fleetinggalaxy

[fleetinggalaxy]

Irene, I Will Not Let You Walk Into Paris Rain Alone

Irene's rebellious phase came as late as Seoul’s first snow this year.

She was clear-headed, knew when to yield, and knew how to navigate the cracks of reality with ease.

But now, as the spire of Notre Dame pierced through the neon lights of Champs-Élysées, she was pouring tequila over the snow-covered railing of the balcony.

The moment the flames ignited, I recognized the lighter—it was the one her parents had given her as a coming-of-age gift. The edges of the ZIPPO had long been worn smooth, and the embossed gold letters had faded into a sigh.

She stood in the wind, one hand in her coat pocket, thumb gently rubbing the lighter’s edge. Flecks of firelight flickered on her eyelashes.

She didn’t cry, didn’t argue, and didn’t look back.

“Let’s go,” she said that day. “If the world insists on making us sick, then let’s run away and be our own doctors somewhere only we exist.”

By the third day, when the phone in the suitcase finally stopped vibrating, the morning mist of the Seine was creeping over the attic skylight.

She sucked on a mint candy as she taught me how to read metro station names.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés rolled off her tongue in broken syllables. My teeth knocked against her sigh, swallowing it into the rumble of the train.

She said the rain in Seoul fell like steel needles, but the rain in Paris curled in the air.

Parisian rain was like frosted glass, soaking the entire city in a soft-focus lens.

I counted the blinking tunnel lights as twenty and twenty-five merged in the speeding tunnels into a liquid mercury reflection.

When the metro passed beneath the Seine, she hummed La Vie en Rose while tracing buttons on my coat, her breath fogging the glass to sketch escape routes from Seoul to Paris.

She suddenly bit down on a strawberry candy shell, and for a moment, my tongue tasted the flashing red light of Incheon Airport’s security check.

Those fragments of Korean spilling from overseas phone calls—we muted them, pickling them at the bottom of an absinthe bottle.

The moment the train doors shut, the world forgot us.

“Do you regret it?” she would ask me sometimes, voice soft, afraid to wake the Parisian night wind and a beautiful dream.

Saying “no” was too light, but saying “love” was too heavy.

But Irene Bae, my bae, I will never let you fall alone. I will never let you walk into Paris rain alone.

The first time she cried in front of me, I made a promise. I would prove that this gamble—the one that nearly made everyone abandon her—was not a mistake. That the bruise her father left on her cheek was.

Let them see.

The so-called foolish dancer, the so-called wrong steps—how they can weave the most beautiful improvisation.

When the bells of Notre Dame rang for the seventh time over the cafés of the Left Bank, she took off her sunglasses, and the dense fog in her eyes finally cleared. The carnival was dazzling.

The shop window reflected a dawn that Itaewon had never seen.

She tapped her silver spoon against the coffee cup three times, her gaze landing on my camera lens like a fish gliding in shallow water.

In the mist of her breath, it froze into a Polaroid blue-toned snapshot—an instant, an eternity.

We shared a kitchen full of unwashed dishes and a pair of Bluetooth earbuds.

The lemon candy wrapper she had bitten into refracted rainbow light between the music sheets, like amber in the Louvre’s display cases.

Her gradually steadying breaths would one day become the password that unlocks a new era on Judgment Day.

Seoul’s neon could scorch butterfly wings, but Paris’s rain could sink all taboos to the bottom of the Seine.

In the end, the rose petals floating in the bathtub drowned out the vibrating phone.

The 64th missed call finally died between her elegant fingers, which were busy dismantling a sachet of herbal tea.

Sirens crushed the parallel streets at 3 a.m.

She traced the life line in my palm, the resonance of the guitar case shaping heartbeats into lingering tremors.

As the bass swallowed the last siren’s wail, her lipstick imprint was already casting a rose-shaped monument.

I tasted the metallic rust of her kiss once again and suddenly understood the footnote in her notebook’s poetry.

That escape itself was the destination.

And Paris—Paris was nothing but the fleeting shape of our breath on the mirror.

Joo Hyun Bae, if—just if—

If our ending is destined to be a fall, then at least, before our farewell, in a love unrecognized by the world,

We have witnessed the freest morning light.

She is dyeing her hair in the bathroom now.

The mirror is covered in violet-red steam.

As the hairdryer hums, I flip to the latest footnote in her poetry book—

“What they call falling is merely gravity’s envy of two souls colliding inward.”