Yeju

  I can’t sleep.

  For the past hour, I tossed and turned on my bed. My mind is refusing to rest despite my exhaustion from writing all day.

  I miss Lia. I miss her way too much, and my bnket does not do a good job of mimicking her body heat. The snowstorm outside is not helping too.

  Letting out an annoyed huff, I roll over on the bed again. The magic wand on my bedside table stares back at me. I’ve already used it twice, and I doubt a third time will calm the chaos in my brain.

  Argh, I give up.

  I hop out of the bed. The night is cold and gloomy, but the snow outside is white and bright. It illuminates my room as I slip into my house slippers and head downstairs.

  It turns out I am not the only one awake. Mom is sitting at the kitchen counter and using her ptop, a gss of red wine by her side.

  She smiles when she notices me. “Oh, Ju-Zi, you’re still up?”

  “Yep, can’t sleep.” I slide next to her as she closes her ptop. “You still working at this hour?”

  “Yeah, st-minute client stuff.” Mom grabs another gss and pours me a cup of wine as well. “Don’t be a wyer, Ju-Zi.”

  “I’m not. I’m doing a Ph.D. in the STEM field to specifically avoid whatever you do.”

  Mom pushes the gss toward me. “Don’t speak too soon. Lots of patent w offices need people like you too. The stuff they do is pretty cool, and you need an expertise in both science and w to do well.”

  “You know, I can’t tell if you want me to go into w or not.”

  She chuckles. “So anyway, how’s your thesis writing progress?”

  I take a sip of the wine. Lawyer-money wine tastes so much better than graduate-student-budget wine. “It’s going. I wrote part of a chapter, and there’s already thirty references.”

  “That’s great! That’s fantastic progress, Ju-Zi.”

  “It’s terribly written though.”

  “That’s what editing is for. Future you can fix it.” Mom leans forward and fixes her gzed eyes on me. “So,” she begins, tapping her fingers against her winegss, “what really happened, Ju-Zi?”

  I avert my head from Mom and stare into the deep red of my wine. After my fight with Lia, I escaped into my room and called the first person I could think of—Mom. I didn’t say much, only telling her vaguely about a fight with my roommate, but she didn’t need to hear much. She could tell from my voice how close I was to breaking apart and immediately made pns to get me home.

  But how do I even begin to expin what happened?

  “I don’t know. It’s… nothing much.”

  “It’s not nothing much,” Mom chides. “Don’t lie to your mother.”

  I sigh. My fingers close around the stem of the gss. “Remember the, uh, new apartment mate after Yuna moved out?”

  She raises her brows. “Yeah…” she says, deliberately dragging the word out.

  “Well, you’re… right. Lia and I, uh, we did… we do have a… thing.”

  Mom punches the air to celebrate while I roll my eyes. Ever since telling Mom about Lia, she has been not-so-subtly prodding me about Lia. I don’t know what signals she picked up on over the phone, but she was adamant that something was going on between us even before we got together.

  Well, she’s always been accurate about these things. Frighteningly so. I didn’t even have to come out to her—she yanked me out of the closet by introducing me to her colleague’s daughter when I was trying to find a date for prom.

  And once again, she was right about my feelings for Lia.

  “I told you you shouldn’t lie to your mother.” Mom does not hide her smugness as she pours more wine for herself. “So tell me more. Tell me everything about what’s going on.”

  I owe Mom the truth, and so I tell her.

  I tell Mom about Lia and that she is one of Chloe’s friends. That both Mom and I had met her before. That it was a coincidence that took us all by surprise. I recount the first day I met her, how angry I still was about Dad, how I blew up at her, and how I tried to chase her out of the apartment.

  I tell Mom about how Lia became my undergraduate student mentee, how I ignored her until she almost broke an instrument, how she cried, how terrible I felt, and how Victoria chided me the next day.

  And when I stopped making Lia’s life difficult, Lia made my life easier. I tell Mom how great Lia is, how excited she is in the b, and how she got me to enjoy doing chores now. I tell Mom how Lia is so easy to talk to, so bubbly and cheerful. How she changed my life and the trajectory of the project.

  I tell Mom that we kissed. It was accidental, but we stumbled into a retionship after that, and I was so happy for a while. So, so happy.

  I tell Mom about visiting Lia’s family for Thanksgiving and being upset at how her family treated her. But Lia snapped at me whenever I brought up anything about her family. I thought the tension was over after the trip, but it still seeped into the fight we had yesterday.

  I tell Mom more about the fateful fight, about the slew of grievances Lia had been holding back from me. I thought our retionship was going fine, but it wasn’t. Lia did not trust me enough, and I did not talk to her enough.

  When I’m done, both our wine gsses are empty, but Mom does not refill them. Instead, she frowns as she listens intensely.

  “So, yeah,” I mumble, “I’m here after that fight. I… promised her I’ll come back to work all of this out with her, but I don’t know. I’m”—it takes me a while to find the right adjective—“scared. I’m scared, Mom. I’m scared of losing her.”

  Mom pces a hand on mine and squeezes it. My vision blurs, and I wipe my tears away.

  “Oh, Ju-Zi, it’s fine to cry. Let it out.”

  I shake my head. I don’t deserve to cry. “I’m a failure at retionships,” I decre.

  “Don’t say that. Listen, no one goes into a retionship knowing everything. No one is ever fully prepared for anything in life. We are all going to make mistakes, and we may accidentally hurt the person we love, but what’s important is to grow from it and strive to be better every day. Treat the mistakes in your retionship like every other mistake you will make in the other parts of life. Ask yourself: what are you going to do about it?”

  I let her words marinate in my mind. “Well, I am hoping to talk to her properly when I get back and sort this out…”

  “Good. Show her your sincerity. Show her she can trust you. Communicate with her more.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work? What if there’s nothing I can do to win her back?”

  “That’s true. Sometimes things do not work out, and you can’t control it. Both of you must be willing to work through this. But you don’t know till you try.” She squeezes my hand again and squeezes out a smile on her face. “And whatever the results may be, I’m here for you.”

  My head is as heavy as my heart, but I manage a small nod. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “No problem, my Ju-Zi. And I’m very sorry for bringing so many of my problems into your life.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, you didn’t start on the right foot with Lia because you were angry for me.” Mom sighs. “I shouldn’t have brought you into my drama like that.”

  “Bullshit. You’re my mother, and I don’t want to see you hurt like that.”

  “And you’re my daughter, and I don’t want to see you hurt like this.”

  I lower my head. The two of us sit in silence for a while, Mom’s hand still csped on mine.

  “Mom, how do you know… if you love someone?”

  She chuckles. “Oh, that’s a tough one, and I don’t think I’m the best person to answer that. But when you know, you know. Just like how I knew I’ll be with your dad, and how I knew I had to leave him.”

  “Dad cheated on you. That’s an obvious reason to leave him.”

  “No, that’s not really why I left him.” Mom chuckles again at my reaction. “I mean it, Ju-Zi. Our retionship already had serious cracks, and finding out about his affair twenty years ago was just the breaking point. I mean, why else would I be stalking who your father is texting? Over the past few years, I've lost most of the love and trust I had for him. Chloe is a convenient reason to finally end the retionship.”

  I stare at my mother, bewildered. She… already stopped loving him for a few years?

  The realization washes over me. How long has it been since my parents went on a vacation together or even… did something together? Ever since I left home for college and then for graduate school, the two of them started working way more and going on their own individual trips. Did they stop hanging out together unless I am back home? Was I the glue for them?

  “If I’d just listened to my heart earlier, maybe we didn’t need this messy divorce over the st summer,” Mom continues. She pokes a finger right in the middle of my sternum. “So, listen to your heart, Ju-Zi. What does your heart say right now?”

  Once again, Lia fshes across my mind. Her sparkling, enthusiastic eyes. Her warmth as we cuddle. Her sweet, adorable voice tickling my ear.

  She can never escape my thoughts, can she?

  “That there’s nobody like Lia in the world,” I whisper. More tears threaten to spill, and I blink them away. “I… I want to be with her, Mom.”

  Mom beams. Her eyes appear to be as teary as mine. “So listen to your heart. And then make sure she knows exactly how you feel. No more hiding things from each other.”

  Resolve fills me and I nod. This time, I am the one pouring us more wine. “I will. But first, I need to finish this stupid thesis.”

  Mom tilts her head, giving me a strange, pensive look. “Look at my little Ju-Zi, all grown up and finally in love.”

  “Was I not like that with Yuna?

  “Not at all.”

  “What? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “What can I say when the two of you were already trying to break it off for god knows how long?”

  I wince. “Yeah, it wasn’t the best time of my life…”

  As I take a sip of my wine, Mom says the worst sentence ever: “By the way, you should go see your dad.”

  It takes me a few moments to recover from my choking. “W- What?”

  “Since you’re in the area,” Mom says nonchantly. “Oh, and your half-sister is in the area too! She’s currently doing something in Manhattan. You should also go see her.”

  Thank god I did not drink anything before hearing that. “How do you know these things?”

  “I keep in contact with my ex. Hey, don’t judge me; you lived with your ex for months.”

  I cannot believe my own mother just roasted me. “I think I need more alcohol to participate in this conversation,” I say before downing the rest of my wine in one giant swig.

  The alcohol burns inside me. Outside, the snow continues to fall as Mom and I continue our conversations into the dead of the night.