Chapter Text
The boy walked through the crowded corridor. His head hung down, eyes fixed to the movement of the tip of his shoes as he took his steps forward. His head bobbed up and down, following the rhythm of the music played in his earphones, fingers busy picking on his own nails. He might get into trouble if the disciplinary teacher caught him bringing electronic devices to school, but he didn't care. He needed the music to keep his mind busy.
He just walked past a group of people, heard their incoherent words and laughter through the music blasting into his ears, and the more he walked into the hallway, the more crowded the place was. He realized that way too late and once his head caught up to everything around him, he was trapped in the middle of the current.
“Do you know that new kid? He draws so, so well!”
He blinked his eyes slowly, trying to fight the overwhelming feeling caused by the buzzing crowd. He took off one side of his earphone to listen to the commotion more clearly.
He followed the directions of the others’ eyes. Some of them were standing on their tiptoes to get a glimpse of the scene inside, some of them whispered to each other. The boy didn't realize the way his body was pushed to the front row by the movements of the other students' bodies that were coming and going—until he found himself on the front row, right in front of the open door to the art studio.
There was someone in the middle of the room—surrounded by some curious people. Some were asking questions, some just wanted to take a closer glimpse of the colorful canvas and be a spectator.
The boy flinched his eyes, trying to get a proper vision of what was laid out on the canvas. His eyes moved carefully, registering every object and color in that unfinished painting.
Then he froze in his place, hands dropped limp beside his thighs without him realizing. He let the wire of the right side of his earphone fall off completely from his ear, suddenly felt like he could feel his own steady heartbeat through his ribs, listening to his own breath that now sounded like it was so clear in his head.
It was a breathtaking piece—despite the white gaps scattered across the canvas.
It was a portrait—of a woman. The background was something akin to butterflies, placed like it was abstract, but at the same time held a purpose. The butterflies covered the woman's left eye, the dark background was a contrast to the woman's skin that seemed like it was luminous.
He held his breath. Suddenly, a rapid stream of melodies filled his head. He snapped his fingers, tried to engrave the melodies into his brain, afraid that he would lose these surges of emerging beautiful melodies inside of his head.
He could vaguely still hear the conversations of a few people around him, seeping in between the notes playing in his mind.
“Who was his name again? The new kid,” the girl right beside him asked her friend.
“I heard it was Musiala?”
Musiala.
“Hey, Michael. Sitting here all alone again?”
He turned his head up, feeling a shadow looming over him, obstructing the page he had opened in his book. He just casually nodded his head, accepting the other person's offer to shake hands.
“What are you doing? Writing songs again?” He now sat beside Michael on the grass, took a peek on the shabby page of Michael's notebook.
“Tsk, stop being nosy,” Michael shushed him away, moving his body several inches further from him. He did an effortless attempt to cover the page.
The other person giggled, “Hey, come on. I want to see it. It's always a delight to see this side of you. You sound so romantic in those songs you write, you know? I wonder who prompted you to have all those ideas.”
Michael just tried to ignore the disruption, continuing humming to the demo song he arranged last week.
“I want to hear it too.”
Michael let out a long sigh when he felt nonstop nudges on his arm.
“Barcola, respectfully,” Michael took a deliberate pause. “Can you leave me alone? Just go flirt with those girls or something. I need quietness to focus—and you talk too much to my liking. You disrupted my rhythm."
Barcola blinked his eyes with an innocent face, attempting to tease his friend further.
“Just one time. Please,” he pressed his palms together in front of his chest, putting a forced begging face.
Michael sighed again. He took off the right side of his earphone and shoved it to Barcola.
“Just once,” he warned him.
“Yippee! You're the best, Mike,” Barcola accepted the white bud happily, shoving it to his ear.
He listened to the beats carefully, tried catching all the instruments Michael used in the melodies through his first listen.
He looked at Michael in disbelief, mouth agape until the end of the one minute thirty seconds demo.
“Man, that was sick!” He took off the bud and returned it back to the owner. “I know you're a musical genius, but this was really something! Never heard this kind of sound from you, but it's definitely one of the best that you've made!”
Michael could feel Barcola's sparkling eyes fixed on him from his side. Too bright, Michael thought to himself.
“You're exaggerating,” that was what Michael could put out.
“No, I’m not! I'm investing in this one,” Barcola wrapped his hand around Michael's shoulders, making the other groan in surprise. “Now I'm really curious. You gotta have some kind of muse to be able to pull out insane ideas like this. It's like you never ran out of brilliant ideas. Or you're just genuinely out of this world.”
Michael paused his hand's movement on the paper.
He then shook his head, “I'm the second one.”
Barcola let out a loud laugh, flicking Michael's ear that ignited a second groan out of him.
“Well, I believe that,” he let his arm linger on Michael's shoulders a bit longer before he jumped from their seat on the ground. “The next period will start soon. I'll go back to the class first.”
Just like that, Barcola walked away, humming to some anime song that Michael started to get bored of because he always sang the same song over and over.
Michael took a peek on his watch. Barcola was right. The next class will start in five minutes. He closed his eyes, feeling the breeze hitting his face, humming to the melodies he made once again, and opened it again, now looking up at the bright sky. The weather was nice.
Michael would be lying if he didn't have a particular vision in his mind whenever he wrote those songs—the one important detail was that the vision was not a person. Not someone in particular.
It was a collage of memories he had of something. Some views. Some figures. Some colors. Some brush strokes.
He couldn't forget any of it. Sometimes it was vibrant, sometimes it was gloomy. Sometimes it was a scenery, sometimes it had a living being in it.
Sometimes, the glimpse of that smile still haunted his sleep—constantly taking some space in that collage of vision.
Sometimes, Michael regretted the fact that he was a coward. He never dared to think about stepping further beyond that door frame, even just simply for saying hi or fulfilling the curiosities in his mind. He just stood there in silence, watching the back of the painter move with delicacy, looking at every brush stroke he made.
Then one of those days, the days where Michael was just peacefully watching the boy painting in that room twice a week, suddenly, he was greeted with some warmth.
That one time, the boy turned his body back—and his eyes met Michael who was standing frozen behind the window.
Michael really was about to run away the moment the eyes landed on him, his heartbeat spiked up because of that sudden eye contact, when a glimpse of his voice froze Michael's body entirely. He suddenly forgot that he wanted to hide his face away from the object of his observation, that he was not ready for anything beyond that glass window or that door frame.
“Hi! Come in here! You can sit over here, better than standing there all the time.”
Even the voice was as warm as his smile.
And don't get him started on the eyes.
The eyes that haunted him for days after that—hell, even until now that several years had passed, sometimes, it still showed up in his mind whenever he tried to compose a new song. The long lashes and the spark in his eyes. It was mesmerizing.
Alas, Michael really was just a coward.
He did actually run away after that—instead of returning the warmth the other boy offered with his greetings—he didn't dare to look back at all. His heart still banged on his ribs with irregular rhythm that he felt like he was close to fainting.
After that day, Michael never went to the studio if he was alone. He would never repeat the same mistake of standing there awkwardly all by himself and getting caught by the other boy.
Michael wondered, would things be different if he wasn't too scared?
Because everything became a what if to him once he finished junior high school. Through the remaining year he had in that school, the only thing he knew about that boy was his name—Jamal Musiala. He won multiple art competitions and his name was everywhere thanks to that. Art was something that not a lot of people pursued at that time, so Musiala seemed like an exceptionally gifted kid in that field.
Michael never actually spoke to him after the last time the boy greeted him with that sweet smile, even until the day he graduated junior high.
Now that they were in different schools, Michael never heard anything about him afterwards. Not even once Musiala was supposed to be in high school, not even in the entire neighborhood, and obviously not in his school. He heard some news from some of his old classmates that he went back to his hometown abroad after he finished junior high school, but Michael never really knew where he was from. By this point that Michael was now in his last year of high school, it seemed like the neighborhood totally erased Musiala's trace all over it. Nobody seemed to remember the child art prodigy who became the talk of the entire school—and the neighboring schools.
But for someone so distant, Musiala sure was a persistent, vivid object in Michael's brain.
How he wished to see his art again.
Michael picked on his skin again, head hung low, eyes fixed on the pattern of the varnished wooden table in front of him.
“Michael, you have an exceptional grade,” the homeroom teacher opened their consulting session, eyes fixed on the student in front of him, hoping for him to pay attention. “With this grade, you might easily be accepted to engineering majors, but we surveyed everyone in 3rd grade three times now and all of your choices were art school—music major. Are you sure about this? Have you talked to your parents about… you wanting to go this path? Is this really what you want?
Michael bit his inner cheeks, still refusing to meet his teacher's persistent gaze on him.
‘So you think art students don't have the brain and you think that they must be inferior to the other students?’
That was what Michael wanted to say out loud to answer his homeroom teacher. Alas, he didn't have the guts to actually spit it out.
He licked his lips before answering with a straightforward answer, “Yes. I've been aiming for this since ten years ago and I have no plan to change that.”
He finally could return the teacher's gaze.
His homeroom teacher cleared his throat, “Well, if that's what you want, then I guess I gotta support you. You will get to your dream major easily, Michael. I'm sure of it. Just keep doing well in school okay? You're one of my top students. I'm proud of you no matter what path you choose. Now you can go back to class and please tell Barcola to come here. He hadn't done his counseling and he submitted an empty form.”
Michael lifted his eyebrows.
“Okay. Thank you for the session, Sir,” just like that, he left the room.
He hated counseling sessions.
A lot of people seemed to underestimate art majors, which in Michael's mind they have a very shallow mindset.
Not everyone could appreciate art, which was a shame, but Michael truly pity those people. For him, art was a substance that kept the beauty in this world. Art would always have that exclusive touch of human feelings, portraying the creator's life and thoughts, all unique to each human being.
It made him fall in love with it.
Music pushed him through the harsh current of life. He never thought of any possibility of any other path he was willing to go down other than dedicating all of his passion to create music.
At least until he could complete that collage of artwork in his brain that he poured passionately into his music.
Life went through so quickly when you're in your last days of school. It was now July and he had now officially graduated from high school. He got admitted to university earlier this month so everything was settled for him.
Barcola went to the same art school as him. He finally chose fine art, which Michael guessed because he loved anime so much and it had been inspiring him to become an artist. He had a sketchbook full of those anime characters that he said he loved so much that he drew them religiously
The dedication was admirable.
Nothing too special about graduation, though. Michael had finished school with good grades, saying farewell to some friends and teachers after the short ceremony, taking home all the stuff he kept in his locker.
The new semester in college will start in September. Michael had to prepare well before he moved into the new city where the school was located.
Life goes on. This city held a lot of memories, but it was about time Michael expanded his horizon a bit further.
Ding dong.
Ding dong.
Ding dong.
Michael groaned on his bed. He threw his blanket to the other side of his bed, unwillingly walked out of bed and stepped on the scattered papers on the floor. He clicked his tongue hard, feeling inexplicably mad that his low quality nap got disrupted.
He opened the door furiously and was met with the usual perpetrator.
Of course it was Barcola with his darkened eyebags showing up in front of his room at 2 a.m. in the morning.
“What are you doing here? Didn't I tell you not to disrupt me when I have deadlines?” Michael asked him sharply despite his eyes still half closed.
Barcola slipped into Michael's room before he was even granted permission to enter from the owner of the room.
“Hey, get the hell out. I can't work properly if there are distractions,” Michael closed his door, hurriedly following Barcola inside, but the other just walked straight to his balcony. “Come on, not today. I have a tight deadline.”
Barcola opened the glass door, letting the cold breeze enter Michael's room.
“I won't bother you. I'll stay here on the balcony. Just pretend I don't exist,” he said, casually laying out his tools on the floor of Michael's balcony.
Michael rubbed his face in despair, “It doesn't work like that. Come on, man. You can't keep doing this.”
Barcola looked up at Michael, “I promise I won't make any sound. I also have a deadline this morning.”
Michael clicked his tongue, feeling defeated.
“Fine. I'll close the curtain,” he said, closing the fabric that covered the glass facing his balcony, obscuring his vision from Barcola who was busy with his own work now.
Forget about the fruitless power nap. Michael lost all his desire to sleep thanks to the guest disrupting his nap.
One hour.
Two hours.
Four hours.
The submission deadline was in three hours. Michael played the whole song once again, listening to his hard work.
Once he felt satisfied, he input the finished and refined recording into the CD that he would submit for the assignment.
After he was done with the work, he threw his body to the floor, feeling his whole body beaten. He was supposed to be used to this self-destructive lifestyle by now that he was already in his third year of university, but it wasn't any easier to go through this over and over for a whole semester.
The door to his balcony was finally opened and Barcola reentered his room with his big canvas and the bag that was filled with his art supplies—with his absolutely sleep-deprived face.
They were frozen in their spot for a while, feeling like they were a reflection of each other. Just the same mess.
“Gotta go now. This should be in the exhibition hall before eight,” Barcola said with a hoarse voice. He yawned after that.
“Well, good luck,” Michael said mindlessly. He tried to close his eyes, catching up to the sleep that he had been deprived of for two weeks now.
“Anyway, come to the exhibition if you have time. No, no. Not for me. There's this freshman in my department who's really good listed in this batch of exhibition together with me. Thought you would love to see his pieces. His artworks remind me of the songs you composed and the type of music you made—feel like they have the same color and atmosphere, you know?” Barcola continued.
He then grabbed one loaf of bread from Michael's food storage box and snatched one can of energy drink from his refrigerator.
Michael just let out a hum to Barcola's invitation.
“I think I've heard of his name even before he came to our uni. His name rings a bell,” Barcola said.
Michael didn't actually pay attention to what Barcola was saying. His brain really felt like it was fried and he genuinely just needed some sleep now. He was starting to question why his guest hadn't left yet despite him saying it himself that his time is tight.
Well, he really just wanted to sleep in peace before he went to his class in two hours.
“It's Jamal Musiala. Just search for works with his name in the hall. I gotta admit he's on a whole different level despite being a first year student. I envy him, but I'm lucky to experience at least one same batch of exhibition with him,” Barcola continued.
Hearing that name, Michael's body was frozen.
He couldn't control the way his body reacted to that name. His heart beat ridiculously faster to the point he felt like his vision was swirling.
“Musiala?” subconsciously, his mouth mumbled out the name.
Barcola who had just finished eating his bread now fixed his gaze onto Michael.
“It rings a bell to you as well, huh?” He lifted his eyebrows, gaze turned to Michael who was laying down on the floor.
Michael pursed his lips.
He's here?
Didn't he go back to his home country after junior high?
He was here this whole time?
He jumped from his laying down position.
“When will the exhibition end?” he asked.
“This Saturday,” Barcola answered, munching on the bread.
Michael looked at the music sheets scattered on his floor, contemplating.
He really wanted to see—again—what kind of music ignited inside of his brain when he saw Musiala's artworks. The version of him who was no longer an innocent child with a naive character with a smile that only bears warmth.
Was he still as passionate? Was he still as warm as that day he greeted Michael?
For Michael, it had been five years, but apparently, those paintings he saw from their junior high school days held such a strong grip on him—warped his mind in such a… beautiful way, Michael would say.
He wanted to see it again—no matter if the form of his art had changed.
[Chapter 1, finished.]