.

Because life has not turned out the way I wanted it to. Because that’s how it always is—as a child, you get no love from your parents, and at school, you get bad grades and never catch anyone’s eye. And after you’re all grown up, you keep peeking in the door of the gynecology clinic, and then wait for an hour, and another hour, at the café where a man has promised to meet you, gulping down several cups of weak coffee before leaving alone in the dark. Then, to top it off, the cat that crosses your path one day on a highway with green apples turns out to be a black cat.

I felt certain that just because practically every single person found someone to marry did not mean that they’d found a love as gentle as a spring breeze or that shook them up like a midsummer storm.

“But that’s how it is. Nothing ever ends the way it begins. How could it?

“I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”