Final.
Hiraeth (Lines That Cannot Be Crossed)
| There was something about the boy that always left Yixing feeling imbalanced; like he was venturing a little too close to the edge of something he desperately wanted for himself but didn’t know quite how to get. Yixing liked to play a piece called “Yearning” sometimes—in those stolen moments when he wasn’t endlessly practicing the sweeping movements and grandiose melodies of classic composers from before his time—and he thought maybe that what the boy made him feel more than anything else: yearning. For what, Yixing wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that he needed to know this boy who lived with his grandmother and exercised with her every morning in the park by Yixing’s house. Yixing needed this like he needed to breath. Like he needed to play the piano. Like he used to need to dance. His parents would never be caught dead in a public park—except, perhaps, for a benefit—and they’d certainly never let their precious, piano prodigy robot out amongst the masses like that either. Frankly the fact that he took the bus to school was a miracle in itself. And so Yixing yearned—for the boy he couldn’t know, for the experiences he couldn’t have, for the something more he somehow knew he’d find in the other and couldn’t keep himself from wanting even when it hurt. Still, Yixing let himself linger in the mornings as he walked to catch the bus that would take him to school and the prison of his practice room. He’d watch the graceful movements of the grandfathers and grandmothers who’d been doing tai chi for years, and the effortless ease with which the boy mirrored them—eyes closed, hands steady, and hair rustling gently in the wind. The sight made Yixing miss dancing hopelessly, and his fingers, so ruthlessly molded to play even without the instrument of his genius before him, would fly across that same wind, playing a song pulled from the deepest place of Yixing’s yearning to meet the movements of the boy like a bittersweet duet. As always happened when Yixing’ played the piano, he lost himself—to the silent song, to the boy, to the yearning. The first time he missed the bus it didn’t matter much; he’d built some practice time into that morning and simply caught the next one as it puffed its way down the street. The second time it happened, he was late. Boys like Yixing weren’t supposed to be late for school because boys like him were meant to be prompt, poised, perfect. Kyungsoo was never late to anything, Yixing’s parents reminded him that day when he came home after staying extra late to practice and found their disapproving gazes powerful enough to bleed despair into his soul. His mother fretted, concerned that this was the beginning of his teenage rebellion; his father threatened to take away his private practice space and make him play in a room shared with others. For once Yixing was glad they didn’t understand him; he hoped his father really would. Perhaps that’s what made him bolder, what pushed him toward recklessness. In any case, Yixing made sure to miss the bus often, again and again arriving late to school so he could watch the boy’s measured movements and make him father mad. Two birds, one stone: Yixing managed to kill both, for a while. Then came the day Yixing's yearning ruined everything. It was the best day of his life—so far; he was still young, after all—but also the worst; and the happiness he felt at the boy’s gift of a blinding smile when he’d been caught staring wasn’t enough to save him when his father’s familiar grip closed tightly around his forearm to drag Yixing back into the house. Disgusting, despicable, wrong. That was the way his father described Yixing’s yearning for the boy who danced tai chi in the park. He’d been too distracted lately, his mother chided; she’d been worried about a secret girlfriend but this was much, much worse. “You’re an embarrassment to this family,” his father hissed, towering over a seated Yixing as he dragged Yixing’s yearning into the open, cut it to pieces with his disdain, and crushed it under the weight of his expectations. You will be better, they told him, because that is the only behavior we’ll accept. Yixing didn’t go to school that day or the next. When he did go back to school he was escorted there in a black car with tinted windows that kept the outside world as dark and unknowable as he felt. And when his parents finally trusted him to take the bus again, it was with unbreakable rules tattooed to his forehead. Practice for your recital Yixing. Don’t become distracted. Don’t touch. Don’t speak. Stop. But what got Yixing on the bus again wasn’t trust, not really. It was something else, something he caught in the glee teasing his father’s smile and the satisfaction painting the curve of his mother’s lips. “The Kim’s had a similar problem with their son,” his mother informed him conversationally over dinner that first night after Yixing was given back his pretense of freedom. “The scholarship was their idea.” Yixing didn’t know what scholarship she meant, or who this Jongdae person was that his father had benevolently deigned to send abroad for school. All he knew was that when he’d walked by the park that morning on his way to catch the bus, the boy hadn’t been there. He was gone. Hiraeth (n.) a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past |
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