Birds seem to chirp in the hopes of bringing about a bit of summer in the face of a dreadful tide of spring.

There are not yet flowers in the bloom, merely the remnants of snow half melted and waiting for the heat of the sun to finish the job, evaporating each footprint, erasing a noble memory with every degree raised. As of yet the leaves find themselves stuck inside the roots of wind-ravaged tree trunks and thorned roses refuse to blossom in the face of such a wretched awaiting world.

It seems things are always the most melancholy come April, the season of change tainted by the year of darkness it leaves in its wake. For every writer, every artist, the remaining memories of long-lost muses and loves are brought back with the arrival of the flowers and the smell of the pollen in the air. A season of love must always at the same time be a season of sorrow, for with every love that is created and blossoming another is destroyed, with only a lonely crater in the soul remaining and aching and aching and aching.

He can remember it all so clearly, such vivid colors cease to dim as the years progress and alter the lives of all those people with which he had once held such strong ties and seemingly endless devotion. The curve of the nose becomes more beautiful in retrospect, the curve of the spine more ethereal and sorrowful. He can feel each kiss, the lasting flavor lingering on chapped lips and the same butterflies from 30 years prior rekindling their nervous laughter and rising from the pits of his stomach and up and up to rest in rose-flushed cheeks.

He, Kyungsoo, can remember not only the details but the illusion as well. The reality so neatly mingled with his dreams that they had morphed together to become a whole, a world of light shaped inside a world of shadows. The façade was too complete to remain, nothing gold lasting for longer than an instant before fading back into the world of darkness.

But this, He, was not of this world, was not for this world, could not be held by the same standards given to mere mortals who walk the face of the earth with dauntless eyes and snippets of poems running through broken fragments of thoughts. Oh no, he, Jongin, muse of the masses and god of the sea, tearless and fearless with wild ecstasy and youth and glowing skin and scars was a master of seduction and sin and destroyed every person who had the unfortunate pleasure of coming into his grasp.

Kyungsoo didn’t stand a chance.

Even in memories he is infatuated, enamored, obsessed and alluded. Somewhere Keats is sobbing beneath his Grecian urn and weeping for the death of such a skewed perception of romance and love and hatred and greed.

Somewhere in the universe, this tale is only just beginning.