real.isay.tions

"We never guessed how much we'd miss the hot and sticky hugs and standing close enough to whisper. Glory of reach and grasp, nudge, nuzzle, spoon and squeeze.

I've heard the phenomenon is called skin starvation and it's the reason infants are laid naked on their mothers' breast the moment after birth. Because touch is how we greet one another in almost every language and say: you are here and I am with you and we are not alone.

I confess I've not yet learned how to translate the gorgeous shock of seeing you. Even from 6 feet, I wonder if you can feel the electricity of my skin, pining in its sweat song, so helpless and hungry: hello hello hello."

there's this line by richard siken that i can't help but think of whenever i witness seunghyo's feelings for seokryu: "sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them."

it's so true. seunghyo is the loneliest cartographer of care in the world — mapping the memories built between him and seokryu. analyzing every look, every word, every touch. labeling the continents of distance between the two of them with his longing — studying the seas of silence stretching them past friendship and into something infinitely more fragile.

bae seokryu; his best friend. his worst wish.

someone whose breaths he has counted like coins from a foreign land — someone whose every move has been canvassed in his dreams. someone who is still so fundamentally out of reach, so unknowable — someone who has been hiding a secret so huge that it swallows him whole.

this episode truly broke me. the ache in seunghyo's eyes as he watches seokryu pull away from him — the helpless haunting he makes of his face when he finds seokryu in his bed. the pure sincerity of his smile as he watches seokryu light up as she eats.