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Halfway through Incheon highway, Mark throws up.
He hastily hazards on the side of the road and opens his side of the car to heave his guts out into the summered asphalt. Amidst his post throw up haze, he hears Donghyuck exclaim, "Jesus fucking Christ, are you alright?" beside him and he throws up an OK sign with shaky fingers above his head in response. These poor roadside daylilies have to manage with Mark's botched breakfast as fertilizer for the mean time. He bets his life and his John Mayer vinyl that Renjun would yell bloody murder if he ever found out about this.
Mark's graduation robe: tailored silk, Navy blue, visions of grandeur. A stark contrast to what he has on right now. His frayed, vomit-kissed loafers probe the gravel miles away from where he's supposed to be. The full picture is that Mark's running. Away or towards something, he doesn't know. All he knows is that he woke up this morning feeling like there's a long stretch of empty space in his mind that he needs to fill. He could've avoided it. Chalked it up to good ol' existentialism, maybe. Done his sorry excuse of a soul-searching expedition on a completely different time and not on his graduation day. For some reason though, he can't. Something about it didn't feel right.
If he were to liken it to something, it’d be similar to the urge of writing on a white wall. Blank spaces are devoid of form and meaning. So then, he wonders, where do they acquire their potency? How come empty spaces have the ability to relay urges to people? What’s forcing Mark to look for meaning and to fill the empty space psychologists would say he probably made up anyway?
"Do you have. Like," starts Mark, "a tissue or something?"
He hears clumsy fumbling behind him before something is thrust to his hand. "Donghyuck," Mark says, finally sitting up straight, "This is my necktie."
"Not my fault you don't have any tissue or any type of handkerchief in the car," Donghyuck snarks. "Would you prefer I gave you your graduation robe instead?"
So Mark ends up wiping filth off his mouth with silk. 50000 won black silk from Japan. He throws the pitiful thing into the backseat after and closes the door to leave the daylilies to die ("You fucking savage," Renjun would say, and not in a good way). They sit idle for a few minutes, watching the Hawaiian girl on Mark's dashboard sway her hips to Purple Rain, before Donghyuck asks, "So where to?"
"Nowhere," is Mark's answer before he starts the car and drives.
1:22PM: upon Donghyuck's constant pestering, they lunch on a roadside American-style BBQ place with an expertise in smoked ribs and taxidermy. Mark loses his appetite after three consecutive failed attempts of not looking at the comprehensive infographic beside their table on how to taxidermy an elk and he gives the rest of his barbeque to Donghyuck.
2:35PM: they stop at a gas station because Donghyuck drank too much iced tea earlier and he has to take a leak. Mark goes to the convenience store to buy M&Ms and two boxes of tissue because hah, fuck you Donghyuck. He moves his graduation robes, clothes, things from the backseat to the compartment, too.
3:00PM: Mark's graduation ceremony starts, and he isn't there.
4:41PM: they've been on the parking lot of an old book warehouse now for almost two hours. Other than an empty pick-up truck and two broken motorcycles, they're alone. Listening to Donghyuck's dead idols sing songs that outlive them. Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong. Mark looks at Donghyuck. Lately, being with him feels like waking up and forgetting what happened in your dream even though you're certain you remembered it just seconds ago. Looking at him feels like desperately grasping on leftover details. They're sitting in a car, and there should be something here but there isn't. Mark doesn't remember what it's supposed to be.
Everything is golden when they reach the beach at around five, six in the afternoon. He isn't sure. There only seems to be sunset and sunrise in the ocean. No hours, no seconds. Just the sun rising and sinking into the horizon. When Mark parks the car, Donghyuck immediately springs out and into the sand, Mark trailing after him in slow, turtle steps.
"Why here?" Donghyuck asks when Mark sits next to him on the sand.
"I don't know. This is just where the road took me."
"You should've told me we were going to the beach," says Donghyuck, laying on his back, "I would've brought extra clothes."
Mark snorts out a laugh. "You weren't even supposed to come with me."
Donghyuck closes his eyes. He remains unspeaking for a moment before quietly saying, "You have honors, you know."
"I know."
"Then why did you skip your graduation?"
Mark doesn't have the answer to that. He lies on his back, beside Donghyuck, and lifts his gaze to the heavens. Once as a kid he'd stared into a pond reflecting the vast blue overhead as a girl with a flower for a name and a face he can't remember anymore told him that if he swam into it the world would turn upside down and he'd fall into the sky. His cousin Wendy had hugged him and cried when he finally woke up after various attempts of CPR. She found him underwater, she'd said, eyes closed and blissful and hands poised upwards as if to fly. It was one of his earliest memories as a kid.
Mark looks at Donghyuck who still has his eyes closed. "You ever feel like you could've done something differently in your life and the direction it is going right now would've extremely changed if you did?"
"Yes," says Donghyuck after a long while, and he doesn't say anything else.
"Well I feel that way now," Mark tells him, "but I have no idea what that something is and what could've changed."
Finally, Donghyuck opens his eyes. "Maybe you'll find that something in this beach."
"Maybe," Mark acquiesces, like that's enough assurance. Like the ocean and the sky are somehow antidotes to whatever Mark's feeling right now. They stay there for a while until it gets too dark out and they have to drag themselves back into the car and shake sand off their bodies like a bunch of playful dogs. By the time they get to the main roads Donghyuck's stolen radio rights again. He blasts his girl group playlist this time. Bubblegum and brassy and blithe. He keeps his sandy feet on the dashboard and mimics high notes Taeyeon-style into the highway.
Just before they enter back into Seoul, Donghyuck asks, "Did you find what you were looking for today?"
"Not really," says Mark, and he feels a strange but familiar pull beneath his ribs as they enter the city, "but that's okay.”
"Okay," Donghyuck says to the phone, “so what do I do now?”
Mark hears Renjun’s static murmur through the phone. On the table beside where the Bonsai’s perched is a laptop with a tab opened to an article entitled Help! my Bonsai is dying! and the other a Youtube tab with Music for Plants, Vol 1 playing in the background. “No, no, I already checked the leaves,” assures Donghyuck. “No pests, no mold. Nothing. They’re just yellow and wilting.”
Mark looks at the plant in question. What’s supposed to be healthy green foliage is ombreing into a wilting yellow. It looks more dried up Kale than Bonsai. “…oh so the mold is in the roots?”
“Yeah, yeah, hold on,” says Donghyuck to the phone, to Mark he says, “Hey can you get the gardening gloves? They’re by the evergeen—the evergreen, Mark, those are spider lilies.”
When Mark comes back, Donghyuck takes the gloves and gives him the phone in exchange. Answering Mark’s confused look, he says, “Talk to Renjun while I check the roots.”
“Want me to leave it on speaker?”
Donghyuck shrugs. “Your choice, really.”
So Mark does. To Renjun he says, “Hi.”
“Hyung?” comes Renjun’s voice, all the way from China. “Hey, how are you?”
“Good. How about you? How’s China?”
“Eh, the same,” says Renjun, like he didn’t enthuse about coming home for a whole month the minute he scored the discounted plane ticket. “You’re moving out next week, right?”
Donghyuck visibly freezes. Quietly, Mark says, “Yeah.”
Thankfully, Renjun doesn’t ask or say anything more other than “invite us for drinks when you’re all moved in” and Donghyuck relaxes. Mark watches him uproot the Bonsai with utmost care as Renjun rambles about his Shanghai trip with his cousins. Dead leaves surround the pot like it’s Autumn. Mid way rave, Donghyuck interrupts Renjun to say, “No mold.”
Renjun pauses. “What?”
“No mold,” Donghyuck repeats. “No diseased roots. They all look normal to me.”
“No rotting smell?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Renjun stays quiet for a while. The Youtube tab for Music for Plants, Vol 1 comes to a pause before booming into a 15-second ad jingle. Donghyuck cradles the Bonsai in his hands, roots through his gloved fingers, careful where he’s usually brash. He holds it like it’s the whole world. The ad has finished and the Music for Plants, Vol 1 has crescendo-ed to its second half before Renjun speaks again. He says, “You should try repotting it. Do you have any extra pots or something? And do you have extra soil?”
Donghyuck thinks. “Yeah.”
“Is it the same soil from the garden beside the Environmental Studies lab? Because I recommend using that. It’s loose and nutrient rich and perfect for potting.”
“I think it is,” says Donghyuck. “It’s probably still in that orange pot you gave me. I can go get it but I’m holding a plant.”
“I can hold it for you,” Mark offers.
Donghyuck looks at him warily before putting the plant on his gloveless hands. “Take care of it, okay?” he says, and Mark nods. Soil trickle to his palms, the shrunken leaves of the plant slightly shaking at his every light exhale or nervous tremor. Suddenly, he feels it, the strange pull in his chest similar to what he felt in the car with Donghyuck during graduation day and during this morning. When he saw the dying Bonsai in their living room this morning, he’d felt something wash through him. It feels like stumbling upon a familiar-looking person but not quite remembering.
Mark watches Donghyuck pad to the kitchen, then to the cabinets under the sink, and finally the fire escape. He hears Donghyuck’s little aha! before he comes back to the living room. Determined and pot-wielding. “I got it,” he tells Renjun.
“Does it have at least two drainage holes?”
Donghyuck checks under the egg-shaped ceramic pot. “Yeah.”
“Great,” says Renjun. “Replant it and then water it after.”
Donghyuck replants the Bonsai. Mark tries to identify what’s brewing in his chest. Littered all over their apartment are potted plants—they spill over counters and infiltrate empty floors. They quietly sit beside sinks and shyly sway beside windows. All green, and this is a color Mark has learned to associate with home. He imagines the emptiness of his new apartment—white and wide and all his. No itchy plants, no sizzling pans, no Donghyuck. He looks at the dying Bonsai and feels oddly responsible for it. If it’s the last thing he can do in this place he’s called home for three years, then he’ll do it right. They’ll save this plant and let it outlive Mark’s stay.
When Donghyuck finishes, they both stare at it quietly. Its dead leaves drip water helplessly and pitifully from the branches to its soil. Through the phone, Renjun asks, “Are you done?”
“Yeah,” Donghyuck says, keeping his eyes on the Bonsai.
“Can you take a picture and send it to me? I wanna see.”
So Donghyuck does. He sends it to Renjun who goes on hold for a while as he waits for the photo to load. Outside, Mark hears summer unfold. Rolling luggage, cutting grass, cars speeding to the nearest beach. The first thing Renjun does when he comes back is sigh. “Donghyuck,” he says, “This plant is unsalvageable.”
“….What?”
“There are barely leaves anymore and the remaining ones have shriveled beyond repair,” explains Renjun, and they both look the sad plant. “I don’t know how long it’s been dying but you should’ve done something about it at the first sign. Are you sure you thoroughly checked the roots? It would’ve been all dried out at this point.”
Probably in desperation or something else entirely, Mark is the one who does it. He digs his fingers into the soil and ignores Donghyuck sharp cry of surprise. Slowly, he uproots the Bonsai the way Donghyuck did earlier. When he successfully takes it from the pot, he holds it up for them to see. Snaking between his fingers, prodding from the otherwise healthy soil, are dried out roots even someone as unknowledgeable as Mark could see. It curls into itself, brittle and brown and withering.
“It’s dry,” Donghyuck says, surprised and a tinge despondent. “It’s dry and dead. It wasn’t that way a while ago. How did it die so fast?”
Mark can imagine Renjun shaking his head an ocean away. “I don’t know, Donghyuck.”
They end the call with Renjun promising to buy Donghyuck another Bonsai. It doesn’t cheer him up. Mark looks at his downcast face quietly, holding the plant still, the concept of life and death settling in his brain like a familiar but unwanted guest. Looking at the Bonsai, he feels the empty stretch in his mind stretch wider as if he’s walking through a never-ending desert. He asks Donghyuck, “Where do you want me to put this?”
Donghyuck swallows. Carefully, he takes the dead plant from Mark’s hands and replants it back to the pot. Classical music reverberates like a terrible, terrible swan song throughout the entire apartment. After watering it again, he places it on the window and says, “Let’s give it a day. Maybe all it needs is sunlight.”
Sunlight slices through the Plexiglass window of the train. It hits Mark’s skin like pellets. Sitting by his feet are the last of his luggage after two back to back trips on the train. His furniture had already been transported to his apartment yesterday and all that’s left are his clothes and his little trinkets. Donghyuck toys with the zipper of a duffel bag.
“You should have taken the taxi, you know,” he says.
Mark hums. “It’s more… economical this way.”
“Oh god,” Donghyuck says with a wince. “You’re starting to talk like an adult. You gonna talk to me about taxes next?”
Mark laughs, adjusting his backpack. “Thanks for helping out, really,” he says, watching Donghyuck zip open and close and open and close the bag. It’s a sleepy hour—with only less than ten people in the train car. He adds, “You didn’t have to.”
Donghyuck looks away. “It’s not a big deal.”
On Mark’s mental to do list: treat his parents to dinner tonight for the third week in a row (they haven’t gotten over their son, their youngest son with honors, skipping graduation day yet and Mark has to appease them by way of dinner). Finish unpacking his boxes by tomorrow. Go with Donghyuck to the shop next afternoon to buy a new Bonsai (like Renjun said, the first one sadly died). And buy periwinkle blue paint for the accent wall in his bedroom.
The train stops at a station. More people enter than exit. He spots an old lady go straight to one of the reserved chairs and doze off. Suddenly, he hears Donghyuck say, “Hey, what’s this?”
When he looks, Donghyuck is holding up a tiny vial of sand. Mark had seen it on top of his bookcase yesterday and stared at it for a whole minute wondering where the hell in the world did the little thing come from. Still, he’d packed it alongside the notebooks and keychains by his desk. “Is this,” starts Donghyuck, holding it upside down, “is this thing real?”
Mark feels oddly protective of it. “Put it back, Donghyuck.”
“No, no, wait.” Donghyuck holds it away from Mark when he tries to reach for it. “Wait! Just—hold on, okay? Look. The stuff inside’s floating.”
Mark frowns. “Give it back.”
“C’mon. Just look!” he grips Mark’s arm and turns it away. “It’s floating, see? And if you look at it for a long time, it looks like it’s changing color.”
Mark swallows. But he does stop struggling in Donghyuck’s grip and leans over to take a better look at it. The sand inside moves like liquid, and every time Mark blinks it changes color from gold to sapphire to silver. It stirs quietly, fluidly—a dance as it bounces against the glass. It’s almost hypnotizing. Suddenly, he feels a strong wave of emotions wash through his body. Overwhelmed, he moves away, feeling his heart jump to his throat and mind go into overdrive. Like it’s seconds away from a realization. He says, chest jackrabbiting, “Give it back, Donghyuck.”
“What is it?” Donghyuck wonders, ignoring Mark, holding it up.
“Donghyuck. C’mon—”
“Hey, hey, chill out—” he says, voice rising as Mark wildly reaches over to grab it. Both duffel bags ruffle underneath them. A monotonous, robotic voice announces they’re nearing the station. “Hyung. Please, stop—” he panics, arm hitting the wall of the train, “Stop it!”
And as Mark slides his hands over it, it falls to the floor with a light crash in the otherwise quiet train car. People look at them in alarm. Sand spills all over metal and glass breaks all over the floor and it comes in waves—
the memories.
The pre-graduation party, the 12AM conversation, the forgotten kiss. It feels like waking up afloat in an ocean and realizing you’re seconds away from drowning and you’re alone, alone, alone. “Oh god,” Mark breathes, throat constricting as he remembers everything. “Oh my god.”
Donghyuck looks glazed over, too. “Holy shit.”
“You broke it,” cries Mark, and if Jeno were here he’d call it misdirected anger. “You fucking broke the vial! I told you to give it back!”
“Mark,” Donghyuck says, looking at him, ashen and startled like he’d just seen a ghost. “Mark-hyung, please, wait—”
Mark picks up his bags, and he realizes too late that he’s crying. “Don’t say anything.”
“No, wait, please, it’s okay—” he starts, and the fucking pity in his voice feels like heartbreak all over again. It feels like Mark’s about to get rejected for the second time.
Mark breathes, “I’m sorry, Donghyuck,” and he immediately exits the train the second the doors open. A gust of wind enters. It picks up the spilled sand and sends it back where it belongs. A bigger crowd enters and by the time Donghyuck’s followed him out Mark’s already up and gone and disappearing into the Seoul air.
(The missing puzzle piece looks like this: a tiny, seven people party and a carpet littered with hollowed out beer bottles. All their friends are passed out. Donghyuck, hands cupped around his mouth, leans over Mark to whisper something silly.
When he leans away, he spills laughter all over Mark’s space and the floor and Mark could think of nothing but the fact that Donghyuck looks like he could spin gold with his smile. So he kisses Donghyuck.
It lasts for only a few seconds before Donghyuck’s pushing him away.
I’m sorry, he hears Donghyuck’s words in his head, over and over again. I’m so, so, so sorry.)
Air comes to him in tiny bouts as he quietly sobs. Apparently, the cure for heartbreak’s worth one important event, a life of a Bonsai, and 20000 won. Or at least that’s what the flyers all over the front of a pink apartment door said. A girl from his Marketing class had told him about it once. The legend of the five witches who can do anything from reviving a bunny to making a love potion. They specialize in curing heartbreak too, it seems.
Mark remembers: he came to them on a Saturday with a hangover and a broken heart. This includes erasing memories, you know, one of the girls, a tall one the others call Sooyoung, tells him with sharp, glittered eyes. Are you sure you got the permission of the other person?
Yes, of course, Mark had lied, and that’s that.
They keep the memory in a tiny vial they sneak into Mark and Donghyuck’s apartment when they’re sleeping. It’ll all be gone in the morning, they’d told Mark. You’ll wake up and forget everything that happened—you’ll even forget us!
Just as expected, his apartment’s white and wide and Donghyuck-less. Pretty much like his life right now. His boxes sit unopened like forgotten memories. He thinks of empty spaces and roads. The woes of love and magic. Life and death. He thinks: where do memories go when they’re forgotten? Do they cease to exist or remain untouched in an unknown space and time?
Someone knocks on his door a little past five, and he knows who it is.
“It’s a mess,” Mark says, opening the door a bit wider, averting his tired and very telling eyes from concerned ones.
Donghyuck smiles—tight-lipped. “I know.”
They tiptoe around each other. Imaginary sand and glass shards all over the floor. Mark sits on the floor where the realtor had stood weeks ago and called it a sun room. All Mark could think of at the time was that Donghyuck’s plants would be happy here. A bit embarrassed, he says, “You can sit on that chair, if you like. It’s the only one I have.”
Donghyuck glides through the room quietly. “Mind if I sit with you?”
“Sure,” says Mark after he’s swallowed the lump in his throat. Donghyuck sits next to him on the floor.
“Can you tell me what happened earlier?” Donghyuck asks, getting straight to the point. “Because I know damn well you felt it too. And I’ve been trying to make sense of it for the past hour but nothing’s coming to mind.”
When Mark stays quiet, Donghyuck sighs. “Hyung, please.”
So Mark tells him. He recounts the whole thing feeling like he’s reopening a wound. He tells him about the five witches, the vial of sand, the heartbreak. He confesses three years of unrequited love. When Mark finishes, Donghyuck says, quietly, “So you basically stole my memories?”
“I’m sorry,” is all Mark could say.
“I kind of hate you right now, you know,” Donghyuck chuckles drily, hollowly, yet he still looks like he could rival the sun and Mark despises that. “Why did you have to do that?”
“Because I’m embarrassed?” Mark chokes out, the floor cold beneath him. “And you clearly didn’t like what happened so it’s better if you forgot, anyway. If we both forgot. It was a mistake and I shouldn’t have done it.”
Donghyuck looks out the window. “Did the magic make you forget, too?”
“Forget what?”
“Your feelings for me.”
Mark feels the steady, staccato rhythm in his chest and thinks no, all the magic in the world could never make me forget that I love you. But they all remain as thoughts that tangle in his mind like complicated knots. Donghyuck coaxes again. “Mark?”
“No,” Mark says, painful and difficult but true. “No, it didn’t.”
They fall into silence once again. There’s glass all over—on the floor, behind Mark’s ribs. In Donghyuck’s deep, deep eyes. One move and it’ll prick. So Mark remains unmoving, sunlight falling around them like air, dancing on his skin like music.
“You’re wrong, you know,” Donghyuck says after a long while.
Mark talks to the floor. “Wrong about what?”
“I didn’t hate it,” he admits, and Mark freezes. “I didn’t hate the kiss.”
“Then why—?”
“I don’t know,” Donghyuck laughs. “We were both drunk. And I was scared. And I guess I didn’t want it to be a one time thing.” When he looks at Mark, there’s a light flush in his cheeks but a determined look in his eyes. “Did you want it to be a one time thing, hyung?”
Mark exhales. “No.”
“That’s good,” Donghyuck chuckles, sounding a bit relieved. “That’s really good.”
He stares at Mark, and his eyes hold greater magic than any potions all the witches in the world could concoct. Mark would walk all over glass for him. He feels something potent in the air, in the walls. Eyes familiar and sunny and pulling, Donghyuck says, “I still hate you for stealing my memories, you know.”
Mark says, “I know,” and crosses miles of empty space and metaphorical shards and sand to get to Donghyuck. Donghyuck meets him halfway.