𝚖𝚘𝚘𝚗.

Overall, I don’t think much will have changed with him, though maybe in instances where I compare him to a knife, he’d be a duller edge, if that makes sense. I still heavily associate him with the color red, with the moon and other nighttime paraphernalia, knives, butterflies, dusk, eclipses, darkness with a halo, deep water, “I shall be there naked with only two wings for cover,” Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘Bride of Ice’. “You’re like an angel. Nothing touches you,” Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. Transient and transitional things. Sensitive, emotional things that are susceptible to reflecting what’s impacting them. Pebble in the water, dagger against skin, clouds during the storm. The effect of something. He’s still very contingent on physical contact, instances of touch through his hands and meeting through his eyes. Still very internal, with the same kind of (baseless) self-certainty solidifying the way he speaks, repeated juxtapositions to the aestheticism I try to illustrate him with. Below this, I’ve tried to paraphrase his biography though I’m also aware that it’s a lot. If you read it all, thank you and I’m sorry for how long it is.

The Hiranchai continue being a very prestigious sept, immigrated farmers that, with hard work and perseverance, make a name for themselves. Getting it out of the mud kind of success story. Very respectable. They’re still lawyers, too, revered for their diligence and devotedness, strong moral compass and elitism. They’re known well in their respective social bracket, maybe especially for their unapproachability, most of the time deeming their peers generally undeserving. They have a kind of national renown for their work, too, and are driven by a righteous sense of justice. It conveys a very spotless, “heroic” kind of image to the public, whose doctrine they make sure is similarly enforced onto Sunan. The family discipline strains their relationship with him but he does everything he can to appease them regardless.

Because of this, Sunan lingered on the outlier of the social hierarchy in highschool, though not with the previous disdain. Instead, he simply never fit properly with any clique. He was a very nice, very sweet student whose group aversion stemmed from him being shy, though he would still speak to anyone who spoke to him. Always well known for his potential as an art student, having flourished in the class. The type to take immediate initiative in any situation that called for kindness. Genuinely charitable, amicable, happy kind of grace. He was the type to show concern towards strangers, help someone if they fall, give his lunch if he’s got something that someone else wants, etcetera. His reputation would have been built on that sincerity, so classmates would know of him as the nice kid and it’s a mantle he keeps up until 2015.

In 2015, he came home to his father’s corpse, murdered during a home invasion. The detectives deduce the motive to be related to his father’s involvement in a case. His mother is intent on him attending school through their grieving, though, and so he’s there through the entire process. The perspective he has of classmates tilts horrendously because of the strain the incident has on his mental health and it never being addressed with professional help. He’s riddled with a paranoia that stokes this fear that everyone is talking about him, talking about what happened. That he’s ostracized now, judging him, that his classmates think he’s some kind of a freak, etcetera.

Since he’s never really had an identifiable sect of his own, these thoughts kind flourish because there’s no active force in his life telling him any different. These ideas amass in the isolation and it worsens because of that same aloneness, callousing him. He essentially pulls into himself and begins to hate everyone else because of what he’s imagined they think of him.

To cope with the violent nightmares he has of his father’s death, he starts using acid. It helps him monumentally, thinking that it also accentuates his perception as an artist. This leads to him using copiously, in an attempt to capture everything he’s envisioning during his trips. It’s kind of unsustainable though, because the highs weaken the detail of the pieces he’s creating. To curb this, he begins microdosing.

He microdoses daily even still, accrediting this as the source for his uncanny attention to detail, mimicked brush techniques, color theory, etcetera. His forgery begins mostly out of a reverence for the paintings he’s seen, envying their timelessness in fear of his own, inevitable mortality. He wants to himself similarly remembered, though through almost hedonistic materialism, lavish indulgence and corporeal wealth, even if it is ephemeral. All the fortune he’s amassed is laundered through multiple intermediaries, too, to ensure he’s as safe and as volatile as he wants to be.

That’s why Hansol won’t let him look. It is a unique catastrophe, a dead body, the impeccable picture of impossibility and reality coming together, slow and quick, even capturing the separative indecision flickering between there. A dead body is unfathomable and unrelatable. It’s an anomaly he can’t reach the way that he is. It’s an anomaly that has to be strained, deduced incrementally. It’s only approachable when things like the identifiable state of being alive are renounced. 

Which means it requires a very tentative step leading over the figurative precipice that plummets deep into the indiscernible darkness. Which means it requires the single breath before the foot is even lifted, a breath sucked inside mistakenly, something for the confidence that twists instead like a knife, don’t feel it until the bloodletting. It requires the hands, listless and shaking and outstretched, requires them to exist as just that as far as they could be imagined to exist as just that. It requires them independent of their senses, needs them as the insentient bridge between that and this, that faraway place of imagination and this, the present. 

When he had first seen his father laying there, his instinct had been to touch him, too, though he can’t remember how. Was it like that, tight fingers as the connectors? He can’t remember if he’d meant to cradle him, or if he meant to keep his hands on him like another prerequisite to some kind of transference ritual where his body is the conduit for his life-force’s siphoning. Did he think he could help him? 

There’s a little rustling, just his head trying to push past the smothering fabric on Hansol’s chest. Hansol still won’t let him look. 

Did he think he could fix it with a sacrifice? Death being truly understood requires death. Anything less means only coming so close. Which means the first step into the dropdown has to end blackly because it’s all over. Which means the inhale has to cut so sharply because it’s being sucked in, while the throat’s being wrung and squeezed like two, colliding walls. Which means the hands have to be just that, simply hands, because there is no ownership and no stimulation allowed inside the charnel. 

There’s a little rustling, just him trying to wrestle himself free, again. His living hands against Hansol’s chest, grip inconsequential and limp as if he were practicing. Hansol won’t let him look. 

He doesn’t want to look, either. It’s the perverse, deluded sense of empathy for the victim, maybe, or the warped beauty of witnessing a pain so inexplicable. He doesn’t actually want to look. He prefers being nestled, closely, exactly like that, until his eyes’ sightlessness is eventually obstructed by the monochrome fuzz of keeping them closed too hard. When he’s not being intimately handled and soothed by an indispensable repertoire of kisses scattered atop his stygian crown, he’s helped to drink the refreshments Lily’s kindly catered. His eyes open again, then, and blink ritualistically as if to dispel their initial static, grazing with careful scrutiny over the hidden room on the right. Inside, there is a table, decorated with envelopes whose addressee is designated by the animal symbol printed on it. His silver mask reminds him he is the cat the stamp refers to. He reads his letter slowly.

dearest cat,

you are the detective & the casualty. 

 at this very moment, a slow acting poison is making its way through your veins. in about six hours, you'll drop dead. somewhere in this house is an antidote with your name on it. all you have to do is do exactly as you're told. i think you already know what will happen if you don't, but just in case, i'll clarify: inside the pretty silver band you wear around your neck is a small blade. step one toe out of line and the blade will cut your throat. don't try to remove it, because that will get you killed even quicker. be careful. i can see you. now, move quickly. because if curiosity doesn't kill you, i will. go up to the master's bedroom and stay there. at 1 am, you can flip the card below.

 love, lily

He reads the letter again. 

What’s a dead body? He doesn’t know the answer, suddenly, and he’s forgotten how to find it. The letter says they could all be dead bodies too, poisoned by the champagne, unless they find the hidden cure. Even Hansol? His glance beside himself says that without saying that, looks without completely seeing. There’s a weight in his chest that feels very much like the swallowed blade of metaphor. He can feel its edge as it continues eviscerating him, down somewhere in his core by the end of its severing. Why? He’s trying to imagine it, even when his eyes have diverted. Hansol as another dead body. Hansol as the man on the ground, the incomprehensible question and answer, eventually decayed, eventually untouchable. 

He’s crying. 

The audible presence of tears, though, and the physical that usually distinguishes them, he retains it. He keeps inside what he can, breath drawing into himself as if it were being raked and shaking him tremblingly, staring until his stare is blank toward the paper in his hands. The master bedroom. Does Lily mean for him to go alone? He takes a glimpse of Hansol again, more clearly, debating it. The letter is for him exclusively, so logic probably suggests that its contents are for him exclusively, too. He thinks, quickly, like Lily’s instructed, swallowing down the upset bile. 

“Why would you make me do this!” His voice is purposefully raised, knowingly lying. It was his own choice to the list at the end of Lily’s post. He picked the cat intentionally. It’s so cute, he says. Baby, come with me. “I never even fucking wanted to fucking come here in the first place! This always happens,” his gaze sheds its focus shakily, his mouth hung open by his stammering. “This always happens! I can’t fucking believe you. Just—” his hands bunch to fists, letter carefully pocketed, sparing Hansol another look. The look of apology, the look to wordlessly entrust that he doesn’t actually mean it, the look of hope. “Just leave me the fuck alone, honestly. I need you to leave me alone.” He departs hurriedly in his fabricated storm, rapidly trampling the ascending staircase in a fit to the chamber Lily’s specified. 

He slams the door shut. He locks it. He waits. 

The chime he’s set his phone to cue rings its notice precisely an hour past midnight. Lily’s letter commands him to flip the card that had accompanied it. 

the dead usually stay dead, but it's always better to be sure. go check on your friend, the wolf. be careful. they're my friend, too.

Lily wants him to look at what he hadn’t before.

His hand lifts to the door’s handle, thumb pressing its seal unto an indicative click, the rest of his hand weakly tugging it open. Maybe it’s a good thing he picked the cat. He has experience with corpses, in an intimate way, a way maybe no one else in this predicament could relate to. Maybe it’s better that it’s him, and not someone else. 

Not someone unsullied, someone unacquainted with the smell of it, the way it sinks into the air, permeation effectively ruining anything breathable. They had to move as soon as he found his father murdered. Not just for safety. His mother would’ve stayed if it was just a matter of personal security. Sunan couldn’t breathe there. There was an odor so repugnant he could taste it, feel it even after the forensic cleaners had scrubbed it from top to bottom. 

And there was a ghost, too.

This time, awaiting him at the end of the staircase, at the end of the steps he takes to turn into the center of the initial room, there is nothing. In the place where Hansol tells him not to look, there is nothing. No explicit stench, no motionless flesh. There’s nothing. He collapses to his knees beneath the revelation. 

“Help,” the very soft murmur, stuttered as his hands splay against the ground. It’s like he’s a child again, with the way he’s painstakingly reaching for something to make it better. His touches are skittish, unimpactful, meaningless. They’re worthless touches. They’d been worthless when his father had been there, too. Worthless and blinding touches, they’re touches that take all of his energy, take so much of him and his lucidity, leave him screaming unseeingly, body heaving through crushing gasps. “Someone help! Someone― Someone come, someone come― I-I-I― I need help― I need help! Please, someone― there’s no one here―!” 

then, suddenly – “i saw your art the other day. in the classroom.” he unwraps the sweet encapsulated in the crinkled yellow wrapper, popping it into his mouth absentmindedly like it’ll wash out the nicotine aftertaste in his mouth. maybe it does. he tells sunan it does, anyways. “your newest painting. it was super pretty, i heard people saying they wish they could be as talented as you.” he rolls the sweet in his mouth, tongue traversing over the surface as he clicks his tongue, a pinch of humour in his words. “i’m jealous. when are you painting me?”

“You know, you should be mindful about saying things like that to me.” His eyes cast to the corner closest to the other beside him with narrowing emphasis, brow knit tight with the shadowing portent of his babyish reprimand, realized with an itchy whine. “I always end up talking too much, or doing too much of anything, actually, because I think it’s okay when maybe it’s not okay! I don’t even think it’s a maybe. I know it’s not!” A firm, convicted nod, scowl not quite the intimidator he means it to be, pursing his lips with an exaggerated, jutted fold. “You’re enabling me! I can tell. Why am I talking to anyone in the restroom? No one does that. I didn’t do it either,” his head jerked sideways with a very pointed snap, watching Hansol implicatively. “Not until I met you, and now that I have, look at all the things I do,” his smile striking like lightning with its hot-white flash, accompanying wink, “just to get to you.” 

There’s a deliberate seat his words occupy, ushered by a palpable curiosity he positions somehow sweetly, somehow inquiringly, kept neatly centered somewhere on the midst of Hansol’s chest with uncertainty that, for once, wasn’t discouraging. Instead, it was like a hope had been sowed somewhere deep within him and bloomed in tiny increments whose growth could not be rushed because of what it was to him. What it was to him was something anomalous, mysterious in the best way, the sealed gift in his hands that he’d pass along like this, in these moments, crush-on-you suggestions he hopes Hansol can extricate with care, unraveling the ribbon adornment like he wants to keep it because he does. Because he thinks it could end up being their red string, and it could. He’ll reach for Sunan’s finger because he wants to tie it carefully and Sunan will laugh, lift his hand, wiggle it, show him that the cord’s already been a tight circle for a very long time. All the time up until that moment, even. Every day of every hour of every minute of every second up until that moment, even. 

A little intense, but he’s never liked someone before. 

“I wouldn’t have wanted to go bungee jumping, anyway. I normally really like heights, but only when it’s like this.” This he elucidates wordlessly, hand overturned in an acknowledging sweep of the surrounding premises. “When I can stand and watch the world go on around me. It always makes me think about everyone else. Where they’re going and if they’re like me.” A pause, softly impacted, though he doesn’t intend it, clarifying just as readily. “Not in a loser, social reject sense, either, but like, you know, some guy who doesn’t know what comes next for him. Though actually, now that I’ve said it aloud, do you think that’s stupid? I feel like it might be. Everyone has no idea what comes next, right? They probably just don’t think about it. My issue is that I think about it all the time.” Another pout, one that carries so dense a detriment that he sinks with it, tucked into Hansol’s side, the incline of his head seeking his please-be-more-than-my-friend’s shoulder for respite. 

“Too much,” a little tut, “but it’s because I really want to know. I want everything to go exactly as I plan, but like, in the end. It’s okay if there’s accidents along the way, just as long as it ends up like how I wanted it to, but the accidents can’t be too severe or I’ll cry. I really don’t do well with hardship. Struggling isn’t meant for me. I deserve a life that’s not easy, but I don’t really have to try too hard, you know? A life like this, where a guy gives me all the candies that I really like because he’s …  thoughtful? Are you thoughtful, Hansol?” It comes with a mischievous snicker, a nudge up against the shoulder he’s claimed as his momentary haven, eyeing the other. “Interesting.” Admiring with a low, humming murmur, a cluttered enunciation blocked by the lime disc he’s plopped in between his lips, suckling. “I never thought you were the type. What else do you do?” 

Check out his art, apparently. The core passion he has as a person. Well, okay.

“Um, I—  Hansol, I—  You’re lying.” His gaze reverts to whatever concentration it’d had before losing itself against the other’s face, his own dropped immediately to hide the warm pink as it spreads over his cheeks, palm pressed on top of his thigh and rubbing down to his knee, trying to console himself. “I mean, are you?” A quick cough, strugglingly trying to quickly reassemble. “Are you lying? You shouldn’t lie. Not that it matters. I—  Why— Why would you look at that, actually? It’s not even done yet. It can’t be that pretty. Just wait until it’s completed, and then you can say things like that.” It trails off softly, too faint, though its detectivity persists thanks to their closeness. 

“I can’t draw you.” He’s speaking slowly but with visible fixation, their eyes reunited with the beginning of his personal focus onto Hansol’s face again, which no longer feels like just that, but a very specific combination of ruinous things. Like playful, glinted eyes that quiz him and round lips that mouth their teasing somehow enticingly. It’s too much for him and at the same time, it’s not enough. He’s thinking about that red thread again, moves his knee to press against Hansol’s, bumping him. “I’m not the best at drawing hands yet, and there’s a specific image I have in my mind, so I want to make sure that I get it right. Will you wait?” 

His gaze flickering up as if assessing him. The answer matters.

“well observed. it’s going to be a landscape of a clearing near my home back in switzerland. holiday home. it’s up in the alps, and around march time, it’s like eden. a paradise. i don’t know if i’m going to paint flowers, because in truth, the conditions can often be too harsh for something so dainty to thrive up there. but it’s also not going to be an exact image. it’s more of an inspiration. the theme for my portfolio this year is fae. a big part of portraying something fantastical in art is the detail, whether to make it more or less realistic. figuring that out is a skill that took lots of practice to acquire.” strangely, she’s shared more with this strange underclassman about her work in these few minutes than she has her best friends over the past 6 months. best not to think about it. 

“are you familiar with any fairytales yourself?”

“Yoona.” Toted with the experimental pitter-patter of his tongue atop his lips, smothered thin in their pressing line like a conveyor, delivering his curiosity with a meager head cant, nurtured intrigue sparkling on him with a simpering incandescence. Then, his head tilts oppositely, “Dylan.” Another test. His head’s inclination to the previous direction. “Yoona.” Another test. Another, reversed list rocking his head. “Dylan.” And he stays like that with unabashed commitment, bobbing like a malfunctional clock, gaze fixated on whatever juxtaposition he’s amassing for himself in the school corridor. His volume gradually progressing as his repetition sows an attachment to either moniker, each the perfect cue to swing their hands cheerily alongside, rhythmizing. “Wait,” he halts abruptly, hands smacked with a stinging finality, eyes on her again, concentration sharpened by his peering scrutiny. “Wait …   Wait.” 

His command creates a usable silence wherein they are both, in fact, waiting. 

“Okay, nevermind!” His admittance comes as a very pitiable whine, eyebrows knit tight with shame, smile mangled into a confounded pout. “I give up! I can’t choose. I was thinking Dylan and then I was thinking Yoona and then I was thinking Dylan and then I thought about Yoona again so I thought about Dylan again which ended up making me think about Yoona again and now, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Now, I’m in a conundrum. Real hot water. Hm …  Will I call you Yoona or will I call you Dylan? And before you even say it,” he’s leaning in, even, as if he could only emphasize the edge of his — utterly harmless — threat in a proximity as close as the one he’s invaded then, looking up at her challengingly, “I’m not going to say both. I won’t. I refuse! I’ll say …” His next pause, equally thoughtful, though much more productive than the last interlude. 

“Actually, I’ll choose tomorrow! That makes sense, right? Then, it won’t be like I chose, but like my mind chose for me. It’ll be the first thing I say when I see you, even! I’ll say, ‘Hi, Yoona’, or ‘Hi, Dylan’, and then we’ll know what I had wanted to call you all along! I just can’t do it right now,” the emphasis is complemented by very big, very imploring doe-eyes, “because I’ve put so much pressure on my brain to find an answer by constantly comparing the two that I’ll inevitably be unhappy with whatever I do say. Do you get me? I’ll think, ‘Wait, this one sounded so pretty, though’, and then I’ll want to go with that instead, but if I say it tomorrow, when I haven’t said anything, I’ll know for sure that that’s the name that I want to go with! Plus, this way, we’ll be sure to speak again.” A very confident nod announces his exit out of the suffocating labyrinth he had unwillingly dragged them through, his grin returning with an air of triumph, preening joyously. His touch softens palpably before receding altogether, rubicund fluster marking a realization he chooses to keep to himself, certain that she was already aware. 

“Sorry, I don’t …  I don’t really have an excuse. Or, well, I don’t know,” shifting a little, teeth gnawing at himself coyly. “I— Well— I— I don’t know. My boyfriend— or well, I always say to my boyfriend, ‘You should tell me when I’m being annoying’, and then he says,” the pitch of his voice dropping mockingly, “‘You’re not being annoying. I don’t think you’re annoying at all’, which is just useless, you know? I don’t know. Sometimes, I start talking and then I can’t stop talking because people have let me talk for so long. I should...”  He rubs at his wrist, retreating into his own space. “I should… I should stop talking. I will,” softly, his nod as a promise, “I will stop talking, but, um.” His lips tuck into his own mouth, inquisitive, somehow peeking up at her, pacing himself clearly, capturing what he’d overlooked in a tentative, single-go.

“You can call me Maew. Like a kitty, yeah. My Dad says that I’m very hyper sometimes, like a kitten. So, I have a kitty’s sound and a kitty’s name. I’ve never been to Switzerland, but I do know a fairytale. Cinderella? Does that count? I like that one a lot because she seems trapped in a really bad situation but she survives and is happy in the end. It’s a special kind of strength that I think that’s very meaningful, because I want to be happy like that as well.” 

His final pause.

His eyes persist with that kind of slate gray bitterness, assess the party like two hands on the outside squeezing either end together until the room caves in, everyone else with their also real bodies smothered into a gross simulacrum of mangled limbs indifferentiable through their fused mess. He’s watching like he’s waiting for something. Another kind of something. A mercy, actually. A path that feels genuinely open, with lights that don’t stop halfway, lights that go all the way for him. Something unquestionable, navigated easily with a little bit of handiwork and a little bit of natural intuition concocting a kind of potion that overwhelms consternation with its numbness, turns him malleable and approachably human for the night. 

He doesn’t find what he’s looking for in that moment, but he does find Hyun.

He’s like him. Not really. Not at all, actually, but he’s heard the joke about how Hyun killed his father. The joke about death. Not just any death. One as personal and as ineludible as that death. The death that he’s still carrying with him despite having bid his father farewell in the morgue already. Hyun’s got something like that, too. An anomaly, an identifying oddity imprinted like a brand. Impossible to name, but it’s there. There’s a metamorphosis he’s undergone. Not who he was on their first day in the art classroom. Someone else, like how he’s someone else. They can both be strangers now, he thinks, mingle in a vagueness.

He realizes he’s found what he’s looking for.

“Hey, I know you.” It’s gentle but audible, greeting laughingly, like there was some kind of usable reminiscence between them to afford him the ease with which he’s started. “You’re the guy that killed my dad, right? That’s really fucked up, you know,” the cup he’d had in his hand is similarly remembered in that moment, liquor swallowed down with a grimace he stifles, heaving a hoarse exhale in the wake of its sting. “You didn’t have to leave the body there, you know. It scared the shit out of me.” He fronts a little pout and winks quickly, apace with whatever light he had wanted on that walkway. It isn’t very bright, but it’s enough to make out his hand if he were to hold it in front of himself. Good enough. 

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. Sorry. I’ve actually stopped painting for a little. I can make it up to you though.” Another wink and another sip. It’s like the potion he was talking about earlier, and he’s infatuated with its sorcery. His actual words feel laughable, too casual to preface his hand’s extension, palm overturned to reveal the plastic bag in its midst, rancid yellow tablets still undivided on the pocketed sheet. “Only if you want. They were giving out party favors. I think the intention was to share, but I don’t think you’ll snitch on me, will you?”

It’s a self-sabotaging doctrine, undebatably, especially so when it’s held beneath the scrutinizing light flickering in his mind. There’s got to be a nuance to meaningfulness for it to be a usable discipline, he realizes. Because there can be no proverbial silver lining threading the dark cloud of ominous portent that swirls into his mother’s scowl. He has to take it for what it is. Nothing good to come when her jaw is rigged like that, grimacing, laden with its unclarified purpose, dispelled by the silence she ultimately decides upon which, always, felt objectively worse. He thinks he prefers her condemnation to that, prefers something in place of nothing, knowing instead of not knowing. 

There’s always this look he gives his father. The kind that speaks for him without speaking. The one he reciprocates, deploys tactfully, emulating perfectly the trustable silence. Though he provides no discernible answer, the solace is palpable. It’s what matters, the consolation afterward. The meaningfulness of everything is what you can take away from it when you’re done. That’s why he’d push with his mother if he were more courageous, daring she’d express it, whatever it was. That’s why the smiles he feels with his father were genuine and not compensatory. He’s siphoning his happiness from him. He feels better.

Everything having to be meaningful is his own ignorant, oblivious coping mechanism. The unsaturated reality, the as-is, what he avoids, it’s a place where he wants it all to matter because the things that seem to have an identifiable purpose usually coincide with tragedy. In his mind, the color of happiness and the color of pain are distinct, with the latter so much clearer than the former he’d begun to wonder how either tint existed even oppositely because it was never a fair comparison between them. 

Pink and red. 

Pink is a flower. Red is the blood. Pink is so linear he can’t think of any other representation. Red is the warning. Pink is so stagnant he’s thinking of the flower again, and when he thinks of the flower again, he thinks of fragility instead because flowers are crushable entities and he wants to avoid repetition. Flowers are the most obviously death-susceptible. They die the most blatantly. Need help all their lives to exist, and then die. Not unlike everything else on the planet. Yeah, but it’s more undeniable with them. No sunlight? They die. No water? They die. There’s more layers with a person. One person can go a whole week with no sustenance. One person can forage all their necessities for themselves. What’s a flower doing but sitting and waiting and wilting?

Pink really is another word for happiness. 

Just as reliant, with a meaningfulness that’s just as nuanced, needs just as much cultivation as its flora. Pink is hard work but he’s committed, will gladly create these incalculable labyrinths of spiraling thought and contradictory dogma if that’s what it takes to stay in its midst. He’s basking in its essence right now, even. His smile is real, the resplendence behind his eyes, stepping cadence cheerful even, moving with such a bliss it doesn’t feel as detrimental as it should when he’s collided with her, Bae Yoona. Her. It doesn’t feel frightening, or it does, but not as much as it should, because he’s seeing her in that same pink tincture. Pink says she’s the senior in his arts class. The name beneath the canvas of that unfinished piece he’s been admiring for the last month. In it, he thinks he’s seeing an emerald field. Fields have flowers. 

Everything has to be meaningful.

“Hey!” It’s more a celebration than an outburst, joyfully at his knees as he reassembles the tonnage of her books into something carriable again, stacked neatly atop each other. “Hi hi! I know you. I mean, everyone knows you, right? Who wouldn’t? I’m not stupid,” laughing shyly, one hand freeing itself from beneath the weight of those tomes to rub over his nape. “But I mean, from the art club. I know you from the art club. Did you know that? I saw what you’ve been painting. Not to sound invasive, but if I do, sorry, but I’ve been watching you. Watching your painting, too. It’s like a child, you know? You helped it grow so quickly! So it must make you happy. Happiness needs help in order to flourish.” He nods and then he pauses, his words progressing tentatively, his curiosity still unabashed though.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, is it a flower that you’re painting? I thought it was a flower because I can see so much green. When I think of green, I think of springtime. Well, not all the time, actually. Sometimes I just think of the forest. And forests aren’t always the same as spring, you know? But, actually,” he drifts amidst a thoughtfulness, head tilted inquiringly. “Actually, when I think of springtime, I think of a forest. I think of a clearing and then I think of a forest behind it. In the belly of that clearing, there’s a lot of flowers. Is that what you’re painting?” His eyes stretch wide questioningly, somehow imploringly, smile persisting as he watches her almost loyally, impossibly shyer with the scatter of another kind of pink. A warm one, hot like blush, coloring him coyly, as he retracts behind the wake of his own revelation.

“Sorry, that’s kind of presumptuous, isn’t it? But is it something similar to that, though? Maybe? It doesn’t have to be, actually. I’d still think the same regardless: That it’s very pretty, very detailed and that you’re very talented. I’ve never really tried painting something like that before.”