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It begins with a cough.
A small one—dry, persistent. The kind that clings to sleep like a burr, catching in the soft edges of dreams. Not enough to alarm him. Not at first. Just a scratch in the dark, a whisper behind his ribs that refuses to be swallowed.
Minho shifts beneath the covers, breath hitching against the stillness. The room feels heavy, cloaked in the hush that follows thunder. His throat is raw. His lungs feel tight, as if someone placed a hand on his chest in the night and forgot to lift it.
He sits up slowly. Muscles reluctant. Ribs sore in a way he doesn’t understand. The air does not move. It simply is—dense, watchful.
He rubs at his sternum, fingers circling the bone like he’s trying to press the unease back down. But the itch only grows, blooming beneath his skin. Something wants out.
Another cough cracks free.
He turns to the side, breath trembling, and spits into his palm—
—and stills.
A petal.
It rests in the cradle of his hand like a secret. Pale pink, fine-veined, the edges curled inward, as if it once bloomed wide and then folded back into itself to sleep. It glistens faintly in the thin spill of streetlight filtering through the curtains.
Minho stares.
His heartbeat crawls upward, catches in his throat, latches there.
The petal is warm.
Soft.
Impossible.
He lifts it slowly, reverently, until it brushes the space beneath his nose.
The scent strikes him all at once—
warm, nectar-sweet, almost golden.
Osmanthus.
Faint and floral.
A whisper of sunlit fruit and memory.
And beneath that—burnt sugar.
The familiar sharpness of heat.
The ghost of shampoo clinging to the pillowcase beside him.
The ache hits so hard it feels like forgetting how to breathe.
Like—
“Jisung,” Minho whispers.
The name leaves his mouth without permission.
Not a call. Not a question.
Just an invocation.
Muscle memory shaped into a prayer.
It doesn’t echo.
It simply falls.
And settles.
Between the hush and the hollow.
The silence that follows is unbearable.
But not surprising.
Of course there’s no answer.
Jisung has been gone for seven days.
He doesn’t tell anyone.
Not at first. Not when the cough becomes more frequent—shallow at first, then deeper, rasping like something is unravelling inside him. Not when the petals begin appearing in places he can’t explain. In the sink, pale and curled, damp from the faucet’s slow drip. On his pillow, scattered like an offering. Tucked into the inside seam of his collar, as if they’d grown there—soft and secret.
He collects them without thinking. Gathers each one with quiet, reverent hands and places them in an old shoebox lined with tissue paper. Every time he opens the lid, the scent rises like memory—floral and full, threaded with something warm and sharp that lives at the back of his throat.
He’s careful. Handles them like relics. Smooths their crumpled edges. Arranges them by hue. Folds the tissue gently over their resting place, as if they might bruise. He doesn’t know why he does it—only that not doing it feels wrong. Throwing them away feels unthinkable. Sacrilegious, somehow.
Because they all smell like Jisung.
Not just his shampoo, or the warm spice of that candle he lit on rainy days. No—him. That impossible blend of skin and summer rain. Of safety and sleep. Of laughter muffled beneath bedsheets. Some petals are faint. Others so strong Minho swears he can hear Jisung’s voice humming in the walls when he breathes them in.
The scent clings.
It winds through the sleeves of his sweaters. Settles in the lining of his coat. Haunts the collar of the hoodie Jisung used to steal. It lingers in the air after Minho moves through a room—trailing behind him like ghost light. Like memory refusing to quiet.
Sometimes, he presses a petal to his wrist. To the curve of his neck. Just to feel close to something. Not Jisung exactly—but the space he left behind. The shape of his absence. The echo still blooming in Minho’s ribs.
It makes his chest ache.
Not from pain.
From want.
The kind that lives in the marrow. A low, golden hunger that memory sharpens instead of dulls. A longing that tastes like sweetness curdled just slightly by grief—like honey left too long in the sun.
Minho curls up on the couch some nights, the shoebox clutched to his chest, petals fluttering with each breath like they remember too.
And when he coughs again, he doesn’t look away.
He watches it fall—slow, weightless, still warm from the heat of his lungs.
Another petal.
Another piece of something that refuses to leave him.
Another answer to a question he hasn’t dared to ask aloud.
The doctors find nothing.
They press cold instruments to his chest, listen to his lungs with furrowed brows and distant patience. They run tests—endless rows of vials and wires and sterile machines that hum faintly, like they’re trying to speak. They take x-rays that make him feel both hollow and too visible. They draw blood that blooms deep scarlet into glass tubes, spinning in centrifuges like he’s being unravelled under fluorescent light.
His pulse is normal.
His lungs are clear.
His oxygen saturation, they say, is excellent.
One of them tilts their head with textbook sympathy and suggests anxiety, scribbling something into a chart without ever meeting his eyes. Another uses the word psychosomatic, and smiles in that practiced way that means, we think it’s real to you.
Minho nods.
Answers every question as truthfully as he can—without telling the truth.
He doesn’t mention the petals.
Doesn’t say how he finds them tucked into his sleeves. How they scatter across the folds of his blankets like confetti at a funeral. Doesn’t tell them how they come more easily now, how each cough slips past his lips like a secret—how each one leaves him more breathless, more full.
Instead, he looks at the wall and murmurs, “It feels like something’s growing in me.”
It’s the only honest thing he says.
They give him a small white bag with a printed label and a pamphlet on breathing exercises. One of them touches his shoulder before he leaves—firm, brief, careful. Like he’s something breakable, and they don’t want the liability.
He goes home with a prescription and a politely concerned look. As if either one could undo the feeling that something ancient and tender is unfurling in the hollows of his chest.
That night, the air in his apartment is too still.
He opens all the windows.
It doesn’t help.
The air is thick—like breath caught in a throat.
The cough comes hard and sudden, ripping the silence in two. He doubles over, hand to his mouth, eyes squeezed shut—
—and something solid catches against his tongue.
He spits it into his palm and stares.
Three petals.
And a stem.
The petals are pale—faintly translucent, their edges curling inward like they’re wilting in slow motion. But the stem is green. Vivid. Alive. Still wet. There’s dew clinging to it, glistening faintly like sweat on skin.
Minho drops it in the sink.
His heart rattles in his ribs like it’s trying to dig its way out. He doesn’t move for minutes. Just stares at it lying there—impossible and soft and real.
He should panic.
Should scream.
Should call someone.
Should do something other than stand barefoot on the cold tile, pulse thrumming in his ears, grief blooming where breath should be.
But he just leans forward, hands braced on the counter.
And breathes.
He doesn’t sleep.
How could he?
Not when something inside him is sprouting toward the surface—
petal by petal,
dream by dream.
Not when every inhale tastes like memory.
And every exhale feels like an apology.
The dreams start on the eighteenth night.
Minho doesn’t fall asleep so much as drift—carried by the weight of too many days without rest, his body folding in on itself like a house without its beams. He closes his eyes expecting silence. Or maybe more coughing. More of that damp ache behind his sternum that’s begun to feel permanent.
Instead, he finds himself standing barefoot on stone.
The air is thick, but not heavy. Warm. Breathing. He’s in a room he’s never seen before, yet knows without question—it hums with a familiarity he can’t name.
The walls are veiled in curling vines, their leaves velvet-soft and pulsing with a faint green glow, as if lit from within. Moss carpets the floor in scattered patches, cool and damp beneath his feet. A single chair sits crooked in the corner, carved from pale wood that looks like it once belonged to something living.
The window, slightly ajar, doesn’t open onto anything. Just sky. Soft and strange. Pale as milk-glass and pulsing like a heartbeat.
Minho turns slowly, breath catching.
There—on the edge of the bed—sits Jisung.
Barefoot. Hair tousled like he’s just woken from the same dream. He’s wearing a thin white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he’s glowing—not literally, not like the vines. But softly. Like he’s the only source of warmth in this green and breathing world.
He’s smiling.
Not wide. Not teasing.
That small, knowing smile Minho had only ever seen in the quietest moments—after laughter, after music, after kisses that lingered.
Like he knows something Minho doesn’t.
“Hey,” Jisung says, and the word lands like sunlight on Minho’s skin.
Minho tries to answer—but the moment his lips part, petals spill from his mouth.
Not one or two. A cascade. Pale blossoms, delicate and slow, tumbling over his chin and brushing his collarbone. They’re warm, freshly formed, like they hadn’t existed until just now.
He chokes on the weight of them. His hands fly to his mouth, but Jisung is already moving—already there. Close enough to touch.
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look alarmed.
Instead, he leans forward—so near Minho can see the flecks of gold in his eyes.
And presses a kiss to Minho’s forehead.
It is not a goodbye.
It is not a forgiveness.
It is something in between.
“You planted me somewhere deep,” Jisung whispers, voice low and rustling, like leaves before a storm. “I’m only growing now that you miss me.”
The dream doesn’t end, not exactly.
It just fades.
Minho wakes with his hand still lifted toward where Jisung had stood.
The room is dim.
The window open just a crack.
The curtains moving like breath.
And on his pillow—
A tulip.
Full and bright. Its petals unfurled. The bloom still glistening with dew.
It’s the colour of the inside of Jisung’s lips.
It smells like osmanthus—warm and nectar-sweet, sunlit and strange. Like apricots ripened in the dark. Like memory blooming in still air.
Minho stares at it for a long time.
Then presses it to his chest.
And begins to cry.
It had been raining the day Jisung disappeared.
Not the kind of rain that arrives with fury—no thunder, no downpour. Just a soft, steady drizzle, fine as breath. The kind that blurs the edges of things and makes the world feel older than it is.
It misted the windows in a thin silver film. The kind of rain that hushes everything. That makes silence deeper.
He’d said he was going for a walk.
Just need to clear my head, he’d murmured, already reaching for the door.
Minho had looked up from the kitchen table, brow furrowing.
“It’s raining.”
Jisung had smiled—that same crooked smile Minho had fallen in love with. Equal parts mischief and melancholy, like he’d lived a hundred secret lives and carried the ache of every one.
“I like the rain,” he’d said, curling his fingers around the doorknob but not turning it yet. “It feels like I’m being remembered.”
Minho had offered his umbrella anyway.
Jisung waved him off, tugged his hood up, and leaned down to press a soft, passing kiss to the top of Minho’s head.
Then the door shut behind him.
Quiet. Final.
He never came back.
The police were polite. Efficient.
They searched the nearby streets, questioned a few neighbors, asked Minho if Jisung had been under stress. If he’d left a note. If he’d seemed unhappy.
Minho said no to all of it.
Because it wasn’t that simple. Because Jisung had always carried sadness like a second skin—but he carried joy, too.
Laughter that bubbled up like a spring in quiet rooms.
Arms that reached for Minho when he forgot how to ask for comfort.
No one could find a reason.
There were no signs of struggle. No fingerprints. No belongings.
Just his shoes by the door—mud-flecked but dry.
A sweater still draped across the back of the couch, sleeves twisted, like he’d only just left the room.
And the faintest scent of osmanthus on the windowsill, where he used to lean his elbows and watch the rain pool in the street—warm and nectar-sweet, like apricots ripening in still air.
A scent that lingered longer than it should have.
A scent that didn’t know how to say goodbye.
Minho didn’t sleep that night.
Or the one after.
He searched the woods with trembling hands and too-thin jackets.
The trail behind the elementary school.
The winding path near the lake, where Jisung used to hum fragments of half-written songs under his breath.
He walked until his legs gave out.
Until his throat burned from calling a name that didn’t echo back.
But there was nothing.
No footprints in the soft earth.
No broken branches.
No messages.
No answers.
Just rain.
Just silence.
And the unbearable, echoing space where Jisung should have been.
The flowers change.
Daisies, first. Small and bright, soft-edged—delicate as breath. They arrived in the earliest days, when Minho still believed the petals might stop. That this was a strange, temporary grief. Manageable. Gentle.
The daisies smelled faintly sweet, with a hint of rain—like the air Jisung used to breathe into Minho’s collar when he hugged him from behind.
Then came the poppies.
Bold and red. Paper-thin petals that bruised at a touch.
They fell from his mouth one morning in a slow, silent drift.
And when they hit the floor, Minho wept.
Poppies were for remembrance. For mourning. For fields where people never came home.
That day, he pressed one between the pages of a poetry anthology Jisung had annotated and closed the book like sealing a secret.
A week later: a single sprig of baby’s breath.
So small Minho nearly missed it—resting on the edge of his nightstand like it had always belonged there.
It smelled like the inside of a cathedral.
Something sacred. Clean.
Too light to hold.
He ran his fingers over the blossoms and thought, This is the shape of the things he didn’t say.
And then—
A camellia.
White. Fragrant. Wide as his palm and heavy with dew.
It felt different.
Less like a message.
More like a memory.
There was sorrow in its bloom. A stillness that wrapped itself around Minho’s ribs and didn’t let go.
He held it for a long time before sliding it into the cover of the novel Jisung never finished—tucked between the final chapter and the receipt from the night they bought it.
He doesn’t know why he keeps them.
He just knows he has to.
They don’t wilt. Not really.
They fade slowly. Settle into the pages like they belong there.
He starts cataloguing them by feeling.
By weight.
By the silence they leave behind.
Some nights, when the air grows too still, he speaks aloud.
“I know this is ridiculous.”
“I know you’re gone.”
“But I still feel you.”
His voice sounds thinner in the dark, as if the walls are listening—but unwilling to respond.
But he says it anyway.
Because it’s true.
Because silence doesn’t scare him as much as forgetting does.
The room never answers.
Not directly.
But once, when he’s halfway to sleep—half-curled in the hoodie Jisung left behind, face turned toward the open window—the closet door creaks open.
Not a crash.
Not a chill.
Just a soft, slow swing of wood on old hinges.
And in the hush that follows, Minho swears—just for a moment, in that space between breath and dream—he hears Jisung laugh.
Not loud.
Not near.
But unmistakable.
He stops seeing other people.
It’s not a decision so much as a soft unravelling. A gradual retreat.
Texts go unanswered.
Calls are silenced without guilt.
The thought of company makes his skin itch—like someone trying to talk over a song only he can hear.
Everyone else is too loud.
Too alive.
Their laughter rings hollow.
Their footsteps feel like thunder.
Even the warmth they bring into a room feels wrong—too sharp, too insistent.
Like trying to drink sunlight when what he needs is shadow.
So he withdraws.
Wraps the apartment around himself like a second skin.
It’s quieter this way. Still.
A place where grief can take shape without needing to explain itself.
The rooms begin to feel more like him—muted. Reflective.
Dust gathers in the corners.
Time warps.
He starts marking the hours not by clocks, but by the sound of his own breath.
By the rhythm of the cough.
By the weight of petals as they land on fabric.
He spends his days listening to Jisung’s voice.
Old voicemails, mostly.
Some from grocery stores.
Some from the bath.
One where he’s laughing so hard he forgets what he meant to say, and ends with,
“You’ll know what I meant. You always do.”
Minho listens to that one the most.
There are recordings, too—soft, scratchy audio pulled from old videos.
Jisung singing under his breath while doing the dishes.
Humming in that absent-minded way that meant he wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
Just being.
Just existing in the same space as Minho, like that was enough.
And it was.
It had been.
One night, the silence stretches too long.
Minho sits in bed with his phone, the room lit only by the pale glow of the screen.
He opens the camera.
Hits record.
Not out of vanity.
Not even curiosity.
But need.
He wants to see it happen.
Wants proof—if only for himself—that it’s real.
He waits.
The cough comes—sharp, sudden.
A hiccup of breath that curls him forward.
And from his mouth, a single petal escapes.
He watches it through the lens.
But instead of falling, it floats.
Rises gently into the air, weightless and sure.
Spinning slightly, like it knows it’s being seen.
There’s no wind.
No breath strong enough to lift it.
And yet it hovers—
glows faintly in the dark—
just for a moment—
then drifts upward, out of frame.
Minho freezes.
His own reflection stares back at him—
hollow-eyed, chest trembling.
He replays the video.
The petal floats again.
And again.
And again.
Every time, it moves the same way.
Every time, it glows.
Minho doesn’t sleep that night.
He sits with the video playing in loops,
the silence broken only by the sound of his own breathing—
and the soft rustle of memory taking flight.
For the first time, he doesn’t feel entirely alone.
Just... haunted.
But gently.
“I don’t think I’m meant to get better,” he says to the empty room.
The words fall out of him like a confession—quiet, exhausted, shaped more by ache than sound.
He’s sitting on the floor, back against the side of the bed, knees drawn up, the soft flicker of lamplight casting long shadows across the hardwood.
The shoebox of petals rests beside him, half-open, a few blooms peeking out like they’re listening.
He isn’t crying. Not exactly.
There are no tears left. Not tonight.
Just that hollow, tender ache beneath the sternum—the one that’s been building for weeks.
Blooming with every cough.
Every petal.
Every dream that ends too soon.
He presses his thumb to the side of his throat, where he swears he can still feel Jisung’s breath from some half-forgotten memory.
The room is too quiet.
Still, in that heavy way that makes the air feel thick—like grief has its own gravity.
“I’ve tried,” he murmurs, voice fraying at the edges. “I’ve tried to move on. I’ve tried to sleep, and eat, and forget what it felt like to wake up to your voice, but…”
His throat catches.
The petals inside him shift.
“…I think you’re still here. Just not in any way I know how to hold.”
He lets his head tip back against the mattress, eyes drifting toward the window.
The glass is fogged, blurred by night.
The moon, a smear of silver in the distance.
And then—so slight it might be imagined—a breeze stirs the curtains.
Not harsh.
Not sudden.
Just a soft, deliberate sweep.
Like fingers brushing silk.
The fabric lifts and falls gently, as if breathing.
As if answering.
Minho doesn’t move.
He doesn’t need to.
Because for just a moment, the air smells like osmanthus—sweet, golden, nectar-rich.
And Minho thinks:
Maybe I’m not supposed to get better.
Maybe I’m supposed to keep blooming.
Weeks pass.
Time begins to lose its shape.
It no longer moves in hours or meals or morning light.
It folds inward. Rewrites itself around coughs and petals and the quiet hush of dreams that come too easily now.
Minho drifts through the days like a house submerged.
He does what he must to survive—but nothing outside of sleep feels real.
Because it’s in sleep that Jisung returns.
He had spoken even in that first dream—
words like roots, like the beginning of something buried.
“You planted me somewhere deep.”
But now his voice lingers longer.
His edges are less blurred.
As if the space between them has thinned.
As if Jisung, too, is finding his way forward—memory by memory, word by word.
Like he’s remembering himself alongside Minho’s grief.
He speaks more now. Softly, always.
As if not to disturb the breath between them.
He recites poems Minho doesn’t remember him knowing—
lines about roots and remembrance,
about how grief rearranges the body without asking.
He talks of silence.
Of echoes that outlive the voice that made them.
Of how some names never stop vibrating in the bones once spoken in love.
One night, Jisung looks at him for a long time—eyes tender, unreadable.
“You keep calling this grief,” he says.
“But what if it’s just love with nowhere to go?”
Minho can’t answer.
The words swell behind his teeth, too fragile to carry.
Another night, Jisung leans in so close Minho can feel his breath—
warm, scented faintly of osmanthus and sleep.
His lips barely move as he whispers,
“I live where you hold breath.”
The words echo.
Minho wakes with a gasp.
His throat is raw.
His lips taste of copper.
He touches them with shaking fingers—
and finds a smear of red.
Not quite blood.
But not quite anything else.
Something old.
Something blooming.
He coughs—
and what comes out is not a petal.
It’s a sprig.
Small. Green. Alive.
The leaves tremble in his palm.
He stares at it, breathing shallowly—
chest too full and too hollow all at once.
And in the stillness of his bedroom, lit only by a tired moon,
Minho can feel it:
A garden blooming in his throat.
Delicate. Wild. Unstoppable.
Every breath he takes now smells like memory.
Every exhale feels like love that never died—
only changed its shape.
It gets harder to breathe.
But not in the panicked, air-starved way he expected.
Not like drowning.
Not like suffocating.
It’s different.
Full is the only word for it.
His chest feels thick with something not meant to be contained—like he’s inhaled too much light, too much memory, too much of the dream.
Every breath swells with pressure, with petals pressing softly against the inside of his ribs, unfolding in silence.
Like something inside him is blooming too fast.
A fever of green.
A tremor of roots.
He can feel it in his bones now—
the slow, inevitable stretch of something growing toward a light that doesn’t exist.
His lungs ache—not from pain,
but from abundance.
From the impossible weight of spring curled inside his body like a secret it no longer wants to keep.
His inhales taste of damp soil and osmanthus,
and the barest trace of warmth that only exists in dreams.
Every exhale comes slower. Gentler.
As if his body is learning not to let go too quickly.
It’s louder inside him than it is outside.
And still—he dreams.
Jisung keeps appearing.
Barefoot in moss-covered rooms.
Perched in windows that open into skies made of memory.
He never rushes.
He never explains.
Just watches Minho with that same soft gaze—
like he already knows the ending,
and still chooses to stay.
He says less now.
He doesn’t need to.
The way he smiles—half-lit, quiet, reverent—is enough.
And Minho…
Minho stops fighting it.
Stops clenching his jaw against the cough.
Stops cataloguing symptoms.
Stops checking his pulse like it might vanish.
He no longer wonders if he’s sick.
Or broken.
Or losing his mind.
Because what he feels blooming inside him doesn’t hurt.
It just doesn’t belong to this world.
And neither, he thinks, did Jisung.
Not entirely.
So Minho closes his eyes—
and lets it grow.
On the fifty-ninth day, Minho lies in bed with the windows open.
The sky outside is lavender-gray, soft and indistinct, like it can’t quite decide whether to be dusk or dawn.
The breeze barely stirs, but it carries warmth—something lush and golden, like the world itself is holding its breath.
The air smells like peach blossoms.
Not the syrupy perfume of imitation bloom, but the real scent—faintly green, faintly honeyed.
Like fruit just beginning to form.
Like something that remembers spring but hasn’t fully stepped into it.
It weaves through the room slow and reverent, curling into the corners like it belongs there.
Minho lies very still.
His limbs feel weightless.
His body, a vessel emptied of everything but breath and memory.
The sheets are tangled around his legs.
His fingers rest loosely over his stomach, rising and falling with each shallow inhale.
Every exhale carries a petal.
They slip past his lips like sighs, soft and pale, floating toward the ceiling in gentle spirals.
Some land in his hair.
Some settle on the windowsill.
One lands on his chest and stays there—warm from his skin.
He watches them without blinking, eyes wide, wet at the corners.
He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for.
Only that he is.
He closes his eyes.
The petals keep rising.
The room holds still.
“Are you coming back?” he whispers.
The question barely escapes his mouth—paper-thin, already dissolving into the air.
He doesn’t expect an answer.
He’s long since stopped expecting anything at all.
But then—
In the space between heartbeats.
In the hush between one breath and the next—
A voice curls up from inside him.
Not into his ear.
Not around him.
Through him.
It moves like warmth.
Like the soft crackle of a hearth.
Like roots threading gently through soil.
Familiar.
Unmistakable.
A voice like roots and candlelight:
“I never left.”
Minho doesn’t open his eyes.
He doesn’t need to.
Because he believes it.
Because he feels it—
in the weight of the petals,
in the hush of the room,
in the breath blooming beneath his ribs.
Jisung is everywhere.
And everything that blooms inside him still speaks his name.
The next morning, the apartment is empty.
Except for the garden.
Petals line the floorboards in a delicate trail, like something unravelling gently—dream by dream.
They curl into the grain of the wood, drift beneath doorways, gather beneath windows that were never opened.
Fresh.
Dewy.
Untouched.
As if they’d fallen not from hands, but from lungs.
A vine winds up the leg of the chair—slow and deliberate, as though it had always been there, simply waiting to be seen.
It reaches toward the table, brushes the rim of a cold mug, cradles the spine of a half-read book.
The air is warm.
Not with light, but with life—verdant and humming.
The bookshelf rustles in the corner, pages shifting on their own.
Now and then, one opens with a soft sigh, then settles again.
As if breathing.
The entire room feels suspended—poised between pulse and stillness.
And on the bed—unmade, gently hollowed where a body once lay—
A single camellia.
White.
Unfurling.
Still warm.
Still glowing faintly, as though it holds the echo of something sacred.
The last breath.
The first bloom.
A name that never stopped echoing.
It smells like osmanthus and apricots.
Like nectar.
And morning.
And something that might be love.
Or the memory of it.
Or its return.
twt: @neme_sisK