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My dearest Yoo Joonghyuk,
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. When trying to express the way you made me feel after we had only spoken twice, this was the first quote that came to mind. I believe that there was a small part of me that always knew in the end, you would be my salvation.
I tend to avoid metaphors involving drowning and a breath of fresh air because I find them dull and overused.
For you, my love, I make an exception.
When we first met, I was drowning underwater. My arms and legs had long grown tired of thrashing and struggling, so by the time you had come around, I made peace with the notion of sinking to the bottom.
When you began to love me, it was not as simple as pulling me out from a body of water and pumping out the fluids that filled my lungs.
You threw me a rope, and urged me gently to grab on. No matter how many times I tried to ignore it, I always found a lifeline waiting patiently beside me.
Though I suppose that could all be credited to your unyielding stubbornness.
I was damaged, and I still am. You have not tried to fix me, but you have embraced me, with all of my broken pieces, and helped me apply the tape and glue needed for me to become a person who is whole again.
We were much younger and much, much more foolish back then.
I know that you may disagree with that, but let’s face it. I chose to major in the liberal arts, for God’s sake.
I made rash decisions back then, like how I swore to myself that I would write this very letter on the day that I decided to marry you.
Oops, spoilers. We’ll circle back to that later.
I used to have an incorrect notion of what love was, and you have not only corrected it, but tore my concept of love down to the foundation and built it up from the ground with your own two hands.
I thought for many years that I would waltz through life in a clear cut path, graduate, work an office job, and probably die a virgin. You have shown me that love is desire, too, while holding the bricks and cement that created my meaning of love.
You have shown me that love is grasping onto the smallest sliver of hope found in a pipe dream.
Originally, I thought that I would propose to you after I had completed my military service and we had both graduated from college. As always, you ruined my plans by renouncing the American side of your dual citizenship, following me halfway across the world to serve, then dropping out of college during your last semester, but you already know how the story goes.
I now write this letter, and you are sound asleep in bed next to me. What prompted this declaration of love, you may ask?
It’s simple, really. Most likely the most simple thing to ever occur in our relationship.
I’ll set the scene, for all of our future lineage who get curious about Grandpa and Peepaw’s epic love story. (I am Grandpa and you are Peepaw, naturally.)
It’s a quiet night, on some insignificant weekday. I’m plucking away at a draft of my new novel to send to my publisher. You crawl into bed beside me, sporting a pair of extremely sexy reading glasses, acquired just recently. You’re 25 now, a real decrepit age. I wouldn’t be surprised if you crumbled to dust the next time I touched you.
You kiss me on the mouth and I ask you how your day was. You complain briefly about the new people who have been signed onto your ESports team, then proceed to open one hell of a book on your lap.
You take to it with a blue pen, scribbling with fervor. I peek over, curious about what you could be so passionate about.
It’s a cookbook.
You are correcting recipes in a cookbook from a Michelin-star chef.
I realize, oh, I want to marry this man.
I tell you that I love you, because I am truly, so infatuated with you that I can’t remember a moment of my life clearly before I felt this way.
And now, I am writing this letter.
Bluntness has always been more your thing than mine, but I suppose that I should ask it outright.
Joonghyuk, will you marry me?
I know that at this point, I’ll probably be kneeling in front of you with a ring, my knees sore because I overestimated your reading speed and pulled out the ring too early. I know that you’ll have tears streaming down your face as you jump up and down with joy and exclaim, Yes, babe, I’ve been planning our dream wedding for years now. But you know that I always have to have the last word in, so hear me out, one last time.
We are like a pair of chopsticks. You tried telling me this once, back when we lived in that small apartment in a small town whose name I have long forgotten. I have wondered what you could have meant by this for years. Only now, as I write this letter, do I realize what you meant. We are like a pair of chopsticks. You know what significance it holds, and I have come to see the depth in such a mundane statement too. Our dozens of grandchildren who will read this in many years won’t, or they might, but that’s their distinction to make.
Currently, I have no solid plan on how I’m going to propose, all I know is that it will involve this letter. I’m sure that by now Mia and Han Sooyoung have released the confetti, or the doves, or some kind of celebratory garbage that I did not agree with. I’m sure that you’re holding me, and that I am holding you too.
I’ll end the letter now, because I’m sure that you’ll reread this letter a thousand times until you’ve memorized every word, and I’m sure that I occupy enough of your brain space already. It’s definitely not the most elegant thing I’ve ever written, it’s raw and unedited and we’ll both probably feel embarrassed when we look back on it. I’m sure that you’ll enjoy it anyway.
Yours, always,
Kim Dokja