The message saying we had broken up came from her account too. I remembered what she had said, that she copied her messages and read them later. If someone other than her was also watching her messaging app, what I sent might be deleted before she read it. But there was one place, I believed, that no one could touch.
Her, B, and me. A chat room on the messaging app with the three of us in it: a group chat. Whatever was posted there, all three of us read the same. No one could delete what someone else had posted. There, I thought, no one could tamper with the truth.
From that night on I began posting stories in that room. One a day. I wanted her to change her mind. I didn’t ask whether she wanted them.
It was the story of X, thirty-eight, quarreling with V, thirty-two, over the price of concert tickets. X, who called his habit of weighing every price diversification, grumbles that the tickets are too expensive, then goes into his own brain and meets animals made of light. A story about emotion being a 90-second guest. A story about how to get up from the yellow chair. There were nights I turned my rule on V too. I wrote that V ending up in the yellow chair might be the karma of her past choices. That was the first shape of this book.
Fiction, as a form, protected me. No one was named, no one accused. And yet, I believed, everyone who read it would know. The story was a letter to her, and a mirror held up to B, and beyond B, to H.
B never once replied. But he never left the room either. Every night, the number that counts the people who haven’t read a message dropped from 2 to 1, then soon disappeared. Both accounts had read it. Who was behind those accounts, there was no way to know.
Truth doesn’t have to be dragged out. Just leave it where the light falls, and the side that is hiding loses its hiding place first. I didn’t shout. Every night, one story at a time, I only let in a little more light. At least, that was what I believed then.
One night, the story got its first reply. It was her. Very short.
“The meerkat’s cute.”
I looked at those three words for a long time. It was the way she talked. That was what I believed. Whether there might be another explanation, I didn’t ask.
A few weeks later, she left another line. “Don’t stop.”
Around then, the news came out that Night Lantern, the band she had loved since she was sixteen, would play in Korea for the first time. She had told me once that she lived for the moment when every stage light goes out and only one lantern is left. The concert was the day after my birthday. I bought two tickets. In that night’s story, X, who had grumbled about the price of tickets, bought two. And I hid a question in the story. A question I believed only she could answer. The moment V said she was waiting for at the concert.
Three days, no answer. On the fourth night a line appeared. “When only one lantern is left.” That it was an answer H could know too only occurred to me much later.