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You ask where it hurts, and he says—
Everywhere.
“Everywhere?” you ask.
“Everywhere,” he says.
But…how can it hurt everywhere?
How is that fair?
—
He slips away from you on a cold February morning, his hand clutched in yours, hurting everywhere. You didn’t understand how he could hurt everywhere, even at the very end, but you think you understand now. You think you understand as the wind freezes your tears and the sky spits out flurries of snow and your chest aches in a way that spreads through each of your veins, sinking into the marrow of your bones.
It hurts everywhere.
And it’s not fair. It just is.
—
“Luka,” Hyuna murmurs to herself. With each step, bare feet crushing the artificial grass beneath them, “Luka, Luka.” Like the beat of a song, like the beat of a heart. Like the steps to a dance shared by two underneath a warm sun. Luka, Luka, Luka.
“Hyu-na,” comes the reply, each syllable carefully pronounced. “Hyu-na, Hyu-na.” Chanted thrice to fit the time signature. Six beats total. And then repeat.
She meets him at the bottom of the hill, throwing herself into his open arms so they both go tumbling to the ground. The light above is blinding and the grass is soft and Luka makes a quiet oof sound as he goes down.
“Luka, Luka, Luka,” Hyuna says.
“Hyuna, Hyuna, Hyuna” he replies. He touches his fingers to her cheeks, and they are ice-cold, but she allows them to linger. To trace out her features as if he hasn’t done this a hundred times before. Thumb along her cheekbone, index finger to the bridge of her nose, Luka watches his own movements against Hyuna’s face with awe shining in his eyes.
“Hyuna, Hyuna, Hyuna” he repeats.
“Luka, Luka, Luka,” she says.
“You’re real.”
Hyuna giggles. “Of course I’m real!” It’s her turn to touch his face now, and she carefully places her thumb against the delicate skin under his eye. “You’re real, too.”
Luka grins like the sun.
—
“Luka,” you whisper, “Luka, Luka.”
Like a plea. Like a prayer.
No response comes from the gravestone. You thought, after three months, it would stop hurting so much. You thought, maybe, it wouldn’t hurt everywhere.
But,
—
“Like this,” Hyun-woo says, and it’s paired with a light tug on Hyuna’s hair. She wants to look back and watch, but she knows the twisting and turning only makes it harder, and Luka doesn’t know how to braid hair at all. So she remains resolutely still.
“Like this?” Luka asks.
“No, like—”
“Oh!”
“Yeah.”
Hyuna taps her fingertips together.
“It’s like,” Luka says, “one-two-three, one-two-three. Like…” (one tug) “Hyu–” (two tugs) “–na” (three tugs) “Hyu–” (one tug) “–na” (two tugs) “Hyu–” (three tugs) “–na!”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Hyun-woo chides, but Hyuna can hear the smile in his voice, and she’s smiling too. Luka continues braiding, muttering the rhythm under his breath. Hyuna, Hyu-na, Hyuna. One-two-three, one-two-three.
Like a dance.
Like the three of them. Woven together. Inseparable.
—
In your memory, you see your brother in the driver’s seat of the car, skull crushed in, face bloodied and bruised beyond all recognition. You remember nothing apart from that. Not even the mangling of your leg.
In your dreams, you see your lover glowing like the spring sun. He lies in your bed, reaching out for you, but the moment he gets too close, blood begins seeping from his eyes. Down his cheeks, staining porcelain skin, and in an instant, he has gone cold.
In the mirror, you see yourself. Bags under your eyes. Fingernails chewed down to the quick, until your skin breaks beneath your own teeth. The traces of blood left behind on your lips are as close to full-circle as you can get.
—
When the teacher says to partner up, Luka makes a beeline for Hyuna.
Hyun-woo looks at her.
She turns away from him and takes Luka’s hand instead.
—
You spend the night of your high school graduation in the hospital, keeping someone else company. The doctors say he is bed-bound, and they also told you only family could stay overnight. But you are the best family he has, and he gets out of bed to dance with you in the dark. Swaying slowly in time with the music playing from his phone.
One-two-three, one-two-three.
He presses his face against your shoulder. You forget your brother is at the graduation ceremony alone.
—
“The steps are like us,” Luka notes. When Hyuna gives him a look of confusion, he elaborates: “Hyuna, Hyu-na, Hyuna. Luka, Lu-ka, Luka.”
It’s the one-two-three one-two-three pattern.
Hyuna’s lips split into a grin. Under her breath, on the next beat, she starts a chant of, “Luka, Lu-ka, Luka.”
Luka matches it with his own, “Hyuna, Hyu-na, Hyuna.”
—
He all but collapses back into the hospital bed, out of breath, but smiling like a madman.
“I can’t believe you,” you whisper. “This cannot be good for you.”
“Nothing is good for me,” he says, which is mostly true. He has more allergies than you could ever count and he’s spent half his life bedbound in either the hospital or hidden away in his bedroom at home. When he makes it to school, it is with a mask covering the bottom half of his face and a cane to aid his walking. On the worst days, he comes in a wheelchair, and you have to help him through some of the doorways.
“Nothing?” you challenge anyway.
“Nothing,” he confirms. Then falters. “Nothing, except for you.”
—
Through the haze of a fever, thoughts clouded by a migraine, unsure if he’s even awake, Luka asks, “Hyuna, would you still like me if I can never get better?”
She promises—
On your first anniversary, he speaks to you through glass, because it is too much of a risk for anyone apart from the doctors to enter his room, lest he get too sick to recover. He asks, “Will you still love me when you realize this is forever?”
You promise—
“Always.”
—
“What was the garden like?” Dewey asks.
Hyuna stares through the empty bottle in front of her. Studies the way it distorts the world. She could describe Anakt Garden in a thousand ways, but when viewed through the grief of nostalgia—
All she can recall is one-two-three, one-two-three. Luka, Hyuna, Hyun-woo.
Luka, Luka, Luka.
—
“You must have really loved him,” your friend says, when you’ve finally made your way out of the graveyard.
Of course you did. Although sometimes, you hated him too. Nothing in life is ever black-and-white; it’s all some muddled mess in between. But when he’s gone and you’re still here, it seems so obvious that through everything—
All you can recall is the love.
—
Warming up for her first round, Hyuna sings:
One-two-three, one-two-three.
And Luka joins in:
One-two-three, one-two-three.
A grim darkness has settled over Hyuna’s shoulders in the time since their graduation from Anakt Garden, but it’s alleviated momentarily by Luka’s voice sounding alongside hers. A song from long ago, composed in the dark, a lullaby for Luka’s worst days.
Hush, my child. Drift to sleep.
Luka, Lu-ka, Luka.
Hyuna, Hyu-na, Hyuna.
Luka holds a hand out, and Hyuna takes it. She spins him slowly, and steadies him when the dizziness nearly knocks him over anyway. It’s only a fleeting joy, and in Hyuna’s mind, her voice is thickened by her own blood clogging her throat.
The problem is,
Luka is her—
“You will never be happy with him,” your brother warns.
But your brother did not spend sleepless nights by your lover’s side, murmuring lullabies in harmony. He did not count the beats with a pencil against the palm of his hand, the one-two-three one-two-three waltz tempo, counting the syllables,
Hush, my child. Gentle, now…
“It isn’t about happiness,” you tell him. It’s half a lie, but your brother’s argument is only half the truth.
You are happy with your lover, but everyone knows it’s only a fleeting joy. His illness will kill him before you can have the life you want. It’s not that you will never be happy with him; it’s that, if you let yourself fall so deeply, you will never be happy without him.
The problem is,
he is your—
one and only weakness.
—
In the days after Alien Stage,
In the days after his passing,
it hurts everywhere.
“How can it hurt everywhere?” Isaac asks, peering at Hyuna’s thigh, where metal meets flesh.
She shrugs. “It just does.”
“How can it hurt everywhere?” your friend asks.
“You would be surprised,” you tell him, and you don’t elaborate any further.
(It’s not fair.
It just is.)
“Did you leave someone behind?”
“No,” Hyuna lies. “Leave me alone.”
You don’t know how to handle being the one left behind.
You find what solace you can at the bottom of a bottle, on the floor of your too-empty apartment.
A waltz has three beats per measure, but it is a dance meant for two.
If even one of them were still within reach—
—
The week before he dies, he asks you, “Will you find me in the next life?”
“You know I don’t believe in any of that bullshit.”
“But—” he looks at you with such earnestness, such adoration, that you can feel your worldview shifting on its axis. He takes your hand in his, fingers cold to the touch, skin too-pale and fingertips tinted blue. “I want to get it right next time,” he says.
The back of your throat aches. You will not cry. If you cry, you are mourning someone who is not yet dead, and if you waste your time mourning those who are not yet dead, you will never be happy.
“You got it right this time.”
“No, I mean…” he furrows his brow. His grip is so weak. It wasn’t always like this. There were times when he could get out of bed on his own—times when he could dance, sock-clad feet against the tiled floor, swaying to the beat of one-two-three one-two-three. “I want a do-over, in a better body than this one. A body that can live.”
You will not cry. You tell yourself, you will not cry.
But the tears build up in your eyes anyway.
“You have lived,” you tell him. “The time we’ve had together, and the time we have together still…is that not what it means to be alive?”
—
Hyuna slips away from Luka on a cold February evening, his body held in hers, hurting everywhere. She doesn’t understand how it can hurt everywhere, even at the very end; how is that fair? But here she is, pain spreading through each of her veins and up into her throat, sinking into the marrow of her bones, dying where she once nearly lost her life before.
In some far away place, the sky is spitting out flurries of something snow-like.
It hurts everywhere.
And it’s not fair. It just is.
Hyuna collapses, and Luka falls with her. Against her skin, he taps out, one-two-three, one-two-three. Like artificial sunlight, like fleeting joy. Luka, Luka, Luka. Hyuna, Hyuna, Hyuna.
“Hyuna,” he whispers against her fading pulse. “Hyuna, Hyuna.”
Luka, Luka, Luka, she thinks.
One-two-three, one-two-three.
Hush, my child. Drift to sleep.
“Find me in the next life, okay?” Cold fingers pressed to her cheek. It hurts everywhere. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll find me. We’ll get it right.”
An impossibility. But it imprints a final smile on Hyuna’s lips.
—
“It hurts everywhere,” he complains, rubbing his forehead with a pout.
She laughs at him, reaching out to fix his glasses. “How can it hurt everywhere?”
“It’s what my head does. You wouldn’t understand. No one does.”
She squints. Leans in closer. “Oh yeah? Try me!”
“I don’t think my body works right,” he admits. “It hurts all the time. My head especially. It throbs, like this—” he taps the side of her head three times.
She frowns. She copies the pattern, tapping her fingers against his arm. “It’s almost like a song,” she muses. “Like… one-two-three, one-two-three. You could make it into music.”
“Music?”
“Music!”
He laughs like sunlight, and she follows suit. He pokes her leg three times, one-two-three, and she does the same back to him.
One-two-three, one-two-three.
Luka, Lu-ka, Luka.
Hyuna, Hyu-na, Hyuna.
—
If we don’t get it right next time, Luka thinks
If we don’t get it right next time, you think
I’ll try again and again.
Endlessly.