experiment
Sehun had a soulmate once.
She was pretty much the love of his life, the reason why he had once seen the world in colour. In the planet they lived in, EXO Planet 1541, everyone saw the world in monochrome up until the moment they meet their soulmate. Sehun had met Soojung one morning on his way to work, and she was his new intern. He had just stepped into his workplace, greeted his secretary, and locked eyes with the lady wearing a labcoat two sizes big on her, and black mary-janes, when the world suddenly burst into technicolour Sehun had to grab the closing door to steady himself. Sometimes Sehun thinks he can still remember what colours looked like when he thinks of Soojung-the brown of her hair, the red of her mouth, the blue of the dress she was wearing the day they met, the gold accents of her shoes.
In their planet, one ages only when they’ve met their soulmate. The sensation of meeting one’s soulmate not only triggers the part of the brain that perceives colour, it also activates the activity of the human cells to age. Sehun had looked forward to it, growing old and seeing the world in colour with Soojung, and they were five years down the line when he found himself seeing the world back to black and white.
It was an unfortunate accident. Sehun wasn’t the only one robbed of a soulmate that day, but the way he found out Soojung was taken away from him was one he wouldn’t be forgetting for a long time. He had been tending to Soojung’s prized garden, snipping off a few of the sick leaves on her rose bushes. The green was vibrant around him, filling his periphery with their summer beauty. Sehun decided he’d prepare a bouquet for Soojung so she’d have something to fawn over when she got home, so Sehun went ahead and cut off some red roses from the bush he was tending to. He was down to his last rose when all of a sudden he felt like a bucket of iced water was dumped over his head, and blinking away the uneasiness he saw the colour bleeding out of his vision. Next thing he knew he was crumpled on the ground with a fistful of roses he can’t tell what colour was anymore, and eyes that only see monochrome.
For how many years Sehun tried putting his life back together. He packed up all of Soojung’s stuff and put them away, hired someone to vacate the planned nursery room he made with Soojung, and paint it back to some colour Sehun wouldn’t even be able to see anyway, and filled the place with books upon books for his researches. He hired a gardener-technicolour-sighted, met and married his childhood friend and soulmate-to tend to Soojung’s garden, only so he’d know that someone can maintain the vibrancy of the garden his beloved left behind.
Sehun had thrown himself back into his job, continuing his life work of collecting and gathering data of the soulmate selection of different living planets. It was the project that he and his team, mostly colleagues, historians, and scientists-much like Sehun himself-concerned with the field, had worked hard to establish and document. Soojung was a part of the team too, along with a few others that were also gone now, and they were the very reasons why the project had continued on. Sehun remembers how fondly Soojung always talked about the soulmate selection, her rounded syllables rolling off her tongue as she plays with Sehun’s fingers, her pale legs extended and tangled with Sehun’s, soaking up the sun while lying out on their backyard.
Sometimes, Sehun thinks he can still see colours. Not for a long time, but flitters of them, like flashes of tainted light, always in the shades that remind him of Soojung. When he stares out the window of his study, overlooking the garden-Soojung’s garden-sometimes Sehun thinks he can still see their green, the way some are ashier than the others from the special fertiliser Sehun still keeps buying for the gardener to use. Other times Sehun thinks he can see how the blue of his research lab’s drawers, or what he presumes still, matched with the colour of the sky. He passes it off as exhaustion more often than not, continuing on opening a drawer and taking out his meticulously labelled phials of specimens, and continuing on with his work.
But one of the colours he thinks he sees, gets flashes of, the most is the colour red. When Sehun takes morning walks he sometimes looks forward to getting around to the rose bushes and, on odd days, he gets rewarded with flickered bursts of red, and it reminds him of the colour of Soojung’s nails, her soft hands that used to tend to the very plants he was currently passing by. Whenever his maid leaves a new bowl of fresh fruits by the kitchen counter during her morning rounds, Sehun’s almost always register the apples and the strawberries first. His mind instantly jumps to memories of Soojung and her fondness of strawberries, the rouge of her lips as they almost blend with the skin of an apple as she bit into them. All these precious colours he believes to still see, even flickers, in his memories of her.
Sehun’s soulmate may be gone, but nothing can and will ever take away the piece of Soojung that stayed with him.
However, when the years blurred into decades, into centuries, into millennia, his co-workers and partners passing away, being replaced only to be replaced again and again as a result of their finding their true loves and following their planet’s cycle of life, Sehun feels that part of Soojung he dearly clings to slipping away. There are times he feels like it never happened, that Soojung was just something his mind made up because of being so lonely for so long, for craving that kind of attention that Soojung’s existence happened. Other times Sehun wakes up in a cold sweat, chest heaving and pained, like something’s missing inside him. He wakes up feeling disoriented, desperate, and forgetting something he thinks he knows is crucial. These are the nights he cries himself back to sleep, for what reason he doesn’t know, not until the next time he wakes up and realises what it was he felt.
It was forgetting Soojung.
-unbetaed
-heh