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Ji Sooheon is dying.
It’s one of those terrible truths of the world, like the fact that Chanmi’s brother is dead, the fact that Jaebom is the one who did it.
Sooheon is dying, and one day, very soon, as is the case with the dying, he will die.
That inevitability isn’t even the worst part. She could live with that (she supposes she is living with it). The worst part is that there hasn’t been a moment where Sooheon was fully alive when he was with Chanmi.
Sooheon was already dying when they met. He’s always been dying.
Ji Sooheon has been dead since the beginning. He’s been dead just as long as Chanmi’s brother.
She’s known this since she followed him to the hospital and pressed her back to the cold walls while he asked the doctor how long he had to live. She’ll never say this, but whenever she goes with him to the columbarium she imagines what his niche will look like. What picture they’ll use, what objects she’ll put in.
(Will she even have the right to talk about him fondly? Some days she feels she knows him better than anyone, others it feels like she doesn’t know him at all, that she's never known a living version of him).
The grief threatens to swallow her whole sometimes.
It’s almost worse than mourning her brother. At least he’s physically dead, at least it makes sense. Ji Sooheon is alive, he is breathing and his heart is beating, but he’s already dead. Chanmi is already preparing herself.
It doesn’t make things better.
She thought it would but it doesn’t. She thought that preparing herself wouldn’t make it hurt as much. That she wouldn’t have to experience the horrific suddenness she went through when her brother died. The pain is slow and dull, it never quite leaves.
Sooheon knows this too.
She sees it in the way he refuses to take pictures, the way his lips move to start saying “I love you” only to stop themselves a fraction of a second early. Like the words will bind her with some terrible curse, like his photos will haunt her forever.
He is always preparing for the end, always biding his time. He is already hollowing out the place in Chanmi’s heart that will one day become his grave.
Sooheon has been dying since the day they met.
But.
He is so very alive.
Sooheon is alive in the photos Chanmi secretly takes when he’s not looking, so peaceful when he is unaware of his permanence in the world. As if being anything more than temporary will ruin the people around him, as if he thinks it would ruin Chanmi if he leaves anything behind.
As if he isn’t alive in every single one. Every person he saved, all the people who have found purpose in life again because of him. Every single whisper, every single remain he forgets to wipe away. He is alive in all of them.
Chanmi collects each one and uses them to fill the hole in her heart the two of them have already begun to dig. Because it isn’t right. Because he is alive before her and that is enough. Even if he is desperately trying to soften the blow for an inevitable end, even if they don’t talk about the future.
If they take things day by day, if they don’t think about how they got here, or where they’re going, things almost seem normal.
That there is something ahead of them. More than flowers and funerary rites.
Every day is a good day to Chanmi. Because Sooheon is here, Sooheon is alive.
It doesn’t matter if there are some days where they have to camp out in the hospital, so sterile and cold. It doesn’t matter if there are some where things are ordinary. He is alive.
(Even if he’s always been dying, he’s always been alive too hasn’t he? He’s always been more alive than someone like Gi Osung, or even Seok Jaebeom. There isn’t a part of him that decayed and rotted into something terrible. Not in a way like them anyways).
One day, she will cremate his body and cry as she does so. She will clutch the red bracelet so hard it bruises her wrist.
Now, she holds his hand and smiles, thumbs his wrist, feeling his pulse steady beneath his skin. She doesn’t think of what they will become, she doesn’t think of the fact that he is dying, that he has always been dying. She doesn’t think of what will be his ashes, the totality of his body.
Chanmi doesn’t think of the grave already carved out in her heart.
If she doesn’t, it’s almost like things are normal. Like two of them aren’t tied by death. (The funny thing is that’s always been true too. They don’t meet in a world where her brother lives. Their destinies are sewn together through tears).
It’s okay, she’s never been one to think about the future anyways.