Wherever it was, in whatever city, he thought about her. Through its high windows the sun made great solid bars of light in the dusty air that were vertiginous to look up at in his hotel room. Before that moment, nothing: a sensation of warmth and light, a golden yellow, a white lace curtain, that might have been earlier, and might have been home.
Jungkook didn't know if she was really an only child, or just the only one who was lost. All that was supposition now. But he came to understand that she was not on her way anywhere.
What was he waiting for? Was he lost just like her? Jungkook couldn't answer; he knew where he was, where he had been placed; how could he be lost?
When she had told him that she had never heard of him or his group, he believed her. The first time they met, the tattoo girl had lifted her eyes, looking backwards toward him; her full soft mouth and red-rimmed liquid eyes made it seem like she was already weeping for him not to leave. Jungkook thought that they had that thing in common in that they both were torn away from all common bonds that they had been born into. They had to rely on others, on those they found around them, yet never trust; had to make their lives without what they had been born with, families, protectors, confidantes. But it did not make them entirely social. They had both pretended, because they both became instead individuals; only thing left to them, instinct for self-preservation.
