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Some days feel more like dreams. They're beautiful in the way that reality isn't, and yet something grounds you. Reminds you that yes, you are here right now. It could be something, but more often it's someone.
For Han Sooyoung, it was a bit of both. Maybe, for her, it was the fact that it didn't feel real that made it real.
The image that would stay in her mind would be this: lamplights curving gently over an expanse of gray sidewalk, a rare shade of green spotted in the trees that sheltered them from the skies above. Yoo Sangah's hand holding hers, not in a way that said don't let go, but in a way that showed that this was something they did often.
They were an increasingly aesthetic pair, or so their friends said. Yoo Sangah and her long, almost golden, almost auburn hair. Yoo Sangah and the way she walked, like the world was her red carpet and she just shared it with everyone else. Han Sooyoung and her turtlenecks and death grip on either a coffee cup or her phone, or in this case, her girlfriend's hands. Han Sooyoung and her round glasses that didn't hide her piercing stare, just amplified it.
They seemed to make the world around them just a little brighter as they walked, and the lights in the lamps appeared just a little more orange and the sidewalk seemed a little less dull.
"Waaait," Sooyoung said, pausing in her tracks suddenly as she slipped away from Sangah's grasp and pulled out her phone. "I just got an idea."
Yoo Sangah, used to Sooyoung's antics, pretended to sigh and cross her arms. She even added a foot tap of impatience for good measure. "Sooyoung-ah," she said, but it didn't quite seem like words.
It felt like a song, or at least something semi-musical. In that moment, like many moments before, Sooyoung thought she was an angel. She was frozen for a moment before Sangah retraced her steps and walked over to Sooyoung's side. "God, you're so stupid. I say one word and you stand there lovestruck."
"It's not my fault you're a good actor," Sooyoung grumbled as she typed out the last sentences of her fleeting thought into her notes app.
"Hmm... the best?" Sangah took Sooyoung's hand again as they continued their evening walk, and all the way Sooyoung was exclaiming in increasingly hysterical tones how amazing her girlfriend was at her job. Sangah's laugh followed, tinkling like bells. It wasn't a moment grounded in reality.
It was a moment with each other.
A little ways away, down the curving gray sidewalk as it twisted and winded, they came across a piano. Placed haphazardly along the side of the building, it was the kind of instrument that had seen its share of war. The original baby blue paint was now peeled and graffitied, but something about the way that it still stood- keys intact, bench tucked neatly underneath- said that it wasn't something to be overlooked. So they didn't.
"Let me play something for you," Yoo Sangah offered as she led Han Sooyoung over to it. The motion didn't really require an explanation, of course, since Sooyoung would follow Sangah to the ends of the Earth.
"I didn't know you could play," she said in all honesty, a little ashamed.
"Really?" Yoo Sangah paused. "I thought I played the part of a pianist once or twice."
"Well, yes, but I didn't realize that was you. I thought they had someone else play the music for you."
Sangah laughed again, not offended in the slightest. "You’re such a cynic. I played the music all myself. Why don't you have a listen?" Sooyoung obeyed, watching Sangah pluck a few keys and wince at their pitch. It was out of tune, of course. Yet there was something in the way that Sangah let her fingers rest against the keys- poised, delicate. Like a ballerina waiting to begin the first step.
Begin she did, bending the piano to her will, flying and tapping across the keys all with a gentle melody like tinkling bells. Like Sangah's laugh.
Sooyoung was in awe. So, of course, she did the thing any normal person would do when faced with such beauty: she jabbed at a random key, and the dissonance was jarring.
Sangah looked up and sighed faintly. It was clear she was annoyed, but she let none of it show as she continued her haunting melody. They stood there, the two of them, listening to a music Sooyoung didn't want to find words to describe.
And the fall air was just a little crisp, with just a faint breeze swirling around them, as if Sangah herself had conjured it. It was beauty incarnate. It was art. It was love.
And then it ended, of course, like all good things did. It didn't end like a grand overture would, or even a novel. This ended like a drawing made with marker- one moment bleeding into the next.
Such was life.
If you asked her in an interview about Yoo Sangah's rise to fame, she would laugh gently enough to be distracting and give a vague answer.
After all, when questions are piled upon questions like that, it's difficult to give the answer you wanted to. Quality over quantity, or something close enough.
And yet, if you knew Sangah- truly knew her, an almost subconscious understanding- you wouldn't need to ask such a question. You would know her answer, or something close enough.
She first starred in a movie adaptation of a book, written by a rather famous author known as Han Sooyoung. If you took it one step further, maybe read between the lines, and hypothetically asked Yoo Sangah how she knew Han Sooyoung, she would laugh a little more genuinely this time and say that she had met Sooyoung-ssi on occasion.
After some thought, maybe if you knew her well enough to call her a friend, she would say that she had, in fact, worked closely with Han Sooyoung.
And if you were Sooyoung herself, asking that question for no reason other than to hear the answer from her lips... well, she would admit to you, amongst the steam of tea and the soft sunlight rounding the edges of their apartment, that she fell in love with Sooyoung the moment she read the first script.
It was the diction, maybe. The lines that she had to say, yes. But the story was most important. Sangah first fell in love with Sooyoung as a story, which was a very easy way to love her. But later, maybe after the third movie had cemented its name in history, and they had gone out together to discuss literature more than once, Sangah began to fall in love with Sooyoung the person.
Sooyoung the writer, the sarcast, and Sooyoung who was hers. Maybe saying that you’ve fallen in love isn't the right phrase. It shouldn’t be past tense. Has she landed yet?
Sangah looks at this woman standing next to her, smirking faintly as she presses another key, and feels that she's falling again. She's been falling. She doesn't think she'll ever land.
This moment will bleed into the next, and this piece will make way for another one. There will always be another page to turn over, and she will always, always, love her.
There are some truths in the world that can't be denied. There are some days that feel more like dreams, and they're the ones that make reality all the more beautiful.