The Pour He Was Owed

He said my name across the kalguksu. Not a question, not a greeting. A claim. Park Seo-yeon-ssi. You owe me a pour. Like the noodles didn't exist. Like Hye-jin didn't exist. Like the third torn page and Hye-jin's eleven pages and my blue pen weren't all living in this same two-block radius, and he just walked in and dragged it all into his mouth.

Four seconds on my collarbone. I counted. The body knows how to count when it's being counted.

Hye-jin stood up. She said, She is not pouring today, and the room got very still in the way small rooms get still when someone draws a line. I loved her for it in the ugly way I love people who do the thing I cannot do in public — the thing where the no leaves the body whole and clean. My face broke for a half-second before I caught it. The mirror across the kalguksu showed me the break and then the catch. Two faces in three seconds. The lobby training is so deep I can rebuild the smile before the insult finishes landing.

I wrote in the back of the sky notebook, beneath his line: I have. I did. I will.

I do not know who it is for. It is not for him. It is not even for Hye-jin. It is for the part of me that walked out of the Jongno 3-ga clinic this morning and added filed, mailed, walked out to the skyline notebook, and thought, for one breath, that the worst of August was behind me. The worst of August is never behind me in August. August is a man in a charcoal suit who knows my name and my collarbone and exactly which kalguksu I eat at.