So I told him honestly how I felt.
“You got dumped because you’re ugly.”
At the time I said those words, I wasn’t even aware of how uncharacteristically childish I was being. My head was simply spinning from the sense of betrayal.
“You think I actually like someone like you? You think I…?”
Returning to his dorm room, Hakyoung was overwhelmed with emptiness.
The reunion he had waited for was nothing like any of the scenarios he had simulated.
He hated Yumyeong’s very existence for defying all his expectations. The height that had grown too tall, the body that was clearly so firm that bones would clash if he embraced him. Even the long eyes that now held an inexplicable melancholy unlike in childhood.
He resented all of it. He hated everything about Yumyeong—his appearance, his personality—as if he had discarded everything Hakyoung used to like about him somewhere along the way.
What he hated most was how Yumyeong acted as if he had completely forgotten all their promises.
Of course, he had no intention of demanding that childhood promises be kept now. No matter how much they had liked each other back then, no matter if they had linked pinkies and promised marriage, by adult standards it was just child’s play. Besides, keeping such promises was impossible anyway since they were both male. Hakyoung knew that much.
Yet he had believed without doubt that at least those tender feelings from back then would remain as precious memories between them. That’s why at first he thought Yumyeong was just playing a mischievous joke. He thought pretending not to recognize him was Yumyeong’s own small revenge for being called “ugly.”
But in truth, Yumyeong had completely erased his existence from his mind.
“You really don’t remember me?”
The moment he asked that question, seized by doubt and thinking “surely not,” his eyes met Yumyeong’s. He didn’t need to hear the answer. He saw the truth in Yumyeong’s eyes.
Those innocent eyes asking back, “Were we acquainted?”
The moment he met those eyes, something hot surged up Hakyoung’s throat. The heartbreak he felt then was immense. It was incomparable to the confusion he’d felt from the reunion being different from what he’d imagined.
Yumyeong wasn’t deliberately pretending not to know him. It definitely wasn’t a joke… Realizing what kind of delusion he had been under all this time alone, Hakyoung’s body trembled finely with deep shame.
“Ah, what is this, what! Why! Why are you being so childish!”
“Get out.”
“Hey, I’m leaving on my own, no… my shirt’s tearing!”
The only thing Hakyoung could do to hide his own turmoil was to immediately remove Yumyeong from his sight. He forcibly grabbed his shirt collar, exposing his neck, and pushed him out. The door closed with a bang, and then came the humiliation.
In the room where only his own breathing could be heard, Hakyoung sighed and rubbed his burning eyes.
It was all just his own delusion.
Thud—he collapsed onto the bed and after a while lay face down with his face buried in the pillow.
In that position, the sun set and the sunset slowly warmed his back. Soon the room became pitch dark. In the room dyed black, Hakyoung lay there without any movement the entire time. His shoulder blades rose lonely on his back where the light had retreated.
Hakyoung had so many things he wanted to ask Yumyeong. Even if the current Yumyeong looked different from what he had imagined, even if he acted annoyingly whenever they met, the childhood memories wouldn’t disappear. So he thought that once they got a little closer, he’d like to have a serious conversation. Though that would only be possible once his wounded and sulking heart had eased a bit…
Still, he had never once thought such a day wouldn’t come. Sharing past memories with Yumyeong—this had always been that natural to Hakyoung.
When the time came, he wanted to ask Yumyeong how much he remembered from their childhood.
Also, whether he missed those times too.
He wanted to ask if he had dated any girls while they were out of contact, or if he had come to like any other kids.
If Yumyeong kept picking fights with him because he was embarrassed about having kissed another boy and promised marriage, he could understand and let it go completely. It made sense to be embarrassed now that they were high schoolers.
“I know there are things you want to forget. I’ll pretend the first kiss never happened. But you remember the time we spent together, right?”
If Yumyeong nodded, he wanted to play him the songs they used to listen to together.
He probably expected to see Shin Yumyeong’s face breaking into a bright smile, saying he finally remembered. The old pop songs his mother used to play that they sang along to without understanding the meaning, the smell of grass brushing past their noses as they ran around trampling the lawn in the garden full of wildflowers, the body heat they felt from each other while napping together, the high body temperature unique to children and the cool breeze that cooled their sweat…
He wondered if Yumyeong remembered even a little of that distant scenery.
But Hakyoung had been abandoned alone in those memories. He was the only one who had been sitting in that dark, grass-scented wildflower garden, waiting endlessly for the other person.
Realizing this, an intense loneliness came over him. He couldn’t even understand why he had come back to Korea.
Hakyoung slowly moved his arm and pulled the blanket over his face.
Year after year as he grew older, he began to seriously think about the fact that the child he had loved so much in childhood was a boy. That really did become a major obstacle at one point. He often agonized deeply over this. He had never easily accepted this fact. Sometimes he worried about his own identity, but aside from Yumyeong, there were no other friends he was drawn to.
Everything was unclear—whether he liked men, whether he liked Yumyeong, or whether he was just ruminating on memories because he had grown accustomed to loneliness from being abroad since a young age.
The diary he had started writing after coming to America, once he could no longer send letters to Yumyeong, was filled with these worries. Hakyoung, who had always been calm, gradually sank deeper into his inner self, and whenever life abroad became difficult, his longing for the friend he had loved so much grew deeper.
He too had always been curious about the identity of these feelings. He thought something would become clear when he met Yumyeong again. His own heart, and what he wanted to do with him—everything.
But now he didn’t want to say anything.
In the pitch-dark room, the pillow silently grew warm and wet. The fact that it was all just his own feelings was driving him crazy with pain.
That night, Hakyoung finally made up his mind to forget everything just as Yumyeong had.
Resenting the time he had wasted, he tried to erase even the past. He wanted to treat Yumyeong as if he didn’t exist in his life at all…
***
A heart chilled by heartbreak grew cold on its own without any effort. For some time, Hakyoung treated Yumyeong like a rock, let alone a first love.
What was unexpected was that this behavior actually sparked Yumyeong’s competitive spirit and made him come at him even harder. Unbelievably, Yumyeong wouldn’t leave Hakyoung alone for even a moment. He seemed desperate to provoke him somehow.
During PE class, he would throw a ball at Hakyoung’s back for no reason to pick a fight, and he would brazenly steal side dishes from his meal tray. At first, those childish acts were so absurd he couldn’t even get angry. His behavior was exactly at the level of “an elementary school boy desperate for attention from the person he likes.”
Thankfully, Yumyeong’s behavior was a great help in cutting off his feelings. After the already disastrous reunion, there wasn’t a single thing about the current Shin Yumyeong that he liked.
First of all, the biggest problem was that he had grown too tall. His delicately cute eyes and nose had also transformed into a striking, tall face with distinct features. There were still pretty parts remaining here and there on the boy’s face for a male, but even that passable face lost its appeal when you saw how he acted.
The rumors surrounding him were also not good. It was well-known that he had been involved in school violence incidents, and stories that he had been marked by third-year sunbaes came around frequently. Some teachers shuddered at the mere mention of Yumyeong’s name. The disappointment they showed toward Yumyeong was not feigned.
Hakyoung thought most of the rumors surrounding Yumyeong were true. After all, he was one of the people who had witnessed Yumyeong unable to control his temper and throwing punches at a classmate.
“If I had known he was this kind of person, I would never have liked him.”
Hakyoung despised violence. Learning that Yumyeong was the type who easily hurt others when swept up in his emotions was enough to fill him with disgust.
Truly, the feeling that he hated Yumyeong was genuine. His goodwill had plummeted vertically to rock bottom in proportion to how much he had liked and expected from him. So he had no intention of playing along every time Yumyeong tried to get a rise out of him. He intended to simply continue hating him and ignore him thoroughly.
That’s how it was, that’s definitely how it was supposed to be…
“If you act like that, I might just go seduce the dormitory fairy.”
Whenever Yumyeong threw out his lowly tactics, a fire ignited at the bottom of his heart.
Along with the assessment that he was a despicable bastard who toyed with people’s feelings as he pleased, there came a fierce emotion that he couldn’t stand to watch Yumyeong date someone else. Hakyoung still couldn’t clearly identify what that feeling was.
Just one thing was certain. He hated Yumyeong terribly, but he hated even more the idea of sending him off to someone else.
He rationalized his feelings at the time, thinking it was probably because he couldn’t stand to see him be happy alone. Also, the thought surged up that if he wanted to date so badly, wouldn’t the proper thing to do be to first settle things about their past together?
