Hyeon,

It’s funny.

How the first and only time you decided to call the number you religiously irked me for — stiltedly written on the back of a used monet sticky note and stuffed into one of your cardigan pockets — wasn’t even from you.

It was from the police, asking me to come pick you up from the station after you had been reported by one of your neighbors for trespassing. 

No damages, nor fine from the midnight commotion — they just wanted you off of their property. Not much of a controversy to sort out, other than the almost incredulous fact that some troubled dumb teenager a few streets over sunk into the bottom of their pool without their permission and causing a scare when they had noticed an eerie shadow at the bottom.

Back then I didn’t understand. I thought it was absurd. How the officer opted to call me instead of your parents, or how you broke into another stranger’s house and tried to swim in the middle of February when I could so easily fall sick from post winter evenings.

Or how easy it was for you to smile in that situation, with your lips a faint shade of chalky blue. 

When I faced the sight of you, all hunched up on one of the benches, still drenched without a towel and only your shaky fingers clenching the metal edge of the seat, I faltered. My throat had closed in on itself, as if that broken smile had plunged me into zero gravity. The stark emptiness biting a part of me that I never thought would grow soft because of someone I barely understood. I couldn’t breathe, bottled pressure ready to combust — like how your lungs must’ve felt when they pulled you out, dragged you here, two minutes into freezing and floating into the unknown.

I couldn’t process the emotion that stirred under my stomach at the sight of you, chirping up at me for actually showing up. Or maybe it was the almost unnerving disbelief eminent behind your half assed joke that someone had came in for you at all. It made my ears ring. Was I livid? Perhaps, frustrated at your lack of concern for everyone involved — for yourself?

So I opted to stay quiet, still stunned, glaring at you from the corner of my eye as the almost bored officer explained the situation and asked me mandatory questions at his desk; and then pinching the skin between his eyes when he realized we weren’t related, nor was I your guardian of any sort.

He and I both sported the same confused expression, while you sat on the other side of the room with your head tilted to watch the walls as if they fascinated you — and maybe they did. I couldn’t decipher more of you at that point.

That night, the officer generously let you off with your second warning, and maybe I shouldn’t have felt relieved then. Maybe it was better if I tried to know more about you than you had allowed me to. Maybe digging for pieces of you that other people could unravel for me can bring you back somehow.

“Let’s keep this between us.” 

In an almost fragile tone, those were the words that you muttered, when I said I needed to tell your parents about what happened. At that moment, you had your fingers wrapped on one of my belt loops and sporting my jacket over your shoulders, reluctantly dragging yourself at my pace. Quiet, albeit the soft noise of your almost silent humming, when I had suggested that. You stopped, animatedly, freezing behind me at the words.

I asked you why after we’ve sat ourselves, almost dangerously overhanging the cliff. You only beamed — at the minuscule car lights visible in the distance from that abandoned park, up some random hill you somehow found out about in one of your random escapades; the faint pollution of the city’s lights highlighting your face and an expression I’ve never seen you wear. Maybe it was the nonchalance in my stance, my loose way of gripping you for answers, but you gazed at me as if I melted a part of you that froze when you were in the bottom of that pool.

You stared at me then. Silently. The bruise on your jaw almost looked like it was blooming in the darkness.

I think I understood. I believe I did.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

How foolish it is, to believe you understand something that you have not even began to comprehend.

“If only I was a star,” you muttered as the building lights began to flicker off one by one in the distance, giving way to the darkness ebbing at the world. We have been sitting in silence for what seemed like hours, just drinking in the star-like windows of the town that would never understand people like you. You said these words as if they were a confession. “I’d fall for you.”

“Huh?” That was the only thing I could muster. A stupid sound that pummeled the tension accumulating between us. I don’t remember if I stumbled over my own tongue, or if I just wanted you to say it again, but this time around at me instead of the starlit blanket over our heads. 

Nothing that came out of your mouth made sense, and yet you still laughed like I’d somehow get it eventually.

If ever you see one that falls, know that in another life, it’s me. 

Back then, I didn’t understand what you meant. Too out of reach for me to even decipher, a few steps too far, a couple lightyears too early — 

But now, I can picture your glassy eyes that night and your laughter bouncing off the empty park at my dumbstruck face, and realize that the somehow and eventually that felt all too murky that night is happening now.

And this time, I understand, what I had misunderstood back then.

Hyeon, you were angry…weren’t you? 

You never actually wanted strangers to pull you out of the pool, never truly wanted to stay silent. You didn’t want me coming all the way to the opposite end of town only to sit quietly and look at you laugh like everything was fine. You didn’t want me there, next to you on that dark hill and listening to you talk about the stars like I thought you did. You never wanted an ignorant fool to stop you from bursting. 

Instead, you wanted someone to jump in and sit next to you at the very bottom, to knowingly hold your hand at ground zero. You wanted me to ask, to pry, to push you against the dirt and squeeze the answers out of you, to be desperate enough to reach you — to stop looking blindly at the way you cracked, to recognize why you never cried. You wanted someone to save you from the isolation, from the loneliness you felt when you were next to the person you thought could actually see you. Someone who’d understand why you’d explode, why you say things like that, why you do things that would hurt.

Then, and only then, would you have held me with those lithe fingers instead of my clothes and looked at me too if I was truly with you then. When air became water, and water became the empty space that can finally house how big you’ve grown out of yourself. If I had known why you did these things, why you never made sense – why you smiled instead of answered.

I still wonder if I can be that person.

(I want to be.)

But I also wonder, if I had become what you had needed, then what would have been left of me?

Yours,
Jun

(—who still wants to be the person
that can sit next to you in exchange 
of becoming nothing.)

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© Rizu Lu

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