hi its me again

The weather outside is pleasant, the comfortable 11-in-the-morning sunshine dyeing white walls in vibrant summer tree greens and sunlight yellows.

The excitement of her class in PE rings through in cheers from the field now further away and Syl dares not look out the window to see.

It wasn’t that it mattered much. She knew that not a single bit of her showed the slightest suggestion of illness but the teacher had looked at her up and down before letting her go. She’d muttered a quick ‘thank you’ and turned to leave when he asked the girl now walking just a step behind to tag along to sick bay.

Syl barely knew her. She was a classmate, Suiren, scholarship kid, the girl with the purple-lavender hair seated on the table directly a row in front her in the assigned seating arrangement of their science classes.

She was quiet, she was good, practiced in smiling exactly at the right times, uniform perfect dress code, greeting classmates and teachers with measured warmth and kept at a precise arm’s length of friendliness that would go mostly undetected. She was wildly good at what she was doing.

Syl knew that precision. Saw it in herself in every moment but here at school where she was mostly left to her own devices. Out of direct line of sight.

Perhaps, Syl had wondered while watching Suiren’s concentrated hunch in writing in front of her, perhaps school was the hell for Suiren that home was for Syl.

Syl peeks a little behind her at Suiren following behind. She was looking outside at the class, yelling as the sound of a whistle rung out. Her expression lays comfortably bare, the usual practiced smile smudged at the edges of her face and for a second Syl sees her, Suiren behind her mask. Syl feels a smile build in her chest.

They arrive at sick bay and upon entering, Syl finds the front desk empty, loud laughs floating in from the other room. She peeks around before meeting Suiren’s gaze. She gives Syl a small shrug. That smile bubbled over as she walks quietly to the opposite room.

The sick bay was a relatively small room, three beds on each side of the room with curtains filled it up, a few of which had their curtains dragged closed.

Syl walks over to the bed in the corner and as Suiren follows, she drags the curtain over the both of them, plopping down onto the bed.

“How long are you gonna stick around here?” Suiren’s voice comes out a little louder than a whisper, eyebrow raised in a genuine curiosity.

“Until PE is done,” Syl answers honestly shrugging as she stretches out over the bed. It is hard and the sheets are beyond uncomfortable. It’s perfect.

“Okay,” Suiren replies and Syl looks at her perhaps a little wildly as she walks over and pushes off her shoes, aligning them nicely before sitting in the space on the bed by Syl’s waist.

“You’re not going to go back to class?” Syl shuffles over a little, giving Suiren a little more space.

“Well they’re playing capture the flag with the other class,” Suiren puts her feet up on the bed too, hugging them a little, “I really don’t think he’ll notice. It’s kinda hectic out there.”

There is a gentle moment of silence before Syl snuffs out her laugh, “You don’t care?”

There’s a smile on Suiren that Syl can see is different to all those ones she’s handed out in classes, “Well yeah, but honestly he probably assumes I’m back by now, and assume I’ve participated. Anyways, there’s too many of us for him to actually keep track.”

Syl was wrong about her. Suiren had school under wraps beyond Syl’s imagination. School wasn’t to Suiren what home was to Syl. This, Syl was right about— she was so good.

Syl laughs a little too hard, covering her mouth with her hands as Suiren gives a little curious frown.

“What?”

“So you’re just gonna stick around here with me?”

Suiren shrugs, “I guess so. Sylvia right?”

Syl nods, “Mmhmm, and you’re Suiren.”

Syl is smiling so hard her cheeks burn. Suiren is so perfectly calculated, a role practiced and performed so sincerely. She all that and more and yet still defiant in all the wrong places, strangely stubborn yet comfortable about being here, skipping class, confident in herself enough that she can get away with it.

Suiren studies Syl a little before a grin blooms over, “What, you don’t think I can scheme a little either? I know you’re not sick at all— if anything goes south I’m putting all the blame on you.”

Syl laughs hard, a little breathlessly at that, nodding.

Their curtain is pulled away violently, suddenly, and their laughter chokes away as they turn to look. A girl with hands on her hip, expression beyond annoyed, brows furrowed accusingly stands huffing a little.

Syl knows her from before but now as their classmate, Malum.

“Am I interrupting something???” her eyes flicker between Syl and Suiren who groans annoyed, head in her hands, “I was trying to get some sleep and you guys are being loud.”

A quick silence overlaps the girls before Syl gives up and ends up laughing, head tilting into her pillow both Malum and Suiren’s gaze snapping to her.

“Excuse me, what are you girls doing in here?” a voice enters, a pair of shoes clicking into the room— the school nurse.

There is a certain quality of air at the end of things— there’s a stillness that signifies the closure of a moment in time; a hasty dot at the end of a scribbled thought.

I know the feeling all too well, the recording of last conversations etching into the deepest corners of my mind to be replayed, re-remembered when least convenient, broken record scratching. All this and yet all I had were the shards of broken silences. What could I even say?

She refuses to meet my eyes and I am aware that I am staring at her with wild bewilderment. She offers nothing. She blinks at the floor.

Something shatters at a distance. I hear the sound approach from futures away. Nobody picks up the pieces. I say nothing.

A soft laugh breaks our silence and she is looking at me now. Her brows are furrowed only in a way it did when she was worried or confused, looks that read, ‘are you okay?’s and ‘what’s wrong?’s. Her eyes held a sadness that would glimmer even through pitch darkness, a skewed smile drawn across her face that was weeping at cracks restrained by pure will and necessity. I have never looked more in pain.

“Syl-“

“Rom, I lied,” her voice cuts through me clean. I feel myself falter. “I lied.”

She holds a brittle smile and I feel my anger melt away beneath my feet. The warmth of her hand reaches mine.

She places a cold thing into my palm, eyes darting around my face, scanning and scanning for anything I would let her see. I look.

A key, its gold and weathered body lying heavy in my palm, a familiar thread bracelet tied as a keychain.

“I’m not getting rid of the room Rom,” she says, voice soft, confessional but removed from any presence of guilt, “I bought it. I honestly was going to leave it vacant, just let it hold all the memories of us quietly-“ she lets out a heavy puff of air and breathes in shakily, “but I think you deserve it. Have it. You have it.”

Suddenly the weight of the key in my hand pulls down on me like an anchor, heavy and stuck. A strange dizziness overwhelms.

I look around this room, tidy with the evidence of a few missing furniture pieces and a few packed boxes lying around on the floor. Every corner of this room held soft memories, the warmth of our summers and our springs soaked into the walls in colour and laughter.

The room filled with a sickly grey. It is autumn. Winter was approaching too fast, too haphazardly.

“Rom.”

Everything in me tells me that I shouldn’t but I defy myself to look at her. As I always have.

“Rom,” my name spills out softer and I do not know what expression I held to see that kind of grief in hers.

Perhaps, simply, it was that mine reflected hers back.

“Syl, no stop,” I shake my head, quiet, “Don’t,” I say and every bone in my body aches from stillness. “Go.”

It comes out as nothing more than a whisper, so final yet shaken that a part of me is convinced I said nothing at all. However as the syllable drops from my tongue she brushes past, gone.

For the first time, I feel what it is to be enveloped in the absence of something preventable.

I do not see her again.

If anyone could’ve saved me, it would’ve been you.

Sometimes I think I can see you better than I ever have through it.

Or maybe it’s that whenever I reach past this barrier, stick my hand between the lightly tearing walls to reach yours, your eyes search me as though I have put myself in danger, something unexpected, uneasy.

(And I’ve seen your eyes flicker a spilt second down past my eyes, and I’ve felt all the air winded out of my lungs and new maybe maybes building silently before I claw them all down.)

And under that uncertainty in your looks I build my cathedrals; I am helplessness in being drawn to you.

There’s a quiet part to us. I don’t think we will ever talk.

I have seen you reach closer, pulling at the threads I have laid out for you. If I am ever more truthful, I would tell you that I have no idea why I tear away every time. Yet the other half of the time that I reach for you, you too are gone, quick and far.

Maybe a part of us, unspoken and ugly, is all in our distance. Never reachable, only witnessed. All eyes, never held.

“Lukas,”

I hear his name spill out from my mouth— as if I hadn’t spent weeks, months biting my tongue bloody to stop myself from saying it the way I had gotten so comfortable in doing so. Stripping the endearment, quiet confessions; his name mine no longer.

“Kyan,”

He replies, and in it I hear the echo of the hollowness he had carried for all the time that I’d known him and longer, seeping out of him in pools of red. I had never been enough to help stop that sort of wound.

“Kyan.”

He mumbles again, eyes closing shut as his frown spreads out clean, a sort of resolve lying in his expression now bare. The sound of his breaths fill the room, in and out heavy.

A hot streak runs down my cheek.

Ever since, I had been spending my first minutes awake every morning aching in the emptiness of my bed, one I had became all too familiar in the scent and warmth of him. Quiet afternoons were now silent, paint staining and staining my hands, layers of colours cracking dry until I felt faint with hunger, falling back into my bed cold and empty, only then having noticed that the world had trickled into the next day.

I imagined seeing him again, that melting smile that restarted my life over and over again especially when it had been mine, to see him again now that he was no longer mine but it would still be him, and I imagined that I could be satisfied with just that.

But he was here, so far from anything home, colour drained away from his skin, shifted into the him that was once deep yet always nagging. One I had seen from time to time but never swallowed up whole in.

No amount of love, I realised, no amount of love I had for him, gave to him, would fill that hollow in him. He harboured a wound that ran so much deeper than his heart. And that I couldn’t even give to him.

that things, and maybe even people, remain, stay for longer than just a chapter’s length.

I feel myself drawn impossibly close to others, the warmth in shared memories and laughs, in getting to know someone and witness their life— I’ve believed in longevity and breaks in cycles and new chances, new beginnings.

I have, in every occasion, tied my heart to others and silently prayed that perhaps this person will stay with me. Maybe not forever, never forever, but for just a little while.

All that I’ve learned is that some cycles are solidified in one’s narrative. It stays, a painful and heavy reminder of history and fate, being dragged around and around the clock until you reach helpless acceptance or reckless relentlessness.

Perhaps, unknowingly in my stubbornness, I’d chosen the latter.

☘︎ ⋆｡°✩ ⋆˚࿔ ₊˚⊹⋆

A spark flickers in Syl’s eyes as she laughs, falling a little over sideways, a complete ease in her manner that she does not often allow.

“Okay, so you two made a bet and you don’t even have a plan on beating him?” She wipes a tear from her eye and I nod. It’s confusing why she thinks it’s so funny but I find myself smiling anyways.

“I don’t need a plan. He’s terrible at the game anyways, I don’t even see how he’d win,” I say, “he made this stupid bet cause he can’t take it that I’m better than him. When I inevitably win, he’ll probably put it on a technicality to make it sound like he would’ve won.”

Laughter still honeyed on her voice, Syl shakes her head, “No Rom. Aidan’s crazy competitive, he’ll practice and figure you out before you even catch onto it. He’ll win.”

A strange thrill rises in my chest, “You know what? Let him try, and when all his efforts go to waste, I bet he’d be even more bitter about it.”

Syl smiles, “You’d better win.”

It is a suffocatingly warm spring.

Perhaps I still yearn for us.

I’d thought the sting in “we” and “us” had healed over, that it was a wound clean, scar invisible. Or perhaps over the years I have bitten and bitten and bitten it apart unconsciously, nervously; pain subdued by poison, permanent.

Maybe I thought I could be happy without—

and I cannot even finish the thought.

I've killed you in my memories, my thoughts, dreams. I've killed your name, killed the way I always wrote it right after mine. I've killed my memory of you with your head on your elbow laid on top of the table that one hot afternoon, drowsily murmuring that you liked the way I wrote your name before falling asleep mid class.

Countless times I have killed you and each time I buried you, mourned you, and then gathered my belongings and moved past you.

But here, at this little park where we belonged, you are here again, laughs bubbling from us weightlessly— with me.

I have killed you so many countless times but the grass remembers the way we called each other's name and the winds whispers it back to me under the tree where we had rested together.

I burn deeply with the resentment I have for you. You will never be here the way you once was, next to me, with us. No words strung together can describe the way I endlessly miss you.

Trans.

Into a calm river, we love throwing irregular stones

We know it’ll be a painful time but still we grab another stone

I wonder with what heart you throw yourself?

Countless emotions are filling up your lake

The water that swallowed your scars will become calm someday

And it’ll grow to have a wide embrace

Throw away the lingering thoughts hanging at your fingertips

As it always has, and as it always will

Everyday, inside your unstable heart there is only sunken pain

And still both you and I continue to breathe as we head towards that ocean

In order for the me of tomorrow to be able to embrace the overwhelmed you of today,

When we reach the shining water’s surface

She didn’t turn back once.

The bus ride here was quiet, she with her suitcases sitting in the seat in front of me, long hair down, hiding her face. We had fought, only a little, but the kind of argument that ends just for the sake of not arguing and we sat in the awkwardness that swallowed after. A thousand questions ran through my head, none of which her actions nor words in the past week had ever answered which had only scorched my frustration wilder.

I could see it in the others too. Suiren who none of us had seen after she stormed out that evening, Rom who only grew quieter and quieter, and Lukas who completely avoided the topic.

He had asked where I was going this morning, stretched out on the sofa, yawning softly as I put my shoes on. “To the airport,” I’d answered and before I could say more he’d sighed softly, nodded and picked up his phone.

They all made me unbearably angry. It was like we’d not known each other for years, like they’d not talked about plans after graduating— in their easy nonchalance and silence, I wondered if anything we had done together mattered to them, to her, at all.

As the minutes that I had last seen Syl stretched out, I remembered her look as she said goodbye, that cold expression on her face frozen over— I had never seen her like this before, but the way her eyes and lips fell into its place and her strange monotony told me she was used to it, that it was practiced, perfected.

“Thanks Aidan,” she’d said as we walked closer towards the gate, tone flat, tired. She turned to look at me, expression all cold, her dark circles darker still. I met her eyes, and she looked over my face, searching for something. I looked away.

“Bye,” I glared at the floor, fidgeting with the cigarette packet in my pocket.

Without missing a beat she turned, and left. It was absurd, her walk so casual I wondered if I would just see her tomorrow, like always. But she was gone and frustration brew so hot in my stomach.

I needed a smoke.

Behind her expression, I had seen it, the red that spilled from the smallest crack behind her ice, blood that ached. Desperation and panic thrummed behind her eyes scanning my face— and yet I couldn’t say anything. Like the rest of them, I too let her go, and it was all over quicker than when we began.

A plane flew over my head loudly and I walked alone, back to the bus home. I pulled out a cigarette and my lighter, placing it angry between my lips. The lighter lit wildly with a spark, and an excruciating shot of pain burned my thumb in its process, skin blistering red.

that piano in the middle of the room where Aidan sat now, as he often did, playing tunes so familiar I found myself humming along without even knowing the name of the piece,

the many bookshelves that lined the walls, filled with our stolen maths textbooks from school, amongst Malum and Kyan’s favourite books,

our artworks made during art periods hung in the little corner of the room, small improvements in our brushstrokes and sketches visible in the works from year to year since seven years ago,

the dust settled in the corners of the room,

seven pairs of shoes now grown a few sizes larger, either thrown or neatly placed by the door,

the familiarity of these exact people here that I had grown to know so well,

and only now since these past seven years did I see that my rose tinted glasses had been cracked from the very beginning.

Everything at once had went silent. The giggles and laughs stopped in an instant, all eyes on her.

She spoke plainly, easily, and in that calm demeanour of hers that made me know that her decision was final. She wouldn’t change her mind.

A heavy and rusted gear started back up, tugging painfully in my chest, that slow motion of clouding thoughts, quickened breaths— an old wound tore back open in a matter of seconds.

Three bodies lay, sprawled across the wooden floor as exhausted boredom began to creep in.

One drifted asleep lightly, recharging from the school day as another flipped through a book, teacup steaming by her side. Music hummed at the tongue of the last as she scrolled aimlessly through her phone, curled on her side. Frustratedly, she threw it away lightly, groaning into her arm.

“Suiren, Mal, I’m hungry,” Syl kicked the other— a light tantrum, “get up, I’m hungry.”

With a sleepy hum, a few refusals and another soft kick to her back, Suiren sat up with one barely open eye. Mal closed her book, groaning as she stretched out her back. Triumph lined Sylvia’s beam, child-like and mischievous.

“Should we have dinner together?” Mal looked towards the clock, “it is getting late.”

Before getting an answer, Sylvia pulled them all by the hand, dragging a yet to fully awaken Suiren into her own kitchen.

In mere moments, the three were sitting side by side, feet dangling off the wooden decking of the backyard, a plate placed on each of their laps.

The world filled with pink and purples, birdsong flowing down from above. Another song transitioned into sound on the speaker as spoons scraped plates clean. White butterflies danced about the flowers.

“That was really good,” Sylvia’s empty dish clattered against wood, “any later and I would’ve died from starvation.”

“Truly, a ‘thank you’ from time to time would do you good,” Suiren stacked her dish on top of Syl’s, “I woke up to help you cook.”

“Or well you were violently woken up to be chef. I don’t think Syl really did anything,” Mal sipped her tea, a gentle grin on her face.

“No yeah, she’s right, what did you do?”

“I was sitting in my corner not doing anything, that’s the best way I could’ve helped-” Suiren was met with blinking and a smile faking innocence, “okay wait I’m joking, I’m joking. Thank you, it was really good. I’ll do the dishes,” a bright laugh spilling from them as Syl toppled to her side at a strong push.

Night fell quick before them. In seconds, darkness drew long shadows under their feet and the whir of crickets echoed. Cool spring winds blew their hair gently into a dance and all slowed into the rhythm of night.

“You know, I’m excited for all of us to finally graduate and be able to be adults and have our own independence to do what we want,” Suiren broke the silence, “I think I’m just really excited for our future together as a group.”

Guilt formed in Sylvia’s throat, a large rock she couldn’t spit out, lodged painfully and stubborn. She would tell them one day, just not now.

“Yeah. Me too,” she smiled as sweetly as she could.

Her facade would work for as long as she needed, Sui was too blind with the trust of their future to see into her deflections.

She met Mal’s eyes looking at her, a curiosity hidden behind an otherwise neutral expression. It was difficult to get away with it with Malum.

Smaller jellyfish floated in individual tanks leading up to the stage, a towering glass pane that displayed the main fish tank. Multicoloured fish swam by harmoniously past him. It was a stunning view, one alluring and drawing him in deeper.

Underwater, time was slower, peaceful in the dizzying endless blue.

He was getting lost in it.

He took a seat at the corner of the stage, looking up at the water’s surface high up. The sun’s white and yellow danced in fractured waves, and he found himself reminding himself to breathe.

It had been a while since he had come to this aquarium, first when he was a child with his sister and parents, and he remembers running through the viewing tunnels to find sharks and to the touch pools to feel starfish.

The pulling in his chest as screaming children run by tells him he misses it. He misses her.

The last time he had visited had been with Kyan, and he can't even recount when their last talk, last text, last call had been. He doesn’t quite know if he misses him.

Still now, he was here, impossibly alone getting lost in the water, staring at schools of fish.

The streets had still yet been quiet, with the building tensions of the half hour before three o’clock, where the rushing of teenagers and their laughs and shouts filled the atmosphere with their exhaustion and relief of finally heading home.

A loaf of white bread, unopened, had lied in between us then, and we were giggling with pure adrenaline and disbelief.

It was summer and a blistering hot day when we had run away from school, with that loaf in hand.

An awkward distance separated us now, seven years since those school days. I, sitting on one end with my suitcase and he on the other, cigarette lit and stuck nonchalantly in between his lips.

It was an addiction I had been struggling to get him to stop, but it was far too late now, and he was too stubborn.

Aidan’s smoke drifted by.

“I guess I never asked,” the sound was his voice was sudden, unexpected. It caught me off guard. “Where even are you going?”

I stared at my shoes, as I had been this whole wait. I tried to reply, mind spinning out the countless explanations for my entirely abruptly announced departure, but not a sound escaped.

I had trapped in my own web of unexplainable guilts.

“I think you know, but Sui took quite a hit”, he drew in another breath of his cigarette, “none of us have heard from her since… you know.”

He was right. That evening a week ago that I told them, voice echoing in a room rendered so quiet that anything would’ve cracked that fragile moment, under a sky so red.

Sui was up and gone in an instant. Not a word, nor a change of expression. Just gone before anyone could stop her. The mention of her stirred a painful tug of anger that I couldn’t place.

The anger covered me in waves. I continued to stare at my feet. Aidan sighed.

“I don't know Sylvia. If you’d just explained yourself–”

“Then what?” I looked up at him, that hot anger freezing over, “What would that have changed?”

He looked confused, pissed off, like I wasn't making sense.

He was right. But I had nothing to say, to explain.

“Maybe then everyone wouldn’t be so fucking confused or even angry with you.”

“And what would that change? I’m leaving either way,” cold words spat out of my mouth, “Sui wouldn’t have even been around for long enough for me to explain before she stormed out.”

A long silence stretched out in the distance between us.

I thought of that loaf of bread that we had shared after cooling down after running out of school. No bread I had eaten after that day was ever as sweet and rewarding.

The bus pulled up, doors opening with a light squeak.

He was so still. A body, a breath. The slow rise and fall and the rhythmic beep…beeps of the machine droned on. Truthfully, I had never seen him more peaceful than this; even more so than the rare few times I have seen him asleep.

Lukas lay, motionless in his hospital gown— this was all too familiar. Four blank and endlessly white walls and even whiter lights caged in the dizzying smell of sterility around us. It was either that or simply being here, it was all dizzying.

I could try not thinking about the circumstances. It was easy. Trapping the panic purely in the drumming of my heartbeat, I focused all thoughts on his recovery. Repeating and repeating, “it’ll be okay, he’ll be okay, it’ll be okay”, aggressively, forcibly, scribbling over the words and words, memories and past faces speeding through my head, that sickening and cyclical nature of loss pounding against my chest quicker, faster, my breathing choking and trapped in the centre of my throat, escape, escape.

This was easier when Suiren was here.

Tears, angry and hot burned my eyes. With a sting, blood coloured my lips as I examined my nail bitten ruthlessly. I didn’t even know I was biting them. I had been doing so well.

Giving Lukas’ blank face one more look, I stood up quickly to leave the room. I needed fresh air.

Pulling the door open, she was simply there. A face so familiar and distant, here now as quietly, abruptly as the day she was gone, one that I had only seen in a past of dreamlike memories, ghosts, one standing in front of me now, skewed frantic. It was unfamiliar, this expression drawn into that face, so unlike her, yet unmistakably, she was standing here, in front of me.

The sound of my heartbeat, quick and violent, filled my ears with thunder.

“Rom…”, Aidan’s voice trailed and in my surprise I hadn’t even realised he also was there, here, standing in front of me with an uncertainty to him that too was unfamiliar.

Fire bubbled in me, the stinging in my finger burning and burning, the taste of iron clinging against my tongue. The world spun out in red.

Absurdity struck my mind blind. With thoughts quieter than it ever had been in the past hours, I slipped past the two, feet carrying me away, anywhere down the hallway. I needed air. Mind whirring, spinning and spinning, away— I needed air.

Anyways this is all I have to offer, thanks to today’s bts concert movie where Jimin just randomly appeared with a lip ring. Thought it would be fun to draw Kyan with one so here ya go

I give up on rendering hair 👎