Page 138 of When Worlds Collide
Chapter 42
I’ve started to measure my life in days.
Five days until I officially overstayed my 90-day tourist window.
Three days until ENT runs out of time to submit my Visa document.
Two days since Jihoon and I had that drunken fight in the kitchen.
Two days until my mum’s mastectomy.
My life is running down in a series of numbers, and each one I had less power over than the last.
My mum’s surgery is on Friday and all I’ve done so far this week is drag through my work day, constantly barraged by the travel updates I set to alert me on my phone in case anything changed. People were panic-travelling all over the world; moving their holidays forward in case they were cancelled lateron, travelling home to be closer to loved ones. The airlines were heaving, and I wanted to make sure nothing drastic happened while I was dealing with my own personal crisis.
Jihoon and I were barely speaking, again. He hadn’t come home on Monday – not that I blamed him for that – but there was a part of me that couldn't help but note this wasn’t the first time he’d just noped-out when we’d had an argument.
It made me feel… precarious, like he could just decide to leave if shit got a little too real.
I hadn’t seen him until after I got home from work on Tuesday. At first, we just stood there, looking at each other over the expanse of the living room – the unofficial no-man’s-land.
I was floundering. My life felt like it was spinning out of control, and the only thing grounding me, holding me here, was standing a room away, looking like he no longer knew how to be near me.
It was too much.
“I’m so sorry.” I was the first to break, because I was the one who broke us in the first place.
As if my words had pulled him towards me, he crashed into my body with his, pulling me against him until I had no choice but to wrap all of me around him.
“You are not my mistress,” he’d mumbled into my hair.
But I noticed he hadn’t said anything about not being his secret, because we both knew that wouldn’t have been true.
“I know you’re not cheating on me with her.” I gulped, squeezing him tighter.
And… that was it. We hadn’t brought it up again, but I still felt it between us, like an extra layer of clothing every time we touched or laid next to each other.
Now, here we were. Thursday. March 6th. The day before my mum’s operation. Two working days left for ENT to finalise my papers. Four days until I either had to Visa-up, or leave.
I’d shied away from getting in contact with HR, at first, not wanting to be a nuisance – such a typical, British attitude – but all week I’d been so far up their arse I could have given them a colonoscopy.
Each day they’d responded to say they’d forwarded my application to the immigration office, but hadn’t heard back. Without that stamp of approval, my probation with ENT would end. Either way, my time in Korea was balancing on the edge of a cliff, and every day I inched closer.
The strain must be showing on my face, because Hana relentlessly brought up how stressed I was looking. She kept handing me bottles of collagen water with helpful little asides such as, “you keep frowning like that, England, and you’ll get premature wrinkles.”
It was starting to feel less and less like she meant well.
Another side effect of the stress was that I was always just one bad moment away from crying. I wasn’t a crier by nature, not really, and not outside of the appropriate circumstances, such as sad movies, cute puppies and parental cancer diagnosis, but for the past week, if someone asked me in passing if I was ‘okay’, I was just as liable to burst into tears, as I was to nod and mumble, ‘sure’.
It was a crapshoot which would happen on any given occasion, but unfortunately it had resulted in the few colleagues that had started talking to me, now giving me a wide berth.
I talked to my parents daily. Actually, so often that it had gotten to the point they’d forbidden me from calling them during my working hours, because, and I quote, “nothing is happening here that is more important than your job.” And,since I’d so far only caught them during coffee mornings and digging out the compost bin, that seemed comfortingly true.
But, in a way it was worse, because I was afforded these little snapshots of a life so normal, so mundane and as familiar to me as my own morning routine that it only served to remind me how far removed from it I was.
I’d never been the kind of kid to hang around my parents overmuch. My apron strings had stretched exactly as far as the local train station in Windermere when I’d moved down to London for university.
I was unused to this feeling, of anxiously needing to be home, and I was rational enough to know it was a stress reaction to… everything.
