The door opened and shut

I rehearsed a first sentence for a week and the door answered before I could use it. She smiled my smile — my exact smile, the one I have spent nine years perfecting behind a hotel desk — and then she used it to slam the steel edge into my forehead.

I have been hit by a door before. This was not a door. A door swings. This one was swung.

The funny part, the part I keep grinding on in the taxi while the Chuseok exodus crawled past my window, is that I photographed it. Blood on marble-white tile, the dent in the steel, my own face in the elevator mirror. I took pictures the way I take pictures of suite amenities. Documentation as a job. Some part of me was already building the file while the blood was still finding my eyebrow.

At Hannam-dong police station I said the words in a calm voice and I did not cry, and I hated that I did not cry, because a crying version of me would have been believed faster. ~~=I think.~~ I do not actually think that. I think I was proud of the calm voice and I think the pride is worse.

Now the chain is on twice and I am eating instant noodles on the floor in this dust-pink set, scrolling my own photos like evidence I do not trust yet. The gauze itches. The lobby smile died somewhere around the elevator ride down and I am not replacing it tonight.