“I want to save you from your sorrow.”
– The Only Thing, Sufjan Stevens

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The practical clock that sits on top of her bedside table reads 1:42.

It is not often that he has a weekday period free of bustling waiting rooms, blurry faces and watchful eyes of traumatic stalkers, so, when he is gifted with one (“Fine, Sehun, you can come back to the dorm tomorrow morning”), he wears his favorite cap and hails a cab, “Ahjussi, to my girlfriend’s house, please.”

He holds his breath as she opens the door he has knocked on a moment earlier, only breathing out once she materializes before him—she, a case of his lost T-shirt and a messy bun that makes him drawl—soft and whispery—or sort of—“Babe…”

He is young, he is handsome, and he has a pair of half-lidded eyes that promises bright future despite current bodily destruction.

“God was good,” is the exact kind of things that will bloom from his youthful, sinful mouth. “God was good when He created me and you.” Oh, how easily he can pass as a boy, that Oh Sehun.

Pushing the door wider, she invites him in, thinking about the boy that he is most certainly not, smiling.

He wastes no time to cling his arm around her shoulders and breathe her in like he is desperate. She is about to laugh at it—Hayi, at what?—when she catches her eyes having unconsciously traveled onto his forearm. His pale and smooth skin reminds her of her own. She also reminds herself, with an imaginary flick to her forehead, Hayi, give him all of your faith.

He turns off the TV, unplugs the landline and switches off their smartphones.

Some time ago when he was rather funny and she, naïve, he sat her on his lap and casually suggested over his nail-biting that they drown every means of communication in her bathtub and without saying goodbye to people including, yes, her kind and loving mom, take off and leave for the wilderness.

“White carnations symbolize pure love,” he pressed her for a reply, “don’t you want to grow your own carnations with me?”

She snorted at the suggestion, landed a wet kiss on one of his cheeks. “Sehun,” she crooned. “I don’t think you’re supposed to take Nat Geo that seriously.”

Her ban on the iPhone destruction has since then caused him to tone down his extremity, but now and then he still likes to bring out the unexplored topic of the—the whole carnations thingy—making her knit her eyebrows in confusion, Why does he want to leave so much? Has he really been watching too much Nat Geo? Can't carnations just grow in my backyard? In his?

She nestles against him on her bed in the darkness of her room, watching the neon pink light of her small clock flicker and die, flicker and die, 1:42, a pause, 1:42. He is warm unlike the afternoon shower outside, very beside her and most certainly not in the wilderness.

On the hottest day of the last Seoul summer and after a prolonged exposure to the sun, he asked her, “What do you want from me, Hayi?” Fun or honesty because, no, she could not have both.

Her answer then was an unconcerned shrug of her shoulders (it was the heat; she could not process a question much less answer one), but somehow his mind translated that small gesture into “less fun and more honesty.”

That summer came to an end. The tree shed its dying leaves, the chilly wind blew her hair messy and a darker shade of melancholy hung low over them.

It is never a matter of too much of Nat Geo.

She has watched enough of it when she was younger to know that those documentaries on black-faced spoonbill of South Jeolla are not something to cry over. Well, it is not that he cries—no, he does not do that, does he?—the little boy in him still thinks hot tears are forbidden—“A sign of weakness,” dictates his father—so he will just tighten his jaw and she will know what she ever needs to know: that, surprise, surprise, her boyfriend feels gray all of the ing time. She nibbled on her lower lip, red and almost bloody, as she listened to him educate her on the bird species now labeled as endangered by the Red Data List. “Oh, how very unfortunate.”

He nodded grimly. “I want to see them before they die. Or I die.”

“There’s not even one black-faced spoonbill in Seoul?” she asked.

“I don’t think so, no, but—Hayi—” he moaned, “it’s not like South Jeolla is that far.” The inhuman schedule of his that hindered the hypothetical journey was left unsaid. “Someday?” he sounded small, heartbreaking, like a child.

She let him rest his head on her shoulder and patted his soft baby hair. “We will see black-faced spoonbills someday and we will grow our own carnations someday, Sehun, it’s a promise.”

She sneaks a glance at him: when he is too tired, he sleeps with his mouth open. Her current view is not his best moment (imagine a dry cave of a mouth), but h