Hyeon,

The first glimpse of your face that I caught sight of after your disappearance was an inconspicuous inch by inch, black and white photo of you on the local newspaper, adjacent to two other missing locals: a man in his fifties missing for two years, and the other, a woman in her late sixties that has been missing for six months.

There’s something inexplicably heavy settling under my feet the more I looked at the grainy, almost indistinguishable photo of you next to these unknown faces. Somewhat like disbelief, and a sudden rush of apprehension that I’m just now starting to get acquainted with, because I — 

I know you, Hyeon.

I was with you before you disappeared. 

And I don’t know who these people are — but what I do know is that people are looking for them too, that people who love them are still waiting, searching, just like how we’re waiting for you…but for a moment, the feeling of my throat closing in threatened my optimism. At the thought of your face still in this column six months, a year, two years, from now. I don’t want to imagine it. I can’t face the possibility of a reality where I may never see you again.

Six months, two years, five years…

I’m beginning to wonder if I can wait that long for you. If I can surrender a part of myself to long for your return even if the world continues, and to pretend that I haven’t lost something. Someone.

With you gone, time feels warped.

Sometimes, the thought of you here feels ages ago. It seems that you’ve been gone for years. The weight of your head on my lap, and your laugh resounding in my dreams feel distant. No matter how I try, I can’t make out what you say every time I try to recall. Is it because I can’t hear what you’re saying? Or is it because I can’t remember?

It doesn’t make sense for our memories to feel this far away, because it has barely been a month.

But that’s what pain does, I guess.

It drags on, and on. This ache makes time unbearable. It warps the days, and dilutes the thoughts that have infiltrated the forefront of my mind since your disappearance.

And sometimes, I feel like I’ve grown sick of it – it, this waiting. The question of where you’ve gone — why you left. Why it’s been weeks but you still haven’t come back, and left me with all these thoughts, and these questions, and this time in my hands —

The desperation of wanting nothing more than for time to fast forward to a point when I’ll finally, finally forget your face, and how you felt next to me, and the sound of your nectarine laugh ricocheting against the sky’s blue the morning I told you that I loved you.

I also still want to ask you why you laughed at me then.

You had laughed.

You laughed at the heart I offered, and yet, you took it anyway. Tucked it into the inside of your cheeks, and grinned through being filled. You laughed until you choked on the affection that crowded your mouth.

You drowned yourself in the taste, all the ends and beginnings rooted too deep in those three words seated in the pit of your stomach, melting against all the unanswered questions still swimming — not as much as a word in reply to the confession other than the sweetest laughter left hanging loose in the air when you decided to leave two days after.

Hyeon — you’re cruel.

Because even without you here, and time feels like it’s melting through my fingers, you still feel so close. Sometimes I feel warmth on the colder side of my bed. Foolishly counting back to check the collection of your developed photographs I still haven’t thrown in the trash — burned. Still expecting you to be buried under my pillows with that frustrating saccharine grin. Still waiting to hear your soft voice ask what I want to do in five, maybe ten years.

You left, Hyeon. You left me.

But I guess you never really did.

I can still imagine your russet hair, and those glistening brown eyes that bore into my soul when you left a kiss on the scar on my cheek one night, slouching down to do the devil’s work in a dark cul-de-sac with your shaking fingers gripping the neckline of my shirt. The moon’s hazy glow staining you as if you weren’t ethereal enough to begin with. Lips cold from the melon icepack left discarded on the gravel and stained neon green, and yet still so devastatingly beautiful. You lingered, and I thought we were okay. No words left to say other than the searing warmth left on my skin from the icy contact from those stitched tight lips that refuse to tell me more.

And then acting like it never happened the daybreak after, waking up next to you on my bedroom floor with your head tucked where my heart is and refusing to speak. Not even a word.

I have a feeling you never really heard my confession that morning, but I’m trying to will myself to believe that you did — because hating you is always easier than loving you.

Yours,
Jun

(—who hates the fact
that he can’t seem to hate you.)

---

© Rizu Lu

All Rights Reserved.