Tell Me More

*Tell Me More*

********

After eleven at night was her favorite time in the hostel.

By then, most rooms had gone dark. Footsteps echoed down the corridor once in a while. The bathroom door opening and closing. Water dripping from a tap somewhere. And the steady, rhythmic hum of the fan.

That was when she would talk to him.

Or "talk" wasn't quite the right word — she would just let it all out.

She would send voice clips.

One.
Two.
Five.
Ten.

She never seemed to run out of things to say.

And he didn't say much in return.

"Yes."
"Hmm."
"Okay."
"Interesting."
"Tell me more."

That was it.

She didn't mind at all.

He was listening, wasn't he? That was enough.

That night, the conversation that had started around eleven-thirty hadn't stopped even past two.

She had traveled all the way back to when she was fourteen.

That was when she first realized that certain things happen to the body without asking anyone's permission.

She had to go on a trip.
A three-day event.
She had no money with her.
She couldn't even afford to buy a pad.

The first day somehow passed.

The second day became much more difficult.

She used rags to keep the blood from leaking. Washed them and used them again. Dried them where no one could see. Watched her posture so no one would suspect. Pain when she walked. Fear when she sat. The constant worry every time she stood up — had it stained?

During those three days, she was more afraid of other people's eyes than of her own body.

She told him all of it.

Why she did it that way.
How terrified she was.
How many rags she used.
How she walked so nobody would notice.
The shame she felt back then.

She had returned home in the early hours of the morning. Five o'clock.

Getting off near her house, her body aching all over. A burning, piercing chill. Wrapping her arms tightly around herself, she walked forward.

When she saw the little stream near the house, she paused.

Moonlight lay spilled across the water.

As she stepped in, the white moonlight on the stream suddenly turned red.

As if all the blood flowing from her body had bled out into the water.

That sight kept flashing back into her mind, over and over.

She told him about that too. In detail. She held nothing back.

He only chimed in occasionally:

"Hmm."
"Tell me more."
"Yeah."
"Interesting."

Then she fell asleep.

It was the next afternoon when her friends picked up her phone.

"Hey, are you running a radio station or what?"

She laughed. "What?"

"What on earth were you talking to him about for two hours non-stop?"

"Just talking."

"You call that talking? That was a full public speech!"

Another friend looked at the phone. "One hundred and fifteen minutes of your voice clips. And him? He gave like one or two words."

She reached out to take her phone back. "So what?"

"What do you mean, so what? Poor guy didn't even get a chance to say a single word."

"Well, he was listening, wasn't he? Besides, if both people keep talking at once, the whole neighborhood ends up listening."

They laughed. But the laughter stopped abruptly.

Because they were listening to those clips again.

One of them took off her headphones.

"Hey... did you actually tell him this?"

"Yeah."

"That old incident?"

"Yeah."

"All of it?"

"Everything."

She didn't find anything unusual about it. She was just sitting there, exhausted from recounting the journey of her fourteenth year — the blood, the rags, the fear, the man she saw at five in the morning, and the stream stained with moonlight and blood.

One friend looked at her. "Good god... how did you manage to tell him all this?"

"What do you mean?"

"In this much detail!"

"So?"

"We couldn't even bear to hear stuff like this. Oh my god."

She stared at them. "Don't you guys have experiences like this?"

"We do."

"Then?".

"Would we ever tell anyone about it?"

She shrugged. "What's the big deal? I can tell him."

"How?"

"Why are you asking how?"

She genuinely didn't understand.

"These are things we'd be too embarrassed to even talk about."

"I'm not embarrassed to tell him. I've told him wilder things than this."

She said it so naturally.

"There are no secrets between us."

Her friends fell silent.

One of them asked softly, "Don't you get it?"

"Get what?"

"Your boyfriend..."

"What about him?"

"Oh, never mind."

"I know what you were going to say."

"No, that's not what we meant. Did you realize the story you told him for two hours?"

"Of course. I'm the one who told it."

"Would anyone else actually sit through and listen to that? Without saying 'enough' even once?"

Another friend added, "He is much better than you think. You just haven't realized it yet."

She said nothing.

For the first time, a tiny flicker of doubt crossed her face.

She knew he was a good person. But what were they even talking about? Surely you can talk about stuff like this. Sometimes he even shares things with her. She had never thought beyond that. She always took it as mutual.

She had never felt like she lived in a world separate from him.

He was her. She was him.

That was why she felt she didn't need to hide anything.

Her pain was his pain. His fear was her fear. Her shyness was his shyness.

What was so extraordinary about that?

Yet her friends kept saying things she couldn't quite grasp. Aren't all couples like this anyway?

"Finding a boyfriend like this isn't easy."

She said nothing.

Suddenly, she began to see him like another human being. Standing just a little bit away from her.

For the very first time, she thought about him with deep, conscious reflection.

She picked up her phone. Opened his chat.

Right beneath her last voice clip, his reply was still sitting there:

"Tell me more."

She stared at it for a long while.

Then she turned off her phone screen.

In her mind, the old stream appeared once more — the blood diluted in the moonlight washed completely away, and she saw the entire stream transforming into a long, serene sandalwood mark.