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For his twenty-first birthday, Hyunggu provides Changgu with an annual bus subscription because he “looks tired” and “public transportation has substantially lower crash rates than the average commuter does”, and he’d swore that a few years back, Changgu had mentioned having an expectation that Hyunggu will always be making his life easier. The first two points are justified. Changgu has no recollection of the third, but Hyunggu doesn’t lie. His friend is too proud to not be immediately brilliant at something and he is also a diminutive terror disguised as a porcelain doll.
He thanks him quietly, because it’s Monday and also the worst kind of rain welcoming it, coming down like an infinite truckload of nails, looking just like the harsh, minimal lines some six year old might use to sketch on a page. It’s five in the morning and Changgu mutters apologies and smiles too brightly for this kind of a day to strangers: fellow students and hard-pressed citizens who thrived off of copious amounts of natural stimulants and whispered half-conscious promises into the bitter winter air once they were out of earshot. Changgu brings himself to be lovely when he can, especially to people he recognizes from afar and earns either kind expressions in return or a sheepish wave or two. He wonders if he’d recognize them in a different context, like the streets or the grocery store, or if the bus is too much a part of how he knows them to see them without it.
Changgu sets aside his backpack and removes a thick wad of old newspaper clippings begging for attention on his usual seat – they’re old articles, usually smothered and stashed in the back of old boxes on the sidewalk that he bothers rifling through when he has the chance and time, and when the theatre of light through the wide windows plays out just bright enough for him to read without squinting. He gives special attention to those new age alchemy brochures people left lying around and all of the fanciful rubbish Changgu loves. The one he has in hand tells about how the lunar cycle affects how young a person looks, and he wants so badly to unironically look into it, wonders if the moon will ever have anything on some blush with a radiant finish. He likes to think that he doesn’t grow old anyway, weary or gnarled, but crawls with the cracks instead and calls it aging.
The window where Changgu sits reflects him in a wobbly off centre sort of way, like he’s caught squarely between existing and not, in a twisting loop of the logical and the absurd, imprecise swells and shrinks for new permutations of unique. The mirror knows. Something about his hair looks off but he’s not even sure which part to try and fix, considering it’s all a mess he eventually came to terms with. The bus whips past advertisements, houses, homes, empty tracks, other buses, and Changgu sits superimposed over the world beyond the glass with his art student attire. He can point at at least three other people in the vehicle that look as eccentrically ordinary as him, but Hyunggu says he’s starting to get more angles in his face, looking older, like the proper adult he just became. And it feels nice, because, again, Hyunggu doesn’t lie.
He watches every detail zip by a thousand frames per second, the ones that are broadly categorized as such. When the bus stops, a dog’s moan pierces the stillness of early morning. The earth is wet now, the sky, dry. Thrice sounds the moan, and then stops. The bus' engine hums again and the doors click shut. Another half story Changgu will have to think about, keeps in a corner of his mind to get inspiration from later and maybe even complete, when his head is no longer stuffed with stuffing. It might be standard fare for a school day, but he is pretty sure he didn’t stay up too late to work on his project – it really shouldn’t feel quite so much like he’d spent an entire day and night breathing wool in through his mouth and out through his nose.
“Excuse me”, someone taps his shoulder, soft voice piercing the air, and it’s Changgu’s favorite. “You’re getting off here, I think.”
The words linger bare in the atmosphere as Changgu realizes he had missed the way the automated voice had announced his stop in stilted syllables, and, like a flock of tiny birds, they fly towards the nearest paper and charm a pen for a shower.
The man was almost twice the weight of every person within eight feet of him, his coat draped over his arm, dripping rainwater all over the bus floor. He brushed more water off it, adding to the growing puddle and Changgu thought, grudgingly, despite himself, of the mop he’d been meaning to buy.
“Oh”, he exhales with embarrassment, and wonder, and a pitter-pattering heartbeat, “Thanks.”
The eye-contact lasts for less than three seconds, and while it is enough to make Changgu forget his still sleep-encrusted eyes, heavy with tiredness, he doesn’t waste more than a thought or two on those sharp features and striking eyes after he exits the bus. He’d seen them many times before. They were Shinwon’s.
He had been his classmate since the age of fifteen and still is, and they’d only talked a few times. When Changgu first caught sight of him, close enough to see the human being peer out of him, he had one finger stuffed between the pages of Matilda, a book Shinwon said he borrowed from his younger sibling and was reading in hope of pulling pranks and teaching his belongings to move. By the end of the year, he had claimed to have mastered it, and Shinwon was such that Changgu couldn’t quite discredit him, he was such that Changgu ever since scolded himself every day for missing out on the occasion to make them more than just two wary strangers.
Shinwon is gorgeous – it’s an undeniable and objective fact – he has soft looking lips and fairy winged lashes and eyes that shine like a fox's, and Changgu isn’t exactly a teenager anymore and bursting with vocabulary stolen from eighteenth century novels whose fashion is sentiment, but he wants to go to him and ask him to drive them both down somewhere they can share secrets. They could get greasy food to go and eat in the roadster under the pitch-black curtain draped over the sky, and hush over the twisted, warped shapes that the stars made against the blackness. They could draw what they see, and Changgu could ask him all the questions he’s been bottling up inside of his chest since the day their eyes met, days and months and years before.
Changgu was not in a position to be greedy. Although his stomach churned to delve into the deep seated caverns of Shinwon’s locked away recollection (did he associate a specific memory with him too?) and his insides twisted to wine and dine in his short-lived companionship, he had to keep his hands to himself. There would be a time when the choice was not left to him, he thinks, and it’s a much better thought than admitting to being a coward.
Shinwon is always surrounded by people. His friends are nothing like Changgu, too scrubbed, too hard around the edges to ever be taken except for what they were: smart people, but people from the more run-down neighborhoods, cleaned up by a ferocious will for education and a desire for what had been kept beyond their reach. They also happened to be ignorantly given to phlegm and effusion, settling into loud nose-blowing and hacking expectorant as soon as the classroom windows steamed up in winter. Since it was still cold that same day, Shinwon had bought coffee from the machine in the hallway. Their cream isn’t flavored here, so he had dumped in a few extra packets of sugar, the kind that looks like little clusters of crystals and comes in brown paper packaging. The stirrers are vibrant blue, and the cardboard sleeve around the cup has the university’s name stamped on it with ink.
He dumps a stack of what looks like second hand sketchbooks onto the desk a few rows before Changgu’s. Some of them had covers of stretched sheet or cloth, one self monogrammed with his initials. All had thick creamy paper and Changgu could spot a few stained faintly with coffee or tea splotches, testimony of their life length, even though Changgu had never seen Shinwon actually paint or draw. The box of paints were new though, a beautiful set that unfolded in tiers to reveal an array of oil and acrylics, and he almost got jealous.
The sun was not totally visible, but there was enough light to see the furniture draped in old sheets and a long-dead succulent Shinwon had brought to class and left sitting on the sill for months and given a name to – he’d always nag at his friends for not using it, but Changgu never dared asking what it actually was – its leaves getting crisp and neglected. Shinwon flicks one; it falls onto the hardened soil in the pot, and Changgu notes the absurdity of something so specific existing and the way it makes it valuable. Changgu watches as Shinwon picks up the whole thing and throws it away, avoiding the slats of the old, wooden floor that he knows creak the loudest and pushing back the curtains over the metal sink, watching dust swirl and settle in the first beam of sunlight through the window. It was drifting down and tamed just enough to defer to the works on display in the room below, as well as Shinwon, poised so delicately beside it that he looked almost like a pastel drawing. It was a spilt bucket of blue, purple and orange and the dusk made his hair glow an ever more violent gold, illuminated by the waking embers of the day. Changgu surely must have not looked the same, because Shinwon didn’t spare him or his creations a single glance.
Changgu wonders why Shinwon had neglected something he’d grown affectionate enough to baptize for so long and it leads him to wonder what else Shinwon likes to hoard, so he takes to proclaiming he’s playing the game “Why does Shinwon take art classes?” at whatever odd hours he feels like rummaging around.
“I don't know him like that, you know”, Hyunggu’s eyes shift to the chopsticks rattling in their canister when he asks him, fishing out a piece of radish and biting into it with his side teeth. He lets the taste unfold across his tongue and glances over his friend in curiosity. “Woah. Lemon juice?”
Changgu ignores the question-shaped fact and looks at the rings stained on the table of his living room, then at the rings still on Hyunggu’s fingers. “You’ve roomed with him for a year.”
“Four years ago. And for hardly ten months. He was never home, and when he was, he was coming through the door smelling of someone else. Is it something you ask an artist anyway? Why do you paint?”
Changgu doesn’t know if it’s directed at him in particular, but the question is light-hearted enough for him to stall around it again. Hyunggu looks the smallest bit nonchalant and his dark hair has grown out further since the last time Changgu saw him, almost covering his ears and sweeping down over the edges of his glasses, the volume of it in the light from every open storefront they passed earlier making him reach out to ruffle it. There’s a surety to Hyunggu’s voice as he talks with Changgu, always, like this present company is as much a part of his routine as a mug or two of morning coffee, black, the extra sugar. Like it would take much more than just a few sentences from another to register, like words between them can never be too few or too many, always just right.
“Dude, he probably studies art for the exact same reason everyone else does here. Waitlists and friends joined at the hip. If your future is in jeopardy, might as well spend it doodling and having fun, right?”
He lifts up his water glass, a toast to his story, a chuckle swinging his feet from the edge of his throat. He sighs when he gets no reaction from Changgu.
“I’m just kidding. All I'm saying is that I have never seen Shinwon draw anything, back in high school.”
“So long ago”, Changgu hums, trying not to burn his tongue on the soaked and steaming contents of his bowl.
Hyunggu nods as he looks at his friend from the very side of his eye, like rotating his neck that tiny extra bit is beyond his baseline of courtesy. “Crazy, isn’t it? I barely remember being seventeen.”
Changgu vividly remembers being seventeen. He knows exactly why Hyunggu puts the topic along with his chopsticks back on the table, because they both had been separated by the dramatic high seas of time, space, and different universities after years of half joking about cooking up get-rich-quick schemes together and living tomorrows as concepts only. When Hyunggu turned up on Changgu’s doorstep, it was after nearly a fortnight of radio silence, unanswered texts and unverifiable sightings in a variety of mildly arty and sometimes seriously frightening pubs near Changgu’s patch (Changgu didn’t even drink), none of whom were accustomed to serving a well-deserved doll-faced looking man who talked shit about most think he didn’t like. Their old school would seem so small now, if they were to go back. Changgu remembers the twenty-four joints between math and photography class, thirty-six when he met a friend at his locker. He recalls its hallways and their overall impression of drabness, the crumbling edges of the road to a family restaurant in town – he’d walked with Hyunggu for post-class meat buns as often as their pockets could take because he was family, their breaths coming in puffs and swoops as they’d make their way down the streets, loose gravel crunching when it wasn’t standing in for snow beneath their shoes. And he’d continued walking, when they no longer talked, and he’d walked again, when they started talking again. Changgu bristles at the memory. If he’s being honest, the past has a tendency to ache now when it surfaces, and stays tender like a bruise. Maybe if he backtracks, he’ll find a way to tell Hyunggu about how lost he used to be, back when he still didn’t know how to name it.
As the evening flies by, Changgu smiles at the way Hyunggu likes to call the people he had dated before “exceedingly tolerable” and other curiously raw terms that Changgu had never heard another human use to qualify relationships. He does it with soul-splitting confidence and obvious bias, often towards himself, sometimes towards whoever he was talking about, and most times towards rainy days and timing along with the rest of the world, much easier to blame. When Changgu points it out, Hyunggu makes a valid point about not being one for caution. He wasn’t the one pining over someone he only knew the name of. He wasn’t the one with Shinwon tunnel vision. So Changgu goes quiet, and strains to hear the latest juicy tidbit in the saga that was Hyunggu’s love life, he lets it drip, one word at a time, into a cloud that makes all rain, everywhere. He doesn’t mind.
But did you ever fall in love? His mouth starts to itch and twitch with interrogations of his own. Tell me, did you gaze at the person, thing or feeling, and burst into color, blink and grin foolish, indecipherable in noise? Did you fall in love?
A week or two after, they actually meet again. One of Changgu’s professors had become well known for hosting some of the best opening nights for new artists, and one of the first in the city to show art from street artists – selling oversized sheets of drywall and launching that style into the homes of the upwardly mobile, modern crowds. Changgu’s not anti soirées but he never had more than a mouthful of alcohol, taken unnoticed on a clear, sunny afternoon with his dad. He wonders if it tastes better with time. He wonders if it always tastes like the air in the living room when both his parents were home; if the aftertaste never goes away but stays until it’s more terrible to not have it on his tongue, until it’s no longer a distraction but a purposeful way to fall into a hole. He would hate for his prefrontal cortex to go into standby mode, that’s one of the few things he needs.
Changgu likes to think that he is good with people, and asks himself if anyone here actually cares to listen to what he has to say or if his words pass through their minds as ambient noise like in the bus. He wonders how many of his words the strangers he’d made small painting talk with have catalogued. It’s definitely at least most of them on his part. Changgu catalogues everything, after all.
His hand is wrapped around something non-indulgent and sickeningly sleep-inducing, he counts the amount of ice cubes in the shape of tiny hearts that float face up in his glass. His head is slumped against the wall, he is bored and scrolling through his phone and blames it on Hyunggu, and whoever else available that he is so intent on disconnecting a call that he does not politely sidestep to avoid colliding into the young man whose head has just crashed into his shoulder. He is just about to tut, apologize, and walk away in the way a few people have before him when the boy positively laughs, and of course, of course.
It was technically night two of their acquaintance, and Changgu’s enduring memory of that moment wouldn’t be how his knees gave way but the way Shinwon looked – he had turned up to the party with one of his earlobes practically scabbing off with dried blood and a wonky gold ring stabbed in the middle of it. He looked young and crushable and hopeful about life in a totally unwarranted way, and Changgu couldn’t take his eyes off him.
“Are you okay?”
“I need fresh air”, he croaks, and it barely sounds like him, and Changgu feels a spasm of quite groundless panic, starting to ask whether he should call someone, before Shinwon gives him another blissful, opiate grin. Shinwon is a special kind of pretty in this lighting, the color in the air flattering his hair so well, making it blush from neon blue to silver. It catches on his nose too, on the dark of the suit he was wearing and his attire probably had more than one tongue wagging. Shinwon’s eyes follow him, glowing dark between the frame of his hair.
Changgu gapes at him through the static buzz in his head. “Are your friends here?”
“My friends...” Shinwon thinks about it for way too long, as though he’s debating whether to lie about it or not and backing up said lie just in case at the same time. He decides to give up on it. “My place is only five minutes away. I just want to go home. Please take me outside.”
This was totally geographically inaccurate and sounded like a shortened rewriting of his entire evening, but Changgu heard Shinwon suppress something that came close to a cough, and didn’t need a second invitation when the other man dragged on his arm in the least aerodynamic process possible. So Changgu takes Shinwon outside, giddy with it. He’s never been this close to him, he doesn’t think he has. Shinwon’s never felt more buoyant, more free, more outward-leaning and light-spirited than he does right now. Changgu figures it’s the alcohol, figures it’s a bit unfair. Shinwon is sitting on the ground, rooted to that spot for long, interminable minutes, and he’s rhapsodizing beautiful nonsense about how badly he wants to start staking out potential cities to settle down on the moon in the future and then maybe fund adoption agencies, for animals, aliens or babies, and points at a stray dog he mistakes for a feline. Changgu has it on good authority that the drink’s side effects will begin to kick in within the hour, during which point Shinwon will be forced to retire to what he guesses is a very student friendly economical bedchamber for what’s left of the night, honestly very little.
He manages to wrangle his address out of him and sends him back to his apartment in the bus. Shinwon is swaying on his feet, vision shrinking to tiny pinpricks, and he staggers backwards, losing his balance with a curse. The situation is absurd and Changgu thinks he should probably get a license, in case this situation arises again, just so he doesn’t have to fling out his arms to catch him every two seconds. He is sober, but he’s the wooziest one, tries not to do anything stupid like telling Shinwon how pretty he looks, how perfect his face is with much gratification to barter for an adjective.
“I'm so out of it.” He seemed to be drifting, but Changgu felt a slight answering pressure against his arm.
“I picked up on that when you started having a conversation with a cat earlier", Changgu says softly. “When you said you needed some time and air.”
Shinwon frowns. “Me? I wasn't talking to a cat.”
“Really? I was right here.”
He whispers. “He was talking to me.”
“Right,” Changgu says, flashing a small smile, trying to match his tone, because it’s the simplest choice of all to gently reassure him anew. “It was talking to you.” Shinwon isn’t intoxicated enough to miss the fact that Changgu’s trying not to laugh.
“He was. You don't have to believe me,” Shinwon counters, twisting to search out Changgu’s hand with single-minded mulishness. Probably to avoid tripping.
“So? What did the cat say to you?”
“That his left ear needed scratching. So I scratched it. He also told me that I probably shouldn’t jump into a stranger’s car.”
“Good thing this is a public bus. And we've met before.”
Shinwon doesn’t do anything but squint and Changgu tries to capture the sight in his mind’s eye, because it feels important. It feels as though he’s inside of a moment he’ll want to remember for a long time. It always does when Shinwon is around.
He lives in an apartment and Changgu nicely asks if he wants him to help him up the stairs in a way that could not possibly suggest anything else, and Shinwon refuses, mumbling something about them both being too old to hold hands without it meaning something. Changgu hates that he forgets to compliment him on his earring.
It strikes him, then, when he’s too exhausted himself to come up with ways to deny or justify it, that he’s been fundamentally right about his stance on love. It’s this noisy sort of rush, a pattern like so many others: blood cycling in the body, bus stops strung in an imperfect but unchanging line, clouds keeping the sky insane, days in sequence becoming weeks becoming months becoming years and eyes growing dull with predictable science until one glorious night, inevitably, one sparkle returns with befuddling irrationality. The love he’s heard of is real, like a monument or a work of art, carved with persistence over lifetimes out of ingredients ordinary.
Shinwon doesn’t talk to him or acts any different around him for weeks after that, he probably doesn’t remember the turn his night had taken. There’s so little Changgu knows about Shinwon, but when he puts the cluster together, they are a collective singular he can’t pick names for, nor apportion fondness. They, as circle, are fused, the breadth of it all filling Changgu’s stomach and pushing his collarbones into his mouth, and as much of an artist he claims he is he realizes he cannot epitomize this as he foolishly thought he could.
He tries, though.
It’s another Monday after class, Changgu asking for extra time to work on a project he hasn’t started, drumming his fingers gently along the table’s worn surface, tracing an old mark on it, a ring left by a glass of water. He circles it absently before moving on before taking a gulp of his orange juice and letting his gaze slowly lift itself to the windows. The street was bare, anyone with an ounce of sense ensconced in their house to keep warm. Shinwon had bought another houseplant to feign taking care of. He didn’t name this one. There was no rain anymore, but the sky held the heavy, grey color that indicated it was close to impending. Changgu’s always loved the blue haze that fell on everything when drops made landfall, when it’s not falling on him.
Where is that small tree growing from? It’s towering over the tall building that blocks Changgu’s view, a balcony perhaps, deep enough dirt, and high enough determination perhaps. Changgu’s old school had what was supposed to be a garden, the sections closest to the perimeter totally screened off – by hedges, by tall plants – creating a kind of strategic wilderness: not without lovely qualities, but frequently sunless, and secretive, full of ferns and unseen except from the highest floor of the building, where the labs were. Changgu knows that because he’s painted it before, and suddenly, he wants to paint it again. Years going by has Changgu feeling his own sense of nostalgia for the people and the places that he’d like to experience through a teenager’s eyes for the first time: the site of an old video store, the coffee house, where he and his friends used to hold their open mic nights, the park where he had his first kiss with a boy he doesn’t even remember the name of. He wants to experience his old bedroom with its cute animals memorabilia and notebooks full of his young perspective on life and posters of childhood heroes. They aren’t specifically exciting places to visit especially as a grown man, but they meant something once, and he hopes that they still do, if he were to go back and visit.
He recalls what this morning’s brochure said, something about distance being the last chance to love the thing hurtling towards someone because they called.
Changgu sits almost in spite of himself, strokes the tip of one nail along the length of a page. He picks up the pencil sitting next to the sketchbook and twirls it between two fingers. He wants to draw what being seventeen feels like.
He starts with the slope of the shoulders.
It's the first time Changgu chooses to not simplify his art into basic shapes or forms; it’s the first time he wants to preserve every single dimension. Not a bow. A line, straight, tense. His fingers itch for the relaxed curve he usually favors, but his eyes recall the defensiveness of the muscles, the sharp edges. He can tell Shinwon’s mind has a way of snapping around a problem like a mousetrap, decisive and lethal, and he wants everyone to know that he knows. If he was allowing himself to think about him just a little longer, he would be mixing crisp color with the liquorice black satin that drapes behind his ear and the oozing brown syrup of his speech. His eyes, unmatched. His jaw, defined, crowned on each side by the curves of a lovely ear. More orange juice on Changgu’s empty stomach and he scratches the two, three lines of his Adam’s apple, so defined under young, taut, a little blemished skin. The prettiest painted subjects often display the relaxed ghost of a smile over spit-slick lips, but Changgu settles for the realistic coral pouts Shinwon wears. The dip of his cupid’s bow, there only to place a finger upon and leading up to the nose, soft but straight.
He smears the soft lead of the pencil over the pad of his middle finger and then strokes over the paper, once, twice, the barely-there blush that bloomed from the kiss of the cold and the fire of fury. He darkens the shade of his jacket absent-mindedly, but he has furtively looked at Shinwon enough times to know he rarely wears black clothes.
“Spot on.”
Changgu’s head snaps and Shinwon is standing here, mouth quivering, the way it did when he was trying to cover a full out grin. He was a study in polarity, solemn and blank or laughing with his entire body, looking all of a high schooler, to hell with lunar cycles. He wasn’t laughing now, but his eyes had crinkled all the way up so that they were crescents, and Changgu wants to scrunch the edges of his lashes with lines, with one of the expensive pencils he had bought and easy to smudge.
“Beautiful eyes.”
It’s all that Shinwon adds, and Changgu doesn’t know if he’s talking about his own eyes, the ones he’d just drawn, or the abstract concept of an artist’s ability to notice the little things. He was being fairly smug about walking in on a drawing of himself.
“I’m Shinwon”, he says as he comes to appear at his side, six feet of gold and a gorgeously dimpled, if hesitant, smile. Changgu’s brain short circuits a bit at the sight of him here, in the classroom, it’s just the two of them and it’s the first time and it’s completely incongruous and, yet, everything absolutely fits.
“Changgu”, he huffs an under-the-breath laugh, feeling himself blush. “We’ve met before.”
He knows, of course, he does.