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One day he looked at his face and thought, “ah, it’s me.”
Pete Phubodin Rachatrakul was his name in this lifetime. Similar to his first name—back before all of this—and easy to roll off the tongue.
Phubordin Ratchatrakul like the king? people would ask. No. Rachatrakul like the owner of the company, he would answer.
It had been a long time since his name had felt so at home in his own mouth and the taste of it reminded him of black eyes and the softest smiles.
His life was good. Better than the last and the one before that. He had a caring father, a small handful of talents, and a smaller handful of friends. The few accolades he had graced the walls of his house and his face peppered the photos his father liked to hang up. He missed his mother and sister a lot, but nothing compared to the odd feeling of a missing limb—a phantom pain that throbbed in his chest, right beside his heart, and that curled around the base of his skull.
You’re missing—, you’re missing—, you’re missing— was the beat of his heart. Never completed, though. Never told him what he was missing. Pete tried to fill the blanks: you’re missing your mother, you father, your sister. You’re missing half of your heart and the ability to keep relationships. You’re missing him.
Sometimes, when he looked at his face in the mirror, he thought of black eyes and the nose moles.
He used to have a different body before, a different face. He had bangs and the corners of his eyes used to droop. He didn't know anything but the curve of his cheek and the way he’d sit for hours on end with nothing but the stub of a pencil in his hands and a piece of paper to spill his thoughts onto.
The stories said that the face he had was the face he had loved the most in his last life. They said that it changed every life but Pete couldn’t remember anything but his face and his face. Only two.
Pete was used to it. Had to be. Made himself tuck away the thought of peach-tasting smiles and sun-warmed skin into the small, warm pockets of his memories to look at and when he needed the strength.
He was used to his absence—to the severe lack of something deep in him—but he wasn’t unaware of the dull, throbbing pain that sat nestled next to his heart and growing into his lungs.
Relationships were ice-creams and expensive coffees and dressing up to go to the mall and trying to impress girls. He knew they weren’t what he was looking for—he would know if they were—but they were little distractions. Moments of fleeting bliss that cradled the ache in his heart and made him feel less alone for a little while.
None of them ever lasted. None of them ever felt right. Pete couldn’t give himself wholly over to anyone when his heart had already been lost a long time ago, taken by firm fingers speckled with dirt and the black dust of graphite. They sensed it and they left and Pete felt lighter and heavier. Good for them, good for me.
His last girlfriend called him intense, the one after her called him flighty—a one-foot-out-of-the-door guy.
He didn't know who was right.
Dreams and nightmares chased each other’s tails endlessly in some weird form of the infinity symbol. Pete was sure he could have worded it better if he’d paid attention in the English literature class where they were learning about poetry, but he spent most of the time daydreaming. What was poetry in front of his pomegranate stained lips, thorny eyelashes, and the lilt of his words as he talked about math and science the same way people did art?
He dreamt often.
Dreamt of palaces and armour and stabbing pain in his stomach, dreamt of grey hair and the gentlest laughter bubbling over the sound of a crackling fire, dreamt of sticky hands, and jumping over fences, and stealing juicy mangoes straight from a farmer’s trees and earning a lashing for it. He dreamt of grapes tossed between them and stones skipped on ponds and the crinkle of paper as he stared at his nose and the mole that studded it. He dreamt of a small smile and the breath of a laugh and—
They should be good dreams, yet he woke up with his throat swollen shut and his fingers digging into the skin of his chest.
“You’re ruining your days,” his friend told him as she sipped on a juice-box that tasted more like water than fruit, “with all this bullshit. You know you’ll find him when you will, or you won’t. It’s easy.”
It’s easy, Pete mouthed to himself. “I’ve lost him.”
“You’ll find him too.”
March was dyed in watermelons and sticky heat because Bangkok was never cold. Pete was halfway through a watermelon when his eyes slid to the fruit seller’s cart like they were drawn there—a lodestone calling him back—and he dropped the hard, green rind onto the curb like a heathen and bolted up.
His feet moved without his permission. He followed.
“Jackfruit,” the boy was saying.
You’re missing—. The curve of his cheek was familiar as he pulled it up in a smile; Pete knew the feeling of it and of it under his fingers and his lips as well.
“Bananas too, please. Only, hm, three; ones that’ll ripen in two days."
You’re missing—. He sounded like the call of the summer birds and smelled like clean sweat and laundry detergent and sunshine. He always did. Smell like sunshine, that is—like sun-dried clothes and his.
“How much will that be?”
You’re.
“Thank you, P’.”
Missing.
Their shoulders bumped when he turned around. Pete felt like drowning. Like the air had suddenly congealed into honey and dripped down his nose and the back of his throat. A name rang in his head—as clear as day—and there were no doubts.
Him.
“Phanuwat.”
And there was that smile—the sunlike smile that Pete knew so well—that made electricity spark down his spine and their fingers and their toes when they joined hands. It was mid-day but the glorious sun felt like it had risen all over again and burned through his skin and left him awestruck and full, more than he had been days ago.
“I go by Kao now,” he said, “Phubodin.”
It was his name but it had never sounded as his as it did in that moment, with their sticky hands held tight and watermelon juice drying against their skin.
“I’m Pete.”
“I missed you,” Kao said, wobbly around the edges.
And Pete had always been whole—a whole person, a whole soul, just whole—but he was full now.