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Chaeyoung is eighteen when she meets Mina for the first time. It’s her first week of university, and she’s wandering the halls of the art building, looking for a studio, when she walks through the wrong door and the center of her universe shifts.
Because there, spinning alone in the darkened room, classical music winding around her like a ribbon, is Mina. She dances like snowfall, light and enunciated. And when the music changes, slows, so does she, extending into long, elegant movements that taste like honey in Chaeyoung’s mouth.
She’s art in motion, all curving, continuous lines, and Chaeyoung can only stare, slack-jawed, as she paints the room gold.
Mina stops abruptly when she notices the younger girl. Her surprise is lavender, carbonated, but Chaeyoung barely registers it. Because when Mina, flushed and flustered and rose-pink, crosses the room to introduce herself, her eyes are liquid caramel and her voice is like wool sweaters and jazz, and Chaeyoung knows—the same way she knows which way is up by the weight in her bones—that she’ll never be the same.
She tries explaining this later to Dahyun, her roommate, and Tzuyu, the impossibly pretty girl who lives across the hall, with little success. “Synesthesia?” Dahyun repeats slowly, tasting the word as it leaves her mouth.
“It means my senses get mixed up. Like, I see colors and shit when I hear music, and numbers all have different smells.”
They still look confused (“Schizophrenia?” Dahyun jokes, earning a forceful shove from Tzuyu), and Chaeyoung can’t blame them.
She’s never been able to explain how she sees the world, in watercolor and G major. To her, crowded rooms prickle like spicy food, like all of September, thrumming with potential energy. Lo-fi music is a vibrant, voltaic indigo, and biting into strawberries is rich like graffiti—white on red, random.
These things are the texture and detail of Chaeyoung’s world, but describing them is impossible, like describing a sphere to someone who’s only seen flat space. It’s an overlay, an extra dimension, vast and inexplicable and lonely.
So instead, she paints. Everything she can’t put into words, she puts on canvas, painting what she sees, tastes, feels in broad, reckless strokes.
This is how she meets Mina for the second time.
She’s back in the art building, working on a new piece (it’s purple and gold and empty cocktail glasses—not about Mina, but not not about Mina), when the older girl glides into the studio.
She looks like a dream. More specifically, she looks like Chaeyoung’s dream, like sunshowers and backlit clouds, like maroon scarves, like the faint, longing croon of a saxophone played in a dimly-lit bar. Like someone Chaeyoung might fall in love with.
“I thought I’d find you in here.” Mina’s tone is light, conversational, as she crosses the room to stand behind Chaeyoung. The younger girl wants to say something witty, but she’s too flustered—Mina was looking for her?—to respond. She focuses on keeping her brush in her hand, tin-foil nervousness on the tip of her tongue.
Mina wordlessly inspects Chaeyoung’s painting, brows furrowed and expression bemused. After a pause, she asks, “Is that… me?”
Chaeyoung is too astonished to be embarrassed. “How did you know?”
Mina shrugs, like it’s obvious, and settles on the stool next to Chaeyoung. “I want to see how it looks when it’s done.”
And somehow, even though Mina’s sitting right there and she smells like white jasmine and crushed velvet and Chaeyoung thinks she might combust at any moment, she manages to continue painting without jabbing a hole straight through the canvas.
Mina talks to her quietly while she works, every word settling in Chaeyoung’s chest. She learns that Mina’s a junior from Japan, studying in Korea with her two best friends. She has an older brother and a dog, which, Mina jokes, are basically the same thing; she listens to classical music, even when she’s not dancing; and she loves sharks.
These things all become part of Chaeyoung’s painting, each detail another brushstroke. Mina comes into focus slowly, beautifully.
A couple hours later, Chaeyoung thrusts the finished painting gracelessly toward Mina. “Here.”
The Japanese girl’s eyes widen. That lovely, lavender surprise is back. “It’s incredible,” she murmurs, lips curving up into a half-smile that pulls the air from Chaeyoung’s lungs. She pauses, then shyly adds, “I’d like to see you paint again sometime.”
“I’d just like to see you again,” Chaeyoung replies, mouth kilometers ahead of her brain. She wishes briefly for death.
Mina just giggles in yellow, a stark contrast to Chaeyoung’s cherry-red cheeks. “I’d like that too.”
After that, all of Chaeyoung’s paintings are about Mina.
Mina asks Chaeyoung to write her number on the back of the painting and texts a week later. They hang out once, twice, enough times for Chaeyoung to know—the same way she knows when it’s going to rain by the trembling, gossamer tension in the air—that a change is coming: not unwelcome, but unavoidable just the same.
The third time they see each other, Chaeyoung meets Mina’s best friends. Sana and Momo are funny, Sana with her pastels and Momo in neon and both somehow the same kind of gummy-sweet. They’re synesthetically similar, twin flames.
When Chaeyoung spends time with the three of them, Momo and Sana ignite like glow sticks, riling each other up, and Chaeyoung sees Mina’s loneliness, sees it drip off her and pool on the floor. It’s gray and opaque, and Chaeyoung recognizes it because it looks like her own—not unhappy, just lonely.
She tells Mina once that she understands why, what it’s like. “I don’t mind being alone,” Mina says, picking at a thread on her sweater. It unravels slowly, tugged loose by worrying fingers.
“But you don’t have to be.”
It’s a cheesy line, for sure, but the grateful shimmer in Mina’s eyes and the gentle hand she lays on the younger girl’s wrist in response make it impossible for Chaeyoung to feel any shame.
Instead, she feels only the urge, powerful and sudden, to ensure that Mina never feels lonely again.
There’s a word for that, Chaeyoung suspects, but she doesn’t know what it is until Mina says it, staring unflinchingly into the younger girl’s eyes.
“I like you.”
It’s late fall, red and green and yellow and F major outside. And then there’s Mina, with her cool, blue words and cool, blue gaze. And Chaeyoung is too busy committing this moment, this color palette, to memory to respond.
But Mina understands her anyway, and the amused, orange laugh she lets out bounces off the walls, dropping into Chaeyoung’s lap like a gift.
They fall into each other, like paint mixing: recklessly, carelessly.
Over time, Chaeyoung learns little facts, facets of Mina she tucks away like secrets. Like that Mina is all deep tones, olives and maroons—muted but rich, calm, compelling. Or that she’s possessive in a way that makes the hair on the back of Chaeyoung’s neck stand on end, makes the edges of Chaeyoung’s reflection hazy and smudged with shades of Mina.
Chaeyoung also learns that Mina tastes more like menthol than mint, cold enough to burn. And that she likes to think out loud, mumbling to herself in little thought bubbles Chaeyoung can see evaporating into the air. And that in Korean, Mina’s voice is like butterscotch, but in Japanese, it’s peppermint and soda candy: staccato, refreshing.
And when Mina speaks English, Chaeyoung goes weak in the knees, softens like melting butter. (Mina learns this too, learns to ask for things in English because Chaeyoung doesn’t know how to say no)
After beating Mina in a game of Mario Kart one day, Chaeyoung discovers that the older girl is competitive to a fault, and ruthless. She plays to win, always, and tells Chaeyoung as much, picking up her controller to start a new game.
“Something you should know about me: I always get what I want,” she says, looking the younger girl dead in the eyes. It sounds like a warning and a promise, and Chaeyoung wonders, for a second, if Mina is going to break her heart.
They officially begin dating in the winter. Seoul is cold and ice-white, but Chaeyoung finds that Mina, bundled up in sweaters and scarves, is the coziest damn thing. Like fuzzy socks and low embers. Chaeyoung wants to wrap the older girl around herself like a blanket, burrow into Mina’s gentle, crackling warmth.
It’s also winter when Chaeyoung introduces her friends to Mina’s. It’s utter chaos, the way all their colors clash in the living room of Mina’s apartment.
In one corner, Momo shows Dahyun pictures of her boyfriend. Dahyun, in her shameless, straightforward, lime-green way, tells Momo point-blank that he’s ugly, and Momo just shrugs and says, “I know.” They cackle together like fizzy drinks.
Meanwhile, Sana and Tzuyu chat on the couch, the older inching closer to the younger with each passing second. Tzuyu is, always but especially now, dark chocolate and green tea and the same shade of blue as the feeling of being indoors when it rains. She looks good against Sana’s wind chimes and pastels.
By the time they leave, the two are practically dating, and Chaeyoung can’t help but admire Sana’s efficiency.
Later, Chaeyoung discovers that Sana’s had her sights set on Tzuyu for a while. Sana likes beautiful things, Mina tells Chaeyoung.
Bold as always, Chaeyoung fires back, “So do I.” Mina blushes and looks down at her feet, and Chaeyoung wants to kiss her a thousand times.
It’s nearly spring when Chaeyoung first sees Mina’s anxiety. It tastes like pennies and sounds like radio static, and it turns Mina’s outline into a rough sketch, messy and jagged and overdrawn.
That same day, Chaeyoung tells Mina she loves her.
Mina stares at her for a while. Her eyes are murky pools—hazel, nearly brown, with the faintest green halo around the edges. Chaeyoung willingly drowns, coming up for air only when Mina's gaze darts away.
“Are you sure?”
Chaeyoung doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Mina’s anxiety recedes then, fades to white noise, and she draws Chaeyoung in for a kiss by the back of her neck. Pulling away, she rests her forehead against the younger girl’s and whispers, “I love you too.”
Her hand drops to Chaeyoung’s chest, over her sternum, and it’s like Mina pushed her fingers deep down into the earth. I love you too. The words fall like seeds into the ground.
Spring and summer pass by in a turquoise, pollinated haze. Chaeyoung takes Mina to the beach in Busan, where the air is salty, crystalline. They swim until their arms ache and flop down onto the white sand in good exhaustion.
When the sun sets, the sky burns like wildfire, and Mina’s wonder is the same pale pink as the shellfish they peeled open for lunch. Chaeyoung only watches Mina, sees sun, sky, sand, and sea reflected in her shining eyes.
“I’ve never had someone look at me the way you do,” Mina tells her once the sky fades to a midnight blue. “I’ve never had someone pay so much attention to me, listen to me like you.”
It’s not hard, Chaeyoung wants to say, when Mina is a watercolor. It’s not hard when Mina is both fireworks and fireplaces, exhilarating and cozy. It’s not hard when Chaeyoung is afraid to look away for a second, afraid she’ll miss something. Because every expression, every flicker across Mina’s features, is, somehow, a new color, a new feeling.
Chaeyoung paints herself with Mina, colors the inside of her brain, the walls of her heart.
Later that night, when Mina pins Chaeyoung down and trails kisses down her body, Chaeyoung sees that same sunset, blazing against the back of her eyelids.
(She’ll never see another without picturing Mina, there on the beach, here in bed, everywhere she turns)
Mina finishes the summer in Osaka, Chaeyoung in Seoul, and they return to each other in the fall, like magnets. They spend most of the next nine months together, and even when they don’t, Mina is the color palette of Chaeyoung’s sophomore year.
In October, the leaves fall in a flurry, like descending butterflies, and Chaeyoung decides that, although Mina is the winter, autumn looks best on her.
Early November, they go on a double date with Sana and Tzuyu. They’re sickly sweet, Sana with her ever-present heart eyes and Tzuyu quietly peeling fruit for the older girl. A filmy tension hangs in the air around them, a thin red thread tied between their fingers. And Chaeyoung knows, even before she looks, that she and Mina don’t have one, but she checks again to be sure.
In December, Chaeyoung learns that Mina cries in shades of blue, and that when she smiles again, it’s like the sun breaking through the clouds. Once, Mina laughs so hard she cries, and that looks, tastes, feels like champagne.
January marks their anniversary; Mina tells Chaeyoung it was the best year of her life, and Chaeyoung has to stop herself from asking for another.
In February, Mina sings for Chaeyoung for the first time. The raspy edge of her voice is like nails against Chaeyoung’s scalp—at once soothing and electric. The sound of it plays in Chaeyoung’s head for days.
At the end of March, Mina goes to London. She comes back in April, wrapped in that gooey, gray loneliness. Chaeyoung tries to kiss it away, pressing strawberry lips against Mina’s skin. But the loneliness stays, brings back Chaeyoung’s to match.
In May, Mina lets Chaeyoung win a chess match against her (Chaeyoung knows this because she’s never come close to winning before), and it feels strangely like sliding down a ravine. Like giving up.
In June, Mina leaves.
Deep down, Chaeyoung has always known—just as she’s known since they met that she’d given Mina a part of herself that she’ll never get back—that she would. Mina always gets what she wants. And this time, she wants something more than she wants Chaeyoung.
But for a moment, when Mina looked at Chaeyoung and filled her senses, Chaeyoung thought she could’ve been enough for Mina to stay.
But Chaeyoung won’t ask and Mina won’t offer, and so Chaeyoung smirks like she’s dropping Mina off at her dorm for the night when she says goodbye for the last time.
Mina takes the colors with her when she leaves. And for a while, Chaeyoung lives in grays, in the smell of freshly-cleaned carpet and whatever beige tastes like. Because you can’t unmix paint, Chaeyoung knows. Once you’ve changed a color, it can never be restored to its original shade.
Chaeyoung can’t disentangle Mina from her life, not when those things have become one and the same. Not when every tiny thing, every look on Mina’s face, Chaeyoung has learned, almost by accident. Not when the already-jumbled neurons in her brain flash the older girl’s name constantly, overwriting her previous associations until everything is just Mina, Mina, Mina.
She became Chaeyoung’s favorite color, and now, Chaeyoung can’t remember what the world looked like before her.
During her junior year, Chaeyoung drops out of school because, after a certain point, she was only staying for Mina.
She keeps in touch with Dahyun, who makes Chaeyoung promise to invite her to every gallery opening, and Tzuyu, who understands how the color leached out of Chaeyoung’s world when Mina left, because Sana left too.
(Though really, she doesn’t, because Chaeyoung still sees the red string wrapped around Tzuyu’s finger, still knows she'd find Sana at the other end)
At some point, Chaeyoung picks up smoking. It’s a nasty habit, but one she feels suits her. Cigarettes are post-afterparty comedowns and twilit balconies. They’re lonely, even when shared, and that’s how Chaeyoung feels.
She sticks to menthols, though, because they feel cleaner, crisper, less sticky.
In the winter, Chayeoung wins a local art contest, then a national one, and her first solo art show opens in the spring, just before her birthday. Dahyun and Tzuyu come, both shimmering with excitement for Chaeyoung.
Dahyun insists that they each buy one of Chaeyoung’s pieces, then, upon learning the price, pales and insists that Tzuyu buy one. Their laughter tumbles like jellybeans, and Chaeyoung is, for the first time in her life, surprised to see it.
A week later, she gets a birthday card from Mina, sent from London and postmarked the 24th. Mina’s handwriting on the envelope is like black coffee—cerebral, sliceable. Chaeyoung can’t read it and can’t throw it away, so she tucks it in a drawer and hopes she forgets about it.
She doesn’t get any more letters from Mina.
Slowly, Chaeyoung lets herself move on, and the color gradually returns to her world. Her art is lauded as original, inspired. She sees the world differently, reads a review of her second gallery. You have no idea, Chaeyoung wants to respond.
Dahyun and Tzuyu graduate the following spring; Dahyun moves to Busan and opens a bakery, while Tzuyu stays in Seoul to work in finance. Chaeyoung brings Tzuyu to every show, hangs onto the taller girl for comfort amidst the swirl of chalky, pretentious art people.
They start dating in the fall.
Tzuyu is smart and undeniably beautiful, and despite her demanding career, she always makes time for Chaeyoung, never missing an anniversary or a single one of Chaeyoung’s events. She’s the perfect girlfriend, and they work.
But Chaeyoung still can’t listen to jazz or drink champagne without tasting regret, bitter like bile on the back of her tongue.
Besides, Chaeyoung knows that Tzuyu belongs to someone else, that when they fuck, they’re only filling, temporarily, the gaps in each other. Tzuyu does too, whispers to Chaeyoung that she misses Sana in the darkness, in the space between their heartbeats.
Chaeyoung just says she knows and kisses Tzuyu again to wash the taste of menthol out of her mouth.
They break up two years later, when Sana returns. Having traveled the world and found the version of herself that was ready to settle down, Sana comes back to Tzuyu, not to Seoul.
Chaeyoung always knew they’d follow that thread back to each other, and when she and Tzuyu break up, it’s like lego pieces separating—clean and purposeful, pieces that could’ve gone together in a different set, in a different life.
Sana looks apologetic when she tells Chaeyoung she doesn’t know when Mina’s coming back. If Mina’s coming back. I didn’t ask, Chaeyoung wants to say, but that would be a lie.
Because she did ask, she’s been asking. She asks the universe nearly every day, unconsciously, irrationally, hopelessly.
Over time, Chaeyoung learns to live with all the little disappointments of letting Mina go without putting up a fight.
Chaeyoung is 27 when she meets Mina for the last time. It’s the opening night of her latest gallery, and she’s making her usual, superficial rounds when she comes face to face with the older girl.
Mina’s colors are different now, more complex; seven years apart have changed the undertones, the shading, the subtleties Chaeyoung used to know like her own name. Her anxiety, though still present, has faded to a quiet hum, bombinating, auburn. She’s dyed her hair blonde, too—it looks more serious this way, more mature.
But it’s weird, what you remember, long after you’ve forgotten it.
Because Mina still burns cold like menthol in the back of Chaeyoung’s throat (and she’ll probably never smoke again, she realizes). Because Mina is still starry, constellated with freckles, and Chaeyoung would recognize those tortoiseshell eyes, that cashmere half-smile anywhere.
Because Mina is still a watercolor, and in seven years, Chaeyoung’s never seen, never painted anything that compares.
They stare at each other, waiting, watching, absorbing. Chaeyoung clenches her fists, nails digging crescents into her palms. Say something, she thinks, because she can’t, won’t, doesn’t know how.
And Mina does. “You look well.”
And all Chaeyoung can say in return is, “You’re back.”
Mina just nods, lips curving up at the edge, and Chaeyoung falls all over again.
But does she? Because how can she love Mina again when she never stopped? When everything she’s created, everything she’s been since she turned eighteen has been painted with shades of Mina. When her heart retains the memory of stuttering, clenching, reaching for Mina, even when—especially when—she wasn’t around.
No, Chaeyoung has always been Mina’s, and this feeling, it’s more like flowing than falling, more like a stream returning to the ocean. It’s purple and gold and champagne flutes—entirely and unequivocally about Mina.
The older girl bridges the distance between them then, taking Chaeyoung’s hand into her own. And that simple gesture, it’s enough for Chaeyoung to know—the same way she knows the way back to her apartment, makes the right turns without thinking, sometimes finds herself accidentally heading home—that Mina’s back for good.
Somewhere, perhaps only in Chaeyoung’s head, a saxophone begins to play.