The Sun Is Also a Star: "Joe"–Epilogue

“Why did you go to USCIS today? It’s not even their jurisdiction."

I’m looking to get overwhelmed by love and meant-to-be and destiny so that the decisions about my future will be out of my hands. It won't be me defying my parents. It will be Fate.

When Dae Hyun was thirteen and still living in South Korea, his father began grooming him to take over the family’s meager crab fishing business. The business barely made any money.

How can all these people be going about their lives totally oblivious to what’s been happening to mine? Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.

She’s pale and scrawny and bedraggled in a poetic sort of way, like something out of David Copperfield.

On the platform, a group of about twenty people in brightly colored skintight bodysuits materializes.

I guess the cliché is true. People in love want everyone else to be in love.

The door to the pawnshop opens, and an enormous white guy in a white tracksuit comes out and over to us. He is all jowls and scowls.

She hugs the violin to her chest before relinquishing it.

"I'll be back tomorrow. You promise not to sell it?” she asks.
He grunts an assent. “You show up, I don’t sell it,” he concedes.

I stare at the directory, trying to divine her location.

He winks the bad eye and then flinches in pain.
Observable Fact: I don’t believe in karma.

As much as I don’t want to tell him anything, I have to keep this cordial.

At first I think he’s just goading me—but then I realize it’s a serious question.

My logic is completely refutable but she doesn’t refute me.

“I used to be a candy striper in a pulmonary ward. That cough does not sound good.”

Before these buildings were buildings, they were just the skeletons of them. Before they were skeletons, they were crossbeams and girders. Metal and glass and concrete.

I try not to succumb to the crazy entropy of this thing between us.

“Yeah, and we call it God.”
She laughs a quiet laugh. “Are you always so—”
“Erudite?” I ask, interrupting.

This is not the first time I’ve had these thoughts, but it’s the first time I’ve really been able to articulate them.

The sun rises every day and defers to the moon every night.

I will let you in close and trust you not to hurt me while I’m in this vulnerable position.

Not only are our meetings in the same building, but also her lawyer and my interviewer are the same person? The odds have to be astronomical, right?

“Meeting your obligations is the definition of adulthood, kid. If you’re going to make mistakes and break promises, now’s the time.”

Headline: Area Teen Defeats Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division of the Department of Homeland Security, Lives Happily Ever After with His One True Love Thanks to This One Weird Legal Loophole No One Considered Until the Last Minute and Now We Will Have a Chase Scene to Stop Her from Getting on the Plane.

What if we are each other’s in-between people, a way station on the road to someplace else?
What if we are just a digression in someone else’s history?

Now I project it out into an apocalyptic future. The lights dim and the glass falls away, leaving just the metal skeletons of buildings. Eventually those rust and crumble.

“Maybe it does bother me,” he says, “but only peripherally. It’s like a buzzing fly, you know? Annoying, but not actually life-threatening.”

I do not care if we’re a novelty to them. I do not care about the politics of it. I don’t care if your parents approve, and I really, truly don’t care if mine do.

It’s a weird kind of dissonance, seeing him stand here in front of my door. He fits and doesn’t fit at the same time. I’ve always known him, and we’ve only just met.

Due to Anomaly in the Space-Time Continuum, Area Dads Have Perfect Timing All Day

“Baby. Not no point in rehashing all this now,” her mom says from her place in the doorway.

I would’ve let it go if I hadn’t met Daniel. If he hadn’t increased by a very significant one the number of things I’d be losing today.

It does feel to her like her entire world is being razed.

Natasha thinks of her AP Biology class and what she knows of eyes and how they work. An optical image of his face is being sent to her retina. Her retina is converting those images to electronic signals.

They have a sense that the length of a day is mutable, and you can never see the end from the beginning.

The plane ascends, and the world I’ve known fades. The city lights recede to pinpricks, until they look like earthbound stars.

In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.

He remembers all the little coincidences it took to get them to meet and fall in love. The religious conductor. Natasha communing with her music. The DEUS EX MACHINA jacket. The shoplifting ex-boyfriend. The errant BMW driver.

She comforts those flying home alone for funerals, sadness seeping from every pore. She holds hands with the acrophobic and the agoraphobic.