Winter Voicemail Across the Bridge of Magpies

Armin swallowed as he clicked the "record" button on the RINE app. "Ohayo, Kagari", he began, scared that his nerves would fail him. He continued in Honoguni, "I know we haven't talked much since the last time I saw you in Edo, but it was really nice to see you at-" He switched to his native Sandwichian English, as he forgot the name of Cafe Rumiho Stargate. "da kine, the star-something cafe two blocks away from Kimetsu-no-Yaiba Shrine". He shuffled in his feet as he continued, "It was nice to get to hang out with you one on one this time."

A frigid breeze ruffled Armin's wool hat, as if the skies were testing the steel of his resolve. Armin was 4 generations removed from his father's ancestral homeland, but he was so enthralled by the language his jiji and baba forgot as teenagers that he consistently topped his high school Honoguni language class. "You're always so bright and cheerful when we see each other or talk on the phone. It's easy to talk to you, and you have the most adorable laugh." Armin smiled bashfully against the nighttime cold.

"You deserve to be happy and fulfilled in all your relationships just like everyone else does." As those words left Armin's mouth, all 158 cm of his frame stood firmly against the taunts of the taller, brawnier island boys, the casual indifference of the island girls, and the lewd comments of pervy haole tourists who thought he was gay. None of that negativity could take away the joy he felt whenever he got a text or a voice message from Kagari. He thought back to all of the jokes about being a bigger weeb than those haoles with backpacks, and how they led him to accept a post-college job offer from Edo Electron Enterprises to work in Honoguni as a bilingual expat. And his mind wandered back to those Saturdays in Edo's trendy Jifuya district during his first summer in the motherland, when he bumped into another United Brancalandian expat with a flaming pixie cut outside of Kuma-Kuma Cat Cafe.

"Don't let anyone convince you that you aren't good enough, or that you don't deserve to be happy, or that you aren't worthy of being loved. It isn't true." Kagari was adopted by a United Brancalandian family of Honoguni heritage with extensive business ties across the Sunset Ocean. Armin wasn't sure if her birth family was from Heljoseon or not, but her dimples were so cute and she pulled off the H-pop girl group look so well she looked like the spitting image of Laleysa in her BitBox dance covers. Despite being raised in Edo from the age of 6 onwards, she still had a United Brancalandian passport, and occasionally made the same grammatical errors in Honoguni that Armin did as a L2 speaker. It was small things like how she said "cosplayer wa doko ni irundai" the same way he did that made him feel like the lucky cowherd who'd met the most beautiful and nimble weaver girl in the cosmos.

"It doesn't matter what you've been through, or what you're going through now." Armin first heard about Sang-woo a few months after he met Kagari. He didn't remember whether she had been with him for 1 year or longer when he heard that, or whether he first heard it from Kagari. But it checked out. Of course there was no way someone with as much online rizz and offline grace as her would be single. It was as if the universe conjured up its version of a heavenly river to keep him and Kagari from being together in the form of Sang-woo. Sang-woo was a financial consultant who graduated from the prestigious Sakakino Business School at Keijou National University. Armin had heard through RINE groups he was in with Kagari's friends that Sang-woo was a bit uptight and seemed to think rather highly of himself. Sometimes he wondered if Kagari was entirely happy being in the relationship as he browsed through photos of her vacations that she tagged Sang-woo in- whether with her family, his, or just with the two of them. You never knew what kind of toxic relationship dynamics could be lying behind a façade of chirpy hashtags and sunny emojis.

"None of that matters. You're awesome and amazing just the way you are." As Armin got busier with work, he stopped visiting Edo as often as he did during the first summer. But he and Kagari still messaged each other or commented on each other's content once every few days. Once in a blue moon, they'd do a voice call to catch up on life. Through these exchanges, Armin felt like she enjoyed his companionship and was okay with them still talking. He never got the slightest sense that she could possibly reciprocate his feelings, even when she wasn't casually reminding him about her boyfriend. So it was something he absolutely had to keep hidden. Why risk losing Kagari as a friend to confess a crush that could never manifest into an actual relationship?

That was what he'd thought before talking to his coworker about seeing Kagari in person. Armin was so good at pretending he only saw her as a friend that all of his female friends in Honoguni assumed he just wanted to be friends with her. It wasn't until his coworker initially assumed that she was his girlfriend before he corrected him that he realized how hollow his act of self-deception was. What was the point of telling himself and his friends that they were just friends if he still had feelings for her? Or if people were just going to assume that they were dating anyways? As Armin gave it more thought, he realized that he was concealing his crush as a defense mechanism against the insecurities from his past and rationalizing his failed dating experiences while in Honoguni. It was easier to keep seeing Kagari as a symbol of hope for what the future might hold than to confront his inner demons. If he wanted to move past all that, he had to confess his love for Kagari- no matter what came of it.

So on that cold winter night, Armin found himself standing beneath a covered area outside a cafe on a near-deserted street, holding down the record button on his smartphone. "Anyways, I'm glad we've stayed in touch all these years, and I hope everything goes your way." He smiled sadly to himself as he realized how improbable it was hat they would end up together like the cowherd and the weaver maiden from the Tanabata legend. But the weight of his bottled up emotions was finally lifting from his chest. "Happy New Year, Kagari. I hope we can talk again soon."

Suppressing a sigh, Armin lifted his finger from the record button on his touchscreen. For a split second, he paused as his index finger hovered over the send button in the RINE app. He gritted his teeth and pressed it, then absentmindedly pored over the Bitbox app to calm his nerves. He tapped on the icon, and was greeted by an eclectic blend of Heljoseon and English audio under a staccato synthetic beat.

"Taste that pink venom, taste that pink venom, Taste that pink venom, get 'em, get 'em, get 'em ..."

The top Bitbox clip in his feed was of one of Kagari's most recent creations. She was doing a goofy little shuffle to her favorite Kuro-Aka song while using text boxes to explain the pros and cons of having 2 cats in a studio apartment. Armin chuckled to himself as Kagari's crimson-dyed pigtails swayed gently as she picked up one of her cats and waved it around.

"Straight to ya dome like woah, woah, woah ; Straight to ya domе like ah, ah, ah"

Armin tore his eyes away from his screen and closed the Bitbox app. He glanced up at his surroundings before starting the 5 minute walk back to his apartment. The overcast skies had cleared slightly as the wind swirled above his head. Instead of an unbroken layer of grey clouds illuminated by thousands of streetlights from below, there was now a pitch-black opening through which the light of two stars shone faintly against the artificial lighting of the urban sky.

Armin almost did a double take as he squinted at the stars shining through the hole in the clouds. Was that Vega and Altair from the Summer Triangle? he asked himself. In the Tanabata legend, the cowherd and the weaver girl were separated by the Milky Way, but were allowed to reunite once a year during late summer via a bridge of magpies. The festival took place in late July or August, but the stars of the Summer Triangle could be seen at other, less rainy times of the year as well.

It was probably a coincidence that the skies cleared up around when he recorded that voice mail, but Armin liked to think that this was a good omen for how things would go for him. Even if Kagari didn't reciprocate his feelings or if she wasn't going to leave her boyfriend, part of him still felt like this was the universe's way of giving him closure for putting his fear behind him. "No one knows what the future holds", Armin thought to himself as he turned around on the path home, standing up straight despite the icy gusts swirling around his hat. "That's why its potential is infinite. And whatever tomorrow brings, I can sleep easy tonight knowing I sent that voice message."