Chapter Text
“Fuck this place for banning anything that lets me enjoy life at least a little bit, man.”
Alysa said to nobody but herself as she lit her Marlboro Gold, which she was keeping as her most prized possession hidden deep in her luggage. Not that there was much in the luggage anyway. The rules of the place were very strict, and there were little to no personal items she could have possibly brought.
The list of her items read as follows: one diary and one pen, which were forced into her hand by their housekeeper as she was leaving.
“You will make so many beautiful memories, Meixuan. Can’t afford to lose them all to time passing. Take this to write it all down so one day, when you are old and wrinkly like me and have lived your entire life, you have something to reminisce about.”
One diary and one pen which would never be used for writing about the retreat. Alysa didn’t need any of that. The only thing they would end up being used for was mindless scribbling to pass the time.
Another personal item she brought with her was her hairbrush she had been using for the longest time. Her hair was long, thick, and got tangled fast. This hairbrush was genuinely the only item she actually felt strong emotions toward.
Nothing sentimental, though. Alysa really wasn’t built like that.
The one and final item was a pack of Marlboro Golds, her favorite brand of cigarettes. She knew it counted as a contraband item, but she didn’t give a shit. All of this was completely forced on her.
There was no freedom of choice.
There had never been any freedom to begin with.
The only freedom she was offered was the one given to her by puffing on her cigarettes. That was all there was to it. Never had been any different.
So here she was, standing in bushes behind the main sleeping quarters of the Buddhist temple, hiding like a madwoman while smoking her cigarette.
Warm and humid night filled with an endless hum of cicadas.
Warm and humid night.
Cigarette smoke.
And a sound.
A sound that was definitely not caused by any natural source. Alysa became alarmed.
The sound she heard was human-made.
Footsteps.
Well, holy fuck.
She was about to put her cigarette out and immediately try to look for an excuse about why she was outside in the middle of the night hiding in bushes. That would definitely go soooooo well, wouldn’t it? Huh.
And then the footsteps came to a halt.
Alysa could hear nothing but the cicadas and her own raised heartbeat. She was damn scared for someone who was usually so nonchalant and put together. Maybe the holy aura of the space was finally getting to her.
She slowly moved past the thickest part of the bushes to a spot that let her see her surroundings more clearly. She needed a position that let her assess the situation.
Alysa slowly looked toward the darkest part of the temple area.
There was a person standing there.
Her reflex was telling her to drop the goddamned cigarette and just run away. Accept defeat.
She had been doing that for her entire life anyway. What difference would it make this time? But maybe, just maybe, standing her ground would make a tiny difference in the grand scheme of things.
Not like anything mattered anyway.
Not anymore.
Alysa tried focusing her eyes into the darkness. Tried seeing more than an outline of a body standing far away from the bush she was hiding in.
A second passed, then another one, and maybe a few more.
Alysa’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness.
The cigarette was slowly dying out, so Alysa took a few more desperate puffs, unwilling to let her only pleasure go to waste. Worldly pleasure amidst all this. Ironic.
And then she looked at the person again.
She couldn’t make out the facial features or anything more, but she could see that this person seemed to be a quite tall blonde woman.
A quite tall blonde woman with her eyes probably fully locked on the moon. Or that was at least what Alysa was assuming. The girl standing far away from her was facing up, completely motionless and still.
She hadn’t moved for the entire time Alysa had noticed the footsteps halting.
Just standing there.
Alysa was intrigued, but she wasn’t intrigued enough to leave the bushes and go inspect the situation. That girl seemed to be enjoying her solitude as much as Alysa was enjoying her own. Who was she to disrupt someone else’s solitude?
Not that she even felt any need to do that.
A girl looking at the moon.
Her with her finished cigarette.
Cicadas and a warm night.
Seeing the solitude of another person makes you feel less alone in your own.
-
Amber couldn’t fall asleep. It was the silence that kept her up. She wasn’t used to silence, and the sudden appearance of such an unknown element made her remember things she would have rather kept completely buried in the backyards of her unwanted memories, never to be dug up again.
Her eyes didn’t close. Sleep never even had a chance to come.
Amber was staring at the monochrome ceiling in her monochrome room, trying to clear her mind, which was usually so blissfully blank.
Not today, though.
Quite the opposite.
Curse you, silence.
She was sweating in the Korean humid summer heat like an addict. Her throat was completely dry. She reached for the glass that was usually standing next to her straw mattress.
It was not there.
Nothing to relieve the hellish heat and thirst. Someone must have taken the glass to the kitchen.
Nothing to relieve her thirst.
Amber sighed.
Then she stood up, but the lack of hydration and the summer heat immediately made her feel dizzy. She sat down once again.
Amber had to get away.
She had to get away from this thirst, this room, this place.
This life.
She collected herself enough to stand up once again and leave the room, trying to make her way out of the hallway. The living quarters in the temple were dark.
The whole place was a maze of tiny identical rooms and narrow identical corridors.
Easy to get completely lost in.
One summer night.
Amber was not the one to lose her way.
What a joke.
Well, she was good with directions, and her memory was second best to none. The thirst and heat were her singular driving force.
She finally made her way out of the building.
The sound of cicadas grew much louder than it had been in her silent room.
She could hear her own footsteps.
One. Two. Three.
She was counting them all.
Counting the footsteps reminded her of the familiar notion of counting one-dollar bills. The familiarity was trying to keep her grounded.
Some nights she was counting one-dollar bills, some nights it was twenties or even hundreds.
But in her mind, counting the steps was the most similar to counting those ones.
Back to ground zero.
When she returned back to reality, she was already standing far from the building in an open space. The backyard was as dark as the backyard of her hidden memories.
But there was one big difference.
This backyard was much more honest.
It was safe.
Nothing hiding anywhere.
There was nothing she expected.
And then she looked up.
There it was.
Hey moon, it’s been so long since we saw each other last.
I’m sure we’ll find some way to make the time pass.
She hummed the song silently.
Only to herself.
The night was warm and her throat was burning, and yet she found herself devoid of all thoughts, her only thought being:
Moon.
One single word replaying in her mind over and over again.
She was not used to the silence.
She was not used to safety and yet excruciating summer warmth.
Amber could swear she smelled a faint whiff of a cigarette somewhere in the distance. That must have been her imagination. Cigarettes and alcohol were numbers one and two on the contraband list, and surely there was not anyone dumb enough to break that rule on the first day.
She remembered the rules.
No alcohol, cigarettes, or any kind of drugs.
Phones were allowed only for one hour a day, but most people didn’t use them at all.
No physical contact with any of the people that crossed the line beyond friendly affection.
No clothes from the outside world.
Amber was not good at following rules, which was why this time, at least once, she told herself she would do her best to try.
She didn’t smoke, and physical contact with others didn’t attract her much. She was trying to run away from physical contact as much as she could when it was not necessary for her survival.
Hey moon.
She hadn’t moved for what felt like ages.
-
Alysa Liu was just four years old when she experienced her first happy memory she could recall to this day. She was standing at the skating rink with her younger sister, feeling completely at home.
Feeling like she belonged.
She was a natural.
Alysa Liu was just five years old when the first memory of her happiness started being overwritten with other, not-so-pleasant memories.
“Alysa, come here! You need to skate when I tell you to!”
She always heard her coach shouting through the rink whenever she decided to have just a tiny speck of fun.
“You cannot eat that! Athletes cannot eat that kind of shit. It has no nutrients. Do I need to remind you again?”
Alysa was just six when she first found out what restriction was.
And that was just the beginning.
These memories started flooding her mind as the memory of the cigarettes hidden in her suitcase flashed through it.
Yeah, no way she would be restricted here.
She really didn’t give a shit anymore.
But being kicked out would cause her a shit ton of problems, so she was hoping the cigarettes were very well hidden.
Not like anyone would go out of their way to tear her suitcase apart looking for contraband items.
It was very early in the morning, but the summer heat was already biting her, the scorching sun stinging in her eyes used to the chilly sensation of the skating rink. Alysa was a girl of winter being thrown into the unfamiliar grounds of summer.
Winter suited her better.
Summer was too happy-go-lucky.
She almost chuckled at that thought.
Alysa Liu, twenty years old.
This was her first summer spent somewhere far, far away from her usual skating rink. First summer ever spent in heat instead of cold.
Unfamiliar sensation.
She was standing in front of a Buddhist temple waiting for the morning exercise to begin. It was almost funny. The lengths her father would go to in order to make her a normal person were insane.
If being a normal person meant spending the summer at a Buddhist temple in some faraway Korean forest, that is. Her father’s idea of normal was already pretty strange itself.
There were no cicadas, but she could already hear different sounds she was getting accustomed to. The sounds of the monks and the other young participants waking up and getting ready for a long day of praying and working at the temple.
The omnipresent movement was something that made her feel at peace. Moving fast, like her and her fellow skaters on ice.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Be present.
She pulled on her uniform, which was already starting to stick to her body.
Heat.
Alysa was used to wearing what she found the most comfortable. How she missed her Nike Elite sweatpant shorts. The uniform was all brown, made out of a thin cotton cloth suitable for the humidity.
It didn’t stop it from being sticky. That was a given.
She didn’t feel quite like herself in this monochrome boring outfit, but hey, not like she could wear her usual clothes. As a matter of fact, she was not even allowed to bring almost any of them to the temple. They could only bring one singular set of outside clothes, which was also the set of clothes she traveled all the way there in.
And then it was taken away from her, the monks saying they would return it when the time was right, whatever the hell that meant.
Just as she was pulling on her now almost-wet shirt again, the field between the temple buildings started flocking with people coming out for the morning exercise.
She went to stand in her row, trying to pay attention to the head monk who took his place in front of everyone taking part in the exercise.
It was only the second day of this exercise, and yet she knew it all by heart. No matter what anyone said, Alysa was really good at remembering instructions.
Following them, though, was a completely different matter.
The monk started the exercise, and Alysa followed, her mind going back to the box of cigarettes she kept hidden in her suitcase.
And from the cigarettes, it circled back to her childhood memories appearing behind a thick veil of the summer heat.
The veil was trying to protect her, keeping most of what she had to see so blurry that she was unable to piece the voices and situations together.
It always came right back to the memories. It always did.
Another exercise.
Another memory.
For as long as she could last.
Then the exercises ended, and it was time for the morning work. This is how her days would go. Just exercising, working, and praying.
Praying to a god she didn’t believe in.
Praying that by the end of all this something would change and knowing it wouldn’t.
By the end of the retreat they were supposed to spend one entire week in silence. That was one thing Alysa was pretty confident she would excel in. Not like she would go out of her way to talk to anyone anyway. She never did.
She knew how this would go.
She would probably talk to the monks and to people in the kitchen while contributing to the cooking duty.
She would probably call her father every day when they were allowed phones, telling him the same thing over and over again.
She would probably ignore all of the missed calls and messages asking her how she was doing.
Not like she knew how to reply to those anyway.
And then there would be a strict routine. Switching off her brain and just doing what had to be done.
Yeah, she was completely and utterly stupid for thinking anything would change.
The morning prayers were spent with closed eyes and in silence. Praying to Buddha while she was trying to fight back the memories of her past flooding her entirely.
Then there was lunch.
She didn’t remember what was being served or discussed.
Alysa spent the whole lunch sitting in silence in her corner, minding her own business, which was probably her daily dose of nicotine cravings and self-loathing.
And then there was the fieldwork.
Alysa never had to do manual labor a day in her life. She did come from a pretty privileged background, and she was aware of that. But the labor of skating and training since she was a child paid off.
She was very strong.
Fit for working in the fields.
Unfit for doing it under a scorching summer sun.
Unfit for doing it while her mind was being constantly tormented by the fragments of who she once was. Who she always would be.
Unchanging.
And then nighttime came, finally bringing her back to the living quarters and reuniting her with her cigarettes. She was rooming with one more girl her age who was supposed to arrive later that week, which meant that for the time being Alysa was the only one occupying the room.
She was lucky.
Or it was nepotism.
She didn’t really know and didn’t really care much.
Not like knowing would magically make her care.
From what she had gathered, most of the people were rooming with five more people. Each time she remembered that, she was secretly happy about her luck, nepotism, or divine intervention. It would be much easier to ignore just one roommate disrupting her peace. Ignoring four more seemed like too much work for someone so tired.
When nighttime came and she was alone in the room, she finally got a chance to get ahold of her treasure in the form of processed tobacco leaves.
Alysa opened the cigarette box, took one cigarette out, and put it back flipped the other way.
For good luck.
She was not one to be superstitious, but she was prone to repeating certain habits, and this was one of them.
There was no luck hidden in that motion.
No secret meaning or hope.
Then she took out one of the cigarettes, hid it deep in her already sweaty pajamas, and left the room. It was already quite late at night, and even though they did have a curfew, nobody seemed to be trying to disrupt it. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do anyway.
The mornings were early.
They came fast.
Sleep was everyone’s biggest treasure.
This was the first time of the day Alysa was not thinking about anything other than relieving her need.
By smoking a cigarette in the bushes.
And smoke a cigarette in the bushes she did.
And then there were footsteps.
Fear.
Moon.
A taller blonde girl looking at the moon.
Someone else’s solitude hidden in the dim moonlight.
Her own solitude hidden in the faint smell of cigarette smoke.
And as she found herself back in the room lying on the straw mattress, she realized she was still not thinking about the foggy memories of her childhood.
She was not thinking about the cigarettes either.
She was just thinking about the moon.
It must have been beautiful if it made that girl stay completely still.
Completely motionless, basking in its dim light.
Hey moon.
There was definitely a song she once heard that said something like that.
There definitely must have been one, but she couldn’t remember.
Hey moon.