To The Boy Who Looks Like My Ex
by Rachel Noelani Bovee
It’s strange, don’t you think, to cycle through the rote normality of daily life, of an everyday Tuesday, when a ghost from the past suddenly appears. Has that ever happened to you? Probably not… you’re what… 21? 24? You haven’t lived enough lifetimes yet to have ghosts. Your faded tee hangs off your lean, broad frame like it was custom draped across your body before you headed to work this morning. There are no paunchy bits spilling over the taut ties of your utilitarian barista apron. You are full of everything untapped: energy, potential, dreams, desires. You are still just in your first lifetime, the one where I was with him.
The warmth of a new spring, painting a grey world in pastel, makes me reckless, eager to socialize, to commune, to chase insta-worthy curated glimmer that shouts,
yes!
I am alive!
I am waking up!
That’s why I am here, in this trendy, white-walled café with high wooden beams and giant windows, here at your gleaming marble counter, here watching the way your glasses slide down your long nose like his did.
You are saying something to me, probably asking me for my order, but my eyes are sliding along the sharp line running from the bottom of your earlobe to the curve of your tightening jaw muscle, and I am flung years back to a sticky corner table in a dark bar off a Gangnam alley where, amidst a makgeolli-fueled haze and a background soundtrack of early BigBang, I could only just barely hear him say in disappointment,
“I was going to marry you.”
Would it shock or frighten you if I traced your jawline with my finger? It’s only that I wonder if my fingertips will remember him too, if he still lingers in the recesses of my touch memory. Maybe your skin is smoother; he always ignored my pleas to
“moisturize!
moisturize!
moisturize!”
The line behind me lengthens and you’re growing impatient. I notice and I’m sorry, I really am, but I’m frozen by the timbre of your voice, the way your thick brows arch and taper off suddenly at the ends, the long pale fingers you gesture with—they are the same fingers he used to play late-night piano recitals, just for me; the same that drummed against the inside of my wrists when we watched movies; the same that gripped the backs of my thighs with an aggression, a confidence I ached for. The same fingers that, in that bar, on that night, jabbed in my direction, accusingly,
“You didn’t come to me.”
Did he have a little brother or a cousin I’m not remembering? Would it be inappropriate to ask your last name, your hometown, if you have an aunt who is a composer and an uncle who is a judge?
You’re angry now and that shakes me out of my mental multiverse. I want to explain it all to you, to tell you about the end and the way we were young and indelicate—breaking each other’s hearts. I want to tell you about the year before that when he went abroad and said,
“Come, if you want.”
But I thought that meant, I don’t care if you come or not, and he thought that meant, I want you to want me like I want you. I want to tell you how when he first left, I missed him so much I stopped taking care of myself and ended up hospitalized from pneumonia in a particularly frigid early February but kept it all a secret. I want to tell you about starting and ending every day with cheery messages sent to his KakaoTalk—messages that smoothed his worries about his job, messages that made him suddenly call just to share his laugh, messages that teased the parts of me that had always made his breath catch.
I meet your eyes, stumble out a bumbling,
“I’m sorry,
I’m so slow.
I’m holding up your line!”
And your face softens, your eyes lift, and a small grin splits across your face. You tell me not to worry, to take my time and, after I order, you smoothly, professionally, distantly ask me what size I’d like my iced oat milk matcha latte to be.
It’s then that I see how full your lips are, the small beauty mark on the left side of your chin, the Adam’s apple that dramatically juts out from your throat, your hairless forearms—all the ways you’re not him.
In an instant, I am steadied. You and I are strangers, standing on opposite sides of a neutral counter, playing our customer service roles. And today, you’re the better actor. I pay and move forward, waiting for one of your coworkers to give me my order. When the buzzer vibrates in my hand, I grab my drink and head towards the door; I don’t bother to look at you.
The cherry blossom trees are raining delicate pink petals, slow, slow, slow. They flutter in the warm breeze, settle on upturned faces.
He and I, we never saw the flowers bloom that spring.
About the author:
Rachel Noelani Bovee, a hapa Native Hawaiian born and raised in San Francisco, received her MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. She mostly writes fiction & essays and is currently working on her debut novel. Her work appears most recently in NUNUM. Rachel lives with her partner and two preschoolers in Seoul where she writes and works as an English professor at Kyunghee University.