Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper.
— Sanna Wani, Tomorrow is a Place

Soobin moves through the building with silent familiarity, walking up and down flights of stairs, through courtyards and commons, muscle memory lighting up his way. Seven years of his life spent teaching here. Seven years, watching the shapes and forms around him deteriorate, achingly, devastatingly slowly. The roses outside slowly morphing into blotches of shadowy red. The clouds turning blurry as though impressionist brushstrokes.

Forty was the cutoff, the doctors had said. Some odd twenty-one years have passed now, from that hazy afternoon when he was seventeen and had been uprooted from his home to an unfamiliar country, an unfamiliar tongue. Thirty-eight years is a long time to live for the human psyche, maybe. But it’s never enough for the bird in your teeth or the ghost weeping outside your window. It’s never enough. It’s never enough.

His students are waiting for him, as usual. The postgrad, always with a cheerful smile and stickers of Molang on his phonecase. The woman, with clacking nails and wide, birdlike eyes curving up in small smiles. The highschooler, perpetually sweating through his clothes, having run here from home after scarfing down lunch. He doesn’t know these people. But he can tell.

He can tell who they are. The postgrad is definitely not fully Korean, not with that name and bone structure. The woman has scars on her fingertips like she’s bled for music time and time again. The highschooler has dark moons under his eyes like he never sleeps. Flesh and blood, each one. Just another lost being wading through the sea, hoping to reach the shore.

He takes his place behind his desk, greeting everyone with a smile. He sets his bag down with a heavy clunk, adjusting his glasses on his nose, feeling his vision wobble. He steels himself inside, and picks up the chalk.

“All right,” he coughs, already feeling the whispers of a headache seeping in from the harsh lights. “It’s noun cases again. We left at chaturthi last time, yeah? Panchami, or fifth, vibhakti is the ablative case. It’s used when we want to denote the preposition from. Say: He runs from house to house. Or, The fruit falls from the tree.”

फलम् वृक्षात् पतति।
The fruit falls from the tree.

He scribbles down the translation, heaving a miniscule sigh of relief when he sees it’s a day when he can see his own writing on the board. He hears the sound of scribbling behind him, no doubt the postgrad noting things down with painstaking tenacity.

He turns back around, sweating through his sleeves. He leans back on the board, grateful for the coldness of it against his back. He’s sure he’s running a low fever.

The woman catches his eye and smiles lightly. She looks away to squint at the board, then back down to her worksheet, lips soundlessly forming around the words. She frowns at her work for a few seconds more, before nodding resolutely to herself and scribbling down an answer in the blank in the chicken scratch he’s grown accustomed to over the weeks.

The highschooler frowns deeply at the verb forms he’s written down on the board, sounding out the harsh vowels and half-consonants with a heavy accent. Soobin makes sure to nod at him encouragingly, because truly, he’s not half bad for someone learning for the first time.

Then the smiley postgrad. The teacher with the marker stains on his hands has always been stumped by that man. He picks things up easily, always asking questions eagerly. Like right now, he’s asking him about the—

The door opens. Someone’s head peeks through, a black head of hair and the fox-like eyes that follow. Soobin stops mid-sentence, mid-word. Because, because—

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I thought this was my class,” the stranger, the terribly familiar stranger rushes out, hands trembling as he clasps them in apology. His eyes immediately zero in on them. They never used to shake like that. They never used to— “Um, actually. Could you please tell me where 14-B is?”

The teacher perpetually fixed behind his desk is unmoving. He is still, like the sun through layers of film. “Yeonjun?” he forces out, from a place deeper than tongue and throat.

The stranger stills, before smiling weakly. It only serves to make the lines around his eyes more prominent. “That’s me, yeah. Didn’t know you knew of me already.”

He shakes his head, the sun setting inside his chest. “Oh, I’m sorry. You must not— Oh. Forgive me. I’m really sorry. Uh, 14-B, you said? It’s in the east wing. This is west. I think you followed the wrong sign. Both say the same thing but lead to opposite wings.”

The stranger makes a humming noise, thanks him, and leaves, shutting the door quietly behind him. Soobin wishes he could have seen him. But with the garish LEDs beaming straight at him, there’d been no hope of making out anything other than his vague outline, his shifting shadow. The rest Soobin fills in with memory.

When he turns back around, his students are staring at him. There is something sad in the woman’s eyes, like she knows. Like she knows.

Soobin clears his throat. “Old friend of mine. Seems like he doesn’t remember me, though. Don’t blame him, really.” He laughs, bright and bitter. “Anyways, Kai, what was it you said?”

𓆰𓆪

He remembers the first week of the new term. New faces, new voices. 

Why Sanskrit? he’d asked all of them, one by one. He remembers each answer. 

“I have roots all around the world,” the postgrad had answered, unwavering. “Korea, Germany, Scandinavia, America. We moved around a lot when I was younger, jumping from east Asia to western Europe to southeast Asia, and I had to acclimate to each language, each environment. So really, what’s another language to the dozens more?” 

“I’m terribly sorry if this seems a little shallow,” the woman had begun, fixing her plait, fidgeting. “But it’s the novelty for me. Of knowing a dead language. Well, I know most Indians still know how to speak Sanskrit, but no one calls it their mother tongue anymore, do they?” 

“We had to read a translated version of the Bhagavad Gita for sociology,” the highschooler had shrugged. Soobin remembers his eyebags being even worse back then. “And I don’t know, I was fascinated. I wanted to read it in the original Sanskrit.” 

Soobin listened. Soobin knew. Soobin ached for such a simple thing—I wanted to, so I did. 

𓆰𓆪

It’s the fourth day of winter. 

Yeonjun walks back home from the bus-stop, clutching the straps of his bag in one hand. The sidewalk, the skin on the back of his hand, the waxy surfaces of leaves—it’s all blue. The world in bluescale, something icy, something cold. Something abandoned. 

It’s always cold in Seoul now. Especially in his house that’s so big and empty. He flips on the living room light, taking a deep breath. It sparks something awfully cold in his chest, something tightening around his lungs like a noose. A trap made of his own arteries. How fitting. 

The windows face the woods. Yeonjun draws the curtains firmly shut against the shifting shadows of the branches and leaves purely out of habit, even though there’s no one to be scared by them anymore, even though there’s no one to hide their face in his lap and say, I’m scared of those things in the shadow, appa, will you protect me? There’s no one here anymore. Just him. Alone. Just him and the ghosts of all things. 

He hangs up his coat by the rack, doesn’t look at the bookshelf with the colourful books she didn’t bother taking with her. She’s probably bought new ones for her and her tiny fists. He washes his hands and face, doesn’t look in the mirror. He hasn’t looked in the mirror since that day. He cooks himself a simple dinner and doesn’t even look in the direction of the square little dining table, beelining towards the couch and settling there with his plate on his lap. It’s all so horribly, horribly quiet. 

He puts his feet up, spoons rice and eggs into his mouth. He turns on the TV, turns it off again. He washes and dries his plate in silence, in blue, socked feet silent on wooden floorboards. He stares at the glowing tungsten inside his light-bulbs until his eyes throb and ache as much as his limbs and insides do. Until it all melts away into emptiness and spots of light. 

He walks robotically to his bedroom, shutting the door with a click. He doesn’t bother turning on the lights, he can still see in the bright blue haze of not-dusk-anymore-not-yet-night. He burrows under his blankets, tucking up his knees and hands with a shiver. He listens to the crickets outside. He tries to imagine the night-jasmines blooming stealthily under his window. He tastes the word on the tip of his tongue, three syllables, like clockwork. The ya, the rae, the hyang. 

His mind inexplicably circles back to the Sanskrit teacher. Choi Soobin. Something—something there. Something hazy, indistinct, something very like memory. That look on the other teacher’s face, just for a split second, when he’d seen Yeonjun standing in the doorway. The way he’s avoiding him now, never meeting his eyes in the common room. 

Yeonjun squeezes his eyes tight, unafraid of the thing hiding in the shadow but terrified of the shadow itself. The dark, the apocalyptic sun hidden away behind sulphur. The loneliness. The hand, reaching out to him, cold and warm and familiar and— 

He thinks the world will end in silence. 

𓆰𓆪

There’s the letter from you sitting torn open inside my drawer right now. It’s been three weeks since I received it in the mail, three weeks of writing and re-writing a reply. I’m sure I’m going to throw this one out too. But I haven’t, not yet. Until then, let me get the formalities out of the way: Hi, noona. How are you? I miss you. I hope you can come visit soon. 

I watched your recent movie just yesterday. It was—I don’t even know what to say. You were phenomenal as always, of course, but there was this, this essence to it. This bittersweet, aching thing when she leaves the house behind at the end. She leaves behind all the pain, all the love, all the memories. It left me breathless, truly. The slow realisation of the leaving it all behind. 

Is it selfish of me to say that I think you picked up the script because of our own childhood? Leaving Korea. Adjusting to someplace as alien as India. Returning “home” with a clouded sense of familiarity and a far overarching sense of unbelonging. I teach Sanskrit to sixteen people at some academy in Seoul. Isn’t that a surreal thing to say. 

Noona, can I confess? (Remember each Sunday night when we would sit out on the porch and confess our regrets of the week? I do.) I feel like I’m growing blurry around the edges, like an old photograph. I don’t know who I am anymore. Seventeen years in Korea, thirteen in India, eight again in Korea—toeing the line between two different cultures, two different homes. It felt something like treason each time I remembered our old home in Ansan when we lived in India. It feels something like treason now to remember the scent of paprichaat wafting through the window, sat in the heart of Seoul. I’m so lost. I’ve never been scared of the dark, that was always you. But this terrifies me. The darkness of unbelonging. 

I’m nearing the cutoff, too. It’s just two years away. How far away it had seemed when I was seventeen and still had twenty-three years left. Where did all that time go? Where did it slip through my fingers, when did it choose to pass me by like a deluge of moths? I’m sorry. I don’t know who I’m apologising to, I’m not sending this to you. 

Ah, Choi Yewon. Dearest, dearest Choi Yewon. You will never see this. I’ll write you one that’s less personal. God. It’s arrived; the time when you do not know me like you used to but I’m still the same. When did I start to not tell you exactly what was in my heart? When did that thief time steal away the most precious thing of mine—familiarity?  

It’s a stomach-turning thing. Realising you’re older but just never wiser. All those years and years and years upon more years… doing what? Doing what. You’ve changed, noona, you’ve grown, you’re a person with a footprint out there in the world, you’re a goddamn star. What did I do? I fled from there, I fled from here, I buried our mother and then I buried our father. And now I’m biding my time until I bury you, or you bury me. Maybe that’s morbid. 

Maybe that’s morbid, but I can’t think. There’s the same scent everywhere. Night-jasmines. Out in the green green yard in suburban Calcutta, here in the middle of Seoul. Remember when we’d sit out on the bamboo chairs on the porch whenever it got dark, determined to see the flowers bloom? How we’d grow bored and start talking, then when we’d look back, the little buds would have bloomed already? It’s a scent that fills me with such an explosive nostalgia I feel I might be washed away in it. Blown to pieces. Reduced to ash and dust. 

Oh. Oh, I nearly forgot him. The very day I got your letter, this crumbling academy found for itself a new philosophy teacher. And God, noona—it was him. It was Yeonjun. Can you believe that? I saw his face, all blurry under the stark LEDs but I knew it was him nonetheless. All the words were punched out of me. I redirected him to his class and I heard no recognition in his voice. Nothing at all. Remember the e-mail we got from his mother all those years ago? I don’t know, but he doesn’t remember me. That same day he approached me in commons and asked my name. You can’t possibly believe that, but it’s true. Choi Yeonjun asked Choi Soobin his name. That sounds like the beginning of a joke. (Which of us would be the punchline?) 

Let me confess something else, then. I’ve been avoiding him. He suspects something, I’m sure, because I catch him staring at me across the room sometimes, frowning. I want to laugh sometimes, truly: What are the goddamn odds? 

What were the odds I’d find him again and once again it would be all wrong?

𓆰𓆪

They run into each other in the hallway. The stark lights make it hard for Soobin to see on a good day, but today isn’t even a good one. It’s bad today, really bad. He walks straight into something solid, something very much like another human being. 

“Oh, sorry,” he rushes out, adjusting his glasses, praying his vision focuses. 

Yeonjun’s eyes, the odd, cheerful slant of them that Soobin thought he’d never see again, not after that day, the e-mail. “It’s okay.” 

It’s a little easier after that, carrying on in silence. They pass by each other, pseudo-parallel lines. Intertwined irrevocably, somewhere in the past. Peacefully aware of the other’s presence, unmeeting on the grid of time. 

𓆰𓆪

Yeonjun doesn’t remember a part of his life. 

All the clear bits are from after the hospital and the blood—her, her, this. Everything that happened before is hazy, lit up a ruddy gold. It’s what Yeonjun finds himself mourning the most. That shimmering past lost in bits of shrapnel. A shadow here, dancing. A smile, bunny teeth. The click of a camera. The sun through layers of film. 

He doesn’t like to think about those years. They leave him uneasy. He knows he will never get them back, in memory or otherwise. They are locked away from him, ever and ever. 

After the blood, it was her. Everything was her—her teeth bared in a smile, her nails painted bold colours. Her voice, the way it carried, the way it drowned. Her smile. Her hands, how they nearly fit in the palm of his own. It was easy. It was nice until it wasn’t. 

It was nice until it wasn’t. He’d like that on his gravestone. (He wishes he had someone to ask.) 

“Hey, Beomgyu-ssi,” he calls, setting his bag down. The teacher in question looks up, elfin features twisting in a signature grin. “Uh, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but. Yeah, what do you know about Choi Soobin?” 

“Choi Soobin,” Beomgyu muses, shifting to the side so Yeonjun can sit down. “Let’s see. He joined before I did, I think some seven, eight years ago. HOD of Sanskrit simply because he’s the only teacher in the department—be your own master and all that, God bless. Rumoured sister of Choi Yewon, y’know, the actress, the one from Starkiller. Lived in India for a part of his life, it’s where he got his degree. I think he has two PhDs. He told me he was bored and just sat down to acquire another one, which is a whole new level of classy.” Beomgyu’s voice drops to a whisper. “And he’s damn fine, isn’t he?” 

Yeonjun hasn’t been here very long. But even he’s used to typical Beomgyuisms like these. 

“Yes, yes,” he replies impatiently. “All that is okay, but do you know anything from before he joined the academy?”

It’s well-known that Choi Beomgyu, History Dept., is a bit of a gossip. Yeonjun has heard it whispered snidely, and heard it called out fondly in the open. Yeonjun now has stories of vodka in Disney character paper cups, colleagues puking out in someone’s backyard, all quite unwillingly. But he likes Beomgyu, like the little brother he never had. The way his eyes crinkle reminds Yeonjun of someone he can’t place. 

Beomgyu hums contemplatively. “Not really, no,” he admits after a silence, twisting his fingers this way and that. “He lived in Korea for most of his childhood before he and his family shifted to India. Lived there for… close to fifteen years? Came back nearly a decade ago. Unmarried, never been seen with anyone in all his years teaching here.” He angles his head closer, hair falling into his eyes, voice dropping. “I think he’s a little short-sighted, but hiding it from the board. Honestly, he’s doing a damn good job of it.” 

Yeonjun stores it all away in his mind, remembering that day the other teacher had simply walked into him in the hallway, the bright flash of panic in his stoic eyes. Like he’d never realised Yeonjun was there, too. 

“Oh, wait,” Beomgyu says suddenly, unscrewing the cap of his Thermos. The scent of his sweetened tea wafts into the air. “There’s a photo of someone in his wallet. I never actually saw the photo, but I remember the vague… shape?” He squints at Yeonjun, turning his head this way and that. “Say… ah, nevermind.” 

Yeonjun opens his mouth to protest, then lets it go. He’s suddenly so tired. He doesn’t want to know. Beomgyu offers him some tea. It’s as sweet as it smells like. 

“My wife makes the best tea out there,” he promises. His grin makes him look younger.

Yeonjun watches the wedding band on Beomgyu’s finger glint. Something inside him aches.

𓆰𓆪

“Say, it’s a Saturday, right?” Soobin smiles. “Do you want to do something fun?” 

The postgrad nods vigorously. The woman and highschooler lean forward with interest. It never fails to surprise Soobin, even after all these years—the simple respect. An extra syllable here, a right hand there. The silence when he’s explaining something. 

The first class he taught, just a beginner lesson on the script and the language’s history, he’d been a nervous wreck. Stuttering, nearly mixing up the order of letters. It wasn’t a bad class, per se—a woman in his class came to him later, saying he’d categorised the history really well. He remembers her smile even now. She still sends him birthday wishes. No, it wasn’t a bad class at all, it just could’ve gone better. 

That first batch of students is the one he remembers the most—the smiling lady, the middle-aged man, the young girl much like the highschooler he teaches now. He attended the man’s funeral. The girl wishes him a happy teacher’s day each year, without fail. He remembers that feeling, the day he handed them little purple graduation caps and handwritten certificates that were unprofessional but felt right, and shook hands with everyone. He remembers that day because it was one of the last good days before his vision started to fail in earnest. 

Shrouded in warm afternoon sun. Laminated certificates glinting. A warm thing in his chest, something he hadn’t felt after leaving it all behind. 

His parents were always afraid he’d end up penniless, because who showed up to Korea with a master’s in Sanskrit? But he insisted. He wanted to come back here, unbelonging or not, see this sunlit land once before he could only see it in dreams. And he’d like to think he’s okay. 

“My Sanskrit teacher was this old lady, respected all throughout the school,” Soobin tells them, settling on his chair. “Her name was Gita. I’ll tell you more about her later, if you want. No, I wanted to tell you this. When I was learning, she’d break up the routine of remembering verb forms and noun cases and words in general by making us translate things into and from Sanskrit. They were funny stories, they were touching. They were the whole reason I realised that I wanted to learn Sanskrit, to be able to speak it like she did. Some things are exclusive to a language—how do I describe the sparks and flame of agni, how do I tell you about the flowers that bloomed in that eternal vasanta? Being able to read and understand wasn’t enough, I wanted to see the language for myself.  

“Anyway. I still remember this one anecdote she gave us to translate from Sanskrit into English. A dutiful man, exhausted after cutting wood for his mother-in-law’s funeral pyre. He comes home, tells his wife to boil some water for him, he wants to bathe. His wife tells him to fill the handim, the pot, light the coals and boil the water himself. He places a hand on her shoulder, a tangible, silent grief. He washes away the wood chips embedded in his skin. Returning from the bathhouse, he picks a few parijaat flowers on the way—night-jasmines, shiuliphul, xewali, the tree of sorrow. I remember reading that so vividly, the heaviness in my heart. He touches the earth of the doorway and brings his fingers to his forehead before entering. They will be in mourning for a year. He tucks the flowers into his wife’s bun. She tells him to place the pot back in its original place. Then she says, Come, let us eat now.” 

Soobin can hear every breath inhaled in his silent class, the beat of his own heart loud in his ears. Remembering that day brings a sharp stab of affection in his chest, something rooted far deeper into the earth of memory than nostalgia. 

“I’d like you to each pick something from that anecdote you like—the traditional one year of mourning after the death of a parent, the significance of the night-jasmine, or simply the husband and wife. Was it the sacred duty of marriage or just an act of love when he tucked the flowers in her hair, when he placed a hand on her shoulder silently? I also suspect this was immediately after her mother’s death, so the wife wouldn’t have been allowed to cook. You could write about traditional Hindu mourning.” Soobin doesn’t know what it is. He feels light. He narrows his eyes, joking, “You know a lot more about Sanskrit than I did when our teacher had us translate that, I expect nothing short of poetry.”  

The highschooler raises a hand, mischief in his eyes. “In Sanskrit?” 

Soobin smiles fondly. “Yes, Riki,” he sighs. “In Sanskrit. Take the help of any book or lexicon you need. Or just ask me.” 

From there, it’s the scribble of pens against paper, the occasional inquiry about which noun case to use, a lot of frowning and tilting their heads at an angle down at their notebooks. Soobin tries not to laugh at the deep frown on the woman’s face, the way she puts up her hair to lean over her work. 

“Kai, Kai, Kai,” she hisses suddenly, leaning over to the postgrad. 

He turns towards her. “Yeah?” 

“Do you know what night-jasmines are called in Korean?” She frowns. “I can’t remember.” 

He frowns too, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “Noona,” he says solemnly. “I’m so sorry. I speak four languages and yet I’m failing you here.” He pokes the highschooler in the ribs, laughing when the boy tries to tamp down a yelp. “Oi, Japanese boy, do you know what night-jasmines are called?” 

He says yakouboku without being asked to. The highschooler frowns. “I was airdropped here… four years ago, hyung,” he deadpans, placing his chin on his palm. “How do you think I know what an uncommon flower is called?” 

The postgrad laughs, a starlike burst of sound. “Oh, but you speak like a native already!” 

The woman rolls her eyes at them, turning back to her desk. 

“Yunjin,” Soobin calls quietly. She looks up. “Yaraehyang-deul.” 

Her mouth opens in an o. “Thank you so much!” 

Soobin closes his eyes. In his mind’s eye, his own disembodied hand, clipping a night-jasmine into someone’s dark hair. Their cloying, heavy scent clings to him still. 

𓆰𓆪

Noona, do you remember the winters we spent without a hint of snow? Do you remember the unfamiliar language, the way it settled on our tongues like pollen? Do you remember the songs, the clothes, the festivals? Do you remember the yellow wooden swings in the school courtyard? Do you remember when one boy from my class flipped right over on a swing and cracked open his head? Do you remember the polymer skeleton in the lab, the way we used to joke this was that classmate of ours whose name I’ve forgotten now? Do you remember the sun setting between the cracks in that canopy of bamboo? 

I do. I do, I do, I do. I cannot tear these memories out of me. 

𓆰𓆪

There’s a bird trapped here somewhere. Yeonjun can hear the frantic beating of its wings, its highstrung chirping, as it attempts to weave its way through the ventilator out to open sky. 

Yeonjun stares up at its tiny form, helpless. He doesn’t just want to let it die. But he has no way of rescuing it. He can’t coax it down and neither can he crack open the shutters of the ventilator wide enough for it to fly through. The bird is going to die. He turns away and tries to keep walking. 

Then he hears a set of footsteps down the hall. He turns. 

“Soobin-ssi!” he calls, waving his arm before realising that that’s probably no use. “Here, here! By EH-8! Can you come here for a minute?” 

Soobin walks over, a drag in his steps. He always walks steadily, like he’s trying to maintain some fragile balance within himself, a weight upon which his soul is centred. Yeonjun has been watching him for a while, his quietness, the way his hands shake as much as his own do. There is something so unendingly familiar about him. Yeonjun feels like he’s missing something vital. 

Sometimes, he’ll stop outside Soobin’s classroom door to just listen to him speak. His steady voice, sure of its own meaning, drifting out from under the door. That mannerism of his, tilting his head to the left, left eye squinting slightly. Yeonjun can’t pin it down. But he knows. 

“Yes, Yeonjun-ssi? What… Oh, there’s a bird trapped here. Are you trying to get it out?” 

“Yes,” Yeonjun admits, a trifle embarrassed.

Soobin doesn’t laugh, or simply leave, like Yeonjun is half-expecting him to. He just nods, glancing up at the bird. He tilts his head to the left, something tightening around Yeonjun’s heart. “Hmm. I could… eh. I could probably reach the ventilator and open it further.” 

Yeonjun frowns up, dubious. “Could you?” 

Soobin smiles slightly, the weight of his eyes settling on Yeonjun. “If we drag a ladder out here, sure.” 

They can’t find a ladder, so they quickly heave out a wooden chair from the exam hall next to them. Yeonjun doesn’t want the bird to bash his head in by the time they even get close to rescuing it. Soobin rolls up his sleeves, stepping onto the seat of the chair. 

Yeonjun sees the exact moment things go wrong. 

Soobin’s hand cracks open the shutters, but the bird pecks at his skin, hysterical with fear. Soobin hisses, jerking back, overbalancing. He catches himself on the bars of the window, swearing. His glasses clatter to the floor and shatter. Yeonjun, still clutching the back of the chair, watches in open horror. 

“Oh my God, I’m so, so sorry,” he rushes, placing a hand on Soobin’s arm to help him clamber down. The bird is gone. The silence in the wake of its absence echoes. “Oh. Oh, I’ll get you new glasses, I’m so sorry I dragged you here.” 

Soobin doesn’t say a word. Yeonjun hasn’t felt this empty since the day his daughter looked him in the eye and said, They said I can’t come here anymore after October, appa. I… What does that mean? I want to keep coming. 

The sun outside is setting. Soobin was probably heading home. 

“Oh, good Lord, I hate myself,” Yeonjun mutters, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Here, Soobin-ssi, let’s go to the nearest optician’s, I’m sure we can make it before they close.” 

Soobin still doesn’t say a word, letting himself be steered by the terribly, terribly familiar hand on his arm, the red of the dying sun a blotch in his unfocused vision. 

𓆰𓆪

They don’t make it before the optician’s closes. Yeonjun’s hand tightens around his arm. 

Soobin can’t see him. Everything in his line of sight is shapeless, an endless void of deep blue dotted with blurry orange flickers which he thinks must be lights from houses and shops. And yet Yeonjun looks stricken. 

Soobin can’t see him. And yet he knows Yeonjun must be beautiful in this shade of blue. 

Chapter Text

“I…” Soobin opens and closes his mouth. “I think you might need to take me home.” 

Yeonjun’s hand tucked into the crook of his elbow, its warmth searing through Soobin’s feverish skin. “Of course I will. I was going to do that anyway. This is all my fault in the first place.” 

Soobin tries not to stumble. He tells Yeonjun his address, an odd, green sense of vitriol poisoning his limbs and muscles. Yes, go on. Take me home and see the wreck you’ve made. Yeonjun quietly hails a cab and helps him in. 

Soobin can’t see anything. Good God, he can’t see a single damn thing. There’s no blue, no little pinpricks of light. There’s Yeonjun’s jaw blurring in and out of his line of sight, his slight humming drumming on the bones of Soobin’s ribcage. Soobin knows that song. Of course Soobin knows that song. I want to become that forest over there. Will you climb up that hill and look at me? 

Yeonjun’s voice is breathy and raw. Soobin has missed his voice for twenty-one long, long years. It’s changed now, gone deeper, worn down in that specific way time erodes—but he’s still Yeonjun. He’s still Soobin’s best friend down at the sandpit. He’s still the boy Soobin abandoned. 

The cab lurches to a stop. Yeonjun pats his shoulder twice, helping him out. 

Soobin turns his head in the direction he thinks Yeonjun is, a darker mass against something already dark. Midnight ink spilled on a night steadily deepening. 

“Oh, Yeonjun,” he laughs, helpless, unmoored. “You really don’t remember me at all, do you?” 

Yeonjun doesn’t reply. Not that Soobin expects him to. 

Soobin traces his way to his door through muscle memory, careful of any bumps in the flagstones. He hears Yeonjun’s light steps follow. He’s always walked that way, now that Soobin thinks about it. Agile and full of light. Like a dancer. 

“Come in,” he says, feeling for the light. “I live alone, so it’s not much.” 

Yeonjun keeps a tight hold on his arm throughout, like he’s afraid Soobin will slip and crack his head open inside his own home. “I like it,” he replies, something heavy in his voice. “My house is too big for me. I… I didn’t live alone until about three months ago.” 

Soobin sits down on the couch, tired to the roofs of his bones down to the lids of his eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You didn’t,” he corrects quietly, pulling his hand back. “I told you because I wanted to.” 

Soobin turns his head towards the sound of Yeonjun’s shaky voice. 

“Tell me,” Yeonjun says. “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.” 

𓆰𓆪

From the beginning? The beginning was thirty-two years ago. We met in first grade, out on the playground skinning our knees scarlet and scraping our hands black and blue. You were older than me by a year but I think you were held back. I didn’t bother with honorifics, I remember. You just Yeonjunnie to my six-year-old self, bug-eyed and curious and not afraid yet.

We used to make paper airplanes and boats. You don’t remember, I know, but—

I’m asking because I don’t remember. I want to know who I was.

… All right. You were the one who taught me how to make airplanes. You were the one who taught me how to play rock-paper-scissors, how to play hopscotch, the works. I used to help you with hanggul. God, hyung, I remember the first word I saw you write, is that pathetic? It was sup. Forest. The song you were humming in the car. You told me it looked like a house, that 숲, and your smile was nearly bigger than your face. It’s one of the key memories I have of ou—of my childhood.

Second grade, you broke your arm, do you remember that?

I… I don’t. I remember next to nothing from before the hospital.

Hmm. Well, you fell off from a tree and broke your arm clean into two. I remember you showed up to class after three days of absence, your missing front teeth bared in a grin as you showed the plaster to anyone in your line of sight. I cried when I saw your arm, don’t remember why, cried so hard you started crying too. My mother told me all this later, after… after.

You were my best friend, hyung. At the sand-lot, in the classroom, sprawled across my bed with a comic book. Drawing with crayons in the margins of my storybooks. Tearing out paper from your mother’s magazines to make those cranes you loved so much.

What did we do?

What did we not do? Eleven years of my life we spent as best friends, before we had to move. We made it work. I still like to think we did everything we wanted to do in those short eleven years. We had sleepovers when we were younger, telling each other ghost stories and then being unable to sleep for the rest of the night. You read me your comic books, I drilled dividing fractions into your head. We fought over toys and ended up crying. We cried a lot, really, my mother told me. You couldn’t leave the two of us alone. Anyways.

Oh, oh, Ppibbi. Can’t forget her. You had a tiny little baby chick you called Ppibbi. You loved her with all your seven-year-old limbs and skin. Then one morning we found her dead. We never found out what happened. You cried for weeks, fought with me over the tiniest things, even told me you wished you’d never befriended me—

How do you remember all this?

I was seventeen. I thought I’d never see you again, you were lost forever. I sat on a plane and thought back on all those years, hoarding everything like a dragon hoards gold.

How did I deal with it? Losing my best friend?

… I wish I knew. Hyung, I wish I knew.

Ppibbi is dead. I’m crying, yelling at you. And then?

We held a little funeral for her. We dug a little hole in the ground and buried her. You were white and trembling and I felt so sad. I knew I couldn’t follow you, not into this grief. I kept my distance. Waited until the sun rose again, waited until you smiled at me in class and said, Did you hear what happened the other day, Binnie? Never once did it occur to me that you might not recover. In my mind, you had to. Who would put up with me otherwise? My sister had big sister things to do all the time, and my parents had adult things to do.

I don’t know, it sounds an awful lot like you were the one putting up with me.

Nonsense. I would never be who I am now if I hadn’t met you. Okay, okay… what else. Oh, Hwang Yeji. That’s a good one. Fifth grade, she was our classmate and your crush. Hallelujah. The lengths you went to get her to look at you, oh my God—

Stop, stop, I don’t want to hear it! … No, I think I do. Tell me what I did.

Made dozens of paper roses and threw them at her.

No.

Yes. She ended up crying. We… we did many things, really. I was so happy. I know this clearly. I was so goddamn happy I was incandescent with it. I don’t think that meteoric joy has touched me ever since we left and I came back alone.

I’m glad. I really am. I know I don’t remember anymore and I have no right to say this, but… I’m glad it was you. My best friend, I mean. You can tell me about us and all the things we did later.

You tell me, now. What happened to you?

𓆰𓆪

Knees pressed together, hands not quite brushing. One cannot see, the other has his eyes closed. They are breathing in the evening. There is a silence, the crest of a luminescent wave, climbing up to their thighs, their waists, their faces.

𓆰𓆪

I was eighteen, so some time in 2016—I had an accident. A car crash. Shrapnel, blood, screams. I woke up and I couldn’t remember most of my life. I remembered myself but I didn’t remember what made me. I could remember my parents but I couldn’t remember if they’d loved me or not. … Oh. Now that I think about it, there was always this, this silhouette in my head, a tall one, back in those first days after. I think that was you. I remembered snatches of your smile. 

Wow, hyung. We’re a little tragic, aren’t we? 

Eh, I don’t know. We found our way back eventually. From then on, well. There was nothing I could do but move on with my life. I got a degree, I fell in love, I found a job, I got married. I feel like I’m a palimpsest, the dilemma of Theseus’ ship. Am I still the same person after so many parts of me have been removed? 

I think you are. You don’t even have a new body. You’re still you. 

Am I still— Do I still harbour the same attributes that made me your Yeonjun, your best friend? Do I still have what I carried to make myself Choi Yeonjun? 

What even made you Choi Yeonjun? 

You tell me. 

… You were Choi Yeonjun to me because you were Choi Yeonjun. I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t ever put the storm you were into words. A thunderstorm bottled up in a boy, the sun at the centre of it all. 

I’m not a storm anymore, I can’t see the sun. 

That’s okay. You’re the same curious thing I knew. Birdlike with all your squawking and chirping and sticking your neck down rabbit holes. I’ll always remember you that way. Smiling, holding out a rock to me because you found it pretty. So no, I don’t think it matters if you still have what made you Choi Yeonjun before. You’ll still be Choi Yeonjun now. 

Hmm. Do you think a name makes a being? 

Let’s not do this. … How are you now, hyung? 

Well, I got divorced, I’m losing the custody battle for my child and I don’t know what to do. She wants full custody while I think we could do joint and I… They told her, my daughter, that she couldn’t come visit me anymore after October, and— And also, who said you could call me hyung? 

Don’t change the subject. You haven’t changed at all, really. I can… No, I can’t, but you’re not alone. You’re not alone at all. You have your own students, you have that damn invasive Choi Beomgyu with his tea, and you… you have me. You have me. I’m still here. 

You say that, but you avoided me for months, Soobin. What was that all about? 

See it my way, hyung. Your best friend whom you abandoned twenty-one years ago shows up suddenly, barging into your classroom to ask for directions towards his. He comes to you that same day, thanking you, asking your name. I was terrified. I thought you’d glean out the truth from my eyes somehow and hate me. I’d rather you not remember me than have you hate me. 

Okay. I get it. But why do you keep saying abandoned? That’s not it at all. You never abandoned me. I know that clearly. You had to leave. And I don’t resent you for it. That’s it. 

I— Thank you. Truly. 

What happened to you? 

Time. That’s what happened to me.

𓆰𓆪

“Oh, fuck,” Yeonjun swears suddenly, nearly knocking over the water bottle on the table. 

Soobin startles. “What is it?” 

“It’s really late,” Yeonjun replies, slumping further into the upholstery, his lower back screaming. “I won’t be able to find a bus. Should I call—”  

“You could stay here,” Soobin offers before he can stop himself. Yeonjun opens his mouth, frowning, but Soobin talks over him. “No, really. Stay here and catch the morning bus home. It won’t be a problem.” 

Yeonjun looks out the window, the crescent of the moon like a puncture wound in the skin of the night. There’s a low breeze filtering in through the curtains, like the wedding veil of a bride made of air. He walks over and shuts the window, drawing his cardigan tighter around his frame. He looks back to the loveseat, at the man holding his past locked behind his lips, behind blues and vignettes and lovers’ lanes. The impressionist brushstrokes of memory. 

“Okay,” he exhales, a mere breath, “I’ll stay.” 

Somehow, it feels like a much bigger thing than it is. 

Soobin throws a blanket over his lap, taking careful steps around his apartment, stepping around the sharp corners of tables and the curved legs of chairs with practiced ease. Yeonjun watches him quietly, something sharp stuck in his throat.

“What are the odds?” he finds himself whispering, whispering because this silence is too fragile to break. What were the odds that we’d weave our ways back in the end? 

And inexplicably, something quieter, Does it matter at all anymore? Do you matter? 

Soobin turns to look at him. Yeonjun doesn’t know what it is that he sees when he smiles at him, a small, gentle thing. It’s the kind of smile he must have sewn onto his face throughout his teenage years. It’s odd to see it on his face now, lips pressed together as they must have been all those years ago. It’s odd, but Yeonjun doesn’t mind. 

“What are the odds of anything at all?” he settles on answering. “I’m afraid the only edible thing I have is instant ramyeon. Do you mind?” 

“I don’t,” Yeonjun says. He stands up, walks over. “Let me make it. Why don’t you have spare glasses here?” 

“I remember you lived off ramyeon all throughout twelfth grade.” Soobin blinks down at Yeonjun’s outstretched hand before stepping out of the way. He hears Yeonjun turn on the stove, the click of the lighter and the smell of petrol forming flame. “I do have spare glasses. They’re just… uh. Yeah, I don’t know where I put them.” 

The crinkling of plastic stops. Yeonjun huffs out an unamused laugh. “Wow.” 

Soobin warms his freezing hands around the flame, before realising he’s probably in Yeonjun’s way. He turns back towards the couch, settling in. “Do you want to hear more stories?” 

Yeonjun’s answer is immediate. “Yes.” 

“All I have are stories.” Soobin glances down at his hands, vague elementary shapes in the dusk. “Once, I think we were sixteen, you picked all the night-jasmines you could find along the fields. Your mother had told you to bring them home for lunch, but you brought a few to me. I stole a clip from my sister and pinned one in your hair. You pranced around the room, singing. Then you demanded that I put one in my hair too. I… I can smell them still. The sun that day, harsh on the skin. The bitter fried flowers for lunch, the ones your whole family liked for a reason I could never comprehend.” He pauses, smile fading. “Wait, I have a photo.” 

Yeonjun turns around curiously, but Soobin is already by his side again.

It’s a bad photo. It’s a really bad photo. His eyes can’t even be seen and his teeth are bared like he’s in pain, but Yeonjun knows. Of course he knows. That’s him in the photo, smiling, mouth half-open like he’s saying something to the one behind the lens. There’s a tiny white flower behind his ear, one hand cupped around it to make it show better. 

Yeonjun nearly burns the noodles, too busy holding something in. Reeling in a wave of something warm and bitter, something like nostalgia. Sharp like the tang of off-season oranges. “That’s,” he exhales, white-knuckled on the edge of the counter, “that’s the photo you keep in your wallet.” 

Soobin shrugs, a curious, one-shouldered thing. “It is.” 

Yeonjun nearly asks Why? before he realises how pointless that is. Why does he still pull the blinds shut in the living room even if there’s nothing to scare him? Why does Soobin teach a completely alien language to this side of the continent? Why does Soobin remember, why has Soobin remembered, all this while? 

Something more gentle than love. Something sharper than nostalgia, something far deeper than old times’ sake. The I know you, you know me from a place deeper than tongue and throat. 

Time. The answer is time. Time spent apart, time together, cutting strokes in tranquility and floating face-down in turbulence. Finding spots of time, of motes and light, behind the unattended grave of a miracle, in the split of a spine carrying the weight of love unaccounted for, in the holy whisper of a name. 

Here it is, then: Soobin remembers, Yeonjun doesn’t. 

So instead, Yeonjun asks, “How do you turn off the lights every evening? Isn’t it—scary?” 

He realises as soon as the words leave his mouth that that’s a stupid thing to say. He finds bowls to scoop the ramyeon into, busying himself to ignore the burn in his heart. 

“Not really,” Soobin replies, back on the couch, twisting his lockpick fingers into grotesque shapes. “I never even thought of it that way. But no. It’s not. I know that I’m going to wake up anyway. I know that I’ll see the long, long blue of the sky outside. I’ll put on a coat, I’ll walk the streets, watch the sun and its people wake up. We have all these stories of an ancient people of the sun, when really, we are that people, crowding around that star for a lick of warmth. It will be quiet. The quiet of dawn. I can dip my face in that brief blue light, be light itself for a moment. If only in a dream.” 

Yeonjun doesn’t reply, can’t reply. He quietly hands Soobin his bowl of undercooked noodles, because that’s the way his daughter had liked it. 

Soobin asks, “How have you been, hyung, really?” 

Maybe it’s because Soobin can’t see his face. Yeonjun spills.  

“We were okay for so long, my wife and I,” he says, putting his bowl down. “Just okay. Never good, never bad. Love was just a word. Not a performance. Food on the table, perfunctory, taken for granted. And that wasn’t bad or anything. I was happy, I really was. I just regret the fact that I don’t know whether she was, too. I don’t know. She was just so angry in the end. It all blew over one night when our daughter, my ten-year-old, asked us if it was her fault, if she was the reason we were so unhappy all the time. That’s when it sunk in, I guess. We were doing something terribly wrong.  

“I don’t even miss her. I just wonder where exactly it went wrong.” He laughs, bitter moons inferior to the sun of indifference. “And now they won’t let her see me. It’s why I joined the academy in the first place, I wanted to see if that would help, somehow.” 

The silence rings. Like a note strung too hard, refusing to fade. 

“Are you too old to accept comfort?” 

Yeonjun doesn’t reply. No, he isn’t too old for it, he’d shoot himself between the eyes if it meant someone would hold him, just for a mayfly’s forever. 

He says nothing. So Soobin does nothing, just asks, “Are you representing yourself in court?”

It catches Yeonjun off-guard, grip on his chopsticks tightening. “Uh, yes, I am.” 

“I have a friend who’s an attorney. Kang Taehyun. Scary as hell, big eyes that see everything. I could get him in touch with you, if you want.” 

Yeonjun frowns. “Kang Taehyun? I swear I’ve heard that name before.” 

“He was all up in the papers that time he settled an inheritance dispute for a widow who’d married her wife overseas.” Soobin snorts. “Or maybe you heard about him from Choi Beomgyu. There’s something there with Beomgyu and his wife and Taehyun. An open secret, really.” 

Yeonjun pauses. “I’ll think about it, thanks.” 

Soobin hums. “Maybe we should try searching for my spare glasses.” 

Yeonjun puts their used bowls in the sink. He’ll wash them in the morning, before he leaves. The low lights catch on the porcelain like the glitter of the sea. He wonders if they went to the sea together, reached across for each other through the bream, threw shells at each other to hide their faces. It doesn’t matter, maybe. But Yeonjun wants to know. 

“Did we ever visit the sea?” he asks, back by the window, opening the shutters he’d closed hours ago. The bruised moon telling him, There you are. There you always are. 

“No,” Soobin replies, quieter than he’s been before, “We didn’t.” 

Yeonjun parts the curtains, breathes in the night-jasmines flowering by his face. “Did we want to?” 

“What would it matter now?” 

Yeonjun doesn’t know anymore. You were never this cruel, he wants to say hysterically, though he doesn’t remember what Soobin never was or wasn’t. How can Soobin sit there and ask him why it matters? When Yeonjun can’t explain why, can’t ever put it into words?  

Do you matter anymore? that awful voice whispers again. He doesn’t know who the you is referring to anymore. He feels like a little boy again. 

Yeonjun closes his eyes to the unremembered breeze across his face. “It would matter to me.” 

A pause, like Soobin is becoming aware of the gravity, too. “Yes. You’d always wanted to go, and I had never not followed. But we never ended up actually going.” 

It’s cold tonight. Yeonjun looks at the bowls again, imagines a stardust future where Soobin never left and Yewon never cried and he never forgot. It would storm one day and they’d have two children, and he and his wife would be okay until their races were run. His daughter would be the July sun to his sunflowers and they would grow together. Him and Soobin would visit the sea and their feet would not drag, their muscles would not tire. The smell of night-jasmines would not feel like an unspoken tragedy, would not carry the heavy reek of loss.

It tastes sweet on his tongue, this unhappened past. Or future, perhaps present. It feels like a comfortable place to lie down and sleep, so Yeonjun wraps up his bones and leaves. 

“And what about you?” he asks. “How did love make a fool of you?” 

Soobin laughs. It sounds all wrong, like he’s forcing the air out of his lungs. 

“I was in love with you when we were teenagers,” Soobin says, a wry smile playing on his lips. “I fell in love alone; you never felt the same. And then we had to leave, then I get an e-mail from your mother saying you’ve had an accident. And then nothing at all. Radio silence.” 

“Oh,” Yeonjun exhales, elegies tucked into the gentle slant of his mouth. 

Soobin gets up. “Forget the spare. There should be a pullout bed by that rolled-up bamboo mat, I promise that blanket is really warm. I’m sorry again, Yeonjun-ssi.” 

Yeonjun falls asleep on a borrowed bed with something bitter on his tongue. 

𓆰𓆪

Soobin wakes up to darkness. The square of blue to his right tells him it’s sometime around midmorning. He had a terrible dream, he was there standing on a bridge, there was someone else next to him, eyes like that of a fox’s, a feeling in his chest whenever he glanced his way. Like hearing a half-forgotten song. Like looking at the boy you were in love with. 

Then that someone began to pull away, left him standing there on the bridge of time. Soobin had tried to clasp their hand, make them stay, but his holographic fingers closed around empty air. 

He had startled awake. The apartment was silent.

Yeonjun isn’t here. 

Soobin doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the lingering dream, maybe it’s the hopelessness of trying to catch a person who’s already crossed the last stop. He puts his face in his hands and cries. 

He weeps like a child. He cries for himself, all the years left to spend lost and alone and scared. He cries for his sister and her films and her unending sadness. He cries for Yeonjun, for his daughter whom he’ll never meet. He mourns for the boy he knew, for the salty air of the shore that will never pierce their lungs, for the ripe oranges he will never see bruise themselves on the ground. He cries for his own raw flesh. He cries for the moon and the stars and the tides. How the sun will never whisper, There you are, I’ve found you. 

The door creaks open. The faint scent of apples fills the air, a blurry silhouette leaning over him. 

“Soobin?” he hears Yeonjun say, as though underwater, “Soobin? What happened? Soobin, please, what— Oh, you’re okay. I’m here. I just went to the optician’s. I found your prescription on the desk and figured I’d get your glasses first thing in the morning. Good Lord, I’m sorry if I scared you.” 

Yeonjun’s fingers brush his cheek when he places the glasses on the bridge of his nose. The world whirs sharply back into focus, Yeonjun’s eyes and Yeonjun’s lips and Yeonjun’s grief. 

“It’s you,” Soobin breathes. “It’s really you.” 

Yeonjun pulls him in. Soobin shakes in his arms. 

Chapter Text

CHOI SOOBIN’S (VERY PERSONAL) DIARY 
[Many pages are torn at the inner margin, like someone has been using them for writing letters and throwing them away.] 

Dec. 5, 2037 

How do you love and then stop? 

I’ve given up all pretence of this being a reply to your letter. There is no “you”. There’s just me and a pen and this unending darkness. I have the lamp and my glasses on, but it’s still all I can do to see these words on paper. I told Yeonjun it didn’t scare me, losing my sight, because it didn’t. But now, these moths are crawling in my vision and clementine teeth are swallowing the sky. I am losing my grasp on language, on letters tracing out words and meaning and purpose. 

Language is all we have, isn’t it? I understand myself and I understand you, the world because people like me have written it down, invented God and gods and monsters and themselves in visions of glory and oceans and light. People before me have set down stepping stones towards myself and all of us and all of you. There is no you, but there is a universal you. I’ve spent too much time around Yeonjun, I’m getting philosophical. You would have laughed at us.

My sister would have laughed at us, really. Sitting in a block of light inside a café and eating ice-cream like we didn’t have better things to do. We didn’t even talk. We said nothing. He didn’t want to talk, I think he’d been on the phone with Taehyun, so I didn’t ask. I think it would have scared teenage me. Having him right there, nothing having changed. Of course, everything has changed. That’s why there’s still something worth staying for. Nothing all that big has changed, is what I mean to say. There are lines around his eyes that weren’t there before, a tremble in his hands that’s new. But he still laughs the same, his voice is the same. 

I still know him the way light knows all things. 

It’s sweet, I guess. It doesn’t hurt anymore. He’s there and I’m here and I no longer have that oddly juvenile urge to hold him to me and hide him away from the world. Growing up is just brutal that way, maybe. Love grows gentle with you as your hands grow knotted and your bones start failing you. Love isn’t that colour that doesn’t exist. Love isn’t that unnamed parasitic creature in your cerebellum. Love is love but it’s enough and it’s not enough. 

Love isn’t enough for Yeonjun when he sees his daughter’s face every other weekend and I see the strain around his mouth every Monday. But he smiles to a class of people and his daughter smiles up at me every Sunday dinner and it is the same, pulsing ache. Fathers and daughters are unlike each other in the slightest, infinitesimal ways. Her smile is his. His way of tucking his overgrown hair behind his ear is hers. Light is their square dining table and happiness is their hands, how they circle around each other, meeting like sprites, an apparition of wings and flight. Love is a winged, flighty thing for those days Beomgyu’s mouth twists around the two syllables of Ryujin’s name like he’s swallowed something sour. He tells me about their fights in more detail than I will ever care to know. Then he weaves his way back home to his heart, a Thermos and an old, chipped mug that says “TO THE NEWLYWEDS :)”. There are valiantly covered-up tooth marks on his neck the next day and I have to physically stop myself from smiling. And look at us. Love wasn’t enough for either of us. You and I still left. Me tracing a phantom’s shadow to an unfamiliar motherland like a child’s handwriting copying someone older’s; you with that war in your heart and that devil Time licking at your heels. Love wasn’t enough. But that’s okay. It was, it is still love. I love you. There. Of course I do. You’re the only blood I have left in this world. You’re the only person who remembers me when I was that child, unafraid and unhurt. 

Is that enough? A connection built on memories? An illusion, a feeling that machine inside your skull tells you to feel? Is it enough to love based on the knowledge that you are family, that you are made of the same DNA and the same inherited mannerisms? Maybe it is. But I know you. I know you. You’re my older sister and I haven’t seen your face in four years, only gazing at 24-frames-per-second on a screen that hurts my eyes. I can’t do that anymore—my sight is getting worse. Soon, I will only see the world in dreams and the occasional flash of a bright red apple, the jut of someone’s jaw. Cracked, pink lips holograms away from meeting mine. 

We don’t kiss. He cried the first time I got close enough. He said he hated himself for pushing forty and being a teenager at heart. I wanted to say, it’s okay, it doesn’t matter to me, but I bit my tongue. How much would my reassurance have really meant? I wasn’t the one he needed to hear it from. He needed to forgive himself before he learnt that I had done so years ago. 

We don’t kiss, but that’s okay. Somewhere along the way, the brush of his rough fingers against mine was enough. It was love and I am not afraid to call it that and it is enough. When you know you will not be able to see the world in a few years, you’d think I’d be hoarding every blurry sight and feeling to myself like a dragon hoards gold. And in a way, I am. The shade of Yeonjun’s daughter’s lip-balm, the one she asks me to buy and swear not to tell her appa, pinky-promise sweet as dew. The coffee colour of the backs of Yeonjun’s hands, ink-stains on his palms and his fingers because pens keep exploding on him. The sky today. The specific shade of maroon the roses outside the academy are. The Molang sticker-set Kai gave me. The colour of my sister’s eyes in that exquisite sunset scene in Starkiller. 

Yeonjun’s vocabulary is rubbing off on me. His daughter teaches him slang that sounds anachronistic in my mouth but perfectly normal in his. But no, it’s not the new words I care about. It’s a turn of phrase in particular. He once said, “If only for a mayfly’s forever.” 

Are all forevers the same? What is the difference between eternities? Unending, unchanging, moving endlessly forwards. That is what we will do. That is what my soul will do when this vessel has withered away. I am no longer a lovesick teenager with love bottled up in my throat. 

But I hope his soul follows mine. I hope we can run to the very end of this. 

𓆰𓆪

Yeonjun clings to Soobin’s every word, the stroke of his pen merely a sound and not a sight to Soobin. Oh, how Soobin wishes he could see him. See that concentrated furrow in his eyebrows, those affable eyes curving up in unstoppable smiles. 

But he can’t. It’s okay, really. Dawn will come. 

Dawn will come, but for now, Yeonjun writes a letter. Soobin lets the words flow and doesn’t worry. Yeonjun sometimes asks him to stop and repeat a turn of phrase, jokes about stopping and fetching the dictionary real quick, but writes cleanly anyway. His daughter sits curled up on his bed, holding a book, Soobin thinks the spine says The God of Small Things, upside-down and dutifully pretends not to listen. 

Dawn will come. Soobin will put on a coat. Yeonjun will let his lips brush the nook of his jaw. 

Dawn will come. Soobin will post a letter, carrying all the weight of his heart. 

Dawn will come. Yeonjun, his buoy in the sea of all things, will be sitting at the dining table with exam papers scrawled out in front of him, the old mug with the tea-stained insides beside him, steaming. The tiny vase his daughter made during Arts & Crafts will be in danger of falling off the cramped surface, and Soobin will go and put it on the coffee table. Inside, the night-jasmines will be browning at the edges with rot but it won’t matter. Soobin will pick new ones in the morning. 

Dawn will come. Overhead, the sky will be the warmest blue Soobin has ever felt. 

There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend.
Tomorrow is a place we are together.
— Sanna Wani, Tomorrow is a Place