fic: 004.
I think that I can recall someone telling me about the ocean (“because you are the ocean” he’d tell me with a sly, slow-spreading smile that I thought was only reserved for me, but it was all a lie, anyways) but I’m not too sure, it was such a long time ago. I drive there with a car borrowed from an old friend-he lives in Japan, now. Have you ever seen me in that old red thing? It’s rusting. I drive like a snail. I’d hate to be caught.
There’s (drafted) beer in the trunk, but no one needs to know that. That’s for you and me, but mostly him. I don’t know where he is right now. I think: Somewhere in Seoul and Maybe he’s happier there, but this is what I want to think: He doesn’t smile when I’m not there. It’s not the truth but it doesn’t hurt as much.
Why should it hurt?
I don’t like a lot of things about him, like the way he’s not photogenic the way I am or the way he doesn’t like the look into people’s eyes or how he doesn’t talk or smile a lot. He carries himself around like he’s older than me, like he’s smarter than me, but no matter how dumb you are labeled by the world or how low your IQ happens to be, I think everyone is the same. Smart, brilliant, stupid, retarded-it’s all very nice but isn’t it all the same thing in the end? It hits you, maybe in little bits (a lovely woman in the worn kind of way watering plants slowly with pails and pails of water) or hard and fast (a freight train coming towards you and you don’t even know). The end result is the same. Always.
I’d like to believe that I have no idea where I’m going and that my feet are carrying me to my fate but life doesn’t really work like that. Maybe in my past life I was someone who fell so deep in love that I waited and waited for whomever to return and they never did. Maybe underneath my romantic tendencies I have no romantic sense at all. Not one bit.
But anyways, the car’s stopping. Not by itself, I’d be scared if it were. In this chapter, a lot of things happen. Being afraid is not one of them. False courage, maybe. False courage.
Actually, I don’t know what the term is.
Maybe it was safe to think that we were stupid back then (fourteen? Fifteen? Directions like First find the square factors of the radicand then change the square factor radicand to an integer but no action) but I don’t really think stupidity cuts it.
So. The sea.
It’s not very spectacular (When I hear it…, he said softly in this brokenhearted, broken-worded, dreamy way that only he could pull off, my heart wants to jump out of my chest-I could tell then that he did not love me very much; he could sum everything up in a couple of words, sentences, fragments and it would have made perfect sense to nobody but me-which is a very, very romantic thing but he intended for someone else to hear it) but as I looked upon the shorelines I thought, How could someone love something as big as this? Because in Seoul you saw everything; in Mokpo, nothing.
When my father named me Donghae, he told me that my love would span oceans. Miles and miles of shorelines. The water would flit from one place to another. I charm and am charmed.
Sometimes I don’t make sense to myself, either.
The crashing as I get closer startles me. Just a little-only that, as I get closer and closer, it just dissolves little by little until I’m left with nothing but a pair of worn leather farm boots (on my scale, that’s four notes below middle C-an F) in my right hand that I have half a will to throw them away, but don’t they remind of you of everything Seoul doesn’t? The dirt crumbling away into the sand is a very apocalyptic sight.
He once admitted to me, I don’t really like to throw things away, and maybe this was the “him” that I saw for all these years. Maybe he wasn’t a very materialistic person. He made me think a bit. He was hard to get to know; people get frustrated and they give up.
People like me don’t (but only because they are infatuated). I think I loved him. I really did love him; we just fell apart somewhere over the hours.
There is a song that I used to like very much and it’s playing in my head as the pitter-patter-cat-feet rain falls.
There is a memory that I used to like very much but it doesn’t really exist, not anymore.
And I believe in little red telephones (so red that after two seconds your eyes would hurt) and that maybe so-and-so was wrong and that the earth isn’t round; I believe in yellow parchment being burned during funerals; I believe in little boys who have ran away from home to make something of themselves only to find that the world isn’t such a pretty place after all. I believe in sugarcoating, I believe in lovers and brothers and most of all, fathers.
And in myself.
I’ll go now, but only he can hear me say, I won’t regret a thing.
And I don’t think I have.