Building, marked twice

The barley tea was already in the kitchen. I brewed it because my hands needed a job that was not my phone.

I am rewriting the morning already. The lobby training works on me too. I smooth my own sentences before I let them land.

Bae Yu-jin wrote one word on the yellow pad. I will not say what it was. I can say it was not my name and it was not BUILDING. He slid the pad across the desk and said bring Moon Tae-hoon tomorrow. I held the baggie with the tooth and the baggie with the lock of hair and I walked down the narrow stairwell without looking behind me, because looking behind me is what someone guilty does and also what someone with a black sedan outside does and I did not want to be that person inside my own head.

I did not notice the strap until I was two streets from the officetel. It had opened along the seam like a mouth. Clean. Whoever did it was not in a hurry. Whoever did it wanted me to know it could have been the bag and not the strap. I locked the door twice. The second lock is the one I trust. The first one is for the version of me that still believes in single locks.

I stood in the kitchen and photographed the new mark next to the August one and I labeled them BUILDING. I am turning myself into evidence. I am building a case file out of my own skin. Either very smart or very sick and I do not care which because I will need the photos on a night when someone asks me what I was doing in September.