Archive of Our Own ^beta

I remember when the days were long

And the nights when the living room was on the lawn

Constant quarreling, the childish fits

And our clothes in a pile on the ottoman

All the slander and double-speak

Were only foolish attempts to show you did not mean

Anything but the blatant proof

Was your lips touching mine in the photobooth

And as the summer’s ending

The cool air will push your hard heart away

You were so condescending

And this is all that’s left

Scraping paper to document

I’ve packed a change of clothes and it’s time to move on

– 📸 –

The misted glass of the bus gave a blurred image of the world outside, a vague painting of auras and lights that followed and moved accompanied by the strange silence that only public transport could give. It was a world of shadows and strange flashing lights that were harsh on tired eyes, the never-ending odyssey of people who left their offices to flood the street, knowing that a warm meal and a delicate smile were waiting for them at home. Street noises, a muffled world and nothing more accompanied Seonghwa.

Emptiness. He was alone with his thoughts and the strange plays of light and colour reflected on the wet glass of the bus, with droplets relentlessly dripping onto it in a strange race to win at all costs.

He fished his phone out of his coat pocket and unlocked it to open the camera. His fingers moved quickly over the settings as he tried to modulate the shutter speed, ISO, white balance and exposure. He always seemed to know what he was doing but all those functions were a language he had never been fluent in and his fingers just moved up and down based on what his eyes saw on the screen.

Hongjoong, he always knew what to do; there had been countless times when Hongjoong had gently taken the phone from his hands even before Seonghwa opened his lips to ask for help, turning the simple device into a sort of professional camera in a couple of seconds, with a couple of taps of skilled fingers.

But Hongjoong wasn’t there. He hadn’t been part of Seonghwa’s life for almost six months. Emptiness. It seeped into the photograph, it poisoned it and left a bittersweet taste underneath Seonghwa’s tongue, so distressing that he had to open the gallery and delete what he had managed to immortalise.

Not worth remembering. Not every disgrace has a positive side, not every thought can be rationalised, not every negative is selected to be developed and tell its story.

Seonghwa loved his job, he really loved it with every fibre of his being. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education with top marks in a quiet class composed only of young women, in a place where his presence was perceived as a mesmerising chimaera, a rarity to witness, a strange sort of miracle and a wicked danger at the same time.

Seonghwa loved children, and he had started loving them even more when he had realised he would never have one of his own – children were not possessions, they were not propriety – and that he would never be a father. What was draining and demotivating was everything that didn’t involve children, all the strange inner workings that teachers all around the world had to confront to be able to enter their classrooms. From meetings with other teachers to discuss the topics and methodology to having talks with parents whenever the situation required it; Seonghwa loved his job and had spent half his life chasing it in a strange haze, but there were still some parts of it he cherished less.

The day had revolved around one of those parts. Meetings with all the other teachers to talk about the children and then move on to a more technical aspect of what they did in class, what they were going to do, what they should be doing and what they would never be able to touch. Somehow, those kinds of meetings held a strange weight for Seonghwa and they were far more draining than spending long hours in a class full of children aged three to five.

They had finished late and Seonghwa was tired. In front of him was a cold and humid night spent in the silence of the four walls of his small but cosy apartment: some warm food to eat, the glowing screen of his TV to entertain him, a long and hot shower to soothe his nerves and help him unwind, a couple of hours spent with his villagers in Animal Crossing, complete darkness and – if everything went in the right direction – sleep.

Food was the hardest part of the routine he had carefully mapped out in his head while watching the droplets of water run down the window of the bus. Seonghwa had skilled hands and an acceptable ability to follow orders, the two most important attributes required to be able to prepare decent and edible food, even good and tasty food. Hongjoong had always loved the homecooked meals Seonghwa prepared and never forgot to compliment him. Yet, no one was there to compliment Seonghwa’s cooking anymore except for his mother whenever he went back home to Jinju and offered to help her in the kitchen while opening his heart to her, suddenly vulnerable while he chopped vegetables or diligently stored kimchi.

Love is stored in the kitchen, something something. When you cook for somebody or somebody cooks for you, you hold their heart on your plate, his mother used to tell him. Hongjoong had taken many pictures – photographs were the only way he knew how to properly show a love that was never enough – of him in the small and tidy kitchen of their shared flat, but the kitchen was also the silent witness of many of their most ruthless and unbridled fights, where words would cut more than knives and venom would poison their appetites for days. The stove was always cold when Seonghwa cried.

Seonghwa didn’t feel like cooking. So, he decided to get off two stops before the usual and walk to a convenience store not far from his apartment where he could buy something substantial to heat up in his microwave. The small shop was run by an elderly lady who had been there for as long as Seonghwa could remember and who had seen him enter countless times, first alone, then with Hongjoong and then alone once again. The cheerful and polite lady knew him well and she was always delicate enough to start a conversation without asking lousy or uncomfortable questions.

The light rain bothered him when he started feeling it against his hair, but the gutters of the buildings and a couple of shortcuts in narrow alleys would protect him most of the way until the safe warmth of his flat. What a desperate person he was, he would rather get wet than cook something for himself with the fatigue of the whole day on his shoulders.

A banner caught his attention and made him stop, heedless of the irritating rain that fell in tiny drops but was starting to soak his coat and wet his hair. His eyes were still unable to simply turn away from what he had loved for so long.

The young man in the photograph was wearing an elegant black jacket, there were four buttons closed on each sleeve, Seonghwa could count them, and a turtleneck jumper with thin black and grey stripes under it. In his hands – and oh, how incredibly beautiful and strange those hands were, with silver rings on elegant but strong fingers that knew how to press and hold in all the right places, with a nail painted black, those were hands that had given him love and deep suffering, saved and tortured – he held a silver and black camera, the same model Seonghwa had always seen and known, even cherished.

The face of the young man was hidden but there was nothing more painful than completely forgetting the traits – the silliest details, the most insignificant flaws, the most beautiful characteristics no one would notice – of the person one had loved. Sometimes one tried but people rarely succeeded despite wanting to.

And so Seonghwa recognised thin, black hair into which his fingers had crept countless times to give gentle caresses, the many piercings and earrings adorning lobes, the corner of an eye that carried the weight of a disgustingly expressive gaze, with reactions connected to thoughts that were plastered on that face. Seonghwa could even see what was not shown, remaining hidden behind the camera: the curve of a beautiful and elegant nose, the delicate slump of pink lips that had always been warmer and more skilled than they looked, eyes that had rested on him many times as if he were the most beautiful thing to ever grace the world and had seen and processed him through camera lenses.

Being looked at twice and captured by different eyes, only then did Seonghwa realise how unsettling the thought had become for him.

THE WANDERER — KIM HONGJOONG

Seonghwa stopped and suddenly the world narrowed in on him, leaving only the poster in front of his eyes and the light rain that was starting to soak his hair. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, he felt he had nowhere to go. All he could do – again, helplessly, carrying the remnants of the person he had never been – was take a picture of the poster. Blurry, the brightness unadjusted, too dark in the background and overexposed in the front due to the light coming from the backlit advertisement.

Seonghwa had gotten to know Hongjoong when he was nothing more but an amateur photographer, a desperate soul trying to encapsulate the world he perceived inside the small space of a frame and let the people around him see the universe from his perspective. It was a strangely unique perspective Seonghwa had slowly left behind the more he had forced himself to put distance between his life and Hongjoong’s; it was all connected to the way Hongjoong had always been able to catch the beauty in what people deemed forgotten or unsalvageable and to shed light on the darkest parts of the world, the delicacy he used when he portrayed nature and animals in a world that was drowning in cement and hyper-modernity, the powerful gaze of his camera that was able to bring the soul of the people it captured to life.

That was how Seonghwa had met Hongjoong three years before.

Hongjoong was still a freelance producer, occasional underground rapper, rebel artist with a penchant for fashion and reforming clothes, flamboyant and avid frequenter of Itaewon’s queer clubs. He made money however he could, never having anything certain in his hands or pockets, living each day as if it were his last and spending what he earned on photography and music equipment and cigarettes and clothes that had seen better days and were just waiting to be reborn under his skilled hands.

By the time Seonghwa’s road had intersected with Hongjoong’s, Hongjoong was working on what would become his first critically acclaimed, groundbreaking, brutally honest and life-changing exhibition, appreciated enough to take him to Seoul, Busan, Incheon and Daegu to present it. STARWALKER, that was the name of the exhibition, and when Seonghwa had stumbled upon Hongjoong he still had no idea that he would become one of the exhibition’s most influential faceless subjects.

Faceless, yes, because the exhibition focused on the vibrant yet almost melancholic life of queer people in Seoul – almost restless in its speed and visceral need to break the mould and move away from an oppressive tradition while fighting with a sense of alienation soothed only by found families – and Seonghwa couldn’t afford to let his features shine, even though it was for an important cause. He would have done it if the world hadn’t been so harsh, if only he had had Hongjoong’s courage, if only he hadn’t been a student about to graduate and hopefully become a kindergarten teacher.

When Seonghwa had met Hongjoong, he still dared to dream.

Seonghwa remembered simple images of that evening, poignant and strange flashes that faded and reappeared in a cloud of smoke made of memories, blurred with fluttering colours, images twisting into each other and tied to conflicting feelings.

San. Platform shoes that made him taller. A dark leather vest that left almost the entirety of his chest exposed. Shiny leather pants that left little to nothing to the imagination of those who looked at him. Dark hair covered a piercing gaze. Heavy dark make-up.

Wooyoung. A mesh top. An elegant suit that clashed with its surroundings as the lights of the club threw their colours on it and yet gave him grace, always so strangely handsome and comfortingly beautiful at the same time. Lively eyes – happy eyes, hungry eyes – that only knew how to stare at San.

Seonghwa. Standing in front of the mirror before leaving his flat. In front of the surface that gave him back a strange reflection. A flowy white shirt, a tight leather corset that robbed him of his breath. A long skirt with a scandalous vent that showed his legs. Boots with high heels and platform. Hair long and slightly wavy. Thinking about being beautiful. Perceiving himself as beautiful. So strange, so liberating, so heart-shattering.

The loud music. The disco lights. The friends he loved and who loved each other. The freedom and awareness of being able to dance. The way individual details of individual people were illuminated by the flashing lights just to then disappear in a new wave of darkness and movements. The broken words he heard and tried to understand: mouths near ears, hands on his cheek, eyes staring at him. The way San and Wooyoung kept dancing with him without excluding him: Wooyoung’s smile, San’s hands, shared laughter, some kisses, always innocent and playful. The joy of ending a terrifying relationship and trying to take life back into his hands.

He was with the people he loved. Free and happy. And he was Park Seonghwa in a way he had never been, unapologetically him in the clothes he wore and the colours Wooyoung had chosen to do his make-up. He was different from the scared but soft teenager who grew up in Jinju always hiding behind his mother, so different from the diligent student who attended all his classes every day and hoped to graduate soon to work with children.

And yet, he was still himself.

Another flash inside his mind.

A stranger. An oversized grey t-shirt that tried to hide a frail physique. Shorts that showed knees. A skirt open on the front. Knee-high black boots that reflected all the lights of the dance floor. Gloves. A camera. Hair half blond and half black. A beret. The stranger tapping politely on Wooyoung’s shoulder while he was dancing with San, glued to San. Short, shorter than San but as tall as Wooyoung. Not many people were as short as Wooyoung. Oh, so pretty.

Captivating eyes. Heavy make-up underlined a fierce gaze. Pointy nose. Sharp cheekbones. A myriad of delicate and intricate earrings seemed to catch every single light whenever he moved. Pearly-white and straight teeth. Sinful lips, slightly curving up in a mischievous smile.

“My name is Kim Hongjoong.”

“I am an amateur photographer and I am working on a project connected to the portrayal of identity and gender expression in Seoul’s queer clubs.”

“What are your pronouns?”

“Do you mind if I take some pictures of you and your friends?”

Lights, colours, darkness enveloped and revealed, a flash erupting from the stranger’s camera while Seonghwa danced with Wooyoung and San. Seonghwa leaning down to hear the photographer’s soft voice drowned by the loud and addictive beat of the song that was playing. The stranger on his tiptoes to talk in his ear. Warm breath. Loud music and so much confusion.

“I can’t hear you, Hongjoong-ssi.”

Seonghwa had found himself engulfed in the visceral need to know more about the young photographer and his craft. What kind of people he approached, how were such delicate topics discussed, how did consent work, had someone ever refused to be vulnerable in front of a camera, could one’s face be hidden from the scrutinising gaze of the lenses and the subsequent judgment of a future observer; those were all questions that had swarmed through Seonghwa’s brain or, at least, some of the ones he could still remember.

“We should go somewhere where we can talk.”

And they had indeed done so, taking refuge in the toilets where the music was muffled and the mirrors in front of the sinks gave them reflections of who they were and how they looked next to each other. For a couple of minutes, when Hongjoong had placed his camera on one of the sinks and had leaned closer to the mirror to check his make-up, when Seonghwa had glimpsed ravenous eyes in the reflection fixed on him, he had thought that Hongjoong would throw him into one of the stalls to get his hands on him. Yet he hadn’t, polite and respectful; he hadn’t even tried to touch him.

He had talked about his photographs. He had done it in quite an impressive way and answered all of Seonghwa’s questions with ease. And Seonghwa had let himself be captured by the camera, enamoured by the lens that seemed to give him strength, determined to look at him and rip out the most hidden and personal corners of his soul.

He had let himself be photographed and had closed his eyes, parted his lips, smiled softly, seduced the camera with charms he had never been aware of but that had always been dormant inside him. He had let himself be captured facelessly and had unbuttoned his shirt slightly to show silvers of skin, moved his legs to let the vertiginous vent of his skirt reveal something more, held his breath to help the corset hug his waist more tightly.

In a dirty toilet stall of some club that Wooyoung and San had chosen for him, with sweat beading his forehead, two loose buttons to reveal straight collarbones, and hands trying to open the vent of his skirt to subtly let the photographer catch a glimpse of both smooth skin and the beauty of his heeled boots, Seonghwa had shed his old skin and had become a muse. That was what Hongjoong would call him for years, my muse, my beautiful star, the brightest star. Back then, Seonghwa still hadn’t known he would become the main subject of Hongjoong’s photographs for the entirety of their relationship, the living force behind the power that gave life to some of his most famous and appreciated pictures.

“I’d like to know if the photographs you took of me will be developed, I would like to know if you’ll use them or display them.”

“If use them, I would like to ask you not to choose the ones where you can see my face.”

“I’m studying to become a kindergarten teacher, I don’t want anyone to know... for people to then think that I’m unfit to…”

Hongjoong had nodded and given him a sympathetic smile accompanied by lively eyes that spoke every word he hadn’t dared to utter: he knew, he understood, he would never betray his trust, he would never hurt a fellow queer person who looked for peace and a safe place in specific clubs where he could freely express himself by throwing him inside the terrifying open jaws of a cruel world that would inevitably devour him. Then, he had given Seonghwa his number.

Seonghwa had placed his phone with a sparkly silver case in the photographer’s cautious hands and noticed the nail polish that adorned some of his nails as he watched Hongjoong tap the numbers on the keyboard and then save himself as Kim Hongjoong PH.

“Send me a little text now, Seonghwa-ssi. That way I can save your number and contact you if I need to. That way I know who I’m talking to if you are the one who writes me first.”

Seonghwa had done so immediately, sending a simple emoji, and had watched Hongjoong’s phone screen light up in his hands, a message from an unknown number appearing on the lock screen. A dark sky full of stars, that was the simple image that the photographer had selected for his phone. Seonghwa hadn’t been able to understand why back then and the mystery had survived through the years, never gaining a deeper sense, but that small text had lit a fire underneath his cheeks, ears and neck and given life to a delicate smile.

It was cold.

But it wasn’t the cold’s fault, it was the dampness, and Seonghwa had been in the rain long enough to be almost soaked and ashamed at the idea of wetting the whole floor of the poor elderly lady’s convenience store just for a pitiful dinner. He considered going back home empty-handed and the long minutes of consideration as he stared at the advertisement led him to get even more soaked.

Under the eaves of the store, with an obnoxious but efficient sign that blinked and sent red and green reflections on the screen of his phone, he selected the picture of the advertisement and pressed share. When the contact list opened, his fingers automatically scrolled to the entry Kim Hongjoong – formerly saved as Joongie-kkeo, formerly saved as Hongjoongie, formerly saved as Kim Hongjoong PH – and pressed send.

Hello, how are you?

Hit send.

I stumbled across this on my way home and I’d like to come to your exhibition. Would it bother you if I booked a ticket? Would it make you uncomfortable?

Hit send.

Seonghwa looked at the glowing screen with a heart swollen with bitterness and sorrow, ready to burst at any given moment and leave a puddle of melancholy and loneliness on the sidewalk where he was standing for the poor elderly lady inside the convenience store to clean: none of the three messages had been delivered, none of the three messages would ever be delivered. The number to which he had written good morning and good night every day for almost two years, the number to which he had revealed secrets, granted dates, written lists for grocery shopping, disclosed ideas for Christmas gifts, donated feelings and emotions, was empty and it would always be.

A dead end. Blocked.

– 📸 –

The weather was milder when Seonghwa stepped out of his apartment and headed for the subway station. The sky was clear but the air was cold against his face, forcing him to wrap the scarf around his neck more carefully and tuck it under the beige coat he had decided to wear.

Sundays were for relaxing at home, for a hot bath with some soft music, for books in the warmth of his bedroom, the work he would have to do the following week with his children, complex but hearty homecooked meals or afternoons spent with his friends, with his family. Or maybe, sometimes, some Sundays were different from other Sundays; some Sundays were for the exhibitions of the man he had loved, some Sundays were shrouded in visceral dread mixed with the vague sense of flattery that the idea of seeing himself portrayed in one of the photographs caused him.

Since they had broken up, Hongjoong had never again organized an exhibition. He had participated in various projects, gotten jobs as a freelancer photographer, took part in contests and won most of them, landed photoshoots for the covers of fashion magazines, but he had never again encapsulated an entire journey – a piece of his soul, an observation of the world through his eyes – into an exhibition. Seonghwa had appeared in many of his works more or less explicitly, sometimes in his entirety, sometimes with his face hidden, sometimes as a symbol or an idea represented by something else, sometimes only in bits and pieces.

For Seonghwa – muse, star – it was hard to imagine Hongjoong’s photographs without him, and his rather fragile heart didn’t allow him to fully embrace the notion that other people’s lives went on despite the bumps in the road, that muses lost their charms and stars died and faded away.

Seonghwa, perhaps profoundly cruel, couldn’t imagine happiness in Hongjoong’s life solely because he had been stripped of his happiness since he had parted their ways with a clean break. He hadn’t been happy with Hongjoong either, not in the last months of their relationship that had grown cold and turned into a strange sort of co-dependency – a man who needed the inspiration to keep his art alive and a man who was afraid to be alone – in which both asked too much and too little of the other in a sick tandem of gestures and behaviours that served only to erode trust and foment despondency.

Allergy and synergy at the same time, a love that corroded.

Seonghwa spent a good part of his journey from home to the exhibition reading the presentation of the event on the official website as stops followed one after another, announced by a kind voice as people got on and off, each of them headed to a different place.

Kim Hongjoong recognises his friends and daily life as the primary source and inspiration in his photography. The artist considers the small happenings of everyday life to be an essential part of his work as he strives to find beauty in details and delicacy in what has been forgotten or overlooked, with queer clubs in Seoul functioning as a common backdrop for some of his most acclaimed and recognised images. His first critically-acclaimed exhibition, STARWALKER, focused on the representation of queer identities and personal gender expression in a conservative country that struggles to leave behind set ideas of decorum by capturing the gritty yet heart-warming hidden world of queer found families around Seoul.

THE WANDERER marks a new beginning. With grace and elegance, through a personal itinerary divided into four sections – STREETS, GHOSTS, SKY & PEOPLE – and studded with personal objects and photographs with emblematic captions, Kim Hongjoong allows visitors to take a look into the meanders of his private life, laying himself bare in a disarming admission of simplicity and weakness, of love for even the most hidden details and exceptionality of the most common glimpses.

Kim Hongjoong, always the same and so difficult to change. No nuance escaped his attentive eyes, no shadow eluded him, no light could hide from the lenses of his camera, no insignificant element went unnoticed. Always alert and always ready, with a curious mind and a heart filled to the brim with a burning passion for his dream, always so dedicated to his work.

And to nothing else.

Kim Hongjoong was a blind, inattentive and self-centred man, careless and absorbed in his work to the point that he sometimes lost the ability to take care of himself or others. Perhaps, incapable of love in the most conventional sense. Sure, he had hands that held tight and crafted art, that grabbed and pleasured, but that felt uncannily empty most of the time, so cold and unfeeling that Seonghwa had started to dread being touched by him. Hongjoong was a powerful rising star who burned bright and demanded to be worshipped, kept on a pedestal, admired for his artistic abilities, without ever giving back any kind of warmth.

Yet, besides that strange and undeniable connection with the art of photography, he had nothing else to call his, nothing else he had known how to love so fiercely, not even the person he swore was the man of his life.

Seonghwa had lost count of the many times he had bawled on his own, in the silence of their shared but almost always empty bedroom, while hugging Mito, his beloved black Holland Lop rabbit. He would never forgive Hongjoong for what he had done to him, instilling the weight of doubt in his heart, the force of a question never answered, the vague feeling that never left him even though he had freed himself from the shackles of their rotting relationship. Sometimes, that feeling came back to life to tell him that maybe Hongjoong was right and that, after all, someone like him didn’t deserve the attention he demanded.

Spoiled child, lovesick fool, and high-demanding partner, he was distracting Hongjoong from his dream, hindering his career with twisted fantasies of a future together and tenderness.

Forgotten dinners that had been planned, disinterested and ugly gifts that were wrapped in colourful paper out of habit, unfulfilled schedules that were left floating over their heads and were never brought up again, sleepless nights spent alone while waiting for a man who would come home at ungodly hours and sleep on the sofa, texts never answered or seen after long hours, sacrifices demanded and never repaid, and the ravenous eye of the camera. It was the lens that watched Seonghwa with its false and cynical eye, never Hongjoong. It had been the lens that had loved Seonghwa the most, never Hongjoong.

This was what Seonghwa told himself when he thought back on his relationship, caught in the clutches of nostalgia that made his past seem even more bittersweet as the throbbing pain of lost love resurfaced in his heart. Yet, when he looked at the developed photographs where the camera had captured him, Seonghwa saw love and devotion embedded in the press of a button, care and attention imprinted on the negative, admiration and beauty in the final developed picture.

Seonghwa had rediscovered himself with different eyes a myriad of times and had never recognised himself, so different from the person he saw in the mirror every day while he brushed his teeth or shaved after waking up. He had been frightened and at the same time fascinated by the image of himself imprinted in the frame, so close yet so foreign to him, a stranger that bore his physical appearance. The man Hongjoong captured and that Seonghwa didn’t know, the man Hongjoong had tried to love and Seonghwa had never gotten to meet.

Seonghwa entered the building housing the exhibition with his phone already unlocked, ready to show the code for the ticket he had reserved the previous evening. He was greeted by a kind young lady with a mole under her right eye and thin-framed glasses who welcomed him with a gentle smile as she scanned his code and opened a small leaflet, quickly showing with her index finger – she had long fingers and manicured nails, the nail polish was a pretty shade of pink – the route he was to follow.

“This is the order recommended and thought out by the photographer, but you are free to choose a different route if you wish. Would you like to leave your coat and scarf here?”

“Thank you.”

The young lady walked away behind the counter, where Seonghwa couldn’t see her, after closing the leaflet. Seonghwa picked it up, shot an inquisitive glance at the map and decided to follow the prearranged order chosen for the photographs; he knew Hongjoong well enough – or at least, he thought he did – to hope to be able to see the deeper sense of what he had attempted to construct. He loved Hongjoong’s vision, he cherished the inner workings of his mind and the way he perceived the world.

“The number of your hanger is 8. Please, bring back the keychain we gave you when you’re done with your visit and we’ll return your– oh…”

“Thank you.”

“You seem to have a familiar face, I have the vague feeling I have seen you somewhere before.”

Seonghwa smiled and remained silent, his gaze fixed on the small number 8 carved into the lacquered wooden plaque he had been given. His favourite number, his lucky number.

He thought about the words of the kind young lady who was looking at him with curious eyes: perhaps in another life, perhaps in another universe, perhaps – more realistically – in the underground at rush hour on a cold morning or a gloomy evening, perhaps among university lecture halls or busy streets. Perhaps – and it seemed the most plausible option – on the pamphlets from Hongjoong’s first exhibition that were in a display stand next to those of the newly opened exhibition, on a small sheet of paper that had Seonghwa plastered on its cover, right underneath the title STARWALKER.

There he was, the face of the exhibition.

Black trousers, a tight corset that hugged his waist, a white shirt with slits in the sleeves that allowed a glimpse of his arms, silver necklaces embellished and enriched his outfit, gloves covering his hands, a silver dangling earring caressing his neck. He sat on the counter of the club where he and Hongjoong had first met and had his arms resting on the shelves where glasses of all kinds, alcohol bottles of all shapes and sizes and pretty decorations had been skilfully arranged. It looked simple enough to mirror reality and beautiful enough to instil the doubt that the background of the picture had been crafted by someone else; it left the viewer wondering.

Seonghwa showed the camera only his side profile: long wavy hair tickled the nape of his neck, the sharp shape of his jaw, his lips rosy and plump, the slight bump in his nose, his eyes were hidden by his fringe and so the most appreciated subject of the entire exhibition had lost his magnetic gaze, the sweetness that lurked in his eyes, the determination that shined in all his expressions.

This hadn’t prevented him from captivating the audience.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you by saying this so suddenly and it’s obvious to me now that you don’t know who I am... I don’t know what came over me. Please, enjoy the exhibition.”

Seonghwa smiled and let the small keychain slide inside one of the pockets of his blue jeans.

“Don’t worry, you didn’t startle me at all, this is actually something I hear quite often. Have a nice day.”

Seonghwa left behind the young woman who had greeted him and entered the first room of the exhibition.

He was greeted by a dark but comforting space, with several chairs and colourful cushions scattered on the floor. There was a huge light screen affixed to one of the walls. Completely alone inside the room, Seonghwa waited a couple of seconds and then decided to sit down on one of the many cushions and lean his back against the wall as soon as he saw the screen getting darker and projecting the letters that made up the word WANDERER on the wall.

Hongjoong’s delicate and kind voice filled the room and Seonghwa felt a sharp pang of indescribable pain burn in his chest, somewhere between his ribs, as if his heart had suddenly been pierced. That was the voice he knew well and had not heard since he had left their shared apartment for good with a suitcase full of clothes, a backpack on his shoulders, a handbag full of belongings and scared Mito inside his pink transport box.

The last words they had spoken to each other had been bitter and full of rancour and venom, harsh and shouted between tears and the terrifying blaze of anger, the disgusting culmination of a relationship that had rotted away months before and turned into a carcass inside their living room, a decaying beast on their carpet that neither of them seemed to have the courage to get rid of so as not to hurt the other.

They had preferred to hurt each other for a long time in the process, both too cowardly to admit that their dream had come to an end, and even the firm and severe tear that Seonghwa had wrought had turned into agony. They were doomed to suffer.

“The world. It’s massive, it’s monumental, it’s three-dimensional, it’s a powerful entity that feels limitlessly infinite. Too big to worry about any of us, the world watches over the lives of its seas, forests, skies, vast wastelands and inhabited lands, its countless cities raised by people.”

The images representing what Hongjoong was talking about appeared slowly on the screen, in front of Seonghwa’s eyes, photographs taken by an experienced hand that had dared to set its lens on breathtaking landscapes and shift its focus to the immense and sublime, for once. An expanse of calm and clean sea, deep and dark forests, the clear sky with its wonderful shades of blue, the silhouette of Seoul with its myriad of lights.

“People. Small, simple, bound to disappear, frail. Yet all the people we meet carry a life of their own, however much it is lived in a derisory period compared to the long rhythms of nature. People and their small lives that can weave canvases that survive for thousands of years, people and their insignificant details no one pays attention to.”

Small videos took the place of the previous photographs in jarring contrast to the majestic aura of nature. The screen showed simple fragments of life where Seonghwa recognised snippets of a past he had shared with Hongjoong: familiar faces, mutual friends he hadn’t seen in months after breaking up, relatives, acquaintances, people he had spoken to and people he had only heard of, himself – from behind, joyfully walking through the streets of Jinju without knowing he was being filmed – Hongjoong’s parents and older brother. Sometimes, Seonghwa missed what he had lost, nostalgia coated his memories in a sweet and thick veil of tenderness and the old wounds started to hurt again.

“The infinite small traces that people leave behind as they live their lives make up the world we know. They are the reason we thread this reckless path known as life and build something of our own for those to come. People’s lives flow in many waves. Will you join me in unravelling mine?”

When the voice stopped and the screen went black again, Seonghwa got up and left the room to enter the first part of the exhibition. As soon as he stepped into the new space, his eyes immediately fell on a caption printed on the wall, placed next to a composition of three small photographs depicting busy streets that should have been alive but conveyed only a sense of deep despondency and emptiness. Then Seonghwa realised it: there was not a single person in those shots, just buildings and lights and means of transport, just a dull, mechanical world.

STREET: a road in a city or town that has buildings that are usually close together along one or both sides; pre-existing paths that most people walk for the entirety of their lives. What happens to those who never leave them? What happens to those who wander and get lost?

The small outline of a street was traced on the floor and the observer could choose whether they wanted to follow the path and walk along its lines or to be free in their exploration. Hongjoong would’ve chosen to roam around the room however he pleased – Seonghwa was sure of it – as he stared at the photographs following his own rhythm, but Seonghwa wasn’t so courageous. He had never been, always bound to the white lines that delimited paths, always too scared to step out of those clean and reassuring boundaries.

The room offered streets and walks of life of all kinds. Empty and busy streets, noisy and calm flashes of a city, dark and illuminated alleyways. A beautiful photograph struck Seonghwa, with strange dulled colours and artificial light that felt foreign in that setting: people waiting for the underground at rush hours in their grey clothes and full document cases, with their heads hanging low or their eyes empty as music played in their earphones and isolated them from the bleak monotony of the outside world.

Then, once again, not far from the underground photograph, another one: a pitch-black night, a dark and cramped alleyway lit up by a small place, the kind of run-down shops ran by trustworthy people who had a fixed clientele, the kind of welcoming place that had cheerful people behind the counter but old wooden stools to offer to those who stopped there for something to eat and some soju. A group of friends – five, maybe ten, it was impossible to count them as they were sitting in a circle – some of them on the floor, some of them on plastic stools, some others simply squatting around an improvised table full of small bowls and half-empty dishes. The light above their heads was pale and aseptic, it contrasted with the colourful neon of the sign that gave life to the entire abandoned street.

Seonghwa couldn’t see the faces of the group of friends but the delicate scene that appeared in the middle of an empty darkness made him tilt his head slightly and smile. It felt like spying on their personal bubble of happiness, it felt like intruding in the warmth they had been able to craft for themselves in a dark and unforgiving world.

That’s the punctum, Seonghwa-ya. A voice in his mind said, so frighteningly similar to Hongjoong’s. It’s not about what I show you, it’s about what you feel when you look at what I show you.

Seonghwa had always been curious. The first time he had seen the way Hongjoong worked on his photographs and the entire process behind the development of a specific image, he had suddenly been overwhelmed by a desire to know more about the art of photography: he had desperately wanted to understand what photography was in itself, what kind of soul did that specific facet of artistic expression have, which essential characteristic distinguished photographs from other kinds of images.

The more he had seen Hongjoong's work, the more his mind had started to demand explanations and had started to feel the weight of an insurmountable question: why was he attracted to some negatives that didn’t seem to interest Hongjoong? Why did certain photographs evoke such a strong interest in him and why was Hongjoong immune to it, sometimes selecting other negatives that Seonghwa hadn’t even considered?

Hongjoong had come to his aid, ever so prepared and ready, so knowledgeable in what he did and loved the most. A philosopher and writer whose name Seonghwa couldn’t remember anymore, completely buried underneath the weight of the concept he had theorised, had talked about photography as characterised by two co-existing elements which, however, didn’t exist on the same level.

Studium, Hongjoong had said and raised his little finger, or the reality of an image. The purely physical, rational and social aspects that made up the shot – people inside it, objects portrayed, clothes worn by the chosen subjects, landscapes captured in the blink of an eye, streets with their never-ending streams of people. It connected the observed and the photographer who took it undeniably and rationally, it was rooted in the ability of the camera to reproduce the real world.

Sometimes, however, the reading of a shot took a different path, as if the observer’s eye suddenly lost interest in the objective life the image offered them.

Punctum, Hongjoong had gone on and raised his ring finger, or the feeling connected to an image. A magnifying glass on the observer’s emotions, a small but striking detail capable of polarising the observer’s gaze. Many reportage photos, even in their cruelty and violence, according to Hongjoong, still lacked a punctum capable of tearing the observers apart and projecting them into the dimension of feeling.

Seonghwa looked at the photograph once again. Studium: an empty street and a crowded place, neon lights and people sitting together. Punctum: those people were friends, those people were family, and those people were happy enough to gift the picture a light of its own. Happiness struck him, a melancholic kind of longing for the warmth he was looking at, so strong that it almost prompted him to reach for the photograph and touch it, to feel with his own fingers the comfortable sense of simplicity the image exuded.

Oh, he was so lonely.

A young woman following the exhibition route in the opposite direction surprised Seonghwa. He felt her attentive eyes on him and looked away; she was staring at him as if she were looking at a photograph, then she tugged at the sleeve of her friend’s jacket and whispered something that left the second girl open-mouthed but that Seonghwa failed to hear before turning and walking away. The occurrence left him confused and speechless but he let it slide quickly. He was no stranger to people looking at him, he had repeatedly observed the way people stared at the photograph where he was the main subject despite never showing his face, several times he had been approached by people telling him how handsome or pretty or beautiful or any variation of the sort he was.

The last photograph before the second room struck him and forced him to stop.

An asphalt road, a wooden bench, bushes behind it that seemed to want to embrace and protect it in its solitude. A hidden place, a space few would see, a corner so sweet to Seonghwa’s memory and yet able to unleash a waterfall of repressed sorrow onto his heart and mind. There was a book on the bench, a book open to a page impossible to see and with a few sentences underlined in pencil. It must have been Seonghwa’s once, whatever title lay between those lines, one of the forgotten books he had never gone back to retrieve after he had left their flat, because Hongjoong didn’t underline his books, he simply folded down the corners of the pages when there was something he wanted to remember.

It had been a cold night but neither of them had wanted to break the spell and go home, both trying hard to drag out an evening that was already over, neither of them wanting to declare the end of their date. They had wanted to stretch that moment and give it the semblance of an infinity that would forever lull them into a limbo where they would not return to their individual lives but would forever remain entangled in whatever strange game they had created.

Seonghwa and Hongjoong had started seeing each other three months before, when Seonghwa had opened the chat and contacted the photographer asking if he could see the photographs taken in the club. Hongjoong had answered eagerly and had invited him to his studio, asking Seonghwa if he wanted to try to develop some negatives with him.

Seonghwa had seen a darkroom for the first time in his life, he had seen the way photographic film was processed and how simple negatives became full-fledged pictures thanks to the skilled hands of a person capable of properly carrying out the complex task with carefulness. Seonghwa had tried to develop a photograph on his own as well, helped by Hongjoong, and the final result hadn’t been disappointing.

That day, after what he ended up considering his first date with Hongjoong, he had gone back home with his heart full of laughter and giddiness, thumping in his chest and causing him to giggle on his own while he had listened to music, and his eyes full of images of negatives, to the point that he could almost see some of them burned inside his eyelids when he closed his eyes.

The negatives, the darkness of the room, the place where the developing photos were put, gloves that touched other gloves, Hongjoong’s patient voice as he explained everything, whispered questions – as if the negatives could get scared, as if they needed their quiet to be able to bloom – and kind smiles filled with pure adoration.

That day, three months later, they had gone out for a walk and then Seonghwa had proposed that they go to an art café to have a warm drink and paint something together, Hongjoong had then suggested stopping at some photobooths to take a couple of photographs to keep as a memory of their small date, Seonghwa had asked to go into the bookstore and had bought a novel for himself – he could no longer remember which one of the many he had bought and then shared with Hongjoong – and Hongjoong had invited him out to dinner at a simple but clean place where the food was good and the atmosphere warm.

Seonghwa hadn’t wanted to go home. He had suggested they buy all the tasty snacks they were able to find between the shelves of a small run-down convenience store they had stumbled upon and eat them together in a park even though the cold had been stinging his hands ever since the sun had disappeared under the horizon, his nose and cheeks had become red and every time he breathed little clouds of steam left his and Hongjoong’s lips.

The shape of Hongjoong’s mouth had been so pretty.

He hadn’t paid attention to the cold.

Assailed by a deep desire to prolong that strange feeling of sticky happiness for the rest of his life, Seonghwa had sought any foothold to prevent the loneliness of his flat, his essays piling up with the books he had to study, the chores he had to do to keep his house clean, from creeping back into his thoughts and shatter the strange idyllic moment he had been experiencing. Perhaps desperately, perhaps irrationally, perhaps with a stubbornness that had never belonged to him and the same transport that characterised teenagers in love, Seonghwa had been huddled in his coat while he ate his Orion choco pies with a smile on his face.

“When you develop all the photographs you have taken today, I want to see them. I want to have a copy of them. You can develop the same negative twice and make a copy of the original, can you?”

“Negatives are moulds, Seonghwa-ya, you can produce infinite copies of the same captured moment. Yet, none of it will ever be able to compete with the true beauty of our experiences.”

“But photographs are pretty. They are crystallised memories.”

Hongjoong had stood up and his camera had covered his face. Seonghwa could only glimpse the two-toned hair, part of his cheekbones, his elegant yet somehow manly fingers, the nail painted black. The blinding flash of a sudden, violent light burst from the camera: Seonghwa, sitting on the bench with a choco pie in his hand, the novel he had bought resting on his lap, a blissful smile on his cold-flushed face and the bush behind him that at times seemed to move to tickle the back of his neck, close enough to swallow the bench.

“You are the most beautiful person I have ever seen, Seonghwa-ya.”

Hongjoong had approached again and, instead of sitting by his side, he had straddled Seonghwa’s lap almost unceremoniously after looking around and making sure that the few street lamps, the wood of the bench and the silent leaves of the bush would be the sole keepers of their secret. The book had slipped from Seonghwa’s legs and the sudden presence of human warmth – Hongjoong’s cunning but kind and adoring eyes communicated sincerity, the sly smile on his lips left space for something more – against his cold, clammy body had made him flinch.

Hongjoong had been so warm and delicate, he had been so real, so close.

His free hand had found its way to Seonghwa’s forehead, elegant fingers had caressed the soft skin and moved down, following a specific path on his face, brushing against the corner of his eye, his cheekbone, the slight curve of his nose, and then his lips; the fingers had touched and pushed gently, prompting Seonghwa to open his mouth slightly as a shiver had run down his spine.

“Please, kiss me, Hongjoong-ah.”

Hongjoong had complied, giving him a weird but light-hearted mixture of small pecks, loud smooches, adoring touches and long open-mouthed kisses that had tasted of Orion choco pies mixed with Kkokkalkorn but that had left them both breathless on their bench. Sometimes their noses would press against each other, sometimes their teeth would knock together, sometimes Hongjoong would let out short and heartfelt giggles and ruffle Seonghwa’s hair, sometimes Seonghwa would lose himself in the sensation to the point of forgetting he needed to breathe and couldn’t live of Hongjoong’s happiness and smiles alone.

“I wish we could take a picture. I wish we could capture this moment forever to keep it alive even after it ends. I don’t want it to end.”

Hongjoong had cupped his face and looked at him gravely.

“Oh, Seonghwa-ya, photographs are not memories that come alive when we develop them and look at them. Photographs announce the death of the photographed.”

Seonghwa took a deep breath in front of the picture he had been staring at for long minutes, immersed in his thoughts and in the vibrancy of what he could still remember. Hongjoong had always been right: people didn’t need pictures to recall powerful experiences, photography was much more macabre than Seonghwa had first thought, too naive to truly stop and think about what it meant to immortalise a person inside a frame.

Studium: an empty bench in an empty park, green bushes behind it, the weather was clear the day the picture had been taken, a book rested on the bench. Punctum: the book had once belonged to Seonghwa, the wood of that bench had witnessed the blooming of their love and their first shared kiss. Punctum, once again: it had been one of the happiest days of Seonghwa’s life.

Punctum, terrifying: it was gone forever, it would no longer come back to him, it would always bring him gut-wrenching pain and sorrow.

Dead, buried in the past.

– 📸 –

GHOST: an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image; people are bound to disappear and leave traces behind. What about those who never come back? Is the essence of those people present in pictures where they haven’t directly been immortalised?

The walls of the second room were grey, there were many more people than Seonghwa had first expected. Real people, observers interested in the photographs who bent slightly to read the descriptions provided by Hongjoong, souls that wanted to connect to a specific form of art, spectators with a world of their own in their hearts, captivated by different images and mesmerised by different photographs. The people in the pictures, on the other hand, were much less than he had expected.

All the photographs on the walls seemed to be characterised by a deep sense of loneliness and emptiness. There had been something before the shot that hadn’t been immortalised, but the essence of what wasn’t there anymore – or had never been there – loomed over the pictures and seeped through them all, creating disquieting contrasts and scenes where absence and presence intersected. It gave life to the true ghosts of absent spirits, it evoked forgotten but needed gestures of raw humanity and left a gush in the heart of those who saw them and who would always and inevitably try to imagine the lives of the aleatory people who had failed to enter the frame.

A swing caught in the middle of its slow repetitive movement but with no one sitting on it, no children close by nor sound of laughter to cover the way the chains creaked. A pavement where a bus had stopped, the central door was open but no one had come out, no person had walked on that small portion of the street. A bouquet and a crocheted scarf thrown into a basket but no hands tried to retrieve them or asked for forgiveness or were controlled by pure disappointment. The window of a café in the middle of the night, lit by the dim lights inside, with the chairs raised above the tables and no one behind the counter who cleaned or kept the place alive. The table in Hongjoong’s flat – which Seonghwa knew well – lit by the strange eerie light of cloudy days coming from the window over the counter, two clementines, one of them open and ripe, the second untouched.

“Excuse me, are you a friend of the photographer?”

Seonghwa turned around to find a middle-aged man with a child looking at him, one of them polite and the other naively curious in the way only children knew how to be. The man bowed slightly when Seonghwa acknowledged him and the child showed a toothy smile with many gaps.

Seonghwa stood still, his eyes fixed on the child and his brain suddenly slow and unable to process even the simplest of questions. He didn’t want to lie to the child – he was older than the ones he worked with, he must be about to finish primary school, smart and with a quick gaze that followed everything around him – who looked at him with eyes made even bigger by a pair of blue plastic glasses, some of those that don’t break even when mistreated and thrown around. He didn’t want to lie to himself with false words that would reopen old questions that had never been definitively answered either. So, he got stuck in a strange limbo, with his feet glued to the ground and his mind shrouded in a thin fog that had brought cold emptiness.

“You are in some of the pictures, in the room called –”

“Let’s go, Yechan-ah. Let’s not bother this young man who just wants to see the exhibition, whether he’s a friend of the photographer or not. We have a lot more pictures to see and comment together.”

And after the father’s – or the guardian’s — gentle but straight-forward words, the two turned away and continued walking through the photographs as they had appeared, with the man occasionally crouching down to talk quietly to the child, pointing at pictures and listening to what he had to say about them, and the boy occasionally turned around just to look at Seonghwa, his eyes seemingly unwilling to let go of him, as if he had seen something special he wanted to cherish, as if he were scared that Seonghwa would disappear if he turned around for too long.

As if he had seen a ghost, bound to disappear.

And he was bound to disappear and flee from the eyes of a child, not because he wanted to, but because the exhibition required him to. The room was structured in such a way that it was necessary to pass through a series of veils to proceed. When the spectator entered, the photographs presented themselves before their eyes without any obstacles, but the more one progressed through the room in the order Hongjoong had conceived, the more white sheets, light veils and physical barriers came between the viewer and the photographs, which became more and more peculiar and cryptic.

Plays of light, strange shadows, places that seemed to have a sort of aura and uniqueness, some errors in the development of the negatives that had traced eerie and faint traces on otherwise fine photographs where the deepest emptiness reigned supreme and the lack of people where they should’ve been was almost unbearable to the eye. A couple of times Seonghwa had to look away, a couple of times he had to take a deep breath and lower his eyes. Those were the ghosts Hongjoong had mentioned at the beginning of the room, the shadows of people who had never been or had ceased to be, or had tried to be in places that had rejected them.

Someone else, yet another philosopher, had tried to explain the true power lurking inside the camera. As Hongjoong had explained his theory to him, Seonghwa had given a name to many of the unsettling sensations he had felt in front of some pictures and the way he looked at the art of capturing small moments had changed radically, forever transformed by a higher understanding of a simple act.

The true pictures of the past flew by in the blink of an eye. The past was ever-changing and constantly growing: the life of humans was centred around collecting and storing as much of the past as possible while living in the present and continually eroding the future. Strange and painful until death, the time when the future would come to an end. The past could only be seized as an image which flashed up at the instant. Only there could it be recognised only to never be seen again: all the images of the past were doomed to be irretrievable, unattainable.

Unless they were captured inside a photograph. Or at least, that was what Seonghwa had always thought.

But Hongjoong – much like the philosopher – had little to no faith in the mimetic capacity of the camera and the photographs it could take through its lenses. It was visible to everyone but people hardly ever gave it too much weight: there was always something different between the photograph and the actual moment – a shadow, a movement, an expression, the way the light touched the skin of the person or the photographed object, the scenery, the vibrancy of the colours – there was always going to be people that would be photogenic and those that were much more beautiful in real life, pictures don’t do them justice.

A photograph was not a mirror of reality, it was something much more powerful, much more terrifying.

A photographic image conjured up the death of the photographed. What the camera was able to reproduce inside an image was only the posthumous character of a lived experience that would never come back. The sacrifice of the subject was necessary to immortalise a fake idol to worship: the killing of the subject itself worked in favour of a skewed and unfaithful representation of the experience that connected the photographer to the subject.

Seonghwa observed the picture in front of him, titled THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND, with a knot in his throat.

He saw a street, a small puddle had formed in a light dip of the asphalt right next to the white line that delimited the place where cars could go from the place where people could walk safely. It was night when the photographer had taken the picture, Seonghwa could see it in the feverish light of two streetlights that appeared reflected inside the puddle. Right next to it, a pair of wired earphones with a white bunny cable protector, there to prevent the outer part of the cable from breaking, bending, tangling, and fraying.

The picture had clear purplish and yellowish halos that extended over the entire image and warped its colours, giving it an almost magical appearance. It had been ruined by water.

Those were his old earphones.

Seonghwa had arrived home late from the university that day. He had only been living with Hongjoong for seven months and yet their cohabitation had already taken on strangely bitter tones, their lives had twisted and poisonous bits that hurt them both and that neither of them knew how to control had started to appear. Seonghwa had loved Hongjoong – he was sure of it – but sometimes he had the vague but crippling sensation that Hongjoong didn’t truly love him back for the person he was but had been, on the contrary, mesmerised by the untouchable muse that Seonghwa had slowly become.

He had loved what the camera showed more than he had loved who Seonghwa was. He had loved the negatives and the process of development more than he had loved spending meaningful time with Seonghwa. He had wanted an ethereal concept and a frail deity to worship and please through the rituals of the camera more than he had needed a lover in flesh and blood.

When the camera lenses had failed to focus on him, there had been no harmony, the ability to listen and compromise disappeared. Hongjoong never wanted to leave room for anything outside his art while Seonghwa had to annihilate everything that had always been part of his life to accommodate Hongjoong’s requests and wishes.

The whole world had to bow to his fancy. So arrogant, so talented. Seonghwa had loved him.

It had been a long day: Seonghwa had gotten up at 6.07 a.m. and found Hongjoong asleep on the couch, already grumbling because he had come home late and had been woken up, he had eaten breakfast and commuted to university for his 9 a.m. class which had ended at 11.30 a.m. He had stopped by the cafeteria to get a quick bite to eat and then locked himself in the library to study in a long session interrupted only by a trip to the café to get a nice drink and a slice of cake. He had arrived at the 3 p.m. lecture completely exhausted and the final presentation of the project he had been working on for more than two months hadn’t been as ground-breaking as he had imagined, earning him a grade far lower than he had expected. He had left the classroom when the sun had already set and returned home, cried on the train on his own while listening to music and opened the door of his shared flat with a knot in his stomach.

It had been a horrible day.

Back then, he still couldn’t have known that it would be the first of many other horrible days of struggles that could’ve been eased from his shoulders but were never taken care of, a continuous intoxicating mixture of love that bordered admiration and suffering that would trap him – always so weak – in a vicious cycle, he would struggle to escape. Because of love, all because of what he had believed to be love. The one who had hurt him the most was also the one who had known how to take care of him and pick up the pieces of his exhausted heart, and Seonghwa had always been quick to make excuses to defend him in front of Wooyoung and San whenever they had criticised him, desperate in a pitiful way and scared to lose the man behind the camera that knew how to trap his soul in negatives.

Seonghwa always demanded too much. Eat less and you will always be satiated, a disgusting advice he had been given when he was still a teenager, leader of a dancing club and main performer, when he wanted to look good and receive external validation, when he wanted the eyes of people to be fixed on him and their mouths to utter only compliments, when his self-esteem was non-existent, leaving him prey to excruciating suffering and vulnerable to people’s words and thoughts about his body and personality and behaviour. There was always something wrong with him. There was always something undesirable in him, back then. Desire less and you will never want anything more, had become the mantra of his relationships.

And while Seonghwa had tried his best to make himself small, sat down and then crouched to take up as little space as possible in order not to bother anyone and kept close a person whose gaze – whose camera lenses – seemed to love him beyond description and comprehension, Hongjoong had taken advantage of all the blank spaces left behind and allowed himself to become bulkier, stronger, and terrifyingly bolder, showing colours Seonghwa had never suspected nor glimpsed before, when the world still shone and photographs were still wonders for him.

Seonghwa had taken off his shoes and placed his backpack at the entrance to remove his jacket. The house was quiet, the lights in the living room were off. He had taken a deep breath and pressed the switch to reveal an empty table, a clean kitchen and the plates, chopsticks and bowls used for breakfast still in the sink, still dirty, so unbearably messy to look at. No one had touched anything, the house seemed uninhabited, empty, and so cold that Seonghwa had been forced to hold his breath when he had headed for the bedroom he shared with Hongjoong to slip into more comfortable clothes.

Then he had seen it.

The bed in disarray, one of the two pillows on the floor, the comforter all crumpled, Hongjoong’s pyjama trousers abandoned on the bed, the shirt thrown on the bedside table next to a charger left plugged in, without a phone.

Something brutal and primal had awakened inside Seonghwa that evening, something had been shattered and had given him a whiplash powerful enough to have him snap out of the strange haze that had intoxicated his thoughts and dampened his judgement.

He had stormed out of the bedroom and immediately pounced on the door of what had been a tiny storage room, a place that Hongjoong had transformed into an efficient darkroom, with the small window fully screened, running water and a place to develop his beloved negatives. His hand had rested on the handle before pulling forcefully, suddenly opening the door and letting the artificial light of the room filter into the most secret, silent, protected and – paradoxically – neat place in the entire apartment.

The disheartening reminder that Hongjoong knew how to take care of what he loved and cherished. The daunting reminder that their shared flat wasn’t one of those things. That Seonghwa wasn’t either.

“Oh, fuck! Close the door! What are you doing?”

The voice that had come from the room illuminated by its usual and eerie deep red light had sounded demanding and irked by the sudden intrusion, some objects inside the room had been touched and knocked down in a clutter, and a tired huff had finalised the irritation. So Seonghwa had closed the door after having found the culprit in his hiding place. He had been angry, seething even, but he had never been cruel enough to purposely ruin the film that Hongjoong had carefully worked on with the destructive power of light, whether artificial or not.

“Hongjoong-ah, come out.”

“Can’t. I’m developing some pictures.”

“I said, come out immediately.”

More clutter, huffs and Hongjoong had left quickly, opening the door wide enough to sneak out and closing it again with a swift gesture. In his usual dark apron, he had begun to remove his gloves while keeping his eyes half-closed, no longer used to the light of the world around him, the outside world with its tasks and obligations. The outside world where Seonghwa lived.

“What is it that you want?”

Seonghwa had opened his mouth to reply but his voice had stuck to his vocal cords. Bitter, rotten, all words had gone to waste in front of such an unfeeling and pitiless question, whatever he wanted to say had liquefied in his throat and sloshed back down into his stomach. No How are you today, my love? No How did it go today? How was it presenting the project you were working on for so long? No Did something happen, Seonghwa-ya? Not even a simple Is everything all right? It’s been a heavy day, are you tired?

But a simple, cruel and cut-throat What is it that you want? thrown right into his face and coupled with an accusatory look, arms crossed over his chest and a cocked hip. If Hongjoong had caught him by surprise and slapped him – suddenly, without warning, stealing his breath and causing Seonghwa to flinch with a burning and reddened cheek – he would’ve hurt him less.

“You didn’t even prepare dinner. I spent the entire day at university and you didn’t even prepare us a simple warm dinner. I’m not asking for restaurant cuisine, just for something edible after a long day.”

“Well, I was developing my photographs.”

“You didn’t even touch the kitchen. You didn’t even make our bed. You didn’t even add some hay to Mito’s enclosure, you know he’s supposed to have some twice a day.”

“We can order food. Stop being so dramatic over the stupidest little things no one cares about.”

Seonghwa’s voice had broken, and all the desperation that had come with the strange awareness of not being understood had pervaded his words, leaving him vulnerable. Seonghwa had always known that Hongjoong would hurt him almost to the point of killing him one day – so fragile, he had been so easy to scar even in his previous relationship that had turned sour in a dizzyingly short time – but he had always hoped to have more time to learn to protect himself, to try to survive, to be better and stronger.

“But I care about those things, Hongjoong-ah! This is the flat we share, this is our life together, those are not stupid things to me!”

Hongjoong had not replied, with his disgusting gloves clasped in his hand and his useless, pathetic dark apron and the discomforting, completely blank look that occasionally appeared on his face when words failed him. Seonghwa had waited and the silence had only lingered, painful, stinging, heavy to understand and bear, a monster between them, nestled right on their living room carpet.

It had only been natural to him. Seonghwa had turned around, returned to the entrance, quickly put on his sneakers without bending down to tie them and snatched his jacket from the hanger after picking up the backpack he had used during the day. And then he had walked out of the house, out of those walls so empty and aseptic and oppressive, out of a place that a person couldn’t make his own and that had shrunk to the space of a darkroom.

If he couldn’t have a home, then he didn’t want a house either. The flat had been a box where they both took refuge when it rained outside and the weather had been cold, nothing more. If he couldn’t have a place to feel safe, to let his love blossom, to return to with a smile on his face after a tiring day and slip in the arms of a lover, then he didn’t want to have anything. He already had nothing, his situation wouldn’t have changed.

He looked at the picture Hongjoong had decided to hang on the wall as part of the exhibition. He looked at the white bunny that had tried for so long to keep the cable of his earphones together, struggling to avoid a faith that was already written and prolonging the sorrow of the old device: they were bound to fall apart. He didn’t remember much anymore, some images were more vivid than others, and some hurt more.

“Seonghwa-ya!”

Small images, small flashes, details, again: the stairs running fast under his feet, the white shoelaces, the terror of slipping on them and falling, his hand clasped on the shoulder strap of his backpack held on one of his shoulders as he tried to put on his jacket, the icy cold of the evening that had greeted him, breathing against his face, the lights of the street lamps, the dark asphalt, the silence of the evening in the neighbourhood where they lived, tears freezing and hurting his face right after leaving the warmth of his eyes, footsteps behind him and a hand grabbing him by the arm, spinning him around, headphones slipping from the pocket of his jacket, falling close to a puddle.

The streetlights had shined bright inside it.

“Seonghwa-ya! Have you lost your mind? Where do you think you are going?”

“I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to talk to you. Please, go away.”

Hongjoong had been panting, he had been chasing him. It had been the first conscious effort to keep him around since they had got together and Seonghwa had become a discounted trophy on a dusty shelf. There had been an effort, there had been an attempt, there had been something that had clicked inside Hongjoong’s mind because he had stopped in the middle of the street with his slippers still on and no jacket to protect him from the cold. And yet he had found the time to grab his camera before going out.

At least he had gone out.

“Seonghwa-ya, listen. After I finish developing the film, we can order some takeout to eat together, we don’t need to make the bed if we are going to sleep in there soon, and we can add hay and some pellets as a treat to Mito’s enclosure, I bet he will be happy.”

After I finish developing the film, what cruel words to utter. Words that sounded like a simple and obvious Know your place, know my priorities, there’s a whole world that comes before you and when I’m done taking care of what's really important, then I’ll pay attention to all your silly worries; give me time with my camera, and then I’ll cherish you as the eternal second you will always be. You are nothing when the lenses of my camera aren’t focused on you.

“Everything is fixable, you see, Seonghwa-ya? It’s no big deal.”

“No, you don’t understand. That’s not the point. How can you be so blind and oblivious?”

“What’s the point, then?”

“That you care more about your photography than me. That I come home after a terrible day where everything has been extremely shitty expecting to find someone who cares about me, a warm meal, a comfortable flat and an understanding partner only to find out you haven’t even lifted a finger or done anything because you have been holed up in the darkroom for the entire day.”

“Seonghwa-ya, the negatives needed to –”

Seonghwa had turned around again to leave – he hadn’t known where, he hadn’t known how – when he had heard Hongjoong mention the negatives again. But he had immediately felt himself being touched again, a gentle but firm hand on his shoulder that had tried to get his attention, a new attempt at keeping him from moving away, tentative and confused, but still a valuable attempt. Seonghwa had been a desperate man, and like someone stranded in the desert for days who pounced on any drop of drinkable liquid to quench their thirst, he had learned how to be content with the simplest and most insignificant actions.

But he was done suffering for the sake of other people’s comfort.

“Don’t touch me, Hongjoong-ah. I’m serious now, if you dare to touch me it’s over for –”

A click.

A cursed sound had interrupted his words, Seonghwa remembered it as if their fight had happened the previous day: the mirror flipping up out of the way of the shutter, the shutter itself, the film being wound on while the mirror simultaneously returned to ready position. The whisper of a picture that had been taken.

And when he had turned around, he had seen it. Hongjoong with his camera in his hands, taking a picture of the puddle next to them as if all the secrets of the world were contained in that disgusting dirty water that had gathered in a hole in the asphalt, the shutter going off as Seonghwa was telling him that he would be ready to break off their relationship if he made one more false move.

Not just distaste, not just sorrow or disappointment. A blaze of naked, pure rage had enveloped Seonghwa in a second, brightened his vision and injected a cruelty that had never belonged to him into his veins. Seonghwa had bent down hastily, picked up his headphones from the wet asphalt and shoved them into the pocket of his jacket where they belonged. Then he had approached Hongjoong again and his hand had slammed down on the camera with all the force his body could contain.

He had seen the precious object trace an arc through the air and fall into the puddle, heard the ominous noise coming out of it, imagined the water seeping inside and tainting the precious film, felt the splash of dirty water on his shoes.

Hongjoong had remained silent.

Seonghwa still remembered.

He remembered the look of betrayal, shock and disbelief in Hongjoong’s pretty features as he had stared at his camera in the puddle. He remembered the hot tears that had started to stream down his face once again. He remembered the way he had turned around and away towards nowhere, taking the subway and knocking at the door of his closest friends, people he knew he could trust.

He remembered Wooyoung opening the door in his light blue pyjama and San peeking at the entrance after some seconds, with hair still damp from a shower and a worried look on his face. He remembered begging them to let him sleep in their flat just for one night, rambling about what had happened and what he had done while sympathetic hands rubbed his back. He remembered Wooyoung cooking a warm dinner for him, San lending him an old pyjama and giving him a new toothbrush and towels for the night. He remembered the way he had felt safe sleeping between them, protected by two warm bodies in the double bed where he had been invited because neither San nor Wooyoung had wanted him to sleep alone on the sofa.

But, most importantly, he remembered what he had come to regret the most with time, the cruelty and childishness of the words he had spat at Hongjoong before running away, with eyes burning with fury and a voice that lacerated the night with the power of a cry for help that went unanswered.

“Fuck you and your damned camera, Hongjoong-ah! Get that disgusting lens away from my face and don’t you ever dare point it in my direction! I hope it’s broken and impossible to repair! I hope you won’t be able to recover the film! I hope no one will come to your next exhibition! I hope your photographs will show how much of a horrible and soulless person you are!”

There was Hongjoong’s soul, in front of his eyes. Bare, simple, hurt.

The photograph, the greatest evidence of the day when their relationship had broken down irreparably, was there to remind Seonghwa of every detail and return every drop of venom. Impregnated with the dirty water from the puddle where the camera and its film had been thrown, the photograph had been poisoned and then developed to be a reminder of bitter times.

Hongjoong used to say that there was a conjunction between death and the photographed and that this union was one of the principles of photographic certitude. Photography was a grave for the living dead. It told the history of lost people even after their disappearance: a history of shadows and ghosts. It spoke of certain horrors and it certified that the captured ghost was alive, somewhere outside the frame, out of the photographer’s reach.

Whatever people knew would cease to exist and become an image. It happened to their relationship, it would happen to everything else around them. The photograph was exposed to death and existed before death. In photographing someone, the photographer already knew that the photograph would survive them and then belong to the afterlife of the photographed subject.

Seized by the camera, people were mortified. Objectified. Subjected to a double, triple, gaze. Scrutinised. Paraded in front of other people’s eyes. Undergoing a process of reification. A loss of humanity was at play. Immediate death. A ghost was bound to remain.

THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND. Those were the things Seonghwa had permanently left behind the night the photograph had been taken: the certainty of being able to find a home inside his house, the hope of being loved unconditionally, the knowledge that love would have consumed him if he didn’t have the strength to suppress it, enough poison to cripple a relationship that had never recovered and had slowly died stuck between doubts and uncertainties, a film that had gotten wet and led Hongjoong to produce one of the most beautiful photographs in the entire exhibition despite what Seonghwa had wished him, the ghost of himself trapped somewhere inside the frame, looking for salvation.

– 📸 –

The thing he left behind, less philosophically: the room named GHOSTS. And he had done so with a heavy heart and the knowledge of having ceased to exist in Hongjoong’s life six months before, when he had taken the drastic decision to leave their shared flat with the intention never to come back.

It had been difficult but he hadn’t faltered despite the deep sense of sorrow and the emptiness he had felt in his chest. He had been surrounded by the people he loved the most – his family back in Jinju, the children at the kindergarten where he worked, Wooyoung and San – and yet he had felt so lonely, so forsaken and strangely bare. His soul, a desolated wasteland.

It was so strange, to think that he once had a friend – a lover – who had known everything about him and witnessed the deepest and most secret parts of his bare soul. Seonghwa saw it plastered on the walls of the exhibition: they had shared a feeling so powerful that words couldn’t describe and images almost failed to grasp. Somewhere, inside Seonghwa’s chest, in the unhealed parts of his weak mind, love for the man behind the camera still lingered; somewhere, inside Hongjoong’s chest, in the strangest parts of his frail heart, love for the muse he had worshipped remained.

It was almost pitiful.

Kim Hongjoong and Park Seonghwa, the photographer and the muse, the couple that everyone was sure only death could do apart, two people who had been kept alive by burning fire and the need to find themselves in the other. They had fallen into a warm relationship that had slowly lost its power. Not lukewarm but not cold, an uncomfortable parasite glued to their skin with a temperature ambiguous and strange enough to sting and cause discomfort; they had turned their love into a ravenous monster.

SKY: The area above the earth, in which clouds, the sun, etc. can be seen. Look at the stars in the night sky and become the person who shines bright like those stars, this is what people want, this is what people say. Sometimes, the weather is not clear; the stars hide. There is nothing on the floor to look at, follow me and I will lend you my eyes. Raise your head with me.

Seonghwa looked up, exactly as the writing on the wall had asked him to, and his eyes met the sky. It was strange, it was frighteningly beautiful what Hongjoong had managed to create: the ceiling of the room was plastered with photographs of the sky, the most disparate colours followed one after the other in many photos placed side by side, like huge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that engulfed the entire white ceiling and morphed into each other, giving it the hues of a clear sky, a thunderstorm, a sunrise, a sunset, a windy day, a starry night, heavy clouds.

He had always loved the sky. Hongjoong was so attentive, he saw true beauty in all facets of human life and somehow managed to capture it inside his deadly frames, giving them the soul they kept hidden and that regular people – so busy with their hectic lives – never had the time or strength to spot on their own unless someone else guided them. Seonghwa needed someone who could take his hand and guide him too. He wasn’t special, he wasn’t like Hongjoong at all.

Not when it came to the sky. The entire world that reigned over his head held a peculiar beauty in its colours and infinite mysteries in the multitude of stars. There had been many moments when Seonghwa had been sad – during his high school days when he was often alone, during the first relationship that had left him deeply scarred, during the time he had shared with Hongjoong and when he had found himself alone in the vast world once again after leaving their shared apartment – but the sky had never crumbled. It had always watched over him, too busy and benevolent to betray him, too powerful to be swayed by human worries.

Sometimes, through the sky, Seonghwa felt he could fall in love with the whole world, adoring even the oxygen inside his lungs and the dirt under the soles of his shoes.

Pictures of the sky had always exuded a certain kind of magic for him. His mother had gifted him a telescope when he was still in elementary school. For my lovely bright star, Seonghwa, the small note attached to the present had said. He had spent days reading the instructions and nights looking for stars, dreaming about being an explorer, an astronaut, a pirate, an alien from a distant world, a child with a different life. He had shown his older brothers all the constellations he had found and told him facts about them, myths. He had cried when his brother had gotten tired of listening and had left. He had wailed back then, he understood his brother after years, as an adult.

Seonghwa: to become a star. Hwaseong: mars.

A woman was staring at him, as if dumbfounded, and only when she realised she was being watched did she look away. Two young women – friends, perhaps – looked at him and then their eyes found each other, one elbowed the other lightly and whispered a secret in her ear, then smiled at him and continued to be enchanted by the photographs and the ceiling. Seonghwa shuddered slightly, afraid of being sensed, perceived, observed, consumed by those eyes. Confused, he failed to understand what it was about himself that attracted so many stares and comments; suddenly unsure and self-conscious, he stopped in a corner that allowed him to show his back to the room and took his time to escape from the eyes of the others. He took the time he needed to observe the four images in front of him.

Morning, afternoon, evening, night.

The same shot repeated four times at different times of the day. In the morning, the sky was reddened by the sunrise, tinged with soft, delicate notes as the day was about to begin. In the afternoon, it was painted a clear blue, cloudless, free of any stain or smudge as the sun shone out of the frame. The colours had lost their vibrancy in the evening, the sun was setting behind the photographer, where the camera could no longer grasp it, and the sunset was only evident in a sad reflection of the sky to the east. There were no stars in the night, and the light pollution from the nearby town didn’t allow them to be seen, it was dark and empty but not perfectly black, there was something else that stained its purity.

The photograph included not only the sky but also other small details, so insignificant for casual observers and yet charged with feelings and memories for Seonghwa. A clean French window showed the sky and helped the inside of the living room to remain in the shadows, a small balcony and two plants whose leaves touched the window pane almost politely could be spotted.

Seonghwa’s legacy in a flat that didn’t belong to him anymore. Hongjoong had something vicious in his hands, he killed everything he touched. It was a miracle the plants were still alive.

The window, an eye on the world, had seen everything.

Seonghwa standing in front of it with his arms crossed over his chest whenever he watched Hongjoong leave their flat, camera in his hands and a mind that felt the pressing need to create and capture, replicate and immortalise; Seonghwa was never welcome when Hongjoong left with his camera, always an intruder, accepted only when he needed to stand in front of the lenses, a parasite when he asked to see the world from behind them. Clean, scented curtains fixed on the wall above the window, the reflection of a man taking care of his house. The glimpse of the vast and unforgiving world continuing to turn and life continuing to flow every time Seonghwa had dined alone, aware that Hongjoong would come back late at night, that he would catch people’s attention in some queer club – in places he never wanted to go with Seonghwa, he didn’t go there to dance or find fleeting feelings, he went there to work – and more details of the sleeping world.

And maybe someone else.

When their relationship had begun to deteriorate in front of his eyes, Seonghwa had begun to suspect that there was someone else, had even wished that there was another person in Hongjoong’s life and that his absences were not due to mere whims, forgetfulness, lack of care or photographs to chase. He had searched long and hard, almost compulsively, for traces of another man in Hongjoong’s days, hoping to have time to grieve the love that once had been, and then have the strength to raise his head again and resume living his life.

He had never found anything: no drastic changes in mood, increased stress, heightened secrecy or changes in sexual desires. No strange negatives out of his camera, no private texts Seonghwa was forbidden to read, no double account on KakaoTalk or contacts saved on his phone, no foreign scents and perfumes on his clothing and skin, no marks of another person’s presence.

It had almost become an obsession at some point – so determined to find something that he had begun to fervently hope to find something, he needed to find something, he had even thought about fabricating something and had forced his mind to see non-existent patterns and connections – and his strange and unsettling behaviour on top of the suddenly decreased intimacy on his part due to the stress that had come with writing his final dissertation had caused their relationship to grow even colder, slowly crippled.

Communication between them annihilated. Nothing remained but a body to be used for photographs and sex, most of the time. Seonghwa cried, most of the time; both after the long sessions where Hongjoong would hail him as the supreme model and muse and fixate on small details of his body, making him feel extremely vulnerable and seen, and after intimate moments when Hongjoong wouldn’t see or hear him anymore and became disinterested.

Then, there were moments, or sometimes days or sometimes entire weeks or months, where the sun would shine and be merciful on them, warming their skin. Hongjoong would leave his camera on the desk in their shared bedroom and hardly ever touch it, he would empty, clean and lock the darkroom in their flat and then turn around and look at Seonghwa as if he were the most beautiful thing the world could gift him. He would talk and listen, revert to the polite and considerate, bright and charismatic young man who had captivated Seonghwa’s heart and enchanted his soul.

Evenings spent together under warm blankets in each other’s arms, dates in nice places amid laughter and giggles, movies commented with popcorn packets in their hands and their cheeks always half full, deep reasoning and the poetry behind the art of photography and all the theory connected to it, true interest in what Seonghwa’s studies and the delicacy needed to interact with such young children, waking up with gentle kisses and worshipping, normal working and studying hours that allowed them to spend time together, conversations for ears that knew and wanted to listen, hands that knew how to take care without ever putting themselves first.

It was so beautiful and yet so fleeting and so easy to lose. For some moments – days, entire weeks or months – everything would make sense, their love would be worth living and experiencing and Seonghwa would revert to believing that despite all the pain and hardships, Hongjoong was the man of his life.

Seonghwa had seen the afternoon become evening and the evening bleed into night countless times. The window had listened to his sobs and seen his tears and had remained impassive, giving him back an image of what he had become: a pitiful young man in old and battered clothes hunched over books and with a glowing laptop in front of his eyes, quietly sobbing over a bowl of soup or sitting on the carpet cuddling Mito while tearing up, a nervous person cleaning everything he could find to keep his mind occupied and give the flat a semblance of warmth, a wounded soul waiting for the tender lover he had once glimpsed – at the beginning of their relationships, a far mirage – and who would never come back.

Memories formed in his mind as tears started to prickle his eyes in front of the photographs.

Memories in the form of flashes, in the form of images. It was almost ironic: when he rationally tried to recall some experiences, he was always confronted with still images blurted out by his mind, as if his brain were incapable of retaining the fluidity and beauty of a specific moment in time and had to resort to the tedious and aseptic art of conjuring up pictures, small photographs inside his mind, reproduction of what had once been and would never come back.

He thought about it.

Once, Hongjoong had likened the art of photography to that of memory and remembrance, the ability to see a large figure coupled with the strange inability of the human mind to grasp the individual details of it, the series of small frames that made up each movement and regulated the life of the entire world. An easy example: the way people walked. It was easy to describe the way people walked from a theoretical point of view but less easy to reproduce or trace a precise moment of their step, the position of their shoulders, the angle of their arms or knees.

Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, with its cynical attention to dissecting and desecrating, revealed every detail to the human eye.

Hongjoong had explained it better one day, with simple and straight-forward words, while they both were in the darkroom and Seonghwa was watching him develop his films, most of them filled to the brim with pictures of him, more or less personal, more or less eligible for an exhibition. Seonghwa had sat on a stool and listened patiently, lips slightly parted and eyes open wide, absorbing every word.

Photography reveals what sight cannot see, Seonghwa-ya, what makes sight impossible. Think about it: the photograph tells us that when we see something, we are not aware of all the small details our seeing cannot perceive. We can only see a much bigger picture, easier to decode.

That was the thin link that united the human mind to photography, at least according to Hongjoong. Both photography and the human mind made images emerge – one of them through the power of technology, expert hands and light, the other with an attempt at recollection of what had been experienced – and gave them a new life. At the same time, a photograph couldn’t exist without a negative used to derive it and print it, just as a memory couldn’t exist without a lived experience that nestled in the unconscious and was then filtered and chosen to appear in the conscious part of people’s minds.

A thought first unconscious and then conscious, an image first negative and then photograph: what they told with their mere existence was that people may never experience their experiences directly and that everything – from thoughts to emotions – began with the desperate desire to reproduce a fleeting moment that would never come back again. People were always scared to lose everything and fall back into a strange bottomless void that swallowed them and left them drained.

Memories, reproductions, images. Yet Seonghwa remembered clearly the day he had left Hongjoong’s flat to never come back, fleeing from the cage it had become, too tired.

Small snapshots at first, and then the bigger picture: the table set, a warm dinner homecooked by him, warm and delicate, the darkness outside the window and the many streetlights, the almost uncomfortable rubbing of the strange fabric of his beautiful elegant trousers and silk shirt against his skin, the steel chopsticks under the warm light of the living room, Mito peacefully sleeping in his enclosure behind him, the reflection of his face in the broth when he had lowered his eyes to the no longer steaming bowl, the perfume that Hongjoong loved and yet irritated Seonghwa’s skin, bitter tears in the seolleongtan in front of him, the mobile phone screen that never lit up, sixteen text sent and left unanswered.

He had gotten up, slowly, retrieved everything he couldn’t do without and placed it in what he had: a suitcase, a bag, his backpack. He had cleaned Mito transport’s box with care and packed his food, blanket and toys. Then he had sat back down at the table and resumed his silent waiting.

At one point, Seonghwa had crossed his arms on the table and rested his head on them, trying to hold back his tears until he had fallen asleep in the false warmth of the dining room, in front of a window that always returned the same landscape to him and witnessed his loneliness, until he had been awoken by the soft click of the door closing and the careful padding of feet on the floor.

Seonghwa hadn’t raised his head. He hadn’t moved, he had remained with his head resting on his arms and his eyes open, his blank stare fixed on the window in front of him, always dark, always with their plants guarding it. Then a warm breath, delicate fingers had caressed his undercut and followed the geometric lines drawn on it that revealed pale skin. A fleeting kiss on his cheek.

“Seonghwa-ya, my love, I’m home.”

“This is our one-year and nine-month anniversary.”

“Well, now I’m home to celebrate it with you!”

The disarming emptiness that had coated Seonghwa’s voice had clashed – nails on a chalkboard, steel forks or chopsticks slowly caressing a glass – horribly with Hongjoong’s carefree answer. It had been jarring, almost chilling, it had shown him that Hongjoong hadn’t cared, that he hadn’t recognised his mistake, that his behaviour had been normal to him and that nothing worried him or troubled his thoughts.

“I had a shower, I wore nice clothes, I put on the cologne you love, I cooked us a homemade dinner to have together and set the table.”

“I’m glad you did, Seonghwa-ya. Everything you touch becomes beautiful.”

“And then I waited. And then you left me here for hours on my own and now my skin feels itchy and the food I prepared for us has turned cold.”

“You shouldn’t have waited for me to come back home, my star. You should have eaten while it was still hot, especially if it was still hot, and shouldn’t have worried about me.”

Something in Hongjoong’s reply, in the way he had spoken, in the strange and twisted words he had chosen, had suddenly set Seonghwa off. He had sat up on his chair with a quick movement, startling Hongjoong – who had been standing by his side – and his fist had slammed against the hard wooden surface of the table. The chopsticks next to his hand had jerked and the seolleongtan’s broth had rippled.

“Are you even listening to what I’m saying? Do you even understand the meaning of my words? You left me waiting here for hours, completely on my own, on our special day. No calls, no answers, no texts, absolutely nothing for you while I was worried sick. I was here waiting for you to come back home to me and you were somewhere… by the way, where the fuck were you, Hongjoong-ah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t. You fooled me many times but you won’t fool me today, not anymore, not now that I know your games and how you always manage to guilt-trip me into believing that I am the problem, that I am the one who’s exaggerating and you have never done anything wrong in your entire life since you met me.”

“Listen, I’m sorry, but it’s not that big of a deal at all. We can still celebrate if you want, reheat dinner, maybe watch a movie, you can choose the one you want, or just call it a day and go to bed together.”

At that moment, Seonghwa had realised that that was no longer the man he had loved when they had first met and during the first months of the life they had shared, but simply a copy of a copy of a copy that had lost its strength and colour, a negative developed so many times that it had started to return a grotesque image, always recognisable but full of halos, smears, disturbing plays of light, colours. The Hongjoong he had loved would never return, doomed to be just an image – a memory – trapped in his mind.

“No, we can’t celebrate now, Hongjoong-ah, this is not how things work. I can’t reheat a dinner that was supposed to be eaten while still warm, I can’t bear the thought of sitting down right beside you for hours and watching a movie in silence, I can’t even imagine taking my clothes off and going to bed by your side, sensing your pathetic attempts at catching my attention, believing that all your mistakes will be forgiven if you treat me well enough when the lights are turned off.”

“What are you talking about now? What’s wrong with you all of a sudden? Don’t be unreasonable, let’s sit down and discuss this as the mature adults we are.”

Seonghwa had gotten up slowly, he had smoothed a couple of wrinkles on his shirt and then had taken a deep breath, needing all the courage he could gather to free himself, all the strength he could muster up to take a step that would throw his life into chaos and uncertainty. It would give him a new beginning, the fear would suffocate him.

“There’s nothing we need to discuss. I packed everything I could.”

His words had been cold and calculated. His eyes had darted towards the couch where he had neatly arranged his backpack, his suitcase, his bag and the transport box. Then, slowly, he had crouched down and lifted the black sleepy bunny that had woken up. Mito had watched him silently, at first happy to be held with so much carefulness and later confused, betrayed by the presence of the transport box, as frightened as Seonghwa, whose hands trembled.

They were so alike, he and Mito, made for each other.

“I’m going away and I am not coming back.”

A sinister snicker full of pity and contempt had come out of Hongjoong’s lips and throat. So strange and frightening, it had been a noise that Seonghwa had never heard before and that had activated a strange alarm bell in his brain, connected to a primordial, inexplicable, gripping fear. Insulted and humiliated by the snickers he had heard in the hallways when people had first heard that Park Seonghwa had created a dance club to follow his passion. Dilettante, that had been the name of the dance club; a man, and he had wanted to dance; he wasn’t nearly as skilled as he believed he was; he tried too hard; he would never be an idol; he was pathetic. Humiliating snickers that had the same sound of that laugh.

“Don’t be silly and impulsive now, Seonghwa-ya, you are not going anywhere. You have nowhere to go.”

“I do, and I will never forgive you for almost letting me forget that I do and that there are people out there who truly love me. I’m leaving.”

Seonghwa had closed the transport box carefully, placed the bag on the suitcase and put the backpack over his right shoulder. Ready to go with the knowledge that he would never return to those walls, not even if Hongjoong begged him on his knees, tears in his eyes. He had taken a good look at the living room and his gaze had then slid to the window, an opening to the world that had always kept him company when he was lonely and had never stopped showing him that there was something out there for him. He just had to find the courage to reach out and grab it.

Seonghwa still remembered clearly the broken and terrified sound of Hongjoong’s high-pitched voice.

“You can’t leave, you can’t –”

Seonghwa still had no way of knowing back then, when he had first heard those words, but they would haunt him for months, that tone would reappear and make him burst into tears at the strangest times, leaving him overwhelmed with guilt and sure that his decision had been too drastic, too severe, too brutal. They would follow him in his sleep and creep into his simplest and most innocuous dreams, tormenting him and digging their nails into his mind, scarring him, making him doubt his choice.

It was engraved in his mind, it was torture. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the pleading, the despair, the suffering that – he only realised later – was not part of a farce and was, on the contrary, viscerally heartfelt. Yet, it hadn’t been enough to make him stay, not anymore.

“I can and I will. I’m tired of the way you love me. You are killing me.”

Hongjoong had approached him and brushed past him as Seonghwa was moving towards the door to put on the only pair of shoes he had left by the door and wear his dark coat. Seonghwa had turned and looked at him for one last painful time, with the knowledge that the image of Hongjoong that he would perceive and burn in his mind would become indelible, a negative that would be reproduced by his brain countless times, less and less vivid but always present.

Hongjoong’s hand on his wrist, calm and reassuring. Fingertips against bare skin. On his tiptoes. A hand cupping his cheek. A thumb brushing his skin with a disarming gentleness that had untied a knot somewhere inside Seonghwa’s stomach, much to Seonghwa’s dismay, and had made his resolution waver and shake. A whisper against his lips.

“Come here, Seonghwa-ya, my brightest star, just one last time.”

Then one last kiss, with the silent window that had watched and protected them. A poisonous kiss that had been carved on his lips and had lingered over Seonghwa’s mouth for an astounding long time, so long that Seonghwa hadn’t dared to kiss anyone in the past six months despite having met people who had caught his attention. Since he had left Hongjoong’s flat, Seonghwa had never again touched anyone’s lips, perhaps out of a visceral and still incomplete need not to erase that part of himself – that thin bond that still united him to Hongjoong – that was so easy to destroy.

What he remembered was the coldness he had infused in that kiss.

Not with an immediate refusal, not driven by a desire to evade that contact but guided by a deep determination: he hadn’t reacted to Hongjoong’s presence for his own sake, for the integrity of his decision, so that he could free himself, so as not to give in again to empty flattery that would turn into painful, burning indifference a few days later. Seonghwa had suffered enough, had endured a long time, and had allowed himself to be persuaded too many times. He didn’t want to repeat the same mistake, like a fool, like a spineless coward.

He had repaid Hongjoong with the same coldness, with the same cruelty, that had always been directed towards him. Hongjoong had wanted a muse and Seonghwa had decided to give him a taste of what it meant to worship an untouchable, unshakable deity, a human statue, a heart of stone.

How pitiful it must’ve been for the window that watched them. Hongjoong clinging to him in desperation, the lips he knew so well parted against his in an attempt to invite him to react, his eyes closed. Seonghwa remembered keeping his eyes open and looking out that window, into the dense darkness of the night lit only by the streetlights, thinking of the unwelcoming cold sky that would greet him. He had remained still, his arms motionless by his sides, his gaze fixed on something that had always seemed unreachable – the whole world in his hands, without Hongjoong – and his lips closed, unmoving, barely trembling under the warmth of such a display of affection.

It had been empty, barren.

“You see, Seonghwa-ya? I still love you. I don’t know who got all these ideas about me not loving you anymore or me not caring about you in your head. Maybe it was Wooyoung or San, maybe it was your mother trying to help you, but you don’t have to listen to them, you have to trust me on this and just let me –”

“Don’t you dare talk about my friends! Don’t you dare mention my mother!”

Steps towards the entrance, sitting on the floor, tying his sneakers with eyes swollen with tears and trembling fingers, heart beating wildly and feeling a deep and scorching sense of betrayal that had run deeper and hurt more than anything Hongjoong had ever done to him directly. His friends, his mother, all the people who had tried to warn him in many ways and had been ignored, all the people Seonghwa loved and cherished, all the people who hadn’t been blinded by Hongjoong’s charisma and had seen him for the man he truly was while Seonghwa had closed his eyes and swallowed great doses of pain. Strings tied perfectly, getting up to adjust his uncomfortable but elegant trousers, smooth out wrinkles in his shirt, and fix his dark hair that tickled his forehead.

“Seonghwa-ya!”

Backpack placed on the ground, a dark and warm coat, button after button to close it and protect himself from the cold, the same trembling hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The backpack back over his shoulder – it was heavy, filled to the brim, full of all the small things he cared about – the bag resting on the suitcase, balanced well since Seonghwa needed to pull it behind him, the transport box with a scared Mito clutched in the hand that wasn’t holding the suitcase. Car keys taken from the ashtray – the ghost of Hongjoong’s past habit – that had been turned into a place where they could leave all they needed and slipped inside one of the pockets of his coat.

“Seonghwa-ya!”

Not far from him, near the entrance, an object was thrown against the wall. It had almost exploded, shattered by the force of the hand that had grasped it and then let it go. Seonghwa had flinched and clutched Mito’s transport box to himself, startled by the clattering and clicking noise he heard and by the sudden movement made by the bunny inside. When he had turned slightly and lowered his gaze, he had seen Hongjoong’s camera gutted at his feet, with the precious film unrolled not far from his shoes and pieces – the inner workings, nerves and organs of that unforgiving machine – scattered all the way to the door.

Seonghwa had not answered, startled. He should have worn his scarf, it was cold outside. He couldn’t remember whether he had left it at the door or stuffed it hastily into his suitcase, into his backpack, into his bag.

“There it goes! The object you loathe! My entire life! The thing you are so scared and jealous of! You are the one who’s killing my art! You are crippling me with your continuous whining! You are distracting me from the beauty of the outside world! You want to drain me, to chain me and keep me only to yourself!”

“Stop it, please. Don’t raise your voice, it’s late and our neighbours are probably already asleep. You are scaring me, Hongjoong-ah… You are scaring Mito and –”

“I smashed it! What else do I have to do? What else do you want from me? I killed what I love the most to keep you by my side. Can’t you see that I’d do anything for you, Seonghwa-ya? Please, Seonghwa-ya! Please, listen to me, Seonghwa-ya, you have to believe me!”

I killed what I love the most to keep you by my side.

The words had died in Seonghwa’s throat. He was sure that he couldn’t remember what specific thoughts had flashed inside his mind upon hearing Hongjoong’s bitter sentences, thrown at him as if they had been sharp daggers, aimed to hurt and, possibly, kill. He just remembered that he had started crying as he had opened the door, heart heavy with the sudden realisation of what his friends and family had been telling him for months: photography was what Hongjoong loved the most, not him.

“Pick up the pieces of the camera on your own and clean the mess you made by yourself. I won’t be here to clean after you anymore.”

Then, before closing the door, ominous words that had had the strength of an ancient curse.

“Your art is going to die a slow death without me, Hongjoong-ssi.”

It didn’t, it survived, tenacious and strong, resilient and able to reinvent itself and take different forms and shapes.

The night sky of the fourth picture that was hanging on the wall in front of him stared back at him, it was the same night sky that had welcomed him, watched him neatly put his suitcase, bag, backpack and transport box in the car and then start the engine, it had witnessed his slow words whispered to the bunny he was taking with him – so reassuring, as if he were trying to help himself by blurting out his worries and cancelling them with sugar-coated words: don’t be scared, Mito-ya, we are going to go home, our real home, this is the place where we will be staying for some time until I figure out things, my mother will take great care of us, she loves us, don’t be too scared of the car, please, this is going to be a long drive, I’m sorry Mito-ya, I know it’s late, I didn’t know what else to do for me, for us – and the way his car had ran away from that building, house, flat, destined never to return.

Then that window had lost sight of him: Seonghwa had no longer watered the plants, cleaned the windows, washed the curtains, sat alone in the living room, studied at the kitchen table, cooked, and waited silently for the man he loved to come to him. It hadn’t seen him drive back to Jinju on his own, stopping a couple of times to cry his eyes out and wait for his hands to stop shaking, videocall San – who had just finished training and had kept him company, listening to him, while he had a shower and then returned home – and then go home to his mother. A two-hour drive, Jinju was far; it had seemed almost unreachable.

That night had been the last time that the window of Hongjoong’s apartment had seen him. It remembered that day and it grieved his loss.

– 📸 –

Seonghwa couldn’t rationally explain why it had been so difficult – and had taken him so long – to sever his relationship with Hongjoong.

Even after six months, all the conclusions he had come to seemed to give him only a part of the truth and never the whole motivation, still foggy and hidden behind layers of his mind he dared not touch and places he dared not explore on his own. Those were the realms of incomprehensible thoughts, where memories of his previous lover that had never been unearthed still rested and the many sensations – contradictory ones, scary ones – that Hongjoong had awakened in him still rested, unbothered.

No one had ever asked him, no one had ever intruded and interrupted his profound silence, but sometimes Seonghwa would have preferred it if they had, in a clumsy attempt to rip him out of the shell he had slowly assembled around himself, brushing off everything as if the year-and-nine-month relationship hadn’t left still festering wounds in his stomach, chest and brain. He was still actively dealing with the aftermath of what he had done and what had been done to him.

I believe in giving people second chances, hyung, I truly do. San had told him once, in front of the sizzling meat he was cooking and a bottle of soju, right after one of their small movie dates. But not every relationship deserves to be saved, not when one of the two people involved completely lacks effort and forces the other to shoulder every burden.

Back then, Seonghwa had wanted to correct San and simply state that, even though he seemed cold and disinterested, Hongjoong wasn’t the type of man he was describing with his straightforward words. Yet he hadn’t been able to. He had simply stared at San with his lips slightly parted and his chopsticks not far from his lips while all his thoughts and emotions had shifted into place and formed a grotesque final truth that Seonghwa hadn’t been able to ignore anymore.

He hadn’t been able to defend Hongjoong because he was indefensible. Seonghwa had been forced to admit that Hongjoong was exactly the type of man San had been talking about that day, and he had suddenly felt lost in the small and hidden restaurant they had chosen because it was quiet and the food was good and the owner was a dear friend of his father.

Leaving hadn’t been easy. Emotions, experiences, memories: Seonghwa was still able to evoke clear images of their time spent together, treasured moments that shone brightly enough to eclipse the darker reactions, the strangest excuses and the sharpest words. The scale had never been calibrated correctly.

In the end, Seonghwa had learnt a frightening lesson: he needed to love and to be loved, and he had hoped that the warmth he had felt in Hongjoong’s hands during the first months of their relationship would come back one day if he had the patience to wait. Infused in the camera, the warmth had disappeared and those fingers had turned cold against his skin.

The camera was kind, the camera with its lens, the machine that stopped a subject in a specific period and trapped them inside a frame, the eye that perverted and created a copy of something that already existed, mimicking it. Hongjoong had come to love the copy more than he loved the original, a living and breathing human being who wanted nothing but to talk to him and go to sleep by his side every night for the rest of his life.

Leaving had required strong confidence and high self-esteem, all characteristics that Seonghwa never possessed, already mauled by a turbulent adolescence and a terrifying past relationship. His brain had always found it easier to believe that there couldn’t have been a way for him to escape his circumstances on his own, that solutions to what he had been forced to go through had never existed. Deep down, some parts of his mind had worked to convince him that his requests, desires and questions had been what had caused his life with Hongjoong to crack and then rot.

He had had another relationship before Hongjoong, other scars left by another monster who had found a gullible and innocent prey with no previous experiences and thus no perception of what kind of boundaries could be set in a healthy relationship.

Stumbling into a cold and manipulative man once might have been a terrible twist of fate, but finding himself for the second time in the arms of someone so fickle and manipulative seemed too absurd, too strange, too specific to be a simple coincidence. You are the disgusting one in the relationship, his mind had often told him and continued to tell him, You pour your guilt onto them to hide, but you are the monster, not the men you love, it was powerful and persuasive, They hurt you only when you force them to defend themselves and you don’t even notice.

And then, he had invested so much time in that relationship. He had believed and hoped so much that he hadn’t had the strength to let go of what he had built with so much effort, all alone. He was always trying to tell himself that the worst days would pass and that better days would come, that he just had to grit his teeth and try harder, that he would be able to charm Hongjoong once again, like he had done when he had caught his attention when they had met.

And then there were photographs between them, the terror of robbing Hongjoong of his art and taking away such a fundamental part of his expression, damaging him irreversibly. It was hard to be a muse, it was hard to hear the metallic sound of a photo being taken at the most random moments, it was strange to live with his heart beating in his throat, with the knowledge that he could be photographed at any moment, even the most private or simple ones. He had only realised it afterwards, but he had risked losing his sense of self and turning into what Hongjoong wanted to see, to yield to the camera’s eye and turn into an image, a copy of what he truly was

The fourth and last room.

PEOPLE: human beings in general or considered collectively; we cross countless people during our short existence and each one of them holds an entire world in their hands. Who comes to stay? Who leaves marks? Who simply disappears? Where do the people we love go when they leave us behind?

People around him, in the photographs. Faces, details, shoulders, objects with complex meanings, the presence of other people even when the photographs were seemingly empty, strangers, all the shades and colours of human relationships. It was strange to see the way Hongjoong’s camera lens was able to capture such a wide range of emotions with a profound delicacy, disturbing when Seonghwa thought instead of the dryness of the reactions and the weight of the words coming out of the photographer’s lips.

It really seemed as if Hongjoong only knew how to live by filtering the world through his photography. He lived believing that the outside world was an enemy and stranger that needed to be observed with a mechanical eye. And perhaps what Seonghwa had always thought was true after all: Hongjoong only knew how to love in the instant of a photograph and his affection found its outlet in the way he trapped people and feelings inside a frame. Nothing remained in the real world: everything – from the photograph to the thoughts in our minds to feelings – started with mimicry and reproduction.

Love always seemed so easy for everyone around him; Hongjoong had made it feel complex and taxing. Some people had it worse than them and still had known how to stick together without hurting each other to face the adversities the world had placed in their path, guided by a pure and steadfast feeling. Seonghwa had never had anything similar, an anchor to cling to or a refuge to hide in, a place to call home and return to at any time or a warm hand to grab to look for support when he stumbled.

As he eyed the photographs warily – he wasn’t being paranoid or self-conscious, he was sure of his feelings by now: people’s gazes were curious and insistent and many eyes were glued to him, making him feel like a macabre experiment to observe, a picture and not a living and breathing person – he couldn’t help but think of some of his friends.

San and Wooyoung: the first professional athlete, proud member of the taekwondo national team and taekwondo teacher, the second backup dancer in a medium-sized company who worked with idols and was a member of a well-known dance crew. San had to watch his weight with strict diets, exercise regularly and spend long hours at the gym, he had to take care of his young students and keep a healthy mindset when competitions were approaching. Wooyoung lived in dance studios, his mind and body were quick to learn choreography and his job required him to be perfect and synchronised even when the spotlights weren’t shining on him, he had toured with his crew as backup dancers recently and had been overseas for three months.

Love didn’t tear them apart, their affection was a delicate form of worship.

Yunho and Mingi: the first dance teacher and choreographer for one of the most important companies in the entertainment industry, the second freelance music producer and songwriter. Yunho devoted half of his heart to his job and carefully crafted choreographies taking care of minuscule details, he wore his body out in front of mirrors and corrected people until their performance was flawless. Mingi heard music in his mind and was able to give it life through complex software, gifting pieces of his heart to strangers who would lend him their voices. Both of them were carefully hidden behind some masterpieces that had reached fame or gone viral on social media, silent creators of skilful moves and words.

Then Mingi had started to struggle with anxiety and as time passed it had almost become crippling, unbearable, and impossible to live with. He had sought professional help and paused the gruelling work hours he had always forced himself to follow. Yunho hadn’t run away when confronted with so much sorrow and Mingi hadn’t hidden himself when plagued by a nameless monster.

Love didn’t suffocate them, their relationship was a gleaming string that connected them and reminded them that the other would always be by their side, no matter what.

Yeosang and Jongho: the first studying law at Seoul National University, the second vocal coach in a medium-sized company who also recorded guides for artists. Yeosang attended all his classes and managed to stay on top of his courses while working absurd hours at an internet cafè not far from the university, he devoted most of his time to his passion and education and set a brutal studying pace whenever the looming shadow of exams started to appear. Jongho worked strange hours and had managed to turn his biggest passion into a job that didn’t pay him as well as he had first expected, but he was still understanding, he had time to wait and grow.

Love didn’t turn them cold even though they didn’t live together, their affection was polite and warm, a strong hug after a tiring day and receptive ears ready to listen to worries while hands washed the tiredness away.

Seonghwa had failed where they had succeeded. His love hadn’t lasted the year, it had withered and died a horrible death in front of his eyes, it had sucked the light out of his eyes and the strength out of his limbs. He was sure all his friends had had to endure more, suffer more, make compromises to grow together.

The word together was the key.

Seonghwa’s hardships had been multiplied because he had always been alone facing them, driven to think that he was exaggerated in the force of the emotions he felt, that he was being too dramatic in his reactions, that he was acting impulsively whenever he asked for clarifications, that he was being unnecessarily sad and difficult to deal with when he asked for more love, attention, consideration. When he thought about it rationally, it all became clear: he was sure that he had been the only one who had encountered a dangerous love with fangs that one day kissed his skin reverently and the day after drank his blood.

It was annoying to have people’s eyes glued on him, strange gazes that seemed to want to eviscerate him. Perhaps it was Seonghwa who was beginning to collapse on himself among the photographs of people he didn’t recognise and who often didn’t even show their faces and appeared as nameless figures in a world of shadows and fog, but the perception that the observers in that room – with more or less familiar names plastered on some walls to decorate the pictures left purposely without captions – were watching him and him alone, not paying attention to anything that was offered to them through the photographs, was suffocating.

A real person in a world of images. What a sight he must’ve been.

On the side of one wall, directly opposite Seonghwa, was a small mirror resting on the floor that reflected only the shoes of the people in the room but which, with a little inventiveness, would be able to reveal a person in full if only the observers paid more attention to it and stopped treating it as a passive object to be looked at and not touched. Yet, while the photographs gave back their images of death and a long-lost past, the mirror gave back life enclosed in a reflection, the fluidity of movement and the beauty of change.

There were words decorating it: it was Hongjoong’s handwriting, the syllables had been engraved on the mirror with coloured markers and embellished with a pair of arrows and a drawing of a flower that Seonghwa immediately recognised as a marigold. Autumn flowers, they bloomed when everything else in the world seemed to wither and die. Hongjoong’s fiery flowers.

FOLLOW YOUR STEPS. REVEAL YOUR TRUE SELF.

Seonghwa squatted down and watched the mirror give him back his full image, when he moved the reflection moved, when he smiled the reflection immediately smiled back; a reproduction, a reflection, but not infused with the essence of nostalgia and doomed to immortality. White sneakers he had cleaned the day before, the flattering blue jeans that looked like they had been sewn especially for him, the soft, comfortable jumper with blue and white horizontal stripes, the dark long hair that fell over his eyes and forehead even though he had tried to tuck it behind his ears.

A body, a person, alive.

For a long time, shaped by the mechanical gaze of Hongjoong’s camera that had twisted his perception of himself, all he had seen while looking at photographs where he was the main subject or while catching a glimpse of his skin in the mirror was a body. Flesh, imperfections, bones, skin; nothing more. Only when he had put distance between himself and the devouring lens that both flattered and destroyed him, he had started to recognise the person behind it: someone to laugh and share memories with, a friend who knew how to dispense love and comfort.

Seonghwa took the phone he kept in his pocket and unlocked it, gently pressing on the camera app. He took a picture of himself, following the rhythm he wanted, letting himself be observed by an eye that didn’t judge and didn’t seek any kind of perfection or superior form of expression. His hands held the phone, his face was half hidden behind the screen, the silver and purple Kuromi cover he had bought himself a couple of months earlier as a gift shone in all its beauty. Those had been his steps, that was his true and unfiltered self.

He paused for a couple of seconds, looking at his reflection. How much more beautiful the photograph saved on his phone’s memory would be if he had any of his friends on his side, how much more delicate and fuller of affection. But he had decided to visit the exhibition without saying anything to anyone, he had booked a single ticket from one day to the next and had gone there in the deepest silence, aware that all his friends would criticise his choice harshly.

Wooyoung and San in particular had cut off any kind of contact with Hongjoong since Seonghwa had broken off their relationship and refused to mention him or pronounce his name in positive contexts. Seonghwa disliked the insults and the harsh words. San had relented but sometimes Wooyoung’s mouth was still treacherous and revealed what he really thought of Hongjoong. It still hurt, hearing someone he had loved defined in that way and knowing those harsh words he never dared to pronounce out loud were a perfect description of what he had experienced.

Having finished visiting the main room, Seonghwa followed with his eyes the many images showing flashes of a life he was no longer part of but had known. Hongjoong’s brother in a dance studio in an eerie and breathtaking play of light and mirrors enhanced by the elegance of the pose in which he had been captured, Hongjoong’s father from behind playing the guitar in the living room, a stranger looking out of the window at a clear blue sky, the beautiful and long black hair of Kyungmoon – one of Hongjoong’s closest friends – standing out against the huge monitor he was working on, two girls gave their backs to the camera while walking through the streets of Seoul holding hands, Hongjoong himself in the darkroom of his flat while he developed his films, his silhouette barely visible thanks to the reddish glow of the only light in the room.

Seonghwa rounded the last corner convinced he would find the end of the exhibition, perhaps with a small shop with some postcards or tote bags or useless gadgets that he would surely want to buy – he always spent too much money in museum shops, everyone always reproached him for it – but which he would certainly regret, vehicles of deep sadness and nostalgia.

Instead, he was confronted by the strange reflection of himself, on the wall, by his face and his jumper with blue and white horizontal stripes, his blue jeans and his long, dark hair that fell over his forehead even though he had tucked it behind his ears. He recognised the green grass symbolic of a mild spring, the light blue sky free from its usual white clouds, the wooden fence over which some climbing plant had tried to creep, the majestic tree that guarded the garden and the houses of the neighbours; it was a place he had not set foot in for a long time – more than six months – and that he would never see again in his life.

Never again would he lie on the soft grass to watch the stars under the summer sky at Hongjoong’s side and hear him whisper while talking about the most mundane things, never again would he have breakfast or dinner at the small table in the garden while the sun was starting to awaken or was slowly falling behind the horizon, never again would he have a genuine conversations with Hongjoong’s parents – kind souls, hard-working people – never again would he observe the tree not far away or the flowers growing wildly, small bits of nature that Hongjoong’s mother took care of when she had time.

In a photograph slightly larger than the others to which the entire final wall had been dedicated, showing his face and his features in its entirety for the first time, Seonghwa saw a version of himself that no longer existed, a strange ghost that wore the exact same clothes he had chosen that morning, trapped inside the frame while being neither dead nor alive, suspended in the liminal space of a heartfelt photograph, taken without paying too much attention to technicalities.

He recognised himself in the image in front of him – a person who hadn’t changed in the slightest since that photograph was taken, after five months of their relationship – but at the same time he saw a stranger he had killed and buried long ago, turning an important page in his life with immense effort. The remnants of what he had been were plastered on a wall for everyone to see and had come back to life to haunt him.

What hurt the most, what filled his lungs with venom and made him take a couple of steps forward to read the caption under the photograph, was the sudden realisation that he was seeing himself from the outside, he was seeing himself through Hongjoong’s eyes and camera lenses once again. He was happy and carefree in the garden of the house owned by Hongjoong’s parents, he had a gentle smile on his lips that softened his generally sharp and intimidating features, his likeness trapped in a moment when he didn’t yet know what would overwhelm him and how much pain he would have to endure.

A photograph as a memory, serving the purpose of keeping a moment alive and crystallising him in an eternal bubble.

The people’s eyes fixed on him had meaning, the questions he had been asked had a reason. It must have felt strange – disturbing even, or disquieting at least – to see the subject of a photograph freely roam the exhibition that should have contained him and encased him inside the rectangle that delimited the perimeter of a photograph, as if his presence had leaked out from the edges of the frame and dripped down the wall to touch the real world. Reawakened, his stillness had been traded for a new life.

He bent down slightly and read the title of the photograph that closed the exhibition.

MARS – THE BRIGHTEST STAR

“You are the brightest star for me, Seonghwa-ya.”

Seonghwa had smiled and barely turned to look at Hongjoong, seated on one of the three remaining wooden chairs that belonged to the table set up in the garden of the house, a quiet place to breathe, rest, share food and laugh. A small oasis of tranquillity away from the hustle and bustle of the city, Seonghwa loved the house where Hongjoong’s parents lived and he had come to love them as well. The preparation hadn’t been easy: just a couple of hours before he had sat in the car next to Hongjoong while taking deep breaths and frantically trying to convince himself that he was worth meeting the family of the person he was growing to love, shaken by the idea of meeting someone’s parents.

He came from a relationship where the other person didn’t want anyone – friends, parents, relatives, acquaintances – to know of his existence and where he was constantly scolded and harshly reproached just because he had dared to demand more: more attention, more respect, more love, more time together, more dignity. Meeting someone’s parents had slowly become a terrifying thought to overcome and even after months, even if Hongjoong had never belittled him or made him feel ashamed, he still heard the echoes of fragile rejections, of a low voice telling him that there was no point in letting anyone know and that others shouldn’t have cared about their relationship.

The man had used him – Seonghwa a bright-eyed young man consumed by first love, a naive heart to betray, a warm body to use as he pleased and then dispose of – and had then cheated and abandoned him without any remorse, throwing salt onto the wounds he had opened: Seonghwa should never have thought their relationship was serious, he wanted to get married, he wanted not to be ashamed of the person he was with, he wanted to have a family, to have children.

Hongjoong’s parents, they had been kind, respectful and warm-hearted towards him. Seonghwa had gone there for a family lunch and had also met Hongjoong’s older brother, spending a different day surrounded by a family he couldn’t call his, but who was just as gentle and understanding as his own back in Jinju. Lulled by the warm spring sun in a silent garden decorated with colourful and delicate flowers, he had almost felt at home, protected by the fence and guarded by the plants and flowers.

The rest of the family had been watching a movie in the living room, and Hongjoong had proposed to stay in the garden and have some time alone. He had retrieved his things and started drawing on his sketchbook with markers, crayons, pencils, stickers and pens scattered on the table, threatening to slip between the planks and fall into the lawn. Seonghwa had already bent down three times to collect them, Hongjoong had thanked him with a sincere smile, humming his tune, drawing his lines.

“Your name backwards is Mars, you truly are made of stars.”

“Stop it with your flattery, Hongjoong-ah. You don’t have to win me over anymore.”

Seonghwa looked at the photograph in front of him. It belonged to another part of him, to another life he had lived and then discarded, slowly peeling off all that had become too tight and suffocating. The sob was born in his stomach and rattled his chest long before he could notice it, his throat failed to stifle it and it left his lips in a strange hiccup. He coughed once, coughed twice and then buried his face in his hands, hiding his eyes, obfuscating his vision, blocking out the presence of that photograph.

The tears that streamed down his face wetted his hands. He felt them against his palms, on his cheeks, inside his lips and over his tongue. His shoulders shivered and trembled with every breath he tried to take. The self-portrait that emerged from the picture plastered in front of him – the picture everyone had seen and some people had recognised him from – told a haunting story: the past encapsulated inside it told him that what once took place may never be given to him in the present and may never be brought before his gaze.

Nevertheless, the photograph was asking him to think of the remains of what couldn’t come under the present anymore. It bespoke a strange kind of horror: it told the history of the person Hongjoong had met, a person that didn’t exist anymore and had slowly turned into a shadow, a ghost, an apparition, an inconsistent image inside films and frames, fleeting in his presence and yet always so strong thanks to the camera’s ability to capture his likeness.

Seonghwa knew that the images were empty. Everything he had once been for Hongjoong had ceased to exist, turned into a photograph, a cold and unresponsive piece of paper.

“If I had been an idol or a famous person, maybe this name would’ve had its own charm, but it has no special meaning in my life. It’s just my name.”

“It’s who you are and it’s beautiful. It suits you.”

Seonghwa had brought his chair close enough to the table to lean on it. He had placed one arm on the hard wooden surface and rested his head over it to be level with Hongjoong, bent over his sketchbook and concentrated on the drawing that was slowly appearing on the paper. He had looked at Hongjoong for a long time – the soft dark hair that covered his forehead, the vivid eyes filled with a mischievous and lively beauty, the thin, pointy nose that gave his face a strange and almost magical beauty, the shape of his lips that were always soft and sometimes curved downwards slightly – and he had thought he was beautiful.

That he was his and would forever be.

Hongjoong had stopped drawing when he had felt Seonghwa’s steady gaze on him and had reciprocated, looking at him with a light in his eyes that Seonghwa had never seen again, his irises turning into the mirror of his soul for a split second and showcasing a personal and deep world that Seonghwa hadn’t known could exist. Always hidden under a different façade, that side of Hongjoong resurfaced only when they were skin against skin, at the peak of their vulnerability or when pleasure was about to take over him.

Seonghwa had moved closer and had placed his lips on Hongjoong’s cheek in a sincere and simple kiss that had turned into a small giggle, then into a silent smile that had lasted long seconds and had contained the whole world, then into another longer and sweeter kiss left on his lips, with his eyes closed, holding his breath, accompanied by the muffled sound of the pencil rolling on the wooden surface and then falling on the grass with a thud.

“You are so beautiful. I want to take a photograph.”

Hongjoong had said.

“Lean back on your chair and pose for me, please, like you did the night we met.”

Hongjoong had said.

“This is going to be a personal photograph to keep in my wallet, but if people could see how beautiful you are, if they could see how bright you shine, they would adore you as much as I do.”

Hongjoong had said as he had turned around to rummage in the bag next to his chair, taking out the camera that Seonghwa had loved and that had loved Seonghwa back with the force of a thousand flashes and rapid cuts.

“If I developed the photograph and included it in my future exhibition, it would immediately become the most popular image, the most powerful, the one that would attract the attention of every viewer. You are so charming in front of the camera. It gives you even more power, you are even more beautiful, you are more special.”

In front of the photograph, included in an exhibition as the final work of art to stare at and interpret, able to evoke emotions in most of the observers and captivate everyone, from children to elderly people, Seonghwa desperately tried to wipe away his years. The small rings he was wearing brushed against his skin and the fuzzy fabric of his jumper tickled his eyes.

He sniffled and tried to regain his composure, aware that there were a couple of people who were looking at him, taking in the sight of the photographed subject witnessing itself and living – breathing – outside the constraints of the frame. The subject watched the subject turned into an object and it became an object once again in the eyes of those who watched his reactions.

To photograph meant to appropriate the thing photographed. It meant putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that felt like knowledge and, therefore, like power. Hongjoong had always been right: all photographs were terrifying memento mori, to take a photograph was to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

The night the photograph had been taken, while Seonghwa had still struggled to catch his breath and tuck himself back inside his boxers and Hongjoong had unceremoniously tried to clean him with a couple of thin tissues and hasty gestures, he had heard the words he had been waiting for, blurted out with little to no sentimentalism.

“There’s something I want to tell you.”

Hongjoong had said, tucking a strand of hair behind Seonghwa’s ear and leaving a soft and chaste kiss on his still-parted lips.

“It had never happened to me before, but I think I’m in love with you, Seonghwa-ya.”

Somewhere inside the picture, the being Hongjoong had loved was not separated from itself. On the contrary, it coincided, and the sudden coincidence gave life to an ungovernable and inexplicable metamorphosis. Through the tears, Seonghwa was finally seeing himself: he was shedding all his masks, one after the other, until they vanished completely and revealed his true bare soul, ageless but not timeless, unwavering, forever engraved in a picture that had never been meant to be shown to the outside world.

Seonghwa livened the photograph by standing in front of it, the photograph breathed a new life inside Seonghwa’s lungs by letting his eyes roam over it to rediscover himself.

– 📸 –

Seonghwa stood in front of a wall plastered with sticky notes of all colours and small photographs. All those who visited the exhibition were encouraged to leave a message or snap a simple picture with the Polaroid camera placed on the nearby table, lying alongside sticky notes of all kinds, tape, pens and markers. At a glance, Seonghwa saw everything: pictures, people posing together, someone snapping and then hanging on the wall a Polaroid picture of their favourite photographs, simple messages that were no longer than a couple of lines, sticky notes taped together to contain longer messages, an explosion of colours and tapes, small drawings.

With eyes still damp, suddenly self-conscious in his favourite striped jumper, he approached the wall to let his eyes wander over the many colours and faces inside the framed Polaroids, hoping to find some words that could prickle him and read some of the messages left.

I visited your first exhibition and will be there until your last.

Congratulations on your second photography exhibition, showcasing the beauty of the world seen through your eyes, I hope you’ll never lose the sparkle that helps people open their eyes and stare at a new world still mysterious to many. Always live your emotions to the fullest and with so much passion. Always be happy, my dear Joongie, dad loves you very much and is proud of you.

Sumin and Jinsik were here for you, Hyung!! You really are cool !! 😛

You have done well, Kim Hongjoong-ssi <3

My darling, my youngest son, I’ll have a look at your exhibition and then ask you to explain to me all the meanings behind your beautiful pictures. Mom will always cheer for you from behind, even when you can’t see or hear her! ❤️

Seonghwa moved away, approaching the table. So many people loved Hongjoong, a dull reminder that he too had tried and failed miserably, almost blatantly. His simple and pathetic attempt at loving someone had harmed him and turned grotesque.

Seonghwa took a deep breath and took the small blue Polaroid camera with a squirrel keyring attached to it. He lifted it above himself and pointed the dark eye – black, deep, still, cynical, rational, hungry for beauty, devoid of reactions and emotions but able to judge and shape one’s perception of oneself – at himself. He saw himself reflected in it as he tried to smile, with his cheeks a bit too puffy and his eyes a bit too swollen. Then the flash hit him and the instant camera threw up the usual small rectangle of paper with its delicate white outline and the image hidden by a deep veil of darkness that would only recede later.

A photograph, but on his own terms.

Seonghwa placed the small photograph on the table and gave it the time it needed to appear and reveal the image trapped inside. He picked up a dark pen after choosing a pink sticky note to write on and then bent slightly over the table to bring his message to life, slowly caressing the paper and gifting it syllables.

In the photograph that appeared inside the frame he was looking at the camera lens and smiling softly, some lock of hair falling over his eyes, his head slightly tilted to the right. Then the pink sticky note with his neat handwriting on it: If you ever want to take one last picture of your lost muse, you still know where to find the brightest among the stars.

He approached the wall, determined to hang what he wanted to leave behind for Hongjoong and then return home, prepare a hot dinner, take a shower, think about the day that would come and what he would do with his children in class. He attached the sticky note with care and then took the roll of lilac tape he had chosen to place the photograph next to his message.

And then something occurred to him.

He didn’t understand why he felt the need to leave behind something so meaningful on the wall of an exhibition for everyone to see. He didn’t understand why he had to leave something behind in the first place. He stopped in his tracks, looked at the photograph, glanced at the sticky note and tore it down with a sudden rapid movement. He folded it, leaving the message trapped inside and let it slip inside the pocket of his jeans accompanied by the photograph he had taken of himself.

He wasn’t giving Hongjoong one last chance. He wasn’t leaving behind one last picture of himself. He wasn’t giving the self-absorbed photographer the satisfaction of seeing his likeness engraved inside a frame one last time.

He went back to the table and picked up a pen while his mother’s voice echoed between his thoughts and shaped them as he wrote. The person who made you feel unlovable isn’t worth loving, Seonghwa-ya. She had told him once when she had caught him crying in his room, just a couple of days after Seonghwa had knocked at her door late at night, with his suitcase and bag and backpack and with Mito’s transport box. He was not your soulmate or the love of your life, he was just another person in the path of your life who didn’t know how to cherish you. He lost his chance at loving you or being loved by you when he took you for granted and mistreated you in the name of his art.

Seonghwa went back to the wall and pressed the sticky note firmly against the wall to make it stick. He read it one last time and barely smiled as he saw his message submerged in other myriads of words. Not special, not personal, just words in a river of praises and love.

Sometimes people are not right for us, hyung, no matter how badly you want them to be. It doesn’t mean that you are the one who’s unlovable or strange or broken, it just means that you two weren’t meant to work out and be together. Wooyoung had once told him two months after he had severed all the ties that kept him connected to Hongjoong. Seonghwa had been invited to the flat he shared with San for a movie night, a sort of small celebration that was meant to ease the pain before the departure that would bring him overseas with his crew and the group they danced for. That’s okay, it happens. Hongjoong-hyung wasn’t the right fit for you, you were incompatible and were looking for different things.

Seonghwa turned around and walked out of the exhibition to talk to the nice young woman who had welcomed him and given him the number to retrieve his jacket and scarf. He would bury the person he had been, the Seonghwa inside the photograph, underneath layers of clothes. He refused to be an unearthed corpse and feed a dead emotion, he loathed the idea of being a ghost in a shadow theatre orchestrated by Hongjoong’s camera.

Never again.

One last message, left behind.

You did great, Hongjoong-ssi. We did what we could for us.

– MARS, the brightest star