Work Text:
September 23, 2028, Saturday
— 08:10 AM
There are places the light forgets to touch.
Quiet corners where time stood still, where dust danced in slow spirals, gathering like forgotten words. The air hung thick with the scent of turpentine and dreams—sharp, persistent, curling through the floorboards, clinging to the walls, to Taesan’s skin like something once-whispered. He lived there, in that space between color and silence, where the hours softened and brushstrokes summoned shapes that might’ve once breathed. The studio was not a room. It was a reliquary—one he built, layer by layer, in pigment and longing.
Mornings arrived gently, as if the world outside feared waking something fragile.
Pale light bled through linen curtains, thin and worn, laying soft shadows across the floor like faded memories. The hush was full-bodied, almost devotional. A candle flickered on the windowsill, the lavender and sandalwood scent winding through the air like a lullaby left behind. Its flame swayed faintly, as if dancing to a rhythm no one else could hear.
Taesan sat among it all, brush suspended mid-air, gaze far and focused.
“You always forget to put the cap back on the paint thinner.” The voice floated from behind him—soft, familiar, threaded through with quiet laughter. It filled the studio the way rain fills silence. Naturally, tenderly, like it had always been meant to return.
Taesan didn’t turn.
A small smile curved his lips. The brush kissed the canvas again with steady care, tracing the familiar slope of a shoulder, the arch of a collarbone. Not merely a portrait—no, never just that. It was Leehan. Woven into the fabric of the canvas like a prayer, drawn in hues that only Taesan could see clearly.
“Because I know you’ll remind me,” he murmured, the reply instinctive, worn smooth with use.
Leehan made a sound, it was a laugh blurred with a sigh. Taesan heard the faint padding of bare feet, the groan of wooden boards yielding beneath steps that didn’t break the stillness. Light skimmed the edges of his lover's form—a shimmer, a hush, skin kissed by sunlight and memory.
Leehan knelt beside him, his presence settling with the soft certainty of rain on old stone. Taesan didn’t look again—he never really needed to. He felt the press of a thumb beneath his jaw, the smear of Prussian blue it left behind. The touch anchored him. The familiarity steadied him. It had always been this way.
“You’re getting obsessive with the blue again,” Leehan murmured, voice low, amused.
Taesan dipped the brush once more, the blue deep and endless, the color of his yearning. He let it spill into the outline of Leehan’s form, letting it bleed, letting it breathe.
“It’s the color of your shadow,” he whispered.
Leehan tilted his head, eyes crinkling. “That sounds like one of those poems you used to scrawl on my arms.”
Taesan’s smile was quiet, almost boyish. “Maybe it is.”
Leehan chuckled under his breath, then leaned in closer. His thumb ghosted over Taesan’s cheekbone, smudging away a faint streak of paint with slow, practiced care. He worked gently, like he was afraid to press too hard—as if Taesan might vanish under the weight of his touch.
“You always get it on your face,” Leehan muttered, soft, fond. His fingers stayed.
Taesan turned into the contact, eyes fluttering shut for a moment. The chill of Leehan’s skin made him flinch—not from discomfort, but from the way it startled something quiet inside him. Cold, always cold.
But of course he was. Leehan’s hands had always been cold. Even in summer.
“Your hands are freezing again,” Taesan murmured, half-laughing. “Do you ever run warm?”
Leehan didn’t answer, only continued his task, fingers steady, unwavering. That’s how Taesan knew it was real. Real things don’t flicker.
“Don’t smudge my masterpiece,” Taesan said, his voice light, teasing.
Leehan huffed a laugh. “Your masterpiece has a streak of blue paint near the temple.”
Taesan didn’t check. “Adds character.”
Leehan rolled his eyes, fondness blooming in the gesture. He leaned in, pressing a kiss to the corner of Taesan’s mouth—brief, weightless, a breeze through a half-open window. And yet, it lingered. Like candle smoke. Like the echo of a name spoken in sleep.
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m in love,” Taesan replied simply. “That’s worse.”
Leehan didn’t respond. His gaze drifted to the canvas, his eyes tracing the shape of himself slowly, almost reverently, as shadows and blues took form beneath Taesan’s brush. A quiet, unspoken distance settled in his expression—soft and star-bright, like someone watching through glass, both near and unreachable.
And for a moment, Taesan wasn’t sure who had drifted away.
The painting was close—close enough to ache, but something held it at arm's length. The fall of light along Leehan's cheekbone, the shadow cradling the throat—it wasn’t right. His brush stilled, hesitation settling in his chest like a held breath. He needed to capture it. He needed to make it true.
But the canvas... the colors... it all felt incomplete.
“You always paint me like I’m holy,” Leehan said, voice quieter now. Like something meant only for the space between them.
Taesan kept his eyes on the canvas. “Maybe you are.”
Leehan’s smile was soft, with something fragile in its edges. “Blasphemy.”
“Then let me be damned.”
Humingang malalim, pumikit na muna
At baka sakaling namamalikmata lang
October 4, 2028, Wednesday
— 10:20 AM
The house, if you could call it that, stood like a forgotten relic on the edge of a town that never quite existed on maps. The kind of place where the streets were silent, where time seemed to exhale and vanish into the mist.
It was old, weathered, as if it had lived many lives before, and was now waiting for the next one. Ivy curled up to its timbers, creeping along the flaking walls, trying to pull the house back into the earth. The garden, long surrendered to wild things, was a tangle of overgrown vines and twisted weeds that whispered their own secret language. Inside, the air was thick with quiet, almost sacred in its stillness, as though the house itself held its breath.
It hadn't always been this way.
There had once been music here. The sound of Leehan’s fingers gliding over piano keys, the soft hum of Taesan's voice as he mixed his paints, their laughter rippling through the rooms like sunlight. It used to be alive with color, with sound, with movement. The walls knew it. Taesan remembered it in the depths of his bones, every corner soaked in the echoes of a time when it had all felt endless.
Now, the house was a shadow of itself—still standing, but empty in a way that reached beyond silence. And the silence. The silence felt heavy, as if something lingered, stubborn in its refusal to leave.
Today, the rain fell relentlessly, its rhythm tapping against the windowpanes like a soft but constant reminder that the world outside hadn't forgotten. But inside, Taesan felt it—something raw blooming in his chest. A kind of ache that wasn’t pain so much as absence made flesh. He’d felt it the moment he woke.
The bed was too still. The sheets too smooth on one side. No warmth pressed against his back, no quiet breath to tether him to the morning. The house didn’t greet him. The kitchen didn’t hum. It was the kind of quiet that didn’t feel like rest. For rest was Leehan's hand draped over his chest, the creak of floorboards he'd memorized by sound alone. And how could it be rest when his lover had disappeared?
“Leehan?" The name slipped from his lips, but the air didn’t answer. There was no response, no echo of a voice he knew as intimately as his own.
Taesan moved quickly, almost desperately, through the rooms, each one emptier than the last. The living room. The study. The kitchen. His pulse drummed harder with every step, panic blooming slow and sick in his chest.
He climbed the stairs without thinking, feet thudding softly on wood that creaked beneath his weight. At the landing, he paused—scanning the darkened corners, the shadows that refused to speak. Nothing. Still nothing.
He called for him again, “Leehan!” This time it cracked out of him, too loud, like it hurt to say. The silence didn’t flinch. It only settled deeper around him.
Taesan turned, almost blindly. Not sure what he was hoping to find—only that something in him pointed forward. Down the hallway, his steps slowed. The attic door was ajar at the very end. Just barely open, yet wide enough to look wrong. Something about the slant of it made his skin prickle. Like it had been opened too quickly. Or not by him at all.
Then, the phone rang.
The sound cleaved through the hush, sharp and sudden. Taesan stopped mid-step, his heart leaping into his throat. Just behind him, a narrow table pressed against the wall—he hadn’t noticed it before, or maybe he had, in the way one notices things in passing, without really seeing it. The phone sat there, unmoving, waiting for someone to answer, as if it had always been.
It rang again, louder this time, its sound filling every empty space. Familiar. A weekly ritual he had long abandoned.
The phone rings once a week. Taesan never answers.
Sometimes it was Sungho, asking about his work, asking how he was doing. Sometimes, it was his sister, a reminder to eat, to take care of himself. And occasionally, it was the gallery, wanting to know when he would send the next batch of work, when his next exhibition would be. They never understood. They never asked the right questions.
They didn’t know that Taesan hadn't painted anyone else in three years. They didn't understand that every stroke of his brush had been dedicated to Leehan, a love letter to a person who never asked for it but had always been its muse. They called it a thematic fixation, a profound exploration of longing. Romantic, they said. Timeless.
But they didn’t know.
The phone rang again, its sound unyielding, demanding attention. But Taesan didn’t answer. His gaze, once fixed on the phone, was pulled toward the attic door. His hands trembled as they reached for the doorknob, but the phone continued to ring, its sharp insistence filling the silence. He wanted to stop the ringing, to shut it out, but it was the door that commanded his attention, not the sound.
What if Leehan had left him? What if he had slipped away in a way that Taesan couldn’t understand? The thought struck him with a cold, hollow ache. He clenched his fists, fighting the rising tide of dread that crept over him. He couldn’t lose him. Not now. Not ever.
“Leehan—” His voice cracked as he called out, this time to the door itself, like the name might reach whatever was waiting behind it. “Please,” he added, quiet, desperate, as if softness might coax an answer where volume had failed.
He stepped forward, opening the attic door with a hesitant hand. The room beyond was dim, bathed in a pale, watery light from the rain-soaked windows. And there, sitting by the window, legs drawn up to his chest, was Leehan. His forehead rested lightly against the glass as he watched the rain pour down outside. The space between them seemed impossibly wide, to Taesan the distance itself was a punishment.
“Leehan,” Taesan whispered, voice barely audible.
Leehan didn’t look at him. His gaze remained fixed on the rain, distant and far away, as though he hadn’t heard him at all. The air in the room felt thick, weighted with all the things that couldn’t be said.
“I went somewhere,” Leehan’s voice came, soft and distant, barely rising above the sound of the rain. “Just for a bit.”
Taesan’s heart twisted. “Where?”
The other’s eyes remained on the window, the light tracing the curve of his face, casting shadows across his features. His voice was so faint, so soft, that Taesan almost believed he hadn’t spoken at all. “Where you couldn’t follow.”
Taesan felt his chest tighten at the words that left his lover’s lips, as if someone had reached in and squeezed the breath out of him. The thought of not being able to follow him wherever he had gone, was too much. It was too much to bear.
Then, as if on cue, the phone stopped ringing. The stillness that filled the house in its wake was oppressive, settling over them like a dense layer of dust. The kind of silence that only existed in the spaces between breaths, between thoughts, between the seconds that stretched far too long.
For a long moment, Taesan stood there, rooted to the spot, his body trembling with the force of emotions he couldn’t name. He tried to convince himself that it was just Leehan’s way—always drifting, always slipping out of reach, not just in thought but in presence, vanishing without warning like light fading from a room. It had always been like this: moments where Leehan was there, and then, suddenly, he wasn’t. That’s why Taesan started painting him, not to capture a likeness, but to anchor him. To keep him still. To hold him in a way nothing else could.
To stop time.
Ba't nababahala? 'Di ba't ako'y mag-isa?
Kala ko'y payapa, boses mo'y tumatawag pa
October 16, 2028, Monday
— 05:21 PM
There are no clocks in the studio.
Taesan had stopped counting the days the moment the first canvas swallowed him whole. Time had no meaning here, not anymore. He marked its passing in portraits—every version of Leehan, rendered onto wood, linen, and panel. Each one a different mood, a different moment, a different fragment of a memory. He painted Leehan in every shade of his existence, capturing him as he was, as he always would be.
He painted him the way someone prays—desperate, hungry, with a faith so raw it bordered on frantic. Somewhere deep in the marrow of his bones, Taesan believed that if he painted just once more, if the lines were truer, the colors warmer, the silence around him would break. Leehan would step down from the canvas, would smile, would turn and reach for him, would speak his name like it still meant something.
He had come close before. A brushstroke too perfect, the curve of Leehan’s smile so vivid it almost seemed real. The glint in an eye too alive. Sometimes, he could almost hear the sound of his laughter, soft and easy, filling the empty corners of the room.
And then, there were the little things—small, undeniable gestures that assured him Leehan was never far. The faint scent of his shampoo lingering on the pillow, the warmth of a coffee mug left on the counter, just enough for the last sip. Fingerprints on the windowsill, recent enough to smudge. Ordinary things. Everyday things. Proof that Leehan had just been there—had just moved through the house. Taesan held onto them like touchstones, quiet affirmations that the world he lived in was still intact. That Leehan still moved beside him, just slightly out of step, just a breath ahead.
In the afternoons, when the house was wrapped in a quiet stillness, Taesan would paint while Leehan hummed softly in the kitchen. The tune was always the same—slow, gentle, a lullaby he swore he had heard before, maybe in another life, or in some forgotten dream. It was a song that wrapped itself around the edges of his thoughts, and for those brief, fleeting moments, everything felt like it was as it should be.
“I still can’t believe Jaehyun did that,” Leehan’s voice would call from the kitchen, the rhythm of his words carrying through the walls. “He tripped and took the whole cake down with him, right in front of the dean.”
Taesan chuckled, his brush stilling for a moment. “I wish I remembered that.”
Leehan’s voice grew quieter, and the sound of the spoon stirring in the pot halting for just a moment. “You were there. You held my hand the whole night.”
Taesan frowned at that, the brush hovering as if caught between colors. “Was I?” His brow furrowed, trying to grasp at the memory. “It’s fuzzy.”
Leehan laughed softly, his voice smooth, like a melody meant to soothe. “You’ve always had a bad memory,” he teased, the words slipping easily between them. “Maybe you blocked it out because Jaehyun was wearing neon green that night.”
Taesan’s lips curled into a smile, the unease he hadn’t realized he was holding fading like mist. “That must be it.”
But later, when the house had grown silent again, Taesan found himself in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at his reflection as if trying to make sense of something that didn’t quite fit. The harsh light from the ceiling cast sharp shadows on his face, the weight of it heavy. His eyes wandered, settling on the strip of an old photo booth print stuck to the side of the cabinet. It was a picture of him and Leehan, pressed together, both of them laughing, their faces flushed with joy. The date printed on the bottom corner was clear—February 2024.
Taesan blinked. His fingers brushed over the paper, the creases softened by time.
That was four years ago.
But that couldn’t be right.
They had taken that photo last year. Hadn’t they?
Binaon naman na ang lahat
Tinakpan naman na 'king sugat
October 29, 2028, Sunday
— 03:00 PM
Sungho visited once a month, a quiet ritual that both irritated and comforted Taesan in equal measure. The door would creak open, and Sungho would enter, always with food in hand—rice porridge, pickled radish, sometimes a slice of cake from the bakery near their old university. He placed them down gently, like he was feeding a wounded animal, as though this was his only way of trying to mend what was broken.
Taesan tolerated him, but barely. His presence was a reminder of the world outside, one that moved in a way Taesan didn’t feel he could follow.
“You look thinner,” Sungho remarked this time, eyes scanning him with that concerned look he always wore. “Are you eating?”
“Leehan cooks,” Taesan replied without looking up. The words were soft, but there was a sharp edge to them, a warning laced with the kind of quiet tension that only came from too many unsaid things.
Sungho froze, spoon halfway to his mouth, the room suddenly heavy with concern. “Taesan…”
“I said I’m eating.” Taesan’s voice remained calm, but there was a finality to it.
Sungho set the spoon down, his gaze fixed on Taesan, as though searching for something in his face that would reassure him. It wasn’t there.
“Have you… have you been sleeping alright?” Sungho asked, his voice softer now, the words careful, as though walking on fragile ground.
Taesan didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked out the window, his thoughts drifting somewhere far away, where the world felt more solid, more predictable. “I dream of him, if that’s what you’re asking.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a smile that reached his eyes. “He always hums the same tune.”
Sungho’s lips parted to respond, but no words came. Instead, he simply stood up and walked across the room, slowly, deliberately, like he knew exactly where he was headed. To the painting that stood against the far wall. The one Taesan had finished two nights ago, during a thunderstorm.
It was a portrait of Leehan, painted in profile. His eyes were closed, lips parted as though he had just exhaled something important. A bruise marred his temple, painted in haunting shades of blue and violet.
Sungho stopped in front of it, his fingers trembling as they hovered over the edge of the canvas, never quite touching but lingering near the paint as if afraid of the weight it carried.
“Why do you always paint that mark?” he asked, his voice low, almost tentative.
Taesan glanced up, surprised by the question. He’d never really considered it. The mark had always been there, woven into the brushstrokes, part of the image in a way that felt inevitable. “What mark?” he asked, as though it weren’t obvious.
Sungho’s gaze shifted to the bruise on the painting, his hand falling to his side with a quiet, defeated motion. The silence that followed was felt heavy, suffocating in its weight.
“I… don’t know,” Taesan answered, his eyes lingering on the painting as if the question itself had nudged something unfamiliar in him. He tilted his head slightly, considering it. “It just feels right.”
There was a long pause, and then Sungho closed his eyes, as if the answer had settled somewhere deep inside him, a truth he wasn’t sure he was ready to face. “You need help,” he said quietly, the words slipping out like a confession, a plea wrapped in concern.
Taesan turned away, trying to distance himself from something that had grown too heavy to face. He looked down at the untouched food, the warm, comforting meal Sungho had brought, but the weight of it felt like an accusation pressing down on his chest. “I already have it.”
Sungho’s shoulders slumped, the conversation falling silent between them like the last vestiges of a storm that had passed without resolution. The air felt still now, as though the house itself had drawn a quiet breath, waiting.
Ngunit ba't ba andito pa rin?
Hirap na 'kong intindihin
October 29, 2028, Sunday
— 09:11 PM
That night, Leehan came to him soaked from the rain.
He was barefoot, as he always was. His clothes clung to his body, droplets falling from his blonde hair and staining the wooden floor beneath his feet. His eyes were wide, unblinking, glassy with something Taesan couldn’t quite place—something other than the chill that had claimed his skin.
"Where were you?" Taesan’s voice cracked slightly, the question tumbling out with a blend of concern and something deeper, something lodged in his throat. He rushed toward him, hands already reaching for a towel, his mind too fast for his body. “You’re freezing.”
Leehan didn’t answer. And Taesan didn't push. His silence always said more than any words he could. His hands, trembling ever so slightly, reached out, tangled in Taesan’s shirt, holding on like it was the only thing keeping him here. Keeping him warm.
"You can’t keep leaving like that," Taesan said, his voice strained, every word heavy with a thousand unasked questions. Each one pressing against the walls of his chest, each one clawing at his throat, desperate to be let out.
“I know,” Leehan whispered, his voice distant, as though the words came from somewhere far beyond the reach of the moment. His fingers tightened on Taesan’s shirt, but there was no fire in his grip—just the hollow echo of something too fragile to hold.
"Then why—" Taesan started again, but the question fizzled on his lips, lost in the space between them.
Leehan cupped his face, his fingers cold but steady against Taesan’s skin. His touch was delicate, almost reverent, as though he were trying to memorize every line, every inch of Taesan’s face, as though he feared that the moment he let go, Taesan would slip through his fingers. "Because if I stay too long," Leehan murmured, his voice breaking the stillness, “you’ll notice the parts of me that don’t fit anymore.”
Taesan stared at him, breath caught in his chest, as if the world had stopped moving.
“And I don't know how to explain them," the blonde whispered again. “Not to you."
The words lingered in the air, vibrating in the silence, echoing through the space between them. Taesan couldn’t answer. He didn’t have the words.
He pulled Leehan close, as if sheer force could anchor him here, as if love could hold back the weight of whatever was pulling them apart. If he held him tightly enough, maybe the world would stop shifting, stop unraveling.
He didn’t say anything. Not yet.
Not when Leehan felt this warm in his arms, his breath soft against Taesan’s neck, his presence solid and real, like the quiet hum of life he had always known.
Not when it felt like there was time.
Tanging panalangin, lubayan na sana
Dahil sa bawat tingin, mukha mo'y nakikita
November 6, 2028, Monday
— 12:37 PM
The attic spoke in murmurs.
It groaned when it rained, its old bones creaking as though remembering the weight of the years. It shifted when Taesan wasn’t looking, bending around him as if it had a life of its own, a secret only the shadows and dust understood. Paintings leaned at odd angles, as if straining to listen to something just out of reach, and canvases curled like ancient leaves, fragile and forgotten. The air in the attic was heavier today, steeped in the scent of linseed and turpentine, thick with the absence of things that had once lived and now lingered only in silence.
This was where Taesan kept the unfinished ones.
Paintings that almost breathed. Portraits half-formed, figures suspended in the act of becoming, and sketches—those fevered bursts of clarity he no longer trusted, those moments of truth that slipped away as soon as the brush left the canvas. One in particular sat beneath a shroud, draped in linen like a body waiting for light. It was the last one they'd worked on together, just before—
He didn’t say the word. He never did. Saying it would pull everything into focus, and focus was cruel. Clarity unraveled the delicate threads that held him together, and Taesan wasn’t ready to confront the storm that would follow.
Today, the shroud was lifted.
The canvas before him was large, large enough to swallow him whole, and for a moment, it felt as though it did. Leehan was there, in the middle of it—lying back, his head turned away, eyes half-lidded, caught between waking and sleep. The softness of his lips and the delicate angle of his jaw spoke of life still pulsing beneath the surface, of quiet moments shared in sunlight, of mornings that stretched endlessly. His figure seemed to breathe with the stillness of the room, untouched by time, as if he might stir at any moment, smile, and laugh, the way he always did, the way Taesan could still hear his voice in the silence.
But the paint was unfinished. The light hadn’t captured him fully.
Taesan stared at it. But not at the figure. He didn’t want to see Leehan like this, not in this unfinished state. His gaze drifted beyond, to the background—the part of the painting that shouldn’t have been there.
It was wrong.
He hadn’t painted it like that. The window—the attic window—shouldn’t have been open. He knew this. He was certain of it. In his memory, it had always been closed, locked shut against the outside world, against whatever pressed in from beyond. But in this painting, there it was—the window was cracked, the curtains fluttering like breath, as if the house itself were exhaling. Outside, the trees stood bare and distant, like dark, twisted fingers reaching toward a sky that Taesan didn’t recognize.
A storm began to hum beneath the horizon of his skull. The edges of the room blurred, and for a moment, he felt as though he was drowning in it—like the air itself had become water, drowning him in its depth, in its endless pull.
He stepped back, his heart hammering in his chest. The paint smelled different now, stronger, as if it, too, had shifted. Taesan swallowed, a lump rising in his throat. He couldn’t look at the painting anymore, not when it felt as though it was staring back at him, as if the walls themselves were closing in with a question he wasn’t ready to answer.
Again, he did not say anything. Not yet. Not until the storm had passed.
But it didn’t. The storm didn’t pass. And the window stayed open.
Kahit sa'n man mapunta ay anino mo'y kumakapit sa 'king kamay
Ako ay dahan-dahang nililibing nang buhay pa
November 6, 2028, Monday
— 11:36 PM
He dreamed of the night it happened.
Not linearly. Never linearly. Not as a story told in sequence, with cause and consequence laid bare. Dreams didn’t honor chronology. They bled instead—one moment into another, repeating themselves with different inflections, reappearing where they shouldn’t, as if memory itself had splintered and rewound.
In this version, they were in the kitchen.
The lights overhead buzzed faintly, yellowed with age, casting long shadows that stretched over the tiles like cracks in the floor. The room was cold—colder than it should’ve been—and quiet in that dense, padded way dreams always were, like everything was submerged.
Leehan stood barefoot on the tile, his weight uneven, one shoulder dipped like he was bracing against a tremor no one else could feel. His shirt was rumpled and clung to his back, damp with something—sweat, maybe. At the hem, a stain bloomed, dry and old and indeterminate. In his hand, a kitchen knife. Not lifted in threat, just held, as if he’d forgotten to put it down.
“You don’t hear it?” Leehan asked.
Taesan’s brows furrowed. “Hear what?”
Leehan didn’t answer right away. His eyes—wide, too wide—were fixed on the ceiling. Not like he was looking at something, but through it. Listening. His lips moved again, barely.
“It keeps calling,” he murmured. “In the walls. Like it knows.”
The words scratched at Taesan’s skin, a chill crawling down his spine. The words didn’t make sense, not exactly—but something in them settled wrong. He stepped forward, reaching for the knife, his hands steady despite the disquiet roiling in his chest. “You’re tired,” he said softly, a quiet plea wrapped in tenderness. “Come sit.”
But Leehan was already moving, already lifting his foot to climb stairs that didn’t exist. The stairs stretched upward, endless and infinite, pulling him into some other place, a place beyond Taesan’s reach.
In the dream, Taesan didn’t follow.
And he wasn’t sure why he didn’t.
Hindi na makalaya
Dinadalaw mo 'ko bawat gabi
November 7, 2028, Tuesday
— 07:21 AM
He woke with paint on his hands. Blue. Always blue. The color of Leehan's shadow.
The room was heavy with the scent of turpentine, thick as it clung to the air. The studio hung suspended in a hush so dense it felt intentional, as though the room were watching, waiting.
Before him stood a new canvas.
The paint was still wet, glinting faintly where the sun's light touched it. He didn’t remember painting it. But there it was. Leehan was seated at a table within it, his posture knotted and hands clasped so tightly it looked painful. His head was bowed, as if in prayer, or surrender. Or listening. There was an emptiness to him—one that swallowed up the space between them, made his form appear distant, unreachable.
And across the table, in red ink, jagged and wild, a message scrawled in frantic, looping letters—DON’T OPEN THE DOOR.
Taesan stepped back, a cold shiver running through him. The words weren’t steady. They bled together, distorting into other words, other meanings—DON’T LET GO. OPEN ME. They danced in front of his eyes like a riddle he couldn’t solve, impossible to read, impossible to ignore. His pulse quickened, heart stuttering as he stumbled backward, tripping over something hard on the floor.
A sketchbook.
It hadn’t been there before.
He knelt down, fingers shaking as he reached for it, the leather cover cracked like something well-worn, stained at the edges, as if it had borne the weight of untold secrets. His name was scrawled faintly on the first page. It looked like his handwriting, but m aybe it wasn't.
He opened it.
March 3, 2025
Leehan’s been quiet lately. He sleeps more. I think something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.
March 7, 2025
He asked me today if I ever heard the house breathe. I told him no. He didn’t speak for hours after that.
March 14, 2025
He’s scared of the attic.
His hands tightened, eyes stinging as the ink blurred faintly, even in the morning sun. But he kept reading.
March 21, 2025
There’s a draft behind the bathroom mirror. He says it whispers to him. I sealed it. He unsealed it. He painted something I’ve never seen before. It was the first time I’ve ever seen him hold a brush. When I asked him what it was, he said: “It’s not mine. It painted itself.”
The last entry held no texts. Only a drawing. A figure—long-limbed, faceless—curled into the corner of a room that might’ve been this one, its ceiling sloped and dim. The creature sat hunched, as though folded into itself, knees drawn to its chest, elbows jutting like angles someone had forgotten how to soften. A tall body, broad shoulders, light brown hair drawn in fine, uneven strokes, as if the hand that sketched it had trembled. The figure watched. Not forward, but inward. As though its gaze were fixed on something inside the walls. Or inside itself.
He closed the book with quivering hands, pressing his forehead to his knees. The room spun, the air thickening as if the walls themselves were closing in. His fingers stung where the turpentine had seeped into raw skin, and his face smelled of thinner and salt and things he hadn’t cried over yet. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to keep his ribs from falling open, trying to hold himself in the shape of a person. But the ache—the quiet, dull, unrelenting ache—remained.
He stayed like that for a while. Minutes. Maybe longer. Until the quiet turned from silence into absence.
That was when he noticed what wasn’t there.
Leehan always came back to Taesan. Even when his mind wandered, even when his words grew thin. Even when he trembled through the night and couldn’t explain why. He always returned, like the tide. Like breath.
But not today. For the first time, he didn’t.
The silence settled over him like a weight, pressing down on him with each passing second. It was a silence that didn’t let him breathe, a silence that swallowed up everything he had left.
Yet, Taesan lit the candle anyway. The flame flickered, weak and uncertain, casting shadows that danced across the walls in strange, twisted shapes. He made tea, the kind they used to drink on Sunday mornings, with bergamot and a little too much honey. The steam rose in curling tendrils that seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared. He put on his favorite records, the ones with brass and swing, the ones that always made Leehan hum under his breath while doing the dishes, the ones that sometimes made him dance. Bublé. Cole. Martin. Sinatra.
It should’ve made the room feel warmer. It didn’t. The music only deepened the quiet. Made it reverberate. Gave it a body.
Still, nothing.
And then he heard a knock. Not at the door. But from inside the walls. Steady. Measured. Familiar.
Taesan froze, his heart pounding in his chest, the sound vibrating deep inside him. It felt as though the world had gone still, all the noise of the outside fading into nothing but that single knock. His breath hitched, but his body moved without thinking, like it already knew what would come next. Slowly, he followed the sound, each step carrying him down the hall, past the kitchen, to the bathroom.
The knock had come from behind the mirror. The one that whispers to Leehan.
The mirror stared at him. It was old. A little warped. It had never reflected things quite right. His reflection looked pale, streaked with the soft smudges of dried paint and feverish sleep. The undercurrent of blue still clung to his hands. His eyes looked wrong. Or maybe just tired in a way that couldn’t be fixed by rest.
The knock stopped and he waited.
The room stretched out, as though it were listening with him. His own breath sounded unfamiliar in his ears. Shallow. Slow. And then—his reflection blinked.
But he didn’t.
Wala mang nakikita
Haplos mo'y ramdam pa rin sa dilim
November 8, 2028, Wednesday
— 10:54 AM
Morning unfolded like a bruise—slow, swollen, blue and violet at the edges. Light filtered through the curtains in strips, too sharp to be soft, too quiet to be kind. The house was quiet, but it wasn’t silence Taesan trusted. Silence had grown clever over time—slippery, deliberate. It waited in the corners. It learned to mimic peace.
He stepped into the hallway barefoot, the floorboards cold beneath his feet. That was when he saw them.
Footprints.
Trailing through the dust like a path someone had walked in haste. Muddy. Familiar. The kind of footprints he could trace from memory alone. The shape of them—the gait, the drag of the left heel—felt known in his every inch of being. The edges were soft, blurred like they had been there for hours, though he had just cleaned the night before. He followed them the way a child might follow breadcrumbs into the woods, forgetting the story never ends well.
They led to the studio. And there, standing in a shaft of grey light fractured by the stained glass window, was Leehan. Painting.
Taesan froze.
He hadn’t seen him like this in months—years, maybe. Not since that one night, the one they didn’t speak about, where Leehan had taken up the brush with shaking hands and made something Taesan couldn’t explain. Something that hadn’t belonged to either of them.
This moment was different. Calmer. Stranger.
Leehan didn’t turn, didn’t blink. His body moved like it belonged to something else—fluid, precise. His arm arced with uncanny rhythm, as though he were tracing the outline of something that had always been there, invisible until now. The canvas before him was a storm. A dream. A nightmare.
Trees stretched and broke in the wind. A sky bleeding in the aftermath of thunder. A figure in white, mid-run—caught in the act of fleeing or arriving, Taesan couldn’t tell. The scene pulsed. It felt like it might step off the frame if he blinked too long.
“Leehan,” he said, softly, like saying the name louder might shatter the moment.
Still, no answer.
Taesan stepped closer, slow and reverent, like walking through a cathedral. “Where did you go?”
The brush didn’t pause. Not even for breath.
Then, “Please don’t leave me again.” His voice cracked, rough and exhausted. Not with accusation, but with need. With the kind of yearning that lived just beneath the skin, waiting to be named.
That was when Leehan turned.
And for the span of a single heartbeat—he wasn't Leehan.
His eyes were wrong. Black, not in color, but in depth, like looking into something bottomless. His face was a map of almosts—almost Leehan, almost human, almost known. His mouth opened, but it was not speech that came.
It was sound, yes. A low, dragging groan, like wind dragging iron chains across stone. As if something old had cracked open behind his teeth. Not pain. Not rage. Something colder.
Taesan’s breath caught in his throat. He stumbled back, hand flying to his chest like he might catch his heart before it slipped through his ribs.
He blinked.
And Leehan was there again.
The light softened his features. The dark had receded from his eyes. This Leehan was tired, soft around the edges, as if he’d been worn down by weather and time. There was paint on his fingertips, drying at the creases of his skin. He looked at Taesan and smiled—barely. It wasn’t joy. Taesan could tell that it wasn't.
“You’re painting me wrong,” he said.
Taesan’s voice barely found him. “What do you mean?”
Leehan turned his gaze to the canvas. The figure in white had blurred slightly at the edges, as though it were running through fog.
“I was colder.”
Taesan didn’t know if he meant the weather, or the room, or something else entirely. But the way Leehan said it—like it was a confession, or a warning—it stuck to him. Clung like varnish that never dried. Like memory in the lungs.
He wanted to ask more, to hold him, to stop the world from shifting beneath their feet.
But Leehan had already turned back to the canvas.
Hindi na nanaginip
Hindi na makagising
November 13, 2028, Thursday
— 04:18 PM
Sungho returned again.
He always knocked twice—never more, never less—as if the sound of his knuckles was a ritual, an attempt to summon something lingering just beyond the threshold. Taesan opened it slower than usual, the hinge groaning like it, too, had grown tired of visitors. The sound echoed down the hall like a memory trying to find its shape.
This time, he brought a box. It was an ordinary cardboard box, taped twice over, like something that had been opened too many times before and still refused to stay shut. He didn’t speak, only gestured toward the kitchen table where Taesan’s tea had gone cold, its steam having already vanished, the cup left abandoned as though it, too, had lost faith in time.
The box landed with a soft thud.
Inside was an envelope. Thick with the weight of conclusions. A folded sheet of sterile white. A certificate inked with finality. A photograph curled at the edges, sun-bleached and unfamiliar. Taesan didn’t remember taking it. Couldn’t remember the moment it had been born. The angle was strange, the place unfamiliar—a room, or maybe a version of one, that no longer existed.
To Taesan at least.
“Don’t show me that,” he said, his voice almost a whisper, like anything louder might tear the room open.
Sungho settled into the chair opposite him, his movements slow, deliberate. His hands rested loosely on his knees, not reaching, not retreating—just present. There was a kind of careful restraint in Sungho’s presence now, like grief in polite clothing.
“You need to remember.”
“I do,” Taesan said, eyes fixed on the window where the light bled through gauze curtains. “I remember everything.”
But memory was a hallway with locked doors. And Taesan had swallowed too many of the keys.
Sungho studied him. Not with pity—no, never that—but with the tired ache of someone who had once believed in rescue. Of someone who had waited at the shore long after the tide refused to bring anything back.
“Then tell me,” he said, softer now. “Tell me how it ended.”
The words hung like frost on breath. Taesan did not answer. His silence wasn’t resistance—it was absence, the kind that hollowed, the kind that made your body feel borrowed. The kind that sat in your spine and rewrote your posture. He stared at the floor like something was buried beneath it.
“He hit his head,” Sungho said eventually, as though rehearsing a script meant to anchor them both. “In the attic. You were there. You called me after. You tried to stop the bleeding with your shirt. Do you remember what you said?”
Taesan turned, eyes glassy with something Sungho couldn’t understand. His mouth parted, then closed. Then opened again, caught in a loop he couldn’t escape.
“You said he was still breathing,” Sungho continued. “But he wasn’t.”
The words settled into the floorboards. Into the paint-smeared walls. Into the place between heartbeats where Taesan now lived. They didn't hit like knives. They moved like fog—slow, consuming, inevitable.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t cry. He never did when Sungho was here. He just folded inward, like paper learning how to disappear. Or a canvas rolled too tightly, starting to tear at tseemsams. The candle on the windowsill flickered once. Then again. Like it was trying to remember how to burn.
“You never left this house after that,” Sungho said, standing slowly. “Not once.”
Taesan didn’t respond. He didn’t argue, nor did he agree. He didn’t look at Sungho, the box, or at the photograph that didn’t belong to any memory he trusted. He looked at the corner of the room where the light refused to land. At the place where Leehan used to sit with a book half-open in his lap, eyes following sentences with a soft grin on his face.
When Sungho left, he left the box behind. And next to it, almost as an afterthought, was a small white card. No message. Just a name, a number, and the thin black serif of a profession that made Taesan’s stomach turn.
Dr. Lee Eunwoo – Clinical Psychologist
Sungho didn’t offer goodbye. He didn’t even bother to close the door all the way.
The silence returned slowly, like dusk crawling back into the house. Like something long exiled, now slipping into the walls. The candle trembled again as the wind pushed against the windowpane.
Taesan stayed at the table, long after the tea had gone cold.
He did not touch the envelope. He couldn't.
Leehan didn’t like it when he opened things without him.
Pasindi na ng ilaw
Minumulto na 'ko ng damdamin ko
November 13, 2028, Thursday
— 10:27 PM
That night, the house changed.
Not with thunder. Not with collapse. But with a settling—like something sacred being unspoken. Like the world had learned how to mourn in unison.
Doors no longer led where they were meant to. The hallway bent wrong, unfamiliar in its angles, as though it had been redrawn by a hand that had never seen the blueprints. The studio—his sanctuary, his altar, his confessional—was gone. In its place was the attic. Breathing. Waiting.
And the window was open.
It should not have been.
Taesan stepped inside. The air felt thinner here. Too still—stillness that clung to him like the silence after last words, after the closing of eyes. Dust danced in the moonligh,t streaming through the open window, silver and weightless. Beneath it, lying like an offering laid gently in the cradle of the night, was Leehan.
He was still.
Drawn in charcoal and light. Folded into himself like someone who had forgotten how to belong to a body. The curve of his back, the tilt of his head—it was all painfully familiar. And in his eyes, there bloomed a sorrow deeper than longing. Not a question. Not regret. Just the slow ache of knowing he could not stay.
And, again, Taesan could not speak.
His throat had become a well of rusted keys, each one too heavy with the past to lift. His feet remained rooted, as though the wood of the floorboards had swallowed them whole. He only stared, afraid that any movement would undo the fragile stitching of this moment.
And still, Leehan looked at him with nothing but love. Not the warm kind. Not the easy kind. But love in its rawest form—tired, grieved, and enduring. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said, voice small and fragile, like it had traveled too far to arrive intact.
The sound of it nearly shattered Taesan. Because it wasn’t just a voice—it was the echo of every brushstroke he had laid in desperation, every night he had whispered to the canvas, hoping it would speak back.
He didn’t answer right away. The sight of him—whole and here—was a violence all on its own. “You didn’t,” he whispered eventually, his throat catching on the edges of belief, his words fighting to be true.
“But I did.” Leehan’s voice broke like water lapping against something submerged. He looked around them, at the warped floorboards, at the shadows that flickered without cause. “This isn’t living. You’re painting me into the walls, my love.”
Taesan’s chest ached.
Leehan stepped closer. Slowly. Reverently. “You can't keep doing this,” he whispered, each word fragile as ash. “It’s over.”
And just like that, the world tilted.
The words were simple. Bare. But they pressed against him like a tide that would not recede. They slid between his ribs and pushed against the cavity where his heart had once known rhythm. He could barely breathe beneath the weight of them.
“I can’t…” Taesan said, the confession scraping against his teeth. “I can’t let you go. You’re all I have left. You’re the only thing keeping me here.”
Leehan stood before him now. Not luminous. Not spectral. Just quiet. The shape of goodbye given form. “I’m not here anymore, Taesan,” he said gently. “I haven’t been for a long time. You’ve been keeping me alive in your mind… in your paintings. But I’m gone.”
The words didn’t fall—they shattered.
Taesan reached out, hands trembling, skin stained with paint that hadn't been washed for days. His fingers tried to brush Leehan’s arm, desperate, as if touch could tether him, as if belief could bind bone and breath again. “No,” he gasped. “You’re here. You’re right here. You feel real. I can feel you.”
Leehan’s expression cracked, and a sad smile pulled across his face. “I’m gone, Taesan. I died. And it’s not your fault. It never was.”
The truth hung in the air, heavy and final, and for a moment, Taesan’s mind quieted. Like a storm that had spent itself. And in the silence, he saw it—the shape of his grief. The gaping hollow. The place he’d tried to paint over, again and again, hoping color would become flesh.
“I…” His voice caught, thick with years of buried sorrow. “I thought… if I painted you enough, if I held on tight enough, you’d come back. I thought I could fix it.”
Leehan’s gaze was gentle. “You can’t fix it. You never could. Not with paint. Not with memory. Not with love.”
Taesan choked on the sob rising in his chest. It wasn’t the kind that demanded noise. It was the kind that broke the spine, that left a man curled around nothing, clutching at air.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Leehan knelt beside him. His hand found Taesan’s cheek—light, barely there. The way wind touches skin. “It was never your fault,” he said. “You don’t have to carry that anymore.”
Taesan’s fingers curled into the floor. Cold. Solid. Real. Unlike the man before him—who was both here and gone, made of a softness that had no place in the world anymore.
“I don’t know how,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to be without you.”
Leehan came closer. “You’ll find your way, my love. You always do.”
Taesan closed his eyes, tears leaking down skin already damp with exhaustion. He didn’t want this ending. He didn’t want release. He didn’t want peace. He wanted Leehan laughing in the kitchen, Leehan barefoot on the stairs, Leehan alive in the spaces between songs.
But Leehan’s touch was thinning. The shape of him was fraying at the edges. His shadows, the ones Taesan had painted in layers of Prussian blue, were slipping away too. Now it was only a faint stain in the air.
“Goodbye, Taesan,” he whispered. “I’ll always love you.”
And then he was gone.
Not in a blink. Not in a tear. Not like a light switching off, but like a song ending mid-note. The kind you wait to hear again even when you know it won’t return.
The attic darkened. The wind shifted. The house exhaled.
And Taesan remained.
Still breathing. Still bleeding.
But alive.
'Di mo ba ako lilisanin?
Hindi pa ba sapat pagpapahirap sa 'kin?
November 14, 2028, Friday
— 05:22 AM
Taesan remained kneeling on the cold floor, his breath shallow, his limbs stiff with the quiet rigor of grief. Dawn filtered in through the attic window, pale and indifferent, casting long slats of light across the warped floorboards. The room had not changed. The shadows still clung to the corners, the scent of turpentine still hung in the air, but something beneath it all had shifted. There was no trace of warmth left. No echo of a voice. No illusion strong enough to deceive him anymore.
He had stayed there through the night, curled into the quiet, listening to the hush left in Leehan’s absence. The cold had settled into his bones. His body had forgotten motion, forgotten how to rise. It was as though the room had swallowed him whole, made him part of its silence.
When he finally moved, it was slow, careful, like a man waking from a dream he did not want to leave. His palms pressed to the floor, stiff and cold, and he pushed himself upright with the kind of effort that felt ceremonial. His legs wavered beneath him. The light around him had changed—but the ache had not.
He turned, his gaze finding the canvas in the far corner of the room. The one draped in time and memory. The one they had started together, before the world split down the middle.
The shroud was gone again.
He didn’t remember lifting it. Maybe it had slipped in the night, caught on something unseen. Or maybe it had never been there at all. Maybe he’d only imagined covering it, trying to protect it from time the way he’d tried, again and again, to protect Leehan from the inevitable.
He stepped closer.
The painting stood tall, unmoving, solemn as a tombstone, and yet it seemed to watch him back. Leehan’s figure lay suspended within it—half-lit, half-formed, mouth soft, eyes turned away. The colors had dulled. The strokes had hardened. It no longer breathed the way it used to. Whatever had once flickered in that image had faded with the years, or maybe with the night.
Taesan’s hands fell to his sides, slowly. It wasn’t defeat—it was acceptance. There was no battle left to fight here. No illusion worth clinging to. The canvas had become what it was always meant to be: a relic. Not a resurrection. He had nothing left to offer it.
Behind him, the house remained still. The kind of stillness that didn’t hum with memory anymore. The kind that followed an ending.
He turned away from the portrait. From the attic. From the years that had blurred into paint and silence. Each step felt like shedding layers of sorrow, of hope, of all the ways he had tried to keep Leehan here.
He reached the door.
His hand, when it curled around the handle, no longer trembled as much. And as it opened, the morning air spilled in—cool and unfamiliar.
For the first time in years, Taesan stepped out of the house.
Hindi na ba mamamayapa?
Hindi na ba mamamayapa?