So I said I am Ezra
4614 words,
I know, I wish it was longer.
"The human body can react with many things."
The chemistry boy had said. One of the few memories that constantly bounce in and out of his mind, words that he can't help but hear, that speak to him in uncountable split-seconds, dimensions out of time.
"The heavy metals. Gases. Radioactive dust that ionize cells."
Six years old. In his bedroom. Reciting facts freshly acquired from an old science textbook. Yoochun faces the window away from the high, insistent voice; he sits at his desk and tries to work, to get his homework done for Monday on a Sunday afternoon. But between the erratic rise and fall of pink curtains and the child teaching him what he already knows, the unfamiliar Chinese characters get lost and won't be retrieved. The essay stalls, the boy cannot confess to his mother just yet as Yoochun has forgotten the words for repentance. He slams the Korean-Chinese dictionary onto the table, just to make a point.
"Hyung? Are you angry?"
Yoochun says no. Of course he isn't. But makes sure to suggest pointedly that Changmin go downstairs to his mother. What he really means is go away and they both know it. Yet, when he hears the rustling of blankets and the click of the door as Changmin slides off the bed and leaves, the weight on his heart just sits heavier than ever.
Skip back to the present.
Autumn is cold and grey. The gravel and bugs toss up against the windscreen. The narrow road stretches long and empty ahead of Yoochun; dry earth and wild grass grow at the sides and the sea glimmers on the horizon like a warped and tarnished copper dish.
It's been twenty years since Changmin and he were children together, but Yoochun still remembers that Monday he went to school with the essay only half done and with no way to decently explain why. He had been so scared then, but now as he grips the steering wheel to follow the road's wide arc, he realizes that most things don't matter in a lifetime.
But some things do. Although Yoochun feels like he must be the only person for miles around, thoughts of Changmin are always drifting at the periphery, waiting for a lapse in his concentration to rush to the fore and drench the present with their colours.
Carbon monoxide binds faster to haemoglobin than oxygen. It's so much easier to die than to live. Why such a thing as life even exists is beyond Yoochun. Logically, the only things that should be are minerals, things that can never change and cease to be, that can't just be gone ever.
But the way things are, Yoochun sees the soil and stone, the mashed-up insects and torn-up roots gathering at the sides of windscreen, and so it appears that the world is edged with death. Things past and gone but still remain, unknown constants in an equation that doesn't make sense.
Where did Changmin go? Yoochun chortles and taps an old tune on dashboard with his free hand. No one knows.
Yoochun turns off the road and stops his car on the grassy verge. He’s here. This beach is his favourite place, the only constant in a life that has changed too many times-mostly for the worse. Nobody comes here except for those same few high school kids playing beach volleyball instead of going for tuition or school-sanctioned extra-curricular activities, just like him so many years ago. Near the sea, he can be happy. Or as close to happy as the world allows.
When he gets out, the wind hits him, and as always at this time of the year, its sheer force surprises him. This is one of the things Yoochun loves about his beach, that the way it is can never be completely internalized, that part of it stays always outside and aloof from him. When Yoochun was young and still remembered God, God was like this beach, large and real and holding him in the palm of his hand. And he used to dream that when he died, God would raise his soul and they would look at each other, face to face, the universe would pour from one to the other and so he would become a patch of sky, a star or a blooming flower winding its stem around a doorway. But ever since he grew up, it seems he’s lost his visionary gift.
And so he finds faith in other things.
The water crashes against the land, the dull light falls across the waves. The ripples change like clouds blown about the sky but the sea looks hard as iron. Yoochun looks out and the sea disappears into the emptiness. He feels like he is facing the edge of the world, safe from others, safe from himself, with no need to confine or define. So he says what has been building in him, wanting to find voice, ever since-
“Changmin.”
The wind whips his hair against his cheeks and eyes. Is he calling for anyone? The name-no, word-is almost completely held in his mouth as if he’s afraid to let it go. He’s afraid to let it sound against the sky and sea and take on a life of its own and look into him. So he says it as softly as his own breath.
The day Yoochun knew, that was a Tuesday. Many weeks ago. Maybe months, but still he prefers to say weeks because it just couldn’t have been so long ago. He had come home from the office, had just set down his briefcase and was hanging up his coat when Yunho came out from the kitchen.
“Your mother called this afternoon. It sounded pretty urgent, so why don’t you call her back?” He had smiled even as his hands fidgeted with the edge of his apron and Yoochun knew immediately that something terrible had happened.
It had taken him several tries to dial the phone number correctly and when his mother finally answered the phone, she too could barely speak. So for the first few moments they just listened to each others’ breathing
“Do you remember-that boy, our neighbour so many years ago? Shim-Shim Changmin. He died-yesterday, or the day before yesterday.”
For the duration of the fifteen minute conversation, Yoochun had felt like he was floating in space, as if the chair had vanished from under him when he learnt that Changmin had been working alone, late at night in the laboratory. The walls had faded away as he heard his mother’s shaky voice tell him of the carbon monoxide leaking from the waste tank, and finally the floor turned into empty space when she cries aloud about the poor boy found face-down, with his face pinkish and eyes half-closed. He had floated in no particular place with the receiver stuck fast to his ear until she blew her nose loudly on the other end and said that such a death was fast and almost painless, and the world reasserted itself with a solid thump as she told him to come for the wake and the funeral.
Although Changmin had long ceased to be part of Yoochun’s life, an icy chill had touched his heart then. And only some time after the sky turned completely black did Yunho find Yoochun crouched on the floor with the phone fallen face up beside him.
The wake and the funeral were both awful. Yoochun had gotten lost twice before he finally found the right place, for Changmin’s family had moved away from the old neighbourhood. And there he found a house completely strange to him, with the wrong wallpaper and too much glass, with too many people stony faced or crying. Changmin’s mother had wailed right in the middle of the last rites and his father was too busy thanking Changmin’s colleagues and employers to attend to his wife. The body lay cold and alone in its coffin, forever a million miles away, untouchable. And when it was Yoochun’s turn to place a lily on top and bid him goodbye, all he saw was an abandoned husk through the box’s glass window.
Yoochun feels something like tears prick the edges of his eyes. He breathes in. So, for the first time since he heard the news, he’s crying? He can’t be sure and so he lets them come, rise inside him and flow out onto his cheeks, lets the wind blow them in a diagonal path down his neck and into his shirt collar.
But certainly it can’t be grief he feels. Yoochun looks at the sky, heavy with low-hanging clouds, filled with light although the sun is nowhere to be seen. He had not liked Changmin. The boy was four years younger and annoying, always calling after Yoochun, Yoochun-hyung look, hyung listen, hyung hyung hyung. He remembers with bitterness how he was forced to be the child’s friend just because their mothers had buddied up when Changmin’s family moved in.
When Yoochun was eight and Changmin was four, he had wanted to play with his new robots. He had invented this fantastic mystery about a trail of missing parts conspiring to find each other and become powerful enough to stamp out human beings. And naturally, the younger boy had wanted to play as well.
“No. You’ll mess it up. So just sit down and watch, if you want.”
“Just let me.”
“No.” Yoochun leaned forward and plucked the robot’s arm from Changmin’s grasp. He was about to lay it in the middle of the newspaper road when the child let out a big wail.
“Ummaaa!”
And that had sent both mothers running from the kitchen.
“Umma, Yoochun won’t play with me.”
And while Changmin’s mother leaned over her own child, wiping off his tears with the edge of his shirt, Yoochun’s mother had scolded him in front of both guests, for being selfish, for bullying someone younger. Yoochun could only nod and feel his face burn as the child soon stopped crying and simply stared at him with beady eyes. Finally, Yoochun’s mother made him promise to share his toys and both adults went back to their tea.
“Here.” Yoochun crushed the cardboard props he had spent hours making the day before.
“You can have these.” He pushed the crumpled boxes and jumbled robot parts to Changmin before running out of the room.
Yoochun marvels at how easily the memories come back. Didn’t he read somewhere that adults forget their lives before the age of ten? How fast time has gone by. He hears the gulls crying in the distance, circling high above the sea or dipping in large unreadable arcs to trail their beaks in the water. The birds carry on with the same old thing each day brings, and on reflection, so has he. Neither know why things were made this way. Certainly it couldn’t be all the universe meant to be, dreamt of being in its long gestation.
Perhaps it’s his own fault, Yoochun thinks as he recalls all the steps he had taken to build such high walls to reduce his life to what it is now. Nine hour days in a stale air conditioned office. Spreadsheets. Graphs. The world reduced to a sea of numbers through which he had to swim to find something meaningful, like consumer preferences for bottle shapes or the maximum price people would pay for three days and two nights in the Maldives. It was something he could do, and he would earn enough to live comfortably, he had reasoned to himself when he took the plunge and registered for statistics instead of pure mathematics in his second year of college. And even before that, really.
He smiles in spite of himself. He had been an artist. That’s what his mother had called him when he was seven and tapped to the rhythm of Chopin’s heroic polonaise when they were in the car, going somewhere. And before he was due to select the high schools he wanted to go, a teacher had stopped him on the way to class, with one of his essays in her hand. “You’re talented. You should write more on your own.” Yoochun had just blushed then, because she was the only person who noticed these things and spoke to him as if she really believed he was worth something. And because he liked her, Yoochun had looked at the ground and said he’d try to write more. But even so, he made the school of math and science his number one choice, gritting his teeth and not daring to look up as he handed the slip of paper to the teacher.
The clouds fly overhead, like huge clumps of dirty wool being pulled about by an invisible hand. But it’s just the wind. Caused by uneven concentrations of cold air in the northern hemisphere and warm air down south. Yoochun stopped dreaming of the invisible boy in the sky after he started middle school.
Yoochun’s first year was a nightmare of too much homework and his teachers’ constant threats of future poverty. He remembers the day his first term test results were released. The boy who sat at the front of the classroom and absorbed information effortlessly topped the level in all subjects. He, on the other hand, was left in the third row from the back, staring at the hasty Cs and Ds scrawled across the white cover pages of his Chemistry, English, Mathematics and Physics papers. The deep shadow of the empty classroom was slashed through with orange sunset spilling from the windows when the class monitor knocked the doorframe.
“Yoochun, the teacher wants to know why you’ve missed class.”
The other boy’s smile was almost poisonously cheerful. Yoochun could barely hide his tears as he was escorted to the after-school study session. He had never liked his classmates, but it still hurt to know they didn’t care about him at all.
Thinking back, Yoochun guesses he hadn’t been studying as hard as other people, but school had never been easy either. Just something he eventually forced himself to go through with so he wouldn’t be poor next time.
He remembers the nights spent in tuition class, drawing polymer chain patterns and memorizing integration techniques. He still knows the deadness he felt in physics class, it was all as dry as dust, the effects of friction, gravitation, even the quantum journeys of subatomic particles. Although it didn’t set his mind on fire, Changmin did.
The child was eleven when Yoochun was fifteen. He had grown solemn and inward and no longer clamoured for Yoochun’s attention although they had to spend time together because of their mothers’ continuing friendship. So forced play dates turned into forced study sessions.
“I’d be grateful if you could help Changmin look over his homework.”
Mrs Shim had smiled at Yoochun before leaving the room. But Yoochun was too old to be fooled by then, and could see the satisfaction and pity in the woman’s eyes. It was obvious to all of them that Changmin was already far cleverer than Yoochun would ever be. While Yoochun went to the district high school, Changmin had skipped two levels in the magnet school he attended and still ranked number five in his level.
So when Yoochun knew the adults were out of earshot, he put down his pen and said loudly, to nothing in particular, “I don’t think you need help. Just study like I’m not here.”
“Ok. That was what I was intending to do anyway.”
Although the answer was a mere echo of Yoochun’s own request, it sparked the bitterest hatred he had ever felt.
Even now Yoochun tastes the afterburn. Envy corrodes the heart, first insidiously, then shamefully. He had thought all through adolescence that Changmin had more, was better, was whole; for while Yoochun struggled with calculus and never understood covalent bonds, the other boy coasted easily above the bewildering tangle of graphs and atoms.
When they studied together, while Yoochun often needed five tries to draw vector diagrams just right, Changmin always sat unperturbed by the shaking table, steadily reading his textbook with eerie, ferocious concentration. It was deeply disquieting in many ways.
“Changmin,” Yoochun calls in the direction of the forest receding in the distance. He says the word a little louder this time, allows himself to think how odd it sounds in his voice, so changed from when he was young. They had gone their separate ways since Yoochun had grown up and out of his childhood home and Yoochun had since forced himself to forget the other boy and the brilliance that he could never be party to. But death changes the look of things and Yoochun feels in his heart that he needs to get the memory of dead man right.
Otherwise his spirit might just stay trapped in another’s outdated resentment. Like an insect floating in amber’s nowhereland.
Yoochun moves a little faster now to the water’s edge, closes in just a little to the green hills. The world moves too, reorienting itself into perspective around him. He sticks his hand under his scarf and presses cold fingers against his neck, wondering why he feels neither sadness nor anger when he speaks the name. Just emptiness, an unreadable pang like the echo of a pebble dropped down a well.
He remembers so well the feeling that he was not whole when he heard about Changmin’s victory at a science fair.
“Yoochun, did you read the newspaper?” Something big must have happened if his mother saw fit to intrude upon his exam preparations.
“Wha-at?” Even the yawn doesn’t soften the irritation in his voice. “Mother it’s 3 AM and I still haven’t finished.”
And you’ve just completely ruined my concentration for the second time tonight. He wants to add on but bites back the impulse to snap at her.
“Oh, I just thought you might want to read the newspaper before you go to sleep,” her voice reminds him of the foolish clucking of a hen, so he twists his hands under the desk and tells her he’s not sleeping anytime soon.
“Well, then you should read this, it might explain some of the problems you have in chemistry homework. Changmin did this thing.”
She unfolds the newspaper she’s been holding and he reads, “14 year Old Boy Wins S. Korea’s Most Prestigious Science Fair.” Changmin’s black, flat eyes cut him like a knife.
Yoochun hated how arbitrary fate was.
But now that he’s twelve years down yonder and actually seeing the wide world, Yoochun knows he can’t just write the universe off in momentary spleen.
Yunho has helped to show him that. Upon further reflection, Yoochun has to admit that this lonely beach is not the only place where he makes sense.
A few months past twenty when it’s August and Yoochun sits at the doorstep, smoking and trying to enjoy the last of the summer when Mrs Shim walks up. Her eyes have that glitter that’s all too familiar to Yoochun, but he shifts a little to let her in anyway.
“My mother’s in the kitchen.” He blows smoke at her while pretending to be helpful. He knows it must be Changmin again, the boy must have topped the level or won some hyped up science quiz, so he doesn’t follow her inside.
This is how Yoochun doesn’t find out about Changmin’s university scholarship until the old hag is gone and his own mother calls him in for dinner.
“But…he’s only seventeen.” He can feel his brows knit in spite of himself.
“Sixteen.” His mother corrects him after she swallows her broccoli. “He’s a smart boy, always was. He was seven months old and could already say-“
But then her face changes all of a sudden and her hand is still, spoon held glinting in midair.
“Son … are you unhappy?”
He feels his face flush and heat up because it’s so fucking obvious and now even his father is staring. So he says he feels ill, why does she always cook food he hates, and leaves the table.
Even the house isn’t big enough to hold in all his tears, so he grabs his father’s wallet left lying on the living-room table and takes the first bus that has free seats. He wants to ride out as far as it will take him, like the childhood fantasy of mysterious interstellar trains, but he chickens out after the bus takes an unfamiliar turn and settles for a homey, clean-looking bar that’s not quite a downtown joint.
“You look sad. Don’t drink so much.”
The voice belongs to the man seated beside him. He’s dressed in rumpled work clothes, black pants and a fraying shirt that should be white, although he doesn’t look much older than Yoochun. Because his eyes are a flat black in the dim light, it’s hard to read his expression and so Yoochun turns back to his beer.
“Stupid pickup lines get you nowhere.” He’s annoyed that he’s only being noticed because someone wants something from him.
“I’m not picking you up. You just look troubled and I was afraid you’d go out later and crash your car into a pregnant lady or something.”
He nearly gets into an argument with the man, partly because he’s stunned by the intrusion into his personal space and partly because he doesn’t even own a car for god’s sake when the guy sums up the past two decades for him.
“You’re not happy.”
After a few hours Yoochun is friends with Jung Yunho, an art teacher at a neighbourhood elementary school.
Three years later they enlist for military service together. Two years after, they are free and move into an old apartment in a quiet place far from main roads and shops. Yoochun tells Yunho about his life just once.
They’re sitting on the grass in a public park because it’s the only space that’s free in a world that runs on money.
Yoochun plucks out a few blades of grass and lifts them to the sunlight before he lets them fall back to the ground.
“I guess that’s how you hate someone, when they have all that it is you want because. It’s just a constant reminder of how mean your own life is. It was so arbitrary, why some of us are just left with the questions and no way to answer them.”
“Not everyone asks those same questions. Maybe he didn’t.” The words are ambiguous, but they are said without judgment. So Yoochun knows they are more than the sort of cliché so often used to fool and quiet the heart. The rustling of leaves behind them grows loud.
When Yunho speaks again, his voice regains its customary warmth. Now he’s lying on the grass and shading his eyes with a large hand.
“Why do you expect a finished world? It’s not a set riddle, to be answered on certain lines. Not bad, not good.”
The wind blowing through the trees gains force and sweeps from the treetops to the ground. Leaves fall all around them, into Yoochun’s lap and get stuck in Yunho’s hair and fingers.
Yoochun remembers every single detail with unerring clarity and even now in autumn, the sound of that high summer day so many years ago still remains immediate and troubling. He had felt for a moment as if his life were a slate being wiped clean, all the writing disappearing under a wet cloth.
His trouble had been his guiding light. For awhile afterward, he lived just trying not to think about anything until he felt it was safe enough to stick his head out of the ground again. And now he lives one day at a time.
Yoochun pulls his coat tighter as a shield again the cold air rushing inland from the sea. The sky is turning greyer as the afternoon wears on. He pulls his sleeve up a little to look at his watch.
3:45 pm. He has time, so he walks further on.
He calls out, pointlessly because the words has lost all the earthly meaning it could have had, purposefully to marshal his own thoughts to where they should be.
“Changmin!”
After today he’s not going to think about him anymore.
The sand is grainy and damp with the season’s moisture, it scrapes under the soles of his shoes. He turns and looks behind him and realizes his car and the road has receded from view; just as well, he wants to be totally alone.
Yoochun breathes in the autumn and tries to remember all past doubts and unhappiness so that he can finally shake them, because Changmin is dead, his own views have changed and so his life is truly in need of renewal, freedom. Even so, thinking about a dead man gives him the chills. The target of so much childish energy is so suddenly vanished. It’s strange really, that a thinking feeling human is not much more substantial than a shimmering of summer heat, transforming from something into nothing when its time is up. Yoochun feels that some part of himself has been called into question, that he can’t quite justify why he is around if the other boy had not been let to live.
Yes, the world is not a finished thing in which lives are to be ranked in value. So lives can't be ranked in which are worth more, which less. Can’t, not should not-there lies the difference, that restraining judgement is impossible because of the way the world is, not merely a choice made out of human compassion. This fact should set him free, that there's no law in the universe that requires him to measure up to anything, to find anything, but Yoochun still finds it difficult to rest, difficult to live with full conviction that he has just as much a right to be here as anyone else. Because occupying space on God's good earth ... that's just not enough, now is it?
Yoochun turns his face skyward and spins around, arms spread out at his sides. He wishes he could fly away, high into the clouds and disappear in a glimmering of light. The responsibility of being alive is too great. All he can say now is that he's wasted it, ten years of dreams, twenty years of stalking in the periphery.
He can't help but feel that Changmin's death is a terrible mistake. The dark eyes and the bright all-seeing mind have been lost forever because of some fault of the equipment that stopped his heart and sealed his blood. The one who should be alive. The one Yoochun had always wanted to be, but was instead destined to be close and yet separate.
The death was not his fault, but Yoochun feels a strange regret like no other. As he turns his gaze skyward and sees gulls flying outward to sea, he knows a mystery has been lost before he could unravel it, and so the only thing left for him is to let it go.
“Changmin, I’m going to forget you. I’ll never think of you again, so just go, be free to be what you are.”
The words sound trite and hollow as they go over the waves and are taken apart, tremble by tremble of air molecules. Yoochun speaks to nothing, his thoughts reach no living soul and quell no beating heart, but it’s the best he can do.
When he starts the car and turns back for home, he resolves to start his life anew.
+
A/N: The story behind this story is a long one and it's so interesting that I think I should tell it as a bonus. I had actually wanted to write a nuclear holocaust GD/Seungri AU and I even wanted to use the same title because of the poem that I took the original inspiration from. But then I shelved it because I just didn't have the motivation to write it, and then, one day I just started writing this instead.
This thing was a devil to write. I think I'm actually disappointed in myself, I started this about thirteen days ago, wanting it to be something quite short, but somehow it became really long and draggy and I just wanted to end it. I still put in effort and I hope it will be a good read. Maybe one day I'll come back and write another version that satisfies the original vision that I began with, but now I'm going back to school soon and still have other things, fandom and non-fandom to do, so this has to suffice for now.
I'm hoping that anyone who might read it and is intrigued will take me up and offer some ways of building towards a conclusion that's more satisfying, from both a philosophical and emotional viewpoint.
This is the original poem,
So I Said I am Ezra, by A.R. Ammons
as a little sidenote, the Ezra in the poem might not be Ezra Pound (the Modernist poet) as many sources say it is. I found out a few years back that Ammons wrote this poem when he found out that his hunchbacked childhood playmate had died in the Second World War. (How's that for trivia? And my memory retains the weirdest things!) I prefer that idea, it's more poignant than a poem for a poet; I prefer personal memory to the whole idea of poems about poems... although I guess both have their place.
I know, I wish it was longer.
"The human body can react with many things."
The chemistry boy had said. One of the few memories that constantly bounce in and out of his mind, words that he can't help but hear, that speak to him in uncountable split-seconds, dimensions out of time.
"The heavy metals. Gases. Radioactive dust that ionize cells."
Six years old. In his bedroom. Reciting facts freshly acquired from an old science textbook. Yoochun faces the window away from the high, insistent voice; he sits at his desk and tries to work, to get his homework done for Monday on a Sunday afternoon. But between the erratic rise and fall of pink curtains and the child teaching him what he already knows, the unfamiliar Chinese characters get lost and won't be retrieved. The essay stalls, the boy cannot confess to his mother just yet as Yoochun has forgotten the words for repentance. He slams the Korean-Chinese dictionary onto the table, just to make a point.
"Hyung? Are you angry?"
Yoochun says no. Of course he isn't. But makes sure to suggest pointedly that Changmin go downstairs to his mother. What he really means is go away and they both know it. Yet, when he hears the rustling of blankets and the click of the door as Changmin slides off the bed and leaves, the weight on his heart just sits heavier than ever.
Skip back to the present.
Autumn is cold and grey. The gravel and bugs toss up against the windscreen. The narrow road stretches long and empty ahead of Yoochun; dry earth and wild grass grow at the sides and the sea glimmers on the horizon like a warped and tarnished copper dish.
It's been twenty years since Changmin and he were children together, but Yoochun still remembers that Monday he went to school with the essay only half done and with no way to decently explain why. He had been so scared then, but now as he grips the steering wheel to follow the road's wide arc, he realizes that most things don't matter in a lifetime.
But some things do. Although Yoochun feels like he must be the only person for miles around, thoughts of Changmin are always drifting at the periphery, waiting for a lapse in his concentration to rush to the fore and drench the present with their colours.
Carbon monoxide binds faster to haemoglobin than oxygen. It's so much easier to die than to live. Why such a thing as life even exists is beyond Yoochun. Logically, the only things that should be are minerals, things that can never change and cease to be, that can't just be gone ever.
But the way things are, Yoochun sees the soil and stone, the mashed-up insects and torn-up roots gathering at the sides of windscreen, and so it appears that the world is edged with death. Things past and gone but still remain, unknown constants in an equation that doesn't make sense.
Where did Changmin go? Yoochun chortles and taps an old tune on dashboard with his free hand. No one knows.
Yoochun turns off the road and stops his car on the grassy verge. He’s here. This beach is his favourite place, the only constant in a life that has changed too many times-mostly for the worse. Nobody comes here except for those same few high school kids playing beach volleyball instead of going for tuition or school-sanctioned extra-curricular activities, just like him so many years ago. Near the sea, he can be happy. Or as close to happy as the world allows.
When he gets out, the wind hits him, and as always at this time of the year, its sheer force surprises him. This is one of the things Yoochun loves about his beach, that the way it is can never be completely internalized, that part of it stays always outside and aloof from him. When Yoochun was young and still remembered God, God was like this beach, large and real and holding him in the palm of his hand. And he used to dream that when he died, God would raise his soul and they would look at each other, face to face, the universe would pour from one to the other and so he would become a patch of sky, a star or a blooming flower winding its stem around a doorway. But ever since he grew up, it seems he’s lost his visionary gift.
And so he finds faith in other things.
The water crashes against the land, the dull light falls across the waves. The ripples change like clouds blown about the sky but the sea looks hard as iron. Yoochun looks out and the sea disappears into the emptiness. He feels like he is facing the edge of the world, safe from others, safe from himself, with no need to confine or define. So he says what has been building in him, wanting to find voice, ever since-
“Changmin.”
The wind whips his hair against his cheeks and eyes. Is he calling for anyone? The name-no, word-is almost completely held in his mouth as if he’s afraid to let it go. He’s afraid to let it sound against the sky and sea and take on a life of its own and look into him. So he says it as softly as his own breath.
The day Yoochun knew, that was a Tuesday. Many weeks ago. Maybe months, but still he prefers to say weeks because it just couldn’t have been so long ago. He had come home from the office, had just set down his briefcase and was hanging up his coat when Yunho came out from the kitchen.
“Your mother called this afternoon. It sounded pretty urgent, so why don’t you call her back?” He had smiled even as his hands fidgeted with the edge of his apron and Yoochun knew immediately that something terrible had happened.
It had taken him several tries to dial the phone number correctly and when his mother finally answered the phone, she too could barely speak. So for the first few moments they just listened to each others’ breathing
“Do you remember-that boy, our neighbour so many years ago? Shim-Shim Changmin. He died-yesterday, or the day before yesterday.”
For the duration of the fifteen minute conversation, Yoochun had felt like he was floating in space, as if the chair had vanished from under him when he learnt that Changmin had been working alone, late at night in the laboratory. The walls had faded away as he heard his mother’s shaky voice tell him of the carbon monoxide leaking from the waste tank, and finally the floor turned into empty space when she cries aloud about the poor boy found face-down, with his face pinkish and eyes half-closed. He had floated in no particular place with the receiver stuck fast to his ear until she blew her nose loudly on the other end and said that such a death was fast and almost painless, and the world reasserted itself with a solid thump as she told him to come for the wake and the funeral.
Although Changmin had long ceased to be part of Yoochun’s life, an icy chill had touched his heart then. And only some time after the sky turned completely black did Yunho find Yoochun crouched on the floor with the phone fallen face up beside him.
The wake and the funeral were both awful. Yoochun had gotten lost twice before he finally found the right place, for Changmin’s family had moved away from the old neighbourhood. And there he found a house completely strange to him, with the wrong wallpaper and too much glass, with too many people stony faced or crying. Changmin’s mother had wailed right in the middle of the last rites and his father was too busy thanking Changmin’s colleagues and employers to attend to his wife. The body lay cold and alone in its coffin, forever a million miles away, untouchable. And when it was Yoochun’s turn to place a lily on top and bid him goodbye, all he saw was an abandoned husk through the box’s glass window.
Yoochun feels something like tears prick the edges of his eyes. He breathes in. So, for the first time since he heard the news, he’s crying? He can’t be sure and so he lets them come, rise inside him and flow out onto his cheeks, lets the wind blow them in a diagonal path down his neck and into his shirt collar.
But certainly it can’t be grief he feels. Yoochun looks at the sky, heavy with low-hanging clouds, filled with light although the sun is nowhere to be seen. He had not liked Changmin. The boy was four years younger and annoying, always calling after Yoochun, Yoochun-hyung look, hyung listen, hyung hyung hyung. He remembers with bitterness how he was forced to be the child’s friend just because their mothers had buddied up when Changmin’s family moved in.
When Yoochun was eight and Changmin was four, he had wanted to play with his new robots. He had invented this fantastic mystery about a trail of missing parts conspiring to find each other and become powerful enough to stamp out human beings. And naturally, the younger boy had wanted to play as well.
“No. You’ll mess it up. So just sit down and watch, if you want.”
“Just let me.”
“No.” Yoochun leaned forward and plucked the robot’s arm from Changmin’s grasp. He was about to lay it in the middle of the newspaper road when the child let out a big wail.
“Ummaaa!”
And that had sent both mothers running from the kitchen.
“Umma, Yoochun won’t play with me.”
And while Changmin’s mother leaned over her own child, wiping off his tears with the edge of his shirt, Yoochun’s mother had scolded him in front of both guests, for being selfish, for bullying someone younger. Yoochun could only nod and feel his face burn as the child soon stopped crying and simply stared at him with beady eyes. Finally, Yoochun’s mother made him promise to share his toys and both adults went back to their tea.
“Here.” Yoochun crushed the cardboard props he had spent hours making the day before.
“You can have these.” He pushed the crumpled boxes and jumbled robot parts to Changmin before running out of the room.
Yoochun marvels at how easily the memories come back. Didn’t he read somewhere that adults forget their lives before the age of ten? How fast time has gone by. He hears the gulls crying in the distance, circling high above the sea or dipping in large unreadable arcs to trail their beaks in the water. The birds carry on with the same old thing each day brings, and on reflection, so has he. Neither know why things were made this way. Certainly it couldn’t be all the universe meant to be, dreamt of being in its long gestation.
Perhaps it’s his own fault, Yoochun thinks as he recalls all the steps he had taken to build such high walls to reduce his life to what it is now. Nine hour days in a stale air conditioned office. Spreadsheets. Graphs. The world reduced to a sea of numbers through which he had to swim to find something meaningful, like consumer preferences for bottle shapes or the maximum price people would pay for three days and two nights in the Maldives. It was something he could do, and he would earn enough to live comfortably, he had reasoned to himself when he took the plunge and registered for statistics instead of pure mathematics in his second year of college. And even before that, really.
He smiles in spite of himself. He had been an artist. That’s what his mother had called him when he was seven and tapped to the rhythm of Chopin’s heroic polonaise when they were in the car, going somewhere. And before he was due to select the high schools he wanted to go, a teacher had stopped him on the way to class, with one of his essays in her hand. “You’re talented. You should write more on your own.” Yoochun had just blushed then, because she was the only person who noticed these things and spoke to him as if she really believed he was worth something. And because he liked her, Yoochun had looked at the ground and said he’d try to write more. But even so, he made the school of math and science his number one choice, gritting his teeth and not daring to look up as he handed the slip of paper to the teacher.
The clouds fly overhead, like huge clumps of dirty wool being pulled about by an invisible hand. But it’s just the wind. Caused by uneven concentrations of cold air in the northern hemisphere and warm air down south. Yoochun stopped dreaming of the invisible boy in the sky after he started middle school.
Yoochun’s first year was a nightmare of too much homework and his teachers’ constant threats of future poverty. He remembers the day his first term test results were released. The boy who sat at the front of the classroom and absorbed information effortlessly topped the level in all subjects. He, on the other hand, was left in the third row from the back, staring at the hasty Cs and Ds scrawled across the white cover pages of his Chemistry, English, Mathematics and Physics papers. The deep shadow of the empty classroom was slashed through with orange sunset spilling from the windows when the class monitor knocked the doorframe.
“Yoochun, the teacher wants to know why you’ve missed class.”
The other boy’s smile was almost poisonously cheerful. Yoochun could barely hide his tears as he was escorted to the after-school study session. He had never liked his classmates, but it still hurt to know they didn’t care about him at all.
Thinking back, Yoochun guesses he hadn’t been studying as hard as other people, but school had never been easy either. Just something he eventually forced himself to go through with so he wouldn’t be poor next time.
He remembers the nights spent in tuition class, drawing polymer chain patterns and memorizing integration techniques. He still knows the deadness he felt in physics class, it was all as dry as dust, the effects of friction, gravitation, even the quantum journeys of subatomic particles. Although it didn’t set his mind on fire, Changmin did.
The child was eleven when Yoochun was fifteen. He had grown solemn and inward and no longer clamoured for Yoochun’s attention although they had to spend time together because of their mothers’ continuing friendship. So forced play dates turned into forced study sessions.
“I’d be grateful if you could help Changmin look over his homework.”
Mrs Shim had smiled at Yoochun before leaving the room. But Yoochun was too old to be fooled by then, and could see the satisfaction and pity in the woman’s eyes. It was obvious to all of them that Changmin was already far cleverer than Yoochun would ever be. While Yoochun went to the district high school, Changmin had skipped two levels in the magnet school he attended and still ranked number five in his level.
So when Yoochun knew the adults were out of earshot, he put down his pen and said loudly, to nothing in particular, “I don’t think you need help. Just study like I’m not here.”
“Ok. That was what I was intending to do anyway.”
Although the answer was a mere echo of Yoochun’s own request, it sparked the bitterest hatred he had ever felt.
Even now Yoochun tastes the afterburn. Envy corrodes the heart, first insidiously, then shamefully. He had thought all through adolescence that Changmin had more, was better, was whole; for while Yoochun struggled with calculus and never understood covalent bonds, the other boy coasted easily above the bewildering tangle of graphs and atoms.
When they studied together, while Yoochun often needed five tries to draw vector diagrams just right, Changmin always sat unperturbed by the shaking table, steadily reading his textbook with eerie, ferocious concentration. It was deeply disquieting in many ways.
“Changmin,” Yoochun calls in the direction of the forest receding in the distance. He says the word a little louder this time, allows himself to think how odd it sounds in his voice, so changed from when he was young. They had gone their separate ways since Yoochun had grown up and out of his childhood home and Yoochun had since forced himself to forget the other boy and the brilliance that he could never be party to. But death changes the look of things and Yoochun feels in his heart that he needs to get the memory of dead man right.
Otherwise his spirit might just stay trapped in another’s outdated resentment. Like an insect floating in amber’s nowhereland.
Yoochun moves a little faster now to the water’s edge, closes in just a little to the green hills. The world moves too, reorienting itself into perspective around him. He sticks his hand under his scarf and presses cold fingers against his neck, wondering why he feels neither sadness nor anger when he speaks the name. Just emptiness, an unreadable pang like the echo of a pebble dropped down a well.
He remembers so well the feeling that he was not whole when he heard about Changmin’s victory at a science fair.
“Yoochun, did you read the newspaper?” Something big must have happened if his mother saw fit to intrude upon his exam preparations.
“Wha-at?” Even the yawn doesn’t soften the irritation in his voice. “Mother it’s 3 AM and I still haven’t finished.”
And you’ve just completely ruined my concentration for the second time tonight. He wants to add on but bites back the impulse to snap at her.
“Oh, I just thought you might want to read the newspaper before you go to sleep,” her voice reminds him of the foolish clucking of a hen, so he twists his hands under the desk and tells her he’s not sleeping anytime soon.
“Well, then you should read this, it might explain some of the problems you have in chemistry homework. Changmin did this thing.”
She unfolds the newspaper she’s been holding and he reads, “14 year Old Boy Wins S. Korea’s Most Prestigious Science Fair.” Changmin’s black, flat eyes cut him like a knife.
Yoochun hated how arbitrary fate was.
But now that he’s twelve years down yonder and actually seeing the wide world, Yoochun knows he can’t just write the universe off in momentary spleen.
Yunho has helped to show him that. Upon further reflection, Yoochun has to admit that this lonely beach is not the only place where he makes sense.
A few months past twenty when it’s August and Yoochun sits at the doorstep, smoking and trying to enjoy the last of the summer when Mrs Shim walks up. Her eyes have that glitter that’s all too familiar to Yoochun, but he shifts a little to let her in anyway.
“My mother’s in the kitchen.” He blows smoke at her while pretending to be helpful. He knows it must be Changmin again, the boy must have topped the level or won some hyped up science quiz, so he doesn’t follow her inside.
This is how Yoochun doesn’t find out about Changmin’s university scholarship until the old hag is gone and his own mother calls him in for dinner.
“But…he’s only seventeen.” He can feel his brows knit in spite of himself.
“Sixteen.” His mother corrects him after she swallows her broccoli. “He’s a smart boy, always was. He was seven months old and could already say-“
But then her face changes all of a sudden and her hand is still, spoon held glinting in midair.
“Son … are you unhappy?”
He feels his face flush and heat up because it’s so fucking obvious and now even his father is staring. So he says he feels ill, why does she always cook food he hates, and leaves the table.
Even the house isn’t big enough to hold in all his tears, so he grabs his father’s wallet left lying on the living-room table and takes the first bus that has free seats. He wants to ride out as far as it will take him, like the childhood fantasy of mysterious interstellar trains, but he chickens out after the bus takes an unfamiliar turn and settles for a homey, clean-looking bar that’s not quite a downtown joint.
“You look sad. Don’t drink so much.”
The voice belongs to the man seated beside him. He’s dressed in rumpled work clothes, black pants and a fraying shirt that should be white, although he doesn’t look much older than Yoochun. Because his eyes are a flat black in the dim light, it’s hard to read his expression and so Yoochun turns back to his beer.
“Stupid pickup lines get you nowhere.” He’s annoyed that he’s only being noticed because someone wants something from him.
“I’m not picking you up. You just look troubled and I was afraid you’d go out later and crash your car into a pregnant lady or something.”
He nearly gets into an argument with the man, partly because he’s stunned by the intrusion into his personal space and partly because he doesn’t even own a car for god’s sake when the guy sums up the past two decades for him.
“You’re not happy.”
After a few hours Yoochun is friends with Jung Yunho, an art teacher at a neighbourhood elementary school.
Three years later they enlist for military service together. Two years after, they are free and move into an old apartment in a quiet place far from main roads and shops. Yoochun tells Yunho about his life just once.
They’re sitting on the grass in a public park because it’s the only space that’s free in a world that runs on money.
Yoochun plucks out a few blades of grass and lifts them to the sunlight before he lets them fall back to the ground.
“I guess that’s how you hate someone, when they have all that it is you want because. It’s just a constant reminder of how mean your own life is. It was so arbitrary, why some of us are just left with the questions and no way to answer them.”
“Not everyone asks those same questions. Maybe he didn’t.” The words are ambiguous, but they are said without judgment. So Yoochun knows they are more than the sort of cliché so often used to fool and quiet the heart. The rustling of leaves behind them grows loud.
When Yunho speaks again, his voice regains its customary warmth. Now he’s lying on the grass and shading his eyes with a large hand.
“Why do you expect a finished world? It’s not a set riddle, to be answered on certain lines. Not bad, not good.”
The wind blowing through the trees gains force and sweeps from the treetops to the ground. Leaves fall all around them, into Yoochun’s lap and get stuck in Yunho’s hair and fingers.
Yoochun remembers every single detail with unerring clarity and even now in autumn, the sound of that high summer day so many years ago still remains immediate and troubling. He had felt for a moment as if his life were a slate being wiped clean, all the writing disappearing under a wet cloth.
His trouble had been his guiding light. For awhile afterward, he lived just trying not to think about anything until he felt it was safe enough to stick his head out of the ground again. And now he lives one day at a time.
Yoochun pulls his coat tighter as a shield again the cold air rushing inland from the sea. The sky is turning greyer as the afternoon wears on. He pulls his sleeve up a little to look at his watch.
3:45 pm. He has time, so he walks further on.
He calls out, pointlessly because the words has lost all the earthly meaning it could have had, purposefully to marshal his own thoughts to where they should be.
“Changmin!”
After today he’s not going to think about him anymore.
The sand is grainy and damp with the season’s moisture, it scrapes under the soles of his shoes. He turns and looks behind him and realizes his car and the road has receded from view; just as well, he wants to be totally alone.
Yoochun breathes in the autumn and tries to remember all past doubts and unhappiness so that he can finally shake them, because Changmin is dead, his own views have changed and so his life is truly in need of renewal, freedom. Even so, thinking about a dead man gives him the chills. The target of so much childish energy is so suddenly vanished. It’s strange really, that a thinking feeling human is not much more substantial than a shimmering of summer heat, transforming from something into nothing when its time is up. Yoochun feels that some part of himself has been called into question, that he can’t quite justify why he is around if the other boy had not been let to live.
Yes, the world is not a finished thing in which lives are to be ranked in value. So lives can't be ranked in which are worth more, which less. Can’t, not should not-there lies the difference, that restraining judgement is impossible because of the way the world is, not merely a choice made out of human compassion. This fact should set him free, that there's no law in the universe that requires him to measure up to anything, to find anything, but Yoochun still finds it difficult to rest, difficult to live with full conviction that he has just as much a right to be here as anyone else. Because occupying space on God's good earth ... that's just not enough, now is it?
Yoochun turns his face skyward and spins around, arms spread out at his sides. He wishes he could fly away, high into the clouds and disappear in a glimmering of light. The responsibility of being alive is too great. All he can say now is that he's wasted it, ten years of dreams, twenty years of stalking in the periphery.
He can't help but feel that Changmin's death is a terrible mistake. The dark eyes and the bright all-seeing mind have been lost forever because of some fault of the equipment that stopped his heart and sealed his blood. The one who should be alive. The one Yoochun had always wanted to be, but was instead destined to be close and yet separate.
The death was not his fault, but Yoochun feels a strange regret like no other. As he turns his gaze skyward and sees gulls flying outward to sea, he knows a mystery has been lost before he could unravel it, and so the only thing left for him is to let it go.
“Changmin, I’m going to forget you. I’ll never think of you again, so just go, be free to be what you are.”
The words sound trite and hollow as they go over the waves and are taken apart, tremble by tremble of air molecules. Yoochun speaks to nothing, his thoughts reach no living soul and quell no beating heart, but it’s the best he can do.
When he starts the car and turns back for home, he resolves to start his life anew.
+
A/N: The story behind this story is a long one and it's so interesting that I think I should tell it as a bonus. I had actually wanted to write a nuclear holocaust GD/Seungri AU and I even wanted to use the same title because of the poem that I took the original inspiration from. But then I shelved it because I just didn't have the motivation to write it, and then, one day I just started writing this instead.
This thing was a devil to write. I think I'm actually disappointed in myself, I started this about thirteen days ago, wanting it to be something quite short, but somehow it became really long and draggy and I just wanted to end it. I still put in effort and I hope it will be a good read. Maybe one day I'll come back and write another version that satisfies the original vision that I began with, but now I'm going back to school soon and still have other things, fandom and non-fandom to do, so this has to suffice for now.
I'm hoping that anyone who might read it and is intrigued will take me up and offer some ways of building towards a conclusion that's more satisfying, from both a philosophical and emotional viewpoint.
This is the original poem,
So I Said I am Ezra, by A.R. Ammons
as a little sidenote, the Ezra in the poem might not be Ezra Pound (the Modernist poet) as many sources say it is. I found out a few years back that Ammons wrote this poem when he found out that his hunchbacked childhood playmate had died in the Second World War. (How's that for trivia? And my memory retains the weirdest things!) I prefer that idea, it's more poignant than a poem for a poet; I prefer personal memory to the whole idea of poems about poems... although I guess both have their place.