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Sooyoung is a soft edge in a world full of sharp.
Joohyun finds reprieve in the bends of her knees and the curve of her smile, soft over wicked-white teeth - but she has twigs for bones beneath her skin and gentle is not a word Joohyun knows.
She is strong. Her shoulders slope back and her spine stands straight, vertebrae on vertebrae on vertebrae on vertebrae. Her hipbones are knives and she hides them beneath lies of softness - skirts and tights and crescent-eyed smiles. She feels anger viscerally, sticky and heavy like the fifteen minutes before a thunderstorm.
Her mother taught her how to apologize. How to bend her back and cover her chest and put a hand over her mouth when she laughs. How to make a boy fall in love with the bones of her wrists and the pitch of her voice, and how to keep herself whip-stitched together, seams pretty and even, especially when she feels most like she’s about to break.
No one ever taught her how to love a girl with peach-soft skin and not leave bruises.
(She tells Sooyoung this, one night, laying on the floor of a half-lit dorm room with sleep trapping her limbs to the rug. Sooyoung props herself up on one elbow, hair falling out from behind her ears. A smile curls at the edges of her lips.
“That’s okay. You can learn.”
She kisses her, then, insistent and warm. Her tongue tastes like nectarines and honey and Joohyun wants to drown in the brightness of her.)
Sooyoung loves with her entire being. She offers everything like she doesn’t know how to give anything less - stands in front of Joohyun with her heart in her hands like a sacrifice, bloody and still-beating. And when Joohyun finds that all she can manage to give is small things - her knuckles, her shoulders, her jaw; two of her heartbeats, her eyelashes, her earlobes - Sooyoung never asks for anything more. She is a soft edge in a world that has trained Joohyun to be sharp. Small. To fold herself inside of herself to make room in train cars and to get out of the way before she needs to be asked to move.
(“Aren’t you ever afraid?” Joohyun asks, body curled tentatively into the warmth of Sooyoung’s side. “That someone could find out?”
“No,” she says, jaw set, eyes full of fire and stubbornness. “Let them. I don’t care. I’m not going to change who I am just because it makes somebody else uncomfortable.”)
She is made of all the bright pieces that Joohyun keeps hidden inside her ribcage, and it's terrifying. She holds Joohyun's hands like something valuable and makes her want to be something more, something outside of her own body. She makes roots inside of Joohyun's chest and tugs.
(Sleep-drunk and heavy but happy happy happy, fingers curled into the backs of Sooyoung's pressed-together palms, Joohyun whispers to the dark, "Thank you. You make me different every day. You make me better."
Sooyoung's teeth glint in the moonlight like pearls when she smiles, proud and warm. Joohyun feels it against her skin.
"No, don't thank me. You did that on your own.")
---
my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
chrome and execute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
becoming something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
bellowings.
- my mind is, ee cummings