He leaned his body deeply against the backrest and folded his arms. With Park Hyeonji, who had been thoroughly sulky about him disappearing without a word on the party day, he was able to smoothly restore their relationship in the near future. Of course, it was a superficial reconciliation as always. Awkwardly fumbling with a roundabout apology, reluctantly passing it over with reproach, unnecessarily making an exaggerated fuss, and then promising next time. As if the only way to preserve this thin ice-like relationship now was to bury their true feelings well.
– Lee Eunha.
Just before hanging up the call, Park Hyeonji called Eunha in a stiff voice. As if there was something left to say. However, she couldn’t bring out any main point and only accumulated silence.
– …Take care. You bastard. Contact me if anything happens.
What came after a long while was all useless mumbling. Eunha tightly gripped the hand holding the phone.
‘…Yeah. You too.’
He thought about relationships that would drift apart the moment one side let go. About the people who held on to that thread without letting go to the very end, about those excessive feelings whose depth couldn’t be gauged.
Trash…… He was aware but determination didn’t come. That was always the problem.
Travel, huh. It was the moment he was pondering deeply when his last trip had been. Among the unread messages, a certain name caught his eye. Eunha looked down at it quietly.
Jeong Taegeon
Meet up once when you have time
It was an unexpected contact. He hesitated for a moment since it was his most recent partner, but soon the sentiment disappeared. What did he want to meet for? Eunha expressed his intent by reading and ignoring it. What to do…… it was obvious it would be a boringly predictable matter.
Eunha, who had let his overlapped hands holding the phone drop limply between his legs, tilted his head back. A peaceful sky came into view. It was still the same daily life. Friends like rocks placed on his heart. Someone’s useless contacts remaining like life’s dregs carelessly brushed off. An emotional state listless beyond boredom.
And summer returning in circulation again. The hot and humid season. Or the season where his shoulders would shrink from air conditioning.
“……”
When the period of that tiresome year returns, Eunha falls into similar thoughts. Actually, whether he’s still just on the path of slowly dying.
Then, a vibration occurred in his hand. Eunha checked his phone listlessly, unable to shake off the lethargy.
Baek Yeonjun
Hyung
(Photo)
(Photo)
Several flower photos taken from various angles had been sent in a bundle. He had faithfully stopped by the café early this morning too. Because the content that arrived after a few hours was somewhat out of the blue, the corner of his mouth crumbled puzzledly. What’s this all of a sudden? After viewing for a while the photos taken quite atmospherically, Eunha sent a reply.
ㅋㅋ What’s this suddenly?
Baek Yeonjun
I remembered hyung likes flowers
When he sent messages to Yeonjun, it was a common phenomenon that the unread indicator didn’t appear at all. Eunha looked at the photos again. They seemed to be photos taken somewhere at school. Unknown yellow wildflowers and purple wildflowers, white flower buds beautifully hanging in clusters on tree branches.
Was it because he saw him every day? He could easily imagine Yeonjun who must have taken these photos while crouching down or holding up his phone. His large build doing that was extremely unfitting, and even if it fit, he seemed like a child, and so it was funny.
Eunha scrolled up through past conversation records. Most were questions asking if he’d eaten. Since the day he collapsed at the movie theater, he had thrown questions every single day without fail asking whether he’d eaten. When he said yes, he asked what he ate. When he arrived at the café and showed his face, he asked if he slept well.
They were all nothing but conventional greetings, but he didn’t know why they kept feeling difficult. A feeling like he shouldn’t approach them half-heartedly.
Sleep aside, since it was inconvenient to lie every time about the specific menu of meals, when he roughly took care of meals, he ended up having one proper meal a day. Because of that, his stomach seemed to have expanded a bit too.
I remembered hyung likes flowers
Eunha, who read the message again, wrote a reply. Pretty. After sending it, he closed his eyes. The thought that actually filled his head the moment he read it remained only under his tongue.
I don’t like flowers. I just hate them withering. No matter how much effort he put in and cultivated them, they would annoyingly die off, and in defiance at that conclusion, he was only repeating the work of blooming, blooming, and blooming endlessly. Even though doing so wouldn’t make them live forever.
* * *
The last weekend of May just before summer. Eunha had another date appointment. They had a proper meal out for lunch, leisurely settled somewhere in a park and had trivial conversation, briefly stopped by a bookstore, and around evening when the sun was setting, they ate simply again and went for a drive to a lake near Seoul.
The last one was Eunha’s suggestion. It was recent times when he frequently went for drives as his chest would feel stuffy whenever there was a chance. Because when he concentrated on the wind fiercely hitting his cheeks, at least his breathing opened up.
Eunha drove, and the car was also his. To be precise, it was in his mom’s name, but it didn’t matter anyway. Yeonjun said he hadn’t gotten his driver’s license yet because he didn’t feel the necessity. The entire way there, he vividly felt him sitting in the passenger seat watching with clear pupils filled with different colors, now familiar. When he asked why he was staring so burdensomely, just, because I like it… he gave that kind of foolish answer again. When he glanced sideways, he could discover him faintly looking this way with hazily relaxed pupils.
It was absurd, and so he laughed.
An evening heading somewhere with a twenty-year-old guy without a driver’s license riding next to him was a not-too-bad state of mind. It seemed like he’d wanted to enjoy that kind of feeling in the first place. Whenever he felt Yeonjun’s youth, whenever he acted inexperienced, Eunha consistently felt pleasure. It was like shallow prestige and superficial pretension.
While slowly walking on the walking path of the lake where the luminarie sparkled, they had trivial conversations again. How could there be such endless things to talk about? Eunha was the quiet type, and Yeonjun wasn’t a talkative nature either, but strangely when they were together, conversation didn’t stop.
Perhaps it was because they were in a relationship where there was much more unknown than known. Like that, countless topics daily came up as conversation subjects and disappeared. Content that couldn’t be remembered when trying to recall it after a day passed. Times when he’d laugh emptily wondering what on earth they talked about so much yesterday again. Small talk that wasn’t heavy and had no nutritional value, impressive anecdotes experienced at some point, things like that.
“Have you been here with someone before?”
It was close to nighttime. The wide walking bridge crossing the lake was safely lit, but it was quite late and the point they’d reached was also deep, so there were no people nearby. The night lake with a gentle mountain as a background looked ominous at a glance, but it also had its own charm.
Eunha answered with a wordless gaze.
“You seem familiar with it.”
He’d moved his steps according to the course he remembered, and it seemed that was read.
Not much different from expected. It was a place that wasn’t very unfamiliar. The first person he came with was Kim Jiwoon, and after that, he’d been here a few times with partners too. One might wonder why he’d come to a place famous as a date course with sex partners, but.
Just because sex was the main purpose didn’t mean they only had sex like work. Sometimes they ate out, sometimes they came out for light drives. There were times they wandered parks idly too. He never requested to spend such time first, but when the other side requested it, he responded without minding. Always, except for excluding emotions, it was a relationship not much different from dating.
So, exactly like today. If there was a difference between those sometimes and now, it was that sex was missing. Because the final destination with those someones was always a hotel or officetel.
It was a suddenly embedded insight. In ‘a relationship no different from dating if emotions are excluded,’ what exactly was a relationship where even sleeping together was removed?
So… what am I doing right now… that dazed awareness. A dim suspicion.
