What Haebeom Had Taken Up

This was the inventory Jae Kyung conducted privately, in the way of someone cataloguing a collection they hadn't expected to acquire and were now unwilling to be without.

The left side of the closet, organized by color in a system that made visual sense even if it defied conventional logic.

The bathroom counter, left side: linseed oil hand cream. Specific shampoo. A small pot of lip balm that Jae Kyung had once used by accident and discovered was responsible for the specific taste of Haebeom's lips, which felt like important information.

The kitchen windowsill: the ceramic cat.

The studio: off limits to reorganization by anyone, under any circumstances, for any reason.

The main room walls: his paintings. His textiles. His sense of color, which had made the previously anonymous rooms into something that had feeling.

The garden: ongoing. Still becoming.

The bedside table, right side: a sketchbook. Always. Replaced when filled, of which there had been three in the months of their marriage. The completed ones were shelved in the studio, and Jae Kyung had looked at them once — with permission — and found himself on every third page, in quick gestural lines, in the unselfconscious way Haebeom drew things he was simply accustomed to looking at.

He had replaced the sketchbook on the shelf and not said anything about this.

He thought about it often.

The bed: this was the deepest inventory item, the one that required the most space in his chest. That Haebeom was there each night. That the cold space he had not consciously noticed as cold until it was filled had been filled, completely, by a specific person who smelled of linseed oil and whose hair was soft and who breathed in the particular pattern that Jae Kyung had apparently memorized without deciding to.

That there were nights when schedules and exhaustion meant only sleep, and these nights were — fine, simply fine, domestic and real and not a disappointment but a kind of abundance of their own: that a person could be in his bed and he could simply rest beside them and the rest was itself the gift.

But there were other nights too.

Haebeom, in the months of their marriage, had fully arrived at the understanding of his own preferences — what he wanted and what he enjoyed and how to say so. He had stopped being surprised by his own wanting and started being direct about it, which Jae Kyung found — this was putting it mildly — very effective.

They had settled into an understanding: not every night, because Haebeom had an 8 AM color theory lecture three days a week and exams and studio deadlines and the genuinely non-negotiable requirements of sleep. Jae Kyung accepted this with the grace of a man who had waited five years and understood proportion.

But on the other nights — on the nights when Haebeom put his sketchbook on the bedside table and turned over and looked at him with those eyes — Jae Kyung's patience was not a quality he was in possession of.

He was not complained about.

Abroad

The first international trip happened in March — a state visit to France that the Queen had approved for Haebeom's attendance with the condition that his exams were completed and his professors consulted.

They were, and they were, and he went.

Paris in early spring was the specific gray-gold of cities that have been beautiful for so long they've stopped trying about it — the light doing what it wanted, the streets operating at their own tempo. Haebeom stood at the window of the state accommodation and looked at it with the eyes of someone whose art education had been built in large part on what had happened in this city and this light.

Jae Kyung came to stand behind him.

"You have the look," he said.

"What look."

"The one where you're painting it in your mind."

Haebeom leaned back against him slightly. "I'm filing the light."

"For later."

"For later." A pause. "Can we—" He stopped.

"Tell me."

"The state schedule. Is there — any part of it that is not—" He was not sure how to ask for this. For the gap in the official that allowed for the personal. "I want to see it. The city. Not from a motorcade."

Jae Kyung was quiet for a moment.

"Thursday afternoon," he said. "There's a three-hour gap between the trade meeting and the state dinner. I'll have the security team identify a viable route." A pause. "Walking distance from the accommodation."

Haebeom turned to look at him. "You'd do that."

"You didn't come to Paris to see it from a window."

"The schedule—"

"Is mine to arrange." He looked at Haebeom's face — the wanting in it, the slight surprise of someone still learning that their needs were schedulable. "Tell me what you want to see."

"The Musée d'Orsay," Haebeom said, immediately. "The Impressionist galleries specifically. And — there's a small gallery in the sixth that shows contemporary Korean artists, I read about it—"

"I'll have it arranged."

"Jae Kyung-ah."

"Yes."

"You know I'm going to stand in front of the Monet for a very long time."

"I know." The warmth in his voice. "I'll stand with you."

They went on Thursday, with the security team and the plainclothes officers and the slightly increased complexity of existing publicly in a foreign city, and stood in the Impressionist galleries together, and Haebeom talked about the light in the paintings with the particular fluency of someone in their native language, and Jae Kyung listened and looked at the paintings and at Haebeom looking at the paintings, and both of them stored the afternoon in different ways for different reasons.

Posted by @Crown_Prince_JK, from Paris:

A photograph of a gallery wall — Impressionist paintings, gold frames, the particular quality of museum light — with one element: at the lower left, Haebeom's hand raised slightly toward a canvas, fingers not touching it, but close. The gesture of someone describing something to the painting rather than to a person.

Caption:  — He talks to the paintings. They answer.

Sixty-two million responses.

Soyeon texted: I CANNOT. I CANNOT DO THIS.

The Year, Accounted

By spring — one year from the wedding, almost, the measurement of time having changed its quality — Jae Kyung sat at his desk in the late evening with the lamp his grandmother had given him casting its familiar light, and conducted the private accounting he made at intervals.

The desk: Haebeom's art books shelved beside his policy documents, because the study was shared and the shelves had been reorganized accordingly.

The window: the garden below, the pond visible, the new plantings at its edge now fully established and becoming what they intended to be.

The house: full. Not in the sense of crowded — in the sense of inhabited, of having the particular density of a place where someone lives rather than exists. His grandmother's lamp and Haebeom's ceramic cat. His formal shoes and Haebeom's paint-stained sneakers. The smell of linseed oil and doenjang that had become the smell of home so completely that he couldn't separate them.

The bed: not empty. Never empty now.

The bond: constant. The background music of someone always present in the deepest frequency of his biology, even across distance. When Haebeom was in an 8 AM lecture and Jae Kyung was in a parliamentary session, the bond was there — faint, warm, undemanding. A thread between them across the city.

He thought about the five years of waiting. About the empty space the exact shape of a person he hadn't met yet. About negative space defining a thing more precisely than its presence.

He thought about blood test results and a hotel suite and a cream sweater with pilling at the hem and paint stains on knuckles and I was shelling edamame.

He thought about a wedding in ivory silk and the bonding mark and bridal style down a hallway and fifteen days on an island and 해범 in fresh ink on his finger.

He thought about cafeteria food photographs and coffee on bathroom counters and Sunday doenjang jjigae and the studio door and standing in Paris in front of a Monet.

He thought about all of it.

Outside, the garden. The pond. The sky reflected in still water.

Inside, somewhere — the sound of Haebeom in the studio, working late, the faint movement of him through the bond's frequency.

Jae Kyung sat in his grandmother's lamp light and felt the satisfaction of someone who has arrived, completely, somewhere worth arriving.

He picked up his phone.

He went to the studio door.

Three beats.

"Come in," Haebeom said.

He opened the door. The amber light. The smell of paint. Haebeom on the floor with his sketchbook, looking up with those eyes — the big dark ones that still, after a year, required him to make conscious decisions about composure.

"It's late," Jae Kyung said.

"I know." He held up the sketchbook. "Look at this. The garden, the pond — I want to do a large canvas. The light on the water at that specific hour in the evening. Tell me if the composition—"

Jae Kyung crossed the studio and sat down beside him on the warm wooden floor.

He looked at the sketch. At the quick gestural lines of the pond and the evening light suggested in the shading.

"The tree," he said, pointing. "You've moved it left in the composition."

"It reads better there." Haebeom tilted the sketchbook. "The actual tree is too centered. I'm—" He paused, looking at the sketch. "I'm painting how it feels rather than how it is."

"What does it feel like?"

Haebeom was quiet for a moment. Looking at the sketch of their garden, their pond, their evening light.

"Like somewhere I belong," he said simply.

Jae Kyung looked at the sketch.

Then at Haebeom's face in the amber light.

"Yes," he said.

He leaned over and pressed his lips to Haebeom's temple. Stayed there. The particular warmth of a man who has everything he was made for and knows it and holds it carefully.

"Come to bed when you're done," he said.

"Soon," Haebeom said.

He would be. He always was.

Home was the word, in both directions, always.

— Moon's Match, continues —

 "Love is a choice made every day. But home is simply home."