He’s lingering like something that haunts, something that’s still too alive to outright call it a ghost, occupying this space like air, as thin and as imperceptible but still there. Still present, with adamancy, in a way that doesn’t need any other verification than its incontestable quality of being real. He could reciprocate if he were touched, he could respond if he were addressed, though he isn’t, and he knows why he’s not. He smells like something. Something else, something like the other, phantasmic something but worse. Don’t say it.
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?”
@hyunth / 2015.
