My first boyfriend is a snow globe

last edited May 6, 2026

[the yearning isn't cleanly for him as a person or for the aesthetic world separately. his body and that world aren't separable, and I don't know yet how to write one without the other]

My first boyfriend almost exclusively wore black shirts. His whole personality was basically kpop: he listened to kpop in the car, his entire tiktok feed was kpop, and he did kpop dancing. He wore pink shorts when he picked me up, his perfume smelled pink, and he used pink body wash. He fell asleep on me showing me Spirited Away and had a tattoo of the three blobs on his inner bicep.

We had a dreamy first date. I chose a bibimbap place since he liked kpop. He drank coke (he drinks a lot of coke) and we watched the sunset in a picturesque park. I got the courage to lay down next to him on the grass, and he got the courage to reach out to hold my hand on the way home. There, I showed him Claude 1 from March 2023 to figure out his suspicions about having narcolepsy. We both had sleepiness issues we couldn't figure out. I thought Claude was cool and could be helpful. I wanted to introduce him to the AI world I was in and a tool that could solve his problems. I wonder if he's still becoming a nurse, if he figured out if it was narcolepsy, if he became ready for a boyfriend.

There wasn't enough time for me to fully know him, so the memory got frozen at its most electrifying peak. It was a little snow globe that I could polish, embellish, and make him more "him" than he ever was.

I went to his house to stay over. I sat on top of him in bed and admired his soft and strong dancer's body. The firm fullness of his arms and chest when I grasped him. I would lean in and take in the closeness and run my lips over his chest. His smell overcame me. It was the pink perfume, but it felt part of him.

[pink and kpop are the evidence, not the quality itself. the quality is something like: aesthetically alive, expressive, confident, soft, strong. still a list and not it]

[need to convey holding him was holding the world he represented. The body and the aesthetic are the same thing.]

We broke up three weeks later. I think the way I did it was cruel. I had sent a how are you doing text in the morning. When he had not responded by the afternoon, I sat down on the piano chair facing the living room and the setting sun, and made the playlist. I chose the songs very deliberately and ordered them in a narrative pattern. Then sent the playlist to him.

Mascara: don't waste your energy, this is my party, I can cry if I want to. I'm leaving and I get to feel however I want about it.

Savage: self-confident, self-sufficient. I don't need this.

Fearnot: gentle, end-of-movie-looking-back. Softening. The credits.

Til We Meet Again: gentle, wish-this-worked-out, hoping the door isn't closed. Maybe, someday.

The playlist description:

i enjoyed falling in love w u. but i feel like u aren't engaging emotionally which is something i care about. so i want to break up. sorry i had to do it with a playlist but i feel like it would take long to meet up when u haven't been responding to texts. thank u for introducing me to kpop <3

At the dining hall, I overheard a friend-group accuse a guy of being bi. "it's just different when it's with a boy!" He said like a sort of defense and also in a casual way. I wanted to join in but — I tried making a joking don't-answer gesture when he was being asked an incriminating question, thinking he was looking my way.

[I feel like I am not gay enough. When I was with him, that world by gay association opened. Now there isn't enough gay stuff about my life — the casual mentions, friends who poke fun, the being part of something.] Even with a boyfriend, there isn't any place to mention him.

["not gay enough" is really "not aesthetically alive enough"]

I try hard not to search up his instagram and the world he represents out of fear of opening up a gash in what's missing in my life. His story and pink world kept going but I am not there and I can't bring myself to see it. I know reaching out would only make it worse. He's not the person in the snow globe.

I'm listening to kpop right now to be closer to that state. I move my head and foot, but I don't sing or dance. I feel sharpness in my chest. I'm listening but it doesn't feel like I'm him. [what is the sharpness? What does the music exude that I don't have] [when the music comes on, it's a demonstration of an aliveness I almost touched and now can't]

I could see when he added songs to his spotify playlist. His world keeps going that I'm not part of. There's some part of me that thinks that sharpness is good. That it proves the door is still there.

[the door isn't to him. The door is to the quality and he never was behind it, which is why the snow globe had to freeze him there]

[the snow globe isn't him, has never been him. it's a version of him I made because the real him couldn't carry the weight of what I needed him to represent. a quality I glimpsed through him and haven't found a way to inhabit yet on my own]

I listened to Truth Of Pursuit - Sarah Kinsley on repeat while writing this.