I looked up, wished on the sky, and followed each and every star, looking for you.

Jae is a woman with her head in the stars and her heart in her home country. Parker knows it the moment he first sees her, standing at the top of a hill in the park with her eye all but glued to the lens of a telescope, saying happily to the man next to her that Ursa Major was never this bright back home. She speaks in the language that Parker remembers speaking before moving to this country, and it shoots him with an arrow of nostalgia. The man (between excited giggles, Jae calls him Hwasoo oppa) laughs and says that it’s because there aren’t as many lights to drown out the sky; something in his tone says that he's said this many times before.

Parker walks up the hill, taking long strides through the dew-laden grass. He asks if he can look through the lens as well because he’s never had the chance to see anything through a telescope. After getting over both the shock of his sudden appearance and the surprise of hearing her language out of someone else’s mouth, Jae agrees. She pauses to fiddle with something, aims it differently towards what she says is the Big Dipper.

He expects boring constellations, far away stars with invisible lines drawn between them by people of the past. Jae shows him the heavens.

She points out the great horse Pegasus as it gallops across the sky, shows him the vain queen Cassiopeia, and finds Polaris among the mess of stars. He falls in love with it, the mysteries of the stars and the figures depicted in them, the smell of perfume and brush of hair on his neck as she leans over his shoulder to point out another shape in the night sky. As she traces the fish tail of Capricorn with her finger, he mutters his name. “I’m Jaehwa,” she replies with a smile that makes her eyes crinkle in the corners. “But you can call me Jae.”

Hwasoo (her brother, as Parker learns later) says that he’s going back to their house and that she should be back before midnight. As he passes, he tells Parker in a hushed tone to take care of his baby sister. Parker agrees, keeping the fact that he wants to take care of her forever in the confines of his thoughts.

Jae giggles nervously at her brother’s words, her cheeks turning pink as she turns defensive with claims that she can take care of herself. Parker shakes his head and tells her that Hwasoo is being a good older brother and that he would do the same if he had a younger sister.

For the remaining hour, they lie on the grass, ignoring the dew that soaks into the backs of their shirts and looking at the far away galaxies with naked eyes.

“I want to go home,” she says quietly after a while, her words aimed at the stars. “My real home.” She explains that her family moved to this country a few years ago, but her parents died in a car accident, and the siblings had no money to return to their country. Their parents wanted their ashes to be spread on the farm where the family had first started, but they’d been unable to carry out that wish. Two porcelain urns still sit on a corner table in the living room.

“I want to go home as well,” Parker replies, telling her of his parents’ desire to live ‘the American dream’, but now all they dream of is going back.

She sighs, rests her head on his chest, and invites him for coffee tomorrow morning at the shop down the street from the park. He can’t accept quickly enough.

It’s over coffee that they learn more about each other, of her hobby for cooking and his for writing music, her plans of being an astronomer and searching for undiscovered stars and planets. Parker says that his plans are as empty as the coffee shop that they’re sitting in, and she laughs when she looks around that they’re the only patrons in the shop. Parker leaves out the fact that, like the coffee shop, she's the only one he sees in his future; it’s too corny and too soon. They continue meeting for weeks, for different meals at different times, but always for a cup of some kind of coffee.

On a rainy October Monday, he looks her in the eyes over two caramel lattes and a plate of waffles and says, “I’ll send you back home.”

His younger brother had only been able to stare as he took the money meant for his college education out of his bank account and bought two airline tickets, putting the rest in a small envelope with her name written on it. His best friend June called him crazy, among other more obscene things, saying that it didn’t matter if the college had rejected him a few months ago; he could save it and try again for the spring semester or buy a new truck to replace the rust-bucket that he currently drives. Why waste it on a girl? Parker had stared straight at her and said that it was a better investment than going to college for an undecided major, and his rust-bucket was perfectly fine.

Tears run down Jae's cheeks like raindrops down the window pane next to them as he tells her of his plan. She and Hwasoo can fly home, spread the ashes, spend a bit of time with their family and friends, and then come back. No sooner than the last words leave his lips does she shake her head. “Thank you, really,” she whispers and dabs her eyes with a napkin. “But I wouldn’t be able to come back once I get there.”

He averts his eyes, staring down at the chocolate designs drawn in the foam of his latte. Her rejection sends a supernova of pain through his heart. “What if you come with me? Then I wouldn’t have to come back,” are the words from her mouth when she sees the hurt in his expression. Parker can hear an edge of desperation in her voice; he knows that she wants to accept his offer and fulfill her parents’ wishes, but she also doesn’t want to leave him here. Her fingernails dig into the wooden surface of the table as he says that he can’t go with her now; he has to stay and help support his family.

“Give me one year then.” He looks up to stare at her, confused. “I'll stay there for a year and then come back.” Jae's words take a few seconds to absorb into his mind and retain meaning, but he nods after he takes it all in. He can wait one year for her. He places the tickets and envelope on the table and pushes them over to her, telling her that the flight is for next week and that she should start packing.

They don't have many things to pack, Parker realizes when he goes to drive them to the airport and they only have five suitcases and a cat carrier between the two of them. A gray cat sticks his nose between the iron bars of the door and meows loudly, causing Jae to make a sad sound and bend down to scratch his nose. Their things fit easily into the back of Parker's truck, the cat on the seat next to Hwasoo. They discuss the siblings' plans while on the road; the family farm is still in their name and they can live there, and both can get part-time jobs while attending school. Jae cries when they're halfway there; Hwasoo puts his hand on her shoulder and Parker reaches over to hold her hand between gear shifts.

Hwasoo gets on the plane as soon as boarding is called, saying with a laugh that he's sure that they want some alone time. He walks away, cradling his father's urn in his arms as his carry-on because he doesn't trust the airplane enough to keep it safe during the flight.

“I'll be here when you get back,” Parker says, his hands resting on her tiny shoulders. “I promise.”

“One year from today,” she confirms, her eyes beginning to tear up again, and then asks what she should do when she misses him.

“You look up and remind yourself that we're looking at the same sky.”

Jae turns to leave, the porcelain pot with her mother’s name spelled out in the blocked lettering of their language balanced on her hip. Parker takes her arm and pulls her back, presses a kiss to her cheek and mouths three words into her skin that he thought he wouldn’t say until he was well into his thirties. Her body stiffens as the words ghost over her skin, but she returns them after a few moments of silence. She leaves him with a sad smile and an even sadder heart.

Weeks pass. Parker lives his life as he did before meeting Jae, attending school and helping to support his family with a part-time job. The telescope she’d given him never leaves the front seat of his truck, a permanent fixture in a black nylon bag. Sometimes, he passes the hill where he’d first met and subsequently fallen in love with her, and he pauses to make the trek to the top, the telescope over his shoulder, and look at the stars.

The Aries ram charges through the sky as fall slips into winter. The heat in the house is turned off because his parents can’t pay the bills, even with Parker’s help. Cetus watches from the heavens as his parents begin to fight, and it’s while the Gemini twins dance through the stars that his parents file for divorce. His mother takes his brother back to their country and begs Parker to come with them. He declines and opts to stay with his father, his promise to Jae still as fresh in his mind as it was five months ago.

While Sagittarius aims his bow at the heart of Scorpius, his father falls ill. A frantic call to his mother leaves him with no answers as to what to do; he can’t pay hospital bills, and he doesn’t even know what his father is afflicted with. It’s a warm summer day when his father takes his last breath, and the funeral is held underneath the weighing scales of Libra.

The thought that he has nothing left to keep him in this country strikes him like a bolt of lightning.

Parker sells his truck and many other things to pay for the funeral, and as he pulls the telescope from the front seat of the rust bucket, a slip of paper falls from the bag, stark white against the black pavement that it settles on. He looks at it and recognizes the handwriting as Jae’s. He has to read it a few times to recognize it as an address in the mid-western part of their home country. Staring down at it, the thought hits him that while Jae hadn’t had all that much of an accent, the little bit of it that slipped through her words was one he recognized from the same region as the address. He gazes down at the paper, then runs inside the house to pack his things and log into the airline website.

The flight to the capital of his home country takes more than half of a day. The sky is dark when he exits the airport and boards a bus to take him to the city on the paper, the stars not able to shine through the lights of the capital. The air that blows in through the window brings smells of the city along with it, the exhaust fumes and the asphalt and the food of the street vendors. It's something he never realized that he missed, and for the remainder of the ride he sits with his cheek pressed against the cold glass so he can see and smell the city he's been away from for years.

The bus leaves him on a main road in Jae's city, and he quickly finds himself lost. Parker wanders into a convenience store to ask for directions, where the young cashier says that he can drive him there if he can wait for ten minutes while he closes the store. The boy says that he's friends with Hwasoo when Parker asks how he knows where the farm is, and the rest of the ride is spent discussing how the siblings have been doing since returning to the country. He's assured that the two have been doing well and he lets out a long sigh of relief.

It's Hwasoo that opens the door when Parker knocks after walking up the long, unpaved driveway. He's immediately enveloped in a back-breaking hug that leaves him gasping for breath once released. “What are you doing here?” the older man asks happily, but then waves his hand as if to erase the question and leads him outside to the foot of a giant hill. With nothing but a smile and a gentle push, Hwasoo tells him that Jae should be up there, just as she is every night.

Parker thinks that his memory has done the girl no justice as he walks up the hill and finds her laying in the grass and looking up at the sky. The moonlight illuminates Jae's skin and gives her hair a silvery shine, almost like an angel. As he gets closer, he notices that her eyes are closed, dark eyelashes tickling her cheeks. He stands next to her and looks down, letting her name fall from his lips in a whisper. Her eyes snap open, and he can see the emotions dance across them, confusion followed by disbelief and happiness. She gets up and all but tackles him to the grass, asking nine months worth of questions and peppering nine months of kisses across his face.

“How did you find me?” she asks, breathless, as she lays her head on his chest and hugs him around the waist with all of her strength, as if he'd disappear if she let go.

“I followed the stars.”



Credit for first line: “Toki Wo Tomete” By Tohoshinki