Work Text:
It goes like this:
Out of the chaos and disappearing blue of the Seoul sky, Kim Dokja surfaces in Yu Jonghyuk’s third regression. He proves himself to be unbelonging and precarious, defies all kinds of definite direction in Yu Jonghyuk’s experience from his regressions–and yet, there is some sort of raw familiarity, some sort of tenderness to him like the past and beautiful home Yu Jonghyuk had once known.
In Yu Jonghyuk’s past regressions, Kim Dokja did not physically exist. Like a shadow, he plagues Yu Jonghyuk during nights and in his dreams, always a step ahead and a step out of reach. There is no hesitation as he chases Kim Dokja down across fields and oceans, arms out, perspiring, on his tongue and the edge of his lips: D☐k☐a, do you rem☐☐be☐ me? Without a face on the shadow he trails, Yu Jonghyuk bitterly suppresses the thought that–more than the figure remembering him–he might not know the other at all.
In the mornings, he jolts awake, emerging from the cage of sleep like a collapsing house, and there is no sign of Kim Dokja anymore by then, every last, desperate memory slipping from his grasp. Outside, the sky is no longer blue so he rises, fights, and never learns.
Though the suddenness of the scenarios had once been inexplicable and had once uprooted everything in his life, stubborn Yu Jonghyuk passes through them with a lingering hope. He searches every corner of Seoul in all of his regressions for something undistinct; he befriends people in hopes of piecing together the features of that fogginess; and he forces himself to sleep every night to chase him so, perhaps one day, Yu Jonghyuk will be able to say, face to face: Dokj☐, I am here.
In his second regression, Yu Jonghyuk dies with a hole where his heart was and, still, there is some part of it laying somewhere he can no longer look to that beats feverishly for him.
But the mind and heart are two different organs. The consideration of running after someone he may never meet and the monotonous repetition of each life eats away at his determination. Each fall into the cradle of death he had once tried his hardest to deny, he easily succumbs to now. There are nights he doesn’t sleep anymore, and there are things he leaves behind even if it doesn’t ease the ache: his purpose to keep going and his making sure that this lingering hope endures, hand on heart, chest heaving. He no longer chases him in dreams, the figure that doesn’t stop to wait for Yu Jonghyuk, running and running until he is nothing but nothing.
Then comes his third regression.
When Yu Jonghyuk catches that first obstructed and however fleeting glance of Kim Dokja through the small window on the carriage door, he also realizes there are some things he keeps despite the things he leaves behind: his hope, his heart, his hands, and his breaths. These things are the basis of his existence; when they are gone, he is gone, every last atom lost to the static of dark matter, never to return.
But they remain and, by extension, so does his search.
In this ruinous and catastrophe-pumped air, Yu Jonghyuk’s breaths had once come out as heavy puffs of air, but now they come out as discarded carbon dioxide and pollutants. He reaches through the now-flimsy train door, wrecked by the chaos that had ensued after the start of the first scenario, past the hoards of dead bodies in his section of the train, but Kim Dokja is long gone before he makes it to the neighboring carriage. Evaporated into thin air like the one in his dreams, neither slowing down nor looking back. His sword fallen to the metal floor, Yu Jonghyuk looks down to his hands and, instead of emptiness and void this time, he finds streaks of tears.
Yu Jonghyuk’s naivety is the doom of all his regressions. In its grasp, he holds firmly onto anything and everything without a logical and reasonable thought. He remains unaware of the processes of the outside world, focusing solely on the experience of his previous regressions and how life then had unfolded. He replays these bits like film strips circulating through a projector with a fading light source, flickering and vague, and lives his next regression based on what can be played like a broken and scratched CD. There is a fault in life this way that Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t want to admit. It is all he has known.
Some nights before his meeting of Kim Dokja, Yu Jonghyuk wonders what it’s like being human, what it’s like touching skin that will never be skin again, what it’s like being afraid of death for its ceasing of life rather than its conception of a new one. The death and rebirth of him are inhuman, the way he lives is inhuman, the way he fights is inhuman, the way he finds himself locked in an earth with an imprint of his body in its ruins is inhuman. When will he live like the human he is? The toxicity in these rubbles do not suit him. He does not want this. He wants Kim Dokja. Why does he have to be born here?
Often, he loses himself and imagines them together in a small home. This home has two stories painted a beige color. The front yard is full of his plant pots and Kim Dokja’s wilting flowers. Kim Dokja insists on doing things by himself and Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t have the heart to stop him, though he does occasionally and secretly fix the wilting flowers to make Kim Dokja proud of himself. They have a white cat named Hae with black spots near her eyes. She is the sweetest thing they have ever known.
In this mirage, he lives like a human. He finally knows the feeling of skin-impermanence, finally understands the poetry they write about love, and finally has, by his side, everything he can ever dream of. When he reaches through this flimsy front door, there is Kim Dokja in his stained white apron trying out the next recipe for their dinner and frowning at him. He asks why Yu Jonghyuk has not returned with the cabbage he had sent him out to get. He is illuminated by the 6 p.m. sunlight, glowing like an angel. Arms out with a space molded for Kim Dokja, Yu Jonghyuk runs toward him.
In the gentleness of such a fragile reverie, he lodges himself deep into its rhythm and wants nothing more to do with the toxicity of what is real.
But there comes an awareness: he can never obtain such a fantasy. Yu Jonghyuk is a part of the fissures and oxygen of this decayed world—and even more than this, every rebirth of Yu Jonghyuk borns another world just as this. His bones crack with the roar of apocalyptic onslaughts and escapes from his mouth the porous ambitions of the constellations. These worlds and him are one of each other, and so the miraculousness and fairytale-esque nature of such a fantasy is ill-suited for him.
So the dream dissipates like fizzy soda on hot asphalt as he turns the unreality of it over and over in his palms, trying to find something resembling that of his life. Still, he clings to the last, frail breaths of it and waits for the Kim Dokja of his hopes, whom he has willed with every final bit of his inhumanity—his otherworldliness—into existence. The likeliness of that home and the visions that come with it nears zero in this apocalyptic world, but Yu Jonghyuk learns that he has to let go of irrational wants to fulfill his needs. At the core of it all, it is not the materialistic desires that plague him but rather a dream for him who is both in and out of reach and the wish to have hands that can pierce the quivering boundary between the realities of Kim Dokja and himself, pulling him past the realm where phantasms exist and where Yu Jonghyuk remains waiting. And even more than that, Yu Jonghyuk with his emotions locked up inside a certain someone wants Kim Dokja to say as he tugs him into his embrace, that wisp of present and future he sees himself holding for the rest of eternity: I have been waiting for you as you have been waiting for me.
Later, Yu Jonghyuk finds him.
+++
Unexpectedly, life with Kim Dokja has nearly lined up with the life in Yu Jonghyuk’s fantasy.
Though real Kim Dokja doesn’t wear his stained white apron and their beige home remains absent, Yu Jonghyuk finds himself loving him all the same. His smiles make Yu Jonghyuk think of riding through Seoul on a motorcycle, his arms spread as wings. The wind is caressing every inch of his exposed skin and his lover is in the front seat, steering them into a new street. His touches make Yu Jonghyuk think of the core of the sun, of hydrogen atoms conjoining together in the heat and pressure to create new elements like the birth of renewed vigor and existence Kim Dokja brings him. His turns to check whether Yu Jonghyuk is keeping up and still trailing behind make Yu Jonghyuk aware of the current, precious moment. No longer does he reminisce about the fantasies; no longer does he sleep at night; no longer does he run aimlessly through these lonely regressions, scrabble at the ground with the brief wondering of why it has to be so painful to live, or root the suffering to his retribution. He forgets what it has been like to be empty.
More so lately, the corner of Yu Jonghyuk’s lips have been curling up into a small smile. When he talks to Kim Dokja, there simmers a promise of perennial everything and anything underneath his epidermis even if he leaves his side in the next second because merely knowing Kim Dokja has been a miracle unsuited for scarred and blemished Yu Jonghyuk. He had dreamt of someone materializing in an ephemeral manner, momentarily enough that he may not build himself a home in their ribcage only to lose them in front of his eyes to the world’s expanding darkness, his hands wounded up by the weakness of his heart. He had dreamt of someone materializing in an ephemeral manner, momentarily enough that he may see solely heaven in them before they disappear again.
But Kim Dokja is different. He fights just as hard as Yu Jonghyuk fights and he lives just as desperately as Yu Jonghyuk lives. There are people he saves who are of no benefit to himself and there are things he destroys that Yu Jonghyuk had seen in his film collection and marked as necessary to advance through the scenarios. Beside him are people who had once been by Yu Jonghyuk’s side; they are happy. The defeat of the Cinema Master Kim Dokja pulls off stuns him. As he falls to the ground with half a shred of consciousness left, Yu Jonghyuk sees a shadow of himself behind Kim Dokja’s figure. In nearly every molecule, atom, and quark, he seems to replace Yu Jonghyuk, shoving him to the sidelines and making him an outsider to the world that had once revolve just around him.
When Kim Dokja covers the vast distance between them in less time than he can draw his sword, the quick-willed Yu Jonghyuk feels relief flood his tense bones and shoulders. In the second he is blown out of the King’s Qualification’s arena by the overwhelming strength of Kim Dokja’s punch, he can only think as the world fades from him: every moment of the pain has been worth it; there is someone out there who has more hope than him.
On the edge of his skull, eight times a day now, Yu Jonghyuk considers the possibility that Kim Dokja is a god. He convinces himself Kim Dokja is a god so that he may build himself a home in his ribcage and stay. He convinces himself Kim Dokja is a god so that he may see someone dear to him not get swept away like so many others and regress only to witness the tragedies again. He convinces himself Kim Dokja is a god so that his inhuman powers may make him a god like how it had brought to him life before.
And yet Kim Dokja is everything but a god. With ichor coursing through their tree-vine veins, gods are lonely and distant like a quasar millions of light years away, their brightness drowning out billions of stars in a galaxy that trickles down to appear as nothing more than a near-vanished dot on the earthly sky. Gods are unfathomable, their porous ambitions a perpetual deposit of haze and toxin in the brooding sky. When day breaks so do the heavy expectations on the elastic stratosphere, and the poison rains like hail to the ground, burning as the depths of hell and hurting as a bandaid ripped off a distasteful scar. Gods are inhuman so they forget humans are fallible.
But Kim Dokja is very much human. His skin is warm against Yu Jonghyuk’s fingertips and his presence is minutely close. Beside him, Yu Jonghyuk catches the unmistakable and raw smell of limitedness, of another lifetime together somewhere in another universe as he watches the future Kim Dokja slip through his frail grasp. His emotions are worn clear as day on his sleeves, and he rains not toxins on the people below him but lifeblood from his light-year-arteries.
Kim Dokja is so human it hurts for Yu Jonghyuk to breathe sometimes. In those moments, the digesting, two-day-old food in his stomach lurches up his throat and threatens to spill its bitter and chemical-soaked content for all to see. In those moments, the foulness of the world manages to get to him and he collapses and crumbles from the inside out. The motions of inhaling and exhaling, in and out, in and out, in and out have always been as natural as fighting to Yu Jonghyuk, but now there are sharpened knives in his lungs.
In those moments, he can’t breathe at all.
+++
Then, there are other moments Yu Jonghyuk can breathe so much that he may very well become a helium-filled balloon and float with past the earth’s exosphere and enter a whole other lifetime with Kim Dokja.
From the murkiness and pain, Yu Jonghyuk wakes to a pale face peering over him and Kim Dokja’s Midday Rendezvous. He had been inflicted with a poison coma in an earlier scenario and had barely managed to order someone to bring him to Kim Dokja. By the end of his sentence, the three syllables of Kim Dokja’s name had died to a whisper. Yu Jonghyuk had fainted after and he had not known anything else that occurred following that, but he is not surprised when he wakes up that Kim Dokja has immediately eased the effects of the status ailment. Kim Dokja brings a spoon with a thick green liquid to Yu Jonghyuk’s mouth, and he feels the ache lessen.
In Yu Jonghyuk’s returning vision, the translucent panel that comes with the Midday Rendezvous obstructs a majority of Kim Dokja’s face. Yu Jonghyuk raises his arm to move the invasiveness of it elsewhere, but he finds that his arm can’t move even with Kim Dokja’s miracle treatment. This is a clear case in point of Kim Dokja’s dual godliness and humanness, Yu Jonghyuk thinks half-heartedly, and allows himself this scarce opportunity. He reaches his ghost arm past the blinking panel and toward Kim Dokja’s face.
「Yu Jonghyuk, can you hear me?」
The hopeful limb passes straight through Kim Dokja. Yu Jonghyuk does not even feel a wisp of touch as it trespasses the outline of skin, stretched taught around calcium-strong bones. It is like reaching for a fleeting silhouette against the backdrop of dawn or an object locked behind a glass encasing to be displayed in the Love Museum, never to be held in his own palms, never to be brought home. He lets his arm drop slowly to the ground and doesn’t know what he had expected.
So he tells Kim Dokja instead, the bitter world they exist in a common-ground foundation for a future he wants:
「Go east immediately.」
Yu Jonghyuk spits a few more words after this and Kim Dokja looks at him in shock. This is an expression Yu Jonghyuk hasn’t seen before on his face. Kim Dokja’s expression packs with him consist of common ones like exasperation, smugness, or annoyance. Emotions such as happiness or contentment fly over their heads like a fighter jet on enemy territory, and he wonders if it is him that is the root of their absence. The shock comes as a surprise to Yu Jonghyuk’s narrow sliver of interactions with Kim Dokja, but even more of a surprise is when Kim Dokja tugs his paralyzed body onto his back.
Yu Jonghyuk feels his world spin off its axis as Kim Dokja turns and shifts Yu Jonghyuk’s body to fit comfortably on his back. In Yu Jonghyuk’s galaxy, stars and dwarf planets are colliding and melting into one another. There are new planets and satellites emerging from the emptiness that is space. The black hole in the center of everything is smiling like a parent when their child entrusts in them the secret of their universe, and the entirety of his galaxy is dancing to a sappy tune of radio music. Yu Jonghyuk’s trivial world breaks away from its orbit around the red giant, scattering clouds of glittery debris on its journey to his thumping and dizzy heart. His head that feels like it will splinter every silence he has kept rests neatly into the crook of Kim Dokja’s pale neck, which smells of a peculiar home and a peculiar cat, while his legs scrape the ground as they travel east. His frame is much too tall for Kim Dokja.
Yu Jonghyuk is distractedly aware of Han Sooyoung next to them. Yu Jonghyuk is distractedly aware of the mystery individual awakening The Catastrophe of Questions early. Yu Jonghyuk is distractedly aware of the ongoing ache in his body wreaking havoc on his ability to move. There are more worthy things taking up his attention like Kim Dokja and this Kim Dokja and that Kim Dokja and the Kim Dokja inside his heart and the Kim Dokja inside his head and the Kim Dokja that easily has him inside his palm. The being of himself seems to revolve around Kim Dokja and Yu Jonghyuk lets it.
As they speed across fragmented bridges and broken, winding roads like a sliced cassette tape, Yu Jonghyuk becomes acutely conscious of the valleys and hills on Kim Dokja’s clothed-back. Protruding spines from bad posture are unleveled plateaus; sharp shoulder blades are jagged, high-peaked mountains; and vine-like ribs are hills and craters. He diligently measures their altitudes and depths every time they press firmly against each other and maps each ridge and dip onto the blank canvas of his mind, makes a new world within their present one to live in peace and quiet.
A cartographer and his land. Yu Jonghyuk and his lover. These landmarks mean everything to him. They mean a step forward and a step into the future. They mean himself. They mean Kim Dokja. He holds them dear as trees hold onto dirt and gravel. He finds himself building monuments and pyramids and homes on its surface to turn the loneliness of such a world into something recognizable, so that people may look and say later on: yes, this is Yu Jonghyuk’s and Kim Dokja’s home. I’m certain of it. If you step a little farther up that hill and look down, you will see their front yard full of plant pots and, if you are lucky, their cat nibbling on one of the leaves. Do you see her? She’s white and named Hae. It means sun. She’s their sun.
This emboldens him.
The visions are no longer illogical or dreamt up as they had been before. Now, they are real. They are here on the very same person Yu Jonghyuk’s earlier visions had weaved around those endless amounts of times he had been kept awake by them. They are a part of Kim Dokja’s blood and sinews, of cartilages and joints. And no longer does Yu Jonghyuk feel that he has to grab them from the clouds over his head like plucking cherries from high-rise trees over them waiting on him, waiting for the first move from the person who had summoned them in the first place. He hears their calls ring in his ears. The future is unfolding itself before him. He just has to say the words.
Yu Jonghyuk has never felt this way; he has never met someone like Kim Dokja. He is lost but his instincts tell him to seize the chance before he may never have it again, the void swallowing up his hopes into its fattened underbelly. This is a one-in-all-his-regressions chance. Each instance he regresses, another timeline grows and branches from his twenty-eighth year in a dendritic pattern, every single one of the parts in that system different from each other. He turns thirty-two in one and dies twenty-eight in another. They are strange and they may never have Kim Dokja again.
Yu Jonghyuk feels their bodies melt into each other. Their bones are conjoining. Yu Jonghyuk forgets the feeling of individualism; he forgets what it’s like being Eris in the planetary orbital or dust in the farther reaches of the solar system. His heart is beating fast enough to send him to his next regression. Sweat seeps from his skin like ocean waves. The dizziness of his heart crawls to his head. His rotational axis snaps in the middle. His throat goes dry like when he presents his favorite candies to his classmates for a project. If it is not for his immobilization, Yu Jonghyuk’s hands would be trembling as he takes the chance, this one-in-all-his-regressions chance.
(And Kim Dokja is lovelier than anything Yu Jonghyuk’s mind can ever conjure up. He is so lovely Yu Jonghyuk wants nothing more than to find himself waking up to his presence every day.)
「Kim Dokja.」
「What?」
「Kim Dokja.」
「I’m right here. What?」
He is scared.
Yu Jonghyuk is so scared.
Yu Jonghyuk takes in a quick breath of Kim Dokja’s smell. The smell of home and everything more. This is what he wants. This is what he wants. Home and everything more. He looks to Kim Dokja’s face, turned away from him, facing whatever is ahead. There is light that bends over his cheekbones and starry eyes; there is happiness in his pores and the well-knit structures of his skin. He reminds Yu Jonghyuk of himself, a person he has never met before. But Yu Jonghyuk is a cartographer in this world and he will explore every last bit of Kim Dokja before he dies. This is his legacy which so many previous versions of himself have died for. He is an explorer.
He is an explorer so, please.
「What is it?」
But the words don’t leave the confinement of his brain.
Yu Jonghyuk lets his eyelids fall shut and lets himself put his entire weight on Kim Dokja’s back. The landmarks are still there. He still feels them. They are waiting.
Yu Jonghyuk is an explorer but he is lost. He is a cartographer but everything has already been mapped.
「Am I heavy?」
He feels Kim Dokja’s body tremble. He is laughing. It causes earthquakes and cracks to form in his world. Yu Jonghyuk opens his eyes. Kim Dokja is laughing for the first time since he has landed in this dimension, and Yu Jonghyuk is the first to see it. What a marvelous sight. His hair shakes with his body and his eyes are crescent moons, their craters his den and their reflections of light his smile.
Yu Jonghyuk is an explorer and this is a new phenomenon he has never witnessed. Yu Jonghyuk is a cartographer and there are new landmarks he has to document.
「What? Are you heavy?」
「Am I?」
「Is this your insecurities speaking? Am I speaking to the deepest parts of Yu Jonghyuk? Hello!」
「Answer my question.」
「No, you feel like a cloud.」
「Be serious.」
「What do you want me to say? That you weigh like a ladybug on a summer day with the salty ocean waves and sand touching my toes?」
「You can leave me here.」
「I won’t leave you here. Don’t be emo and sorry that I made fun of your weight. You weigh like a hundred-and-ten pound dog but my spine can take it.」
Something like the future and present click together inside Yu Jonghyuk’s head. Promises are eternal and he reaches through Kim Dokja’s skin to grab what he wants. When Yu Jonghyuk’s arm crackles as it comes into contact with Kim Dokja’s hydrogen-core skin, the smell of smoke produced penetrates his nose, and the coarseness of it leaves him breathless. Still, he digs through the viscous bathtub of tissue, searching for something smooth and warm as a heater in winter. He searches for this with as much hope as he had searched for Kim Dokja in those earlier days. In the end, he finds it: Kim Dokja’s hand, whose fingers and knuckles are ice-cold. Yu Jonghyuk warms them up for the both of them. He hears that Kim Dokja tell him to go, hears that Kim Dokja tell him that his hands are warm enough now so don’t waste anymore time on him.
「Dokja, I like you.」
Real Kim Dokja doesn’t falter, but his body is trembling again.
Yu Jonghyuk is scared to see whether he is crying or laughing. He is scared to find out what Kim Dokja will say to him. His mind spins with the possibilities of his response that unravel to fit two categories:
1. Yu Jonghyuk, what the fuck did you just say? You know this isn’t the time to be joking, right? The disaster is waking up.
2. The bridge is just by us, Yu Jonghyuk, think again :)
Kim Dokja’s grip on Yu Jonghyuk’s legs tightens. For the first time, he turns his stubborn head to glance at Yu Jonghyuk, whose eyes are squeezed shut. His vulnerability is so human. Kim Dokja turns his head forward again. There is light that falls on Kim Dokja’s face, but there is heaven that falls on Yu Jonghyuk’s being.
「Open your eyes. Why are you closing them? Are you scared? Of what? Jonghyuk, you are someone I can never be. Why do you think so?」
Kim Dokja is neither crying or laughing. It is his heart beating.
Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t respond.
「It’s because I don’t want to be you. We are two different universes. We were never meant to meet. You are a protagonist and I am a bystander. The spotlight shines brightly only on you and I am watching you from outside the theater. I am existing in a world I wasn’t supposed to exist in. You are on the back of someone who was never meant for you to touch. I am saving someone who was not meant to be saved. That’s just how it is. I have watched your movie unfold before me and your life has become something I can never live. I am not brave like you. I only have enough energy to live one life. So Jonghyuk, when we meet in this regression, don’t be sad because it is a miracle I am even beside you, let alone be able to touch you. What do you think is my answer to your confession is?」
「“Jonghyuk, I like you back. I have always been waiting for you.”」
Kim Dokja’s body is trembling again, but Yu Jonghyuk likes this tremble this time. Yu Jonghyuk can hear him laughing quietly over the sounds of steps. It is the best sound he has ever heard.
「Yes.」
「That’s good.」
「When do you think you’ll be able to move on your own?」
Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t want to be able to move on his own. He assumes a silence long enough that Kim Dokja looks back at him. Kim Dokja’s face is beautiful, Yu Jonghyuk thinks when he sees it. Everything is beautiful, Yu Jonghyuk thinks.
「In two days.」
「You won’t kill me then, right?」
Another silence.
Yu Jonghyuk is trembling on the inside. He wants to laugh, he wants to cry, he wants to put his arms around Kim Dokja as tight as he can. What has Kim Dokja lived through to come to such conclusions? Yu Jonghyuk moves his ghost arm to pierce through Kim Dokja, to touch the irregularities that make up his joints and marrows and to feel the musical rhythm of his heart. Nothing is amiss, but Yu Jonghyuk suddenly remembers the nature of this world.
「I can’t promise that.」
「Then at least swear you won’t kill me until we reach the end of this regression. Agree to an {Oath of Existence}.」
Another prolonged silence.
There are many things running through Yu Jonghyuk’s mind. He thinks of the end, of whatever end. He thinks of them, of Kim Dokja and Yu Jonghyuk to whatever end. There is a joy in indulging himself in these thoughts, so human in nature. Kim Dokja has taught him what it’s like to be human, and Yu Jonghyuk has allowed himself to feel what it’s like to be human.
And Yu Jonghyuk thinks of death.
Of death.
(Looming in the horizon like swollen clouds threatening to burst into a fierce rainstorm, drenching the both of them. There is no escape here, in the belly of such a creature. The ground is mud and landslides. They are knocked off their feet. There is no escape here.)
「I swear.」
The blue flames of the Oath of Existence envelop him and direct itself to the center of his chest, the burn of it cold and freezing but unhurting to his heart. This fire is twice the strength of a regular oath. There is a reason for this.
「Jonghyuk, you are strange but not a stranger.」
Beyond the spoken oath to let Kim Dokja live until the end of the regression, under the guise of silence, Yu Jonghyuk has also sworn:
I will love you forever.
+++
Yu Jonghyuk is twenty-eight this year, and he learns that Kim Dokja is also twenty-eight this year.
During their short rest between the scenarios, Yu Jonghyuk takes a few seconds to do the math on the sandy ground, calculating the precise amount of days between their birthdays. There is no reason behind this action, only that Yu Jonghyuk has become overwhelmed with a lightheaded feeling of happiness. A few seconds turn into a few minutes and the messy scribbles in the sand increasingly become complicated. Kim Dokja tells him it’s okay to count on his fingers and it’s okay he doesn’t know how many days there are in April or June, but Yu Jonghyuk refuses the first and denies the second. He must carve this moment into the world, and there are obviously not 50 days in June and not only 3 days in April.
In the end, Yu Jonghyuk figures it out with only a little, tiny bit of Kim Dokja’s help.
In birth, they are 171 days apart, but now they are only two hydrogen atoms’ widths apart, squeezed tightly together inside their small tent. Yu Jonghyuk’s dreams and reality have become entangled, dancing a slow waltz in their embrace of each other, as he lays quietly beside the subject of his longing. The fragility of the moment is beyond comprehension. Yu Jonghyuk is afraid he will break the thin glass around them if he breathes too loudly, but Kim Dokja pulls Yu Jonghyuk’s arm around his waist and the rest is history.
Kim Dokja is a miracle. He is a god. He is a human. He is in Yu Jonghyuk’s arms, a truth himself. A truth of divine, a truth of the world Yu Jonghyuk has dreamed of. In their tent, Kim Dokja tells him of a planet where Yu Jonghyuk does not exist like here, only in a form which he cannot grasp or touch, slipping away like a feather in the wind. In that world, there are 3,149 chapters in the intersection of their lives, and Kim Dokja has held all of them close to his heart, to the thumping, the life present in it. This is what keeps him existing, he tells Yu Jonghyuk, so he is not a miracle or a god or a human from birth or the moment he started walking. It is Yu Jonghyuk who has made him one.
“What?” Yu Jonghyuk breathes and tightens his grip on Kim Dokja’s waist. There is something climbing up his throat that tastes like a certain phenomenon washing up sandy shores and controlled by the moons that are Kim Dokja’s eyes. His body is trembling. Yu Jonghyuk is twenty-eight this year and he will remain twenty-eight this regression.
He takes a moment to sort his thoughts in the messy cabinet files of his brain before telling Kim Dokja, “Tell me it again. Tell me your story again.”
Soft enough to make Yu Jonghyuk think it had never happened at all, Kim Dokja sweeps his thumb over his left cheekbone. Yu Jonghyuk’s cabinet files become messy again, but he wants this. He wants this more than anything he has ever wanted.
“It sounds like yours, doesn’t it? There are similarities in our stories. I spent my nights thinking about this once.” Dokja spreads his arms out in front of them and swings them up, down. “I would lay in bed like this and stare at the ceiling, think about a world that wasn’t mine.”
Yu Jonghyuk imagines Kim Dokja in his bed, piecing together the broken parts with no start or end that Kim Dokja has told him about his past. Words like home and parents are absent from the things that Kim Dokja says to him just as mentions of his enjoyment and contentment in life remain missing. Yu Jonghyuk imagines a small Kim Dokja, barely reaching his waist. He is a kid who has seen all too much. Yu Jonghyuk finds a friend in him. His family takes him in. They grow up together. He imagines that, later on, Kim Dokja can tell him about his parents or about his life beyond work and reading–or how he may have learned to properly care for plants and created a garden in their front yard. This is how Kim Dokja should have lived. This is how they should have lived.
Kim Dokja lowers his arms and looks to Yu Jonghyuk. He is waiting for him to speak; there is a vulnerability on his face like a kid waiting for praise from their parents. Kim Dokja has never had a thing.
“You can think about it again,” Yu Jonghyuk says. They will have a lot of nights together in the future, he is sure of this. He will make it happen. The future will be happy for Kim Dokja, nothing else. “Tell me about what you want.”
Kim Dokja looks at him with a funny expression. Yu Jonghyuk takes a photograph of the moment and slips it into the cabinet marked “first.” There are a lot of first-times with Kim Dokja in there, and the space is ever-filling up. It will be overcrowded one day, but Yu Jonghyuk has come prepared with another cabinet just for it.
Yu Jonghyuk knows there are a lot of things Kim Dokja can’t want in this world, but at least he has him. He tries to predict what Kim Dokja will say with such a limited selection. Does he want a weapon like Yu Jonghyuk’s? They can match like those couples he has seen on social media once. Or maybe he wants a million coins to spend. Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t have a million coins yet, but he can try to acquire some.
“I want a kid b–”
Yu Jonghyuk finds himself laughing. Out of pain or surprise or both. A kid is not a strange want so Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t know why he is laughing, but his laughter gets louder and louder until he has to muffle it into the side of Kim Dokja’s face. Yu Jonghyuk also wants a kid. In the form of a cat, of course, but they can also adopt if Kim Dokja wants that. He adds a kid into their imaginative house, which turns into a mess like his file cabinets. Cushions and papers are scattered all over the floor. There is a five-year-old in the center of it all with Hae in the crook of his arms. He calls him dad with the sweetest smile.
Kim Dokja turns his face and pulls at the skin on Yu Jonghyuk’s cheeks gloomily. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say I want a kid that is a cat. Raising kids is really troublesome. I don’t think I want to do that.”
Yu Jonghyuk tells him he had only been laughing because they are unfit to raise kids and because the image that had been summoned when Kim Dokja suddenly spoke those four words was so abrupt that it had caught him off-guard. A cat is more suited for them, anyway. Do you think there are still cats here? Maybe they can buy one from the Dokkaebi shop. Hopefully it won’t turn out all scaly or demon-like because they bought it from there. What about your wolf thing? The one with the gold and blue clothing I can never recall the name of.
That’s a celestial being, not a pet, Jonghyuk. And I don’t think there are cats left alive here. The Dokkaebi shop is something we should not buy living items off of. I think Han Sooyoung is better.
Han Sooyoung? He laughs again. Right, Han Sooyoung.
Their conversations often transpire like this. It follows a peculiar route of missing the past and imagining what life would be like for them together in the past, but these thoughts are very much a desperate shelter from the present. They are a leaking umbrella in a monsoon. Kim Dokja realizes this first and then Yu Jonghyuk follows. When they realize, they laugh with their heads somewhere off in the sky at the ridiculousness of it, and they later cry about the stubbornness to which it persists. But it’s okay. Kim Dokja holds Yu Jonghyuk’s warm face in his hands, kissing his nose. Yu Jonghyuk returns it. They are sane and they are human. Humans are fragile and they miss the past like that. Like nostalgia or deja vu. Their flesh is made of the past, their memories are of the past. They are fading and old, a creaky clock that ticks until it can no longer tick, revolving around a twenty-four-hour day of past and present and future. If you find one frozen at 7:40 when your working one says 8:12, can you really be sure it had stopped today or yesterday?
There is nothing they can do about this, so they accept it.
And Yu Jonghyuk realizes it is more than a joy to have Kim Dokja by his side. The world seems bright and hopeful now. There are many things he wants to talk about with Kim Dokja, and there are many more things he wants to show Kim Dokja. He wants to talk to him about the clouds he had once stared at when he was seventeen, cumulus or stratus, on his way home from school. He had researched their formation on his desktop after, and they are still interesting to him. He wants to show Kim Dokja how beautiful a home can be when there is someone waiting for him to return. It is warm.
At the end of their conversation that day as Yu Jonghyuk loses himself completely to sleep for the first time this month, Kim Dokja whispers, “Tell me about yourself. I want to hear your story. From you.”
Tomorrow, Yu Jonghyuk thinks, he will tell him tomorrow. They have all the time in the world by each other’s side.
+++
When he is fourteen, Yu Jonghyuk finally thinks about his future, about what he wants to do, and what he wants to become. He had reached that age where people would ask him if he had any plans for the future because he was no longer a kid, but he had never thought about something so far off before. The following nights, he envisions himself playing video games for a living without much trouble and firmly decides that, yes, this is what he is going to do when he grows up.
So he tells them he wants to be a doctor. They tell him it is good that he is so ambitious and say to his mother that she had raised such a good son. She smiles.
What?
Back then, he hadn’t understood why people cared so much about what they couldn’t presently hold. Living in the present is the most important thing. The two words of the future had never occurred to him as something urgent or necessary to take seriously because it would come later, not now. He can’t do things in the future and he can’t do things in the past as he can in the present. He can say, “I will make a vase for my mom,” and do it right now, but he can’t say, “I will make a vase for my mom in the future,” and do it in the future because he lives in the present. The future is unstable. And that future him is not him at all. They are two entirely different beings.
He may not even exist in the future.
Then, Kim Dokja comes crashing into his life. He teaches him that the present is sometimes painful but he has to live through it to get to the happy future and that the present is great and all but the future will even be greater. Even if the future looks hopeless or cloudy. What he lives for will come to him one day so just keep holding on. Even if he isn’t even sure of what he lives for.
Yu Jonghyuk had once lived in the present and forgotten the future. Now, he continues living in the present and looks forward to the future.
In the midst of this, he realizes two things:
1. The figure which had loomed behind Kim Dokja’s shoulder that one instance was his future telling him not to forget it.
2. That Kim Dokja is his future.
He is absolutely sure of these.
+++
At eighteen, Yu Jonghyuk stands before his house with a suitcase. The feeling of burden is gone from his shoulders as his connection with this building is.
Last night, he had laid awake thinking hard and deep about the future he wants like the adult he is. A family of his own comes to mind like an adult he is, but he doesn’t want a family. Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t know what he wants and he doesn’t know how people can so easily pinpoint their future and chase it down just like that. There are a lot of things Yu Jonghyuk the adult doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to cook a good meal or how to talk to people without them finding him weird or strange.
Yu Jonghyuk is an adult now, but why does he feel like he hasn’t changed at all? This isn’t what they told him the future would be like.
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
+++
Yu Jonghyuk is twenty when he sees a glimmer of his future in the distance.
The night sky is all void in the city but Yu Jonghyuk sees stars, galaxies, and nebulas lurking in its depth. He sits on the balcony of his apartment on the seventh floor and the third door down from the elevator that goes up all the way to the eleventh floor, taking in all the Seoul wind. His house is tiny but lovely. Here, he has learned how to cook a good meal and how to talk to people smoothly. He learns the second by first talking to the plants he had bought from a grandma selling them on the streetside the first day he moved in. She had five left that day and he really couldn’t leave her out in the cold.
His wallet is empty when he reaches the front door of his apartment. All that is left is his ID and a debit and credit card.
Pathetic, they would tell him when they see him like this, but the burden is gone. They are not here anymore. Yu Jonghyuk is free and he can do whatever he wants.
Is this what growing up feels like? If so, Yu Jonghyuk wants to grow up; he enjoys living like this.
At night, Yu Jonghyuk lays awake not thinking about his future anymore. Instead, he scrolls through his phone and social media and sees people who have their lives together. They have significant others, pets, and stable jobs. They have bright smiles and crazy hair-dos. What does Yu Jonghyuk have? What does he have that makes him the same as them? Yu Jonghyuk has a few plant pots and his own apartment decorated how he likes, his own apartment that makes him feel safe and happy.
That is all he needs, he thinks.
+++
When he turns twenty-one, Yu Jonghyuk finds he is still missing something.
His apartment gets a little emptier as the days are marked off the small calendar on his wall, and his plants are drooping when they had been so healthy before. There’s a thin layer of dust which has settled on his furniture even though Yu Jonghyuk meticulously cleans every corner and inch of his apartment every week. The grocery store near his house runs out of his favorite canned drink and jarred-kimchi brand for a whole two months because shipments are delayed. The elevator breaks down right on the day Yu Jonghyuk brings back home three full bags of groceries, so he has to climb fourteen flights of stairs and can’t get up to go to work the next day.
Yu Jonghyuk is an adult. It has been three years since he has turned an adult, so he must think about this logically like an adult. What would his mother do right now? What would the people taller than he will ever be do right now?
They would not get a cat so he gets a cat, and his house becomes so much livelier. After he learns that cats shed too much fur and that he will never get every single strand off his clothes no matter how hard he tries, Yu Jonghyuk solves the dust issue by increasing the once-a-week clearing to two. Twice per week. The cat chases the vacuum and mop everytime he cleans. He finds it cute.
Yu Jonghyuk solves his other problem of drooping plants by googling, “Why are my plants wilting?” and getting twenty different causes which he all checks individually. There’s no point not to.
Oh. It’s because he has overwatered them. All the yellow tips and drooping leaves fit the criteria the website provides him. Yu Jonghyuk cuts back on the water they get, and his cat begins to get curious why he spends thirty minutes a day digging around some green thing on some brown thing. It nibbles on one of the leaves before he tells it not to. It nibbles on it again. There are a lot of things Yu Jonghyuk still has to learn, but he makes sure to close his balcony glass door everytime he leaves now.
The rest of the issues fix themselves in time, but the emptiness is still there.
Okay.
It’s okay. Yu Jonghyuk can think it through logically like he has done before and his cat can talk in human language and call him an idiot for thinking too much about it if it wants. Everything he has built up feels like it’s collapsing back down onto him, earthquake style, but it’s fine. Everything’s fine. His couch is fine even though it has double-sided tape every three inches to stop his cat from ripping it to shreds. His fridge is fine even though it has been kind of missing half its content lately. His balcony is fine even though he has so many things on it all at once.
So Yu Jonghyuk will be fine.
Then onto the next question: what does he want? He sits on the balcony again, this time with a sleeping cat on his lap, and nothing comes to his mind. He starts thinking about why he never knows what he wants instead. His mother. His family. He thinks about what is stopping him from knowing what he wants. His mother. His family. He thinks about what he wants. It’s blank.
Well, that is not very surprising.
His cat wakes up and its claw latches onto the corner of his shirt. He hears a sound of fabric tearing. The cat looks up at him with eyes as big as the sun on the other side of the earth. It blinds Yu Jonghyuk and he forgets about his ripped shirt. He brings the rebellious thing up to his face, pulling at its cheeks like pulling at a dumpling that will tear it straight down the middle.
“Tell me what you think I want, Hae. Anything. Anything at all.” The desperateness to discover what makes him full is fading. It is replaced by the emptiness of his bone marrows and the ever-increasing tightness of his chest cavities.
Hae gently touches the middle of his chest where his twenty-four rib cages have come together to protect his heart. The touch is soft and gone as swiftly as the stability of his world, but Yu Jonghyuk understands it well enough: he comes to Yu Jonghyuk in dreams, a boy in a white cloak with black hair, a boy who has grown up much faster than the rest because his parents are gone. They had stargazed together with their backs against the rural grass and dirt once, pointing out Orion and the Big Dipper in the sky as easy as reading each other’s palm rivers and creeks. These are constellations, and they know something both Yu Jonghyuk and the other currently don’t.
Once, they had ridden their bikes down to the city, bursting like an overripe pomegranate with life and vigor. The constellations here are gone, replaced by the void of the polluted night sky. Yu Jonghyuk bumps into a girl with dark, short hair, furiously typing on her phone as they cross the street. He says sorry and catches a glance of her screen when she turns to tell him it is no problem.
Yu Jonghyuk lifts his–
What?
He turns his head to look at her phone again, but she has vaporized from existence in the moment of his confusion. The boy tugs him. The pedestrian crossing time is dwindling to two seconds, and the cars at this intersection are waiting for the last two people on the road.
Once, the boy had told Yu Jonghyuk his name. His legs are kicking at the grass below their feet as they sit hanging off a ledge on the gravel path. His shoes are stained with the dirt from when Yu Jonghyuk had accidentally stepped on them, frantically apologized, and became friends with him. Yu Jonghyuk kicks at the farthest grass he can and fails, while he waits for the person next to him to speak.
“Kim Dokja. I’m Kim Dokja. The ‘Dok’ can mean either reader or alone.”
Yu Jonghyuk smiles. He reaches the farthest grass the next time he kicks.
Once, they had kissed each other in the treetops with a space carved out just for them. Yu Jonghyuk shuffles closer to the other like a little kid in red domes at playgrounds. He looks at his face that is bright and shining as he talks about listening to bird chirps and math that is too hard for an average ten-year-old like him to do, parabolas and vectors and tangent. Yu Jonghyuk tunes out his rambling and leans forward. His hands are clutching the hem of his shirt. His lips make contact.
In the next second, Kim Dokja is clutching his forehead and his face is distorted with laughter. He grips the skin there as though the kiss may fly away from him like migratory birds in winter he has read books about. The words of sparrows landing themself on his backpack die in the chamber of his heart, and he finds himself feeling woozy. Yu Jonghyuk is looking at him. Kim Dokja doesn’t know what to tell the boy who is his first friend, so he leans forward and his lips make contact too.
Kim Dokja the bird observer thinks to himself that migratory birds will stay in their summer homes just for this winter.
Dreams like this are stabilizing to Yu Jonghyuk who sits under a sky that is a creaky clock and the future, the present, and the past all at once. Time is a circle and it seems to fold in on itself as he recalls every instance that blurry face and indistinct name have appeared. This is what he wants. Yu Jonghyuk wants somebody by his side. Forever. He wants someone that will fit in the hole of his heart like a missing puzzle piece, and he will fit in their heart like a fractured glass pane.
An airplane rumbles above. A star fades in the night sky. There are deaths and conceptions of life every second.
Finally, Yu Jonghyuk knows what he wants. But there comes another problem: he doesn’t know where to find what he wants.
+++
Yu Jonghyuk turns twenty-five when his parents awkwardly try to signal to him that it is time to settle down and start a family. They tell him that having a family is what it feels like for bears to hibernate: warm and invigorating, their swollen bellies filled with enough food for the entire winter. There are no worries about being worried or anything like that during those moments, just happiness and security that makes thirty-one round-trips around their heads each day. They exaggerate their arm movements around the couch and mold two figures out of the air with their hands.
His wife and his kid.
At first, Yu Jonghyuk agrees with them. He wants to settle down and start a family, too. He has learned how warm a family can be if he truly loves the people in them. He has learned that a family is supposed to make him feel tired and worn in the way that he can’t stop loving them and can’t stop wanting to do everything with them. And family means himself. Himself means family.
But when they push on him the societal norms he so much despises, Yu Jonghyuk leaves through the front door and later cries silently on a secluded sidewalk in the dark, folded into himself like when he was still an embryo inside his mother’s belly.
+++
When he blows his twenty-seventh candle on a vanilla cake his colleagues have surprised him with, Yu Jonghyuk thinks that there is exactly one year left of his life. Time is a circle and he has seen his death in its journey again and again, becoming numb to the repetition of it. Life is fragile, and Yu Jonghyuk is about to miss its fleetingness after it ends because death is eternal. There is no escape in its palms.
Yu Jonghyuk goes home that night like every other night. He takes the subway, picks a seat farthest from anyone that may disturb him, and leans back against the chair to close his eyes and think about his life, his home. He comes back to his apartment at 10:48 PM and Hae is still awake. The cat circles him, sniffing his pants first, then his weathered coat that rustles when he bends down to take off his shoes. The automatic light in the foyer is much too bright for Yu Jonghyuk, but it turns off as soon as he leaves the foyer and steps into the living room, collapses on the couch.
Hae jumps to lay beside him, licking his face.
Yu Jonghyuk doesn’t know anything anymore. He knows nothing. Nothing at all. Not of his life nor his dream nor his home nor his cat.
Why does anything matter when death, looming in the distance even closer than his enemies, will make it all meaningless in the end?
+++
Yu Jonghyuk turns twenty-eight three times when he realizes this: death is not the end of things.
Having an ending does not make a story insignificant. Having an ending does not make life spiral out of control because the ending is not an ending but actually a new start. It is an angel in disguise knocking on your door with magazine subscriptions and it asks you which one you prefer out of its selection: a knuckle sandwich or a forehead tattoo? Of course, you would say a knuckle sandwich because it would finally punch some sense into the thick-headed you. And a forehead tattoo flaunts too much for your tastes.
Right, this is what Yu Jonghyuk realizes. He realizes that angels are not real, but the knuckle sandwich is still very much real. It leaves a red mark on his face when he closes the front door with a magazine subscription inside his hand and his brain off life support, ripping off the IV needle from its vein. Yu Jonghyuk realizes that he needed to realize this in order to live, to make the most of what he has because he will never have it again. Ever. Time is a circle that stops being a circle at a certain point where a hole exists and the limit does not exist. This hole is the end. At this end, time will never be a circle again.
+++
When he celebrates his 28th birthday the 1,863rd time, Yu Jonghyuk lives in the sky.
From there, he watches 3rd regression him and alien Kim Dokja find each other like two soulmates who were never meant to be, one like the silence after a flatline and the other like the end before the Big Bang. He follows them on their journeys across planets, solar systems, and galaxies to, in the end, hold each other tightly in their shared tent. The space between them conceives a new Kim Dokja and a new Yu Jonghyuk. This Kim Dokja is the same as he has always been and will always be, but this Yu Jonghyuk has changed. This him has a new, wonderful hair-do by Kim Dokja himself; this him has figured out what has been the cause of that aching all those years; this him has finally made a home in someone’s rib cage like he has wanted for so long; this him has learned to let go of things not meant for himself, how to love gently and with everything he has, and how to live like every part of him has wanted; and this him has mastered solving problems and how to talk to people and how to hold Kim Dokja like he will never have him again.
This Yu Jonghyuk has changed. He has changed inside and out in order to love himself. He has changed inside and out in order to find Kim Dokja and, by extension, love him too.
+++
So when Yu Jonghyuk says he has everything he could have ever wanted, he means it.
With all of his heart and organs.