I was lying in bed, watching a video of two K-pop idols that I shipped, when I thought of death again. I thought of death, and the months where I thought about death every waking moment.
It started when an advice column happened to appear on my newsfeed last November. A woman who just lost the love of her life uttered her desperation, “now that he has been cremated, he can’t be revived. I know I need to live my life instead of crying it away, but how?”
Growing up in an average Asian family that practices Taoism but is in fact atheist, I, like most people, never liked being reminded of death. And like most people, I’ve gotten better at this growing up — or at least have learned to numb myself when it gets too real.
But the sentence penetrated me. My defense mechanism didn’t work at all. The woman’s letter wasn’t just a reminder of death but something more. The way it was worded — the implied logic that she thought a revival might have been possible before the cremation — revealed the real terrifying thing: not death, but how fragile we were, helplessly hoping for things we normally thought of as delusional when we faced the non-negotiable separation with loved ones that was death.
It revealed how fragile we were, in love, facing death, hoping for miracles.
The following months, I couldn’t live, for I couldn’t get death out of my head. I thought of death and how it crept near when I was counting tempo during my drumming classes. I thought of death and how wise or dumb I really was in terms of spending my limited time during a film screening. I thought of death and how nothing really mattered with this definite death waiting ahead when I was nervous about my finals at university.
I turned to my mom, my best friend, and my lover. I asked them what they thought would happen after death. Was there anything? “I really can’t tell,” answered all of them, “I can probably tell you otherwise if I ever see a miracle one day, but then I just haven’t.”
The torturing fixation lasted about four months. Then, one day, I could suddenly once again immerse myself with all the little things that were part of what we called living. And when I lived, death seemed more patient: it seemed to understand that I had no time to die. Yet. Before it came, it never came. It never seemed to rush, so neither should I.
The thought of death only came again one midnight in spring, when I was watching a video of two K-pop idols that I shipped. Something suddenly clicked, and I realized why I still shipped them — this guiltily-intruding passion of a 13-year-old girl that a 23-year-old woman still clung to.
The only time I have ever experienced anything close to a miracle, was with shipping the two idols.
That was ten years ago. I was younger, new to shipping, wholeheartedly wishing every ship of mine was “true love.” They were younger, too. Two K-pop idols, two groupmates, quite experienced (I was actually late to the party), but still relatively young, at the second peak of their career.
They were really good friends. The shipping experience was so good that I thought all shipping experiences would be as good — they weren’t, and that was how I learned that most ships involving real people ended badly.
But with them, it was good. They were together a lot, and it was easy to find sweet and playful interactions to fill my days with romanticism. It was good. It was good until one day, another K-pop singer uploaded an intimate picture with one of them. The picture was removed from the account quickly, but of course, it was never truly removed from the internet ever since. While I had never had sex, I was convinced that it was what two people just having sex should seem like. Carelessly intimate. And exhausted. My fantasy was shattered. I burst out crying in bed that night.
That was when the miracle happened.
This dream of my imaginary perfect love didn’t end there. The first day of the very next year, the two K-pop idols posted pictures of them watching the snow falling down. Some said it was a traditional activity for married couples.
They seemed even closer than before in the following years.
I accepted this unexpected, lost-and-found happiness tamely with confused disbelief that was very quickly overcome by ecstasy.
It felt like a miracle, for it was something in no way I had control over which was most-likely to develop in an undesirable way. Like death. But this one didn’t. This one developed in a way I didn’t even dare to desire.
Things I can work on or aren’t so seemingly impossible — academic performance, my own relationships, my own dreams — aren’t miracles. Those things take chances. A nearly dead ship, though, takes the doing of a god out of the machine. Deus ex machina.
Looking back, I was not quite sure if it was the doing of a machine god or just money and fame. Focusing on the fan-supported same-sex ship with a groupmate in the aftermath of an accidental, fandom-wrecking revelation seemed more logical than miraculous to me now.
Also, whether it was “true” blossoming love between two old friends or a business decision, it only felt like a miracle to me. For the two idols, this was a choice, something they had control over.
In short, it was no miracle. But at least I truly felt like I was experiencing one at the moment. And that was the only time it ever happened.
It was midnight in spring ten years later, and I was watching the video of the two idols. They were still lovey-dovey. Neither of them had had any public relationships in the ten years. I still watched videos of their semi-romantic interactions, hoping that what had happened ten years ago was truly a miracle of mine, hoping that they did, actually, love each other in a romantic way.
It was just like the Teletubbies. At the end of each episode, the Teletubbies stood in a row on the hills and waved goodbye to the viewers. After jumping into a hole that led to their underground dwelling, they jumped out one last time to say goodbye. Then, the episode reached its true end. I remembered sitting in front of TV, secretly wishing that a miracle would happen and that they would play one more episode after the Teletubbies jumped out. I was let down every time, but I kept on wishing.
And I was still wishing on that midnight in spring. I was waiting for the fake miracle to be revealed as real, waiting for a real goodbye to be revealed as fake, waiting for someone to tell me that miracles did exist and that the TV show would never end.
