#sel.

i don't know what to say.

don't know what to feel.

maybe it's the way that everything manifests.

i don't like it.

i don't like anything.

anything, but, somewhat, not you ?

i don't even know.

i'm going in circles.

but atleast you're in the middle.

beloved and free, filled the life of mine with glee.

sadness seems distant, an unknown entity.

you spare me words that eradicate, mend, and be.

at this distance, the wind has carried the ache away, replacing the ire and the pain and the acts and the thoughts… specifically the thoughts. he dissects them, one by one, and it feels like shedding layers of clothing that are nothing but garments of mortality. skin, in its rawest form, his shape no longer a mirror to the past, simply letting it flow in the river. the ocean will welcome it home, the way he will welcome peace home.

in its last peel, he finds three beads, three counts. 

they are the trifecta to a man once loved and lost:

one is found in the crux of the weeks, months of barren uncertainties. the pungent stench of death hung in the air. the atmosphere was thematic, cremation under the sun in the company of the crows, the vultures. they licked the bones clean with their unforgiving cacophonies, sans tongues. it was three months away from yeon, from heejae. and even when the concern was potent, laminating him in its dominance, sometimes the thoughts of the man eclipsed them. he should have been more than angered, the inclination towards the pendulum of wrath was more than justified. expected, even. but here he is, wondering where all the indignation went, as it was instead replaced by the consternation. it was as if a betrayal so lamented could not erase, eliminate feelings cultivated since they were children. and don’t cry, again, don’t cry— so, he didn’t cry. there was no use; again, crying, like shouting, screaming, it would only earn nothing if not more beating to the body. but hasn’t he always preferred that brand of agony, more corporeal than psychological? and no tears to spare. after all, what was the man if not a pawn to his father? for that, he painted the nights with doubt. it was not the man, was not the boy. he found himself in the juncture of worries again, from time to time, even when he could have detested it, should have detested it. seonho might not have been innocent, yet might not have been guilt-ridden. not that way. not in ways that faulted, flawed him to absolution. hwi knew better. or so he thought. and still, that was how he knew how to kill, maim. survival was an odd won. strangely so, but he wouldn’t default the red onto seonho’s hands. it was the war. he couldn’t, wouldn’t blame seonho for it. and is he to blame, for not blaming seonho? they both had red on their palms, fingers coated in the weight of lives taken. one, another. he lost count of his own kills at the age of twenty. ( and swore, someday, one of them would be the father’s. swore. swore again, closer to the heart, severed arteries proving that he was more a man than a beast… or at least, that was what he wanted to believe. )

the second phase was syncopated like a series of heartbeats, unveiled only after the ear was pressed against the vessel, the barrier. eavesdrop on the thud, thud, thud. he recalls vividly how seonho swallowed. he swallowed after the lies, didn’t he? yeon was not alive. no, no, no. again, in the proximity of demise, he was told, once more, that his sister was the sacrifice that bloomed naught if not the strange flowers, of whose each petal was inscribed with the calligraphy of youth. seonho had witnessed everything, everything in hwi’s life that he’d ever come to value after his father’s passing: his sister, his arrows. seonho knew the best, worst points to strike, to stab. and his wounds gushed incessantly, giving away the vermilion underneath the torched light. it illuminated the grotesque truth: for him to survive, he was to stand against the man that would lie through his teeth… nemeses carved out of circumstances. he was to stand against the man that would lie through his teeth— lies that were intended not to sear but to save. yeon, no. yeon was the last filament pulled so thin to the point of unbridled hatred, so yeon became a name lied. it is risible, in retrospect, how he did not falter to see the mirroring tears in seonho’s eyes. the lies were not easy. the facts were not easy. they lived with each other’s blades pointed to the throats, edging towards the verge of this precipice. when it ended, none of them walked out unscathed, because in a war, blood had to be spilled, and men had to be killed. so killed, he was. is. life is nothing if not the aftermath of all the parchments scribbled with history so grotesque he forgets the feelings of his hands, the feelings of his heart. does he have the latter when the former sinned so much, too much? when the former held the cold body of a beloved without the capability to hear the beating, ramming heartbeats? … and again, again, again, in the pit of his hollowed chest, he dares seonho to take this beating alongside seonho’s. not like it does anything else other than beating him from inside out his heart purpled. he is a case of post-mortem drowned in pity.

and the third dissection is a dichotomy. first, how do you long for a man that would shatter you, smother you? next, how do you yearn for a man that would cradle you, alter you? for the high and for the low. the man was shaped into the mould of a bastard son; he wonders, sometimes, how blinded he had been, to the point where deceits were wielded so flagrantly before his eyes, and he fell for them without a second thought? so turn back, he needed to turn back. to the beginning, in which these lattices of lies started being spun. the knots clumped at all the wrong, worst places for them. see it this way: when the table is turned, there was a boy at the hill where his mother had been buried years and years prior. there was a boy at the hill that would smear his silk robe with the soil, digging and digging and digging until his small hands were blistered, so that he could put the clothing on his father’s corpse, so that he could put the corpses in his own heart? next to each other, his parents were, are. and next to each other, the boys were. are? to this question, he has no answer. to this question, he has no verdict.

( at the end of the day, there is a boy that will welcome him home, too. )