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High above the deep blue sky, down the Milky Way,
Rides a ship without a sail, with no oars they say,
Ship of white, its only crew, is a rabbit white,
Westward it floats along, silently through the night.
-Yoon Geuk-young
Min Yoonji was a pragmatic girl, she didn’t believe in what couldn’t be proved by empirical methods. The sky isn’t really blue, it's just an optical illusion that has been used to write poems and love songs. Love . That, for Yoonji, was an illusion even much bigger than to assign a color to the sky. Feelings were for her only a chemical imbalance she preferred to avoid, she didn’t need the excess of dopamine that generates love in her brain, she lived well and calmly between her books of quantum physics and advanced mathematics. Her classmates called her the robot, but Yoon Ji was as human as anyone in that room cluttered with teenagers burned by hormonal changes typical of the age. That Yoonji told herself that she didn’t need love didn’t make her immune to it, even though she tried to hide herself behind books of a thickness that made everyone head hurts, or even if she told herself that love was an stupidity.
When a smiling, huge-eyed boy appeared in her classroom, she didn’t flinch. Just one more idiot. That the boy had a sparkling personality made her head hurt, why did he always smile? Why didn't he stop talking? Why did he always say nonsense stuff? And, above all, why did he smile at her when everyone in her class ignored her? Oh, that smile with the shape of a geometric figure, like a rectangle. She had always liked geometry in all its variants. She repeated to herself that that was the reason why the smile of that boy named Kim Taehyung made her feel something ticklish in the stomach. Yoonji always enjoyed finding the perimeter of the rectangle, because it was simple, there were no complications. So why when she heard him laughing next to that other idiot Park Jimin she felt the same tingling sensation? Laughter is only a sound, and the sound is nothing more than vibrations in the form of waves that propagate by elastic means until they reach our ears, without geometric forms in between. She ignored that worm that had settled in her guts, she killed it with quadratic equations and vectors.
When they were in science class and the subject was about the outer space and their teacher started talking about the distance between the earth and the moon, Kim Taehyung said what to the ears of Yoonji was the greatest stupidity of the century. A foolishness that made her feel a heat in the chest and forced her to turn the head to observe that naive boy. A nonsense that took care of returning to life that annoying worm.
“I really believe there are rabbits living in the moon”
All of their classmates laughed at the insane statement, but they forgot it only a minutes later. Min Yoonji couldn’t bring herself to let it pass, that got stuck in her brain and she repeated that sentence over and over again in her head. After that day, when she arrived at the classroom, the first thing she did was look for Taehyung, and she always managed to find him smiling or doing something strange next to that friend of his. That smile was about to make the poor girl mad. His cheeks bulged upward, making his huge eyes turn into brilliant slits. Why did he have to be that way? Why did she have to feel that warmth in her chest every time the boy smiled that way? Why did he had to look so cute? Even though the boy was a whirlwind he emanated an innocence that was melting the well calibrated circuits of Yoonji.
Suddenly it was no longer just the smile of the boy that seemed so adorable, now so were his eyes, so huge and expressive as charged with purity. She doubted that the boy knew the evil, and how someone who believes that there are rabbits on the moon could be evil? When those huge eyes met Yoonji's, she felt she could look at those chocolate-colored orbs forever, but when he added that peculiar smile of his the girl could do nothing but turn her head because that was more than she and the worm in her stomach could stand.
Kim Taehyung didn’t always put in order his words according to his thoughts, which made him gain a few mockings for the class bullies. In spite of that, the boy looked always happy, as if that didn’t affect him at all. How do you do it, Kim Taehyung? How can you be so adorable and stupid at the same time? That is why Yoonji couldn’t help but approaching him one cold morning of November, in which she arrived too early to the school. The boy was at his desk, his head moving to the rhythm of a melody that Yoonji couldn’t hear, and without rhythm he sang a rap she didn’t know. She sat down on the next desk and caught his attention touching his shoulder. When the boy got rid of the headphones that prevented any outside sound from reaching him Yoonji began to speak.
"Did you know that humans have two hemispheres in their brains?” Asked Yoonji, eluding an appropriate greeting. Taehyung didn’t understand why she was asking that to him, nor why she was approaching him, if always he smiled at her as a greeting she simply turned her head and ignored him. He didn’t have time to respond because Yoonji decided she didn’t need an answer. “The right and the left, the first is creative and the second rational. Your mind works faster than your mouth and it does it abstractly, because your dominant hemisphere is the right one, which means you are creative. Maybe that's why you say a lot of stupid things. Whatever. When you try to convert what your creative mind understands from your way of seeing the world and adapting it to the way the rest of us see it is when start your difficulty of expressing yourself correctly with words. At least that's what I read, you probably have a high IQ, but if you keep saying nonsense shit no one will believe it”. Taehyung looked her without knowing what to say, wondering if inside her head she had a computer connected to the school WiFi. The girl put one of her small hands on the shoulder of the boy in a way to express her encouragement. “Don’t feel bad when those assholes make fun of the way you speak”.
Yoonji said nothing more to him, she got up from the desk that didn’t belong to her and went straight to her own without even turning to see Taehyung, who continued processing all that the girl with disheveled hair and short stature had said to him. The rest of the day she could feel those abnormally large eyes perched on her all the time, but Yoonji went on with her usual routine, without ever talking to him or even looking at him. The next day the first thing she found on his desk was a chocolate with a small note glued to it, disdainful she looked at her classmates imagining that it was a joke, but when she read the note she couldn’t prevent the feeling of that worm twisting inside her and the sensation of her heart giving abnormal palpitations.
Thanks for the nice words you said to me yesterday. You don’t feel bad when those assholes make fun of the way your left hemisphere work, I think is cute and I like it :)))
Kim Taehyung.
Yoonji knew that something bad was happening to her brain, she had always been rational, but now she was in a kind of dream in which the protagonist was her classmate Kim Taehyung. She thought about him all time, when she ate her lunch, when she was brushing her teeth, when she tried to do her homework, and mostly she thought about him before going to sleep. The memory of his deep voice always worked as her lullaby. When she looked at him at school she couldn’t help but feeling a sting in her cheeks and when he was greeting her, with more confidence since she dared to speak to him, she felt like she couldn’t breath. The heat that invaded her body when he approached her enough to make easier smell that essence of vanilla told her that something wasn’t okay, that maybe she should have to see a doctor, specifically a neurologist, to make sure her brain wasn’t incinerating itself for the hard study.
Now, when Yoonji saw the boy smiling she couldn’t help but do the same, she didn’t know why, it was something the textbooks couldn’t explain to her. She didn’t know why sometimes she found herself watching at her classmate lips, which were voluptuous and rosy, or why she wondered what would feel like if those lips gave her her first kiss. She didn’t understand why her chest felt hurt when she found Taehyung talking happily with a girl that wasn’t her or why she felt envy of the girl because she never got the chance to talk to him like that, or why she felt annoyed by the fact of Taehyung smiling to other girls. She didn’t understand why she felt her eyes got wet and glassy when she heard the rumor that Taehyung had confessed his feelings to a girl from another class, or why she was glad to know that everything was been a big confusion. Taehyung filled her with so many emotions that she simply couldn’t comprehend.
Her brain no longer kept math formulas in it, now was full of information of his classmate; like he liked the lions, that he had two moles in the arm that formed an elephant, that he played the saxophone, that he had the rare habit of engaging in conversations with inanimate objects and sometimes even with himself, that he liked to make holes in his t-shirts, and so much more that really wasn’t for any use at all, not in school nor in life. She was sure that on any admission test for college there weren’t questions about Kim Taehyung's favorite color, nor would she be asked to write an essay about why Kim Taehyung's smile shines brightly. Yoonji should be solving calculus exercises and preparing her presentation for history class instead of lying on her balcony with her eyes fixed on the night sky, more specifically on the moon. Everything Yoonji knew about Science, Physics and Calculus was forgotten when, after having been watching the moon for over an hour, she was able to find the rabbit that lived on the lunar surface. She thought of Taehyung and his stupidity, how he was the most irrational human being she had ever met, and how he was the one who returned the warmth to her chest. Thickly tears slid down her cheeks as she continued watching the craters on the satellite that formed the animal's silhouette. And perhaps the idiosyncrasy of Taehyung was contagious, because Yoonji was laughing at the same time that she was sobbing, how could two such different bodily reactions like laughing and crying could happen to a single person at the same time? But the logical explanations no longer mattered, not now that she was able to see, once again, the rabbit living on the moon.
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"Do you see him now, Yoonji?" His father asked, watching her tenderly as she continued to gaze up at the sky. Eyes narrowed trying to catch the figure. "I told you that a rabbit lived there”.
The girl tilted her head a little more, trying not to lose sight of the rabbit now that she had found it.
"Why a rabbit is living in the moon?" How did he get there? What he eats? How does he breathe?”
Yoonji's questions were thrown one after another leaving no room for his father to try to answer at least one of them. The man smiled, and although his body had lost all strength he stood up from the hospital bed where he was lying back, and with a tremulous step went to the window, where his little daughter looked out.
“No one knows how the rabbit came to the moon, the only thing that is known is that it’s only visible for those people who believe in something more powerful than ourselves, something that even science can’t explain”.
Only then Yoonji looked away from the moon, watching his father with a slightly furrowed brow.
“Like what?” She wanted to know, because even though she was little she was aware that mathematics and science could explain everything.
“Like loving someone, or believing in magic, or seeing the positive side when things are going wrong, believing in forgiveness, believing in the power of a smile, believing in the power of love in general. Those kinds of things make you able to see the rabbit on the moon, never forget them. Live to find the rabbit Yoonji, that is always the best way to live. And remember that everytime you look up at the night sky and you found the rabbit who lives in the moon I’m going to be somewhere smiling happy because if you are able to see him that means you’re living the right way”.
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Min Yoonji was a pragmatic girl; she didn’t believe in what couldn’t be verified by empirical methods, at least until Kim Taehyung was transferred to his school. Before Kim Taehyung any other common night in the life of Yoonji would be her reviewing the lessons learned that day in class, instead she was drawing and adding glitter on a card made by herself as she hummed a joyful tune.
The next morning she was lucky to find Kim Taehyung sitting at his desk, he had headphones in his ears and was mouthing of a song. She walked up to him and, with her heart pounding loudly and fast inside her chest, she left a card with bright colors on it on his desk. Before the boy had the chance to analyze it, she turned away and went straight to her own desk, she could felt her hands sweating and her cheeks getting red in a heat that was definitely not there minutes before.
On the card was a drawing of the moon with a rabbit eating a carrot over it, there were hearts, stars and a bad attempt at portrait of Kim Taehyung, plus a legend that said:
I also think there are rabbits living on the moon. Do you want to go for a hot chocolate after school?
Min Yoonji.
With nervousness she turned her head until she met Kim Taehyung's gaze, who was glancing at her with one of those rectangular smiles she loved like a crazy, his cheeks flushed and eyes bright. For the first time since Kim Taehyung was transferred to her class, Min Yoonji smiled him back.