Memories were always something you would never understand.

Sometimes you’d be able to picture that face in your mind, see it so vividly, so clearly, yet be unable to put it on paper. The paintbrush rests loosely between numb fingers, a palette tipped gloomily on a hand, the assortments of paint beginning to drool and edge down.

You reckon it’s laughable, the way you think about that song he would sing for you, hear the soft strumming of his guitar, be able to hear it, ringing in your head but be unable to hum it aloud. How you pass a place you’ve been, remember a fond memory but forget what exactly made you happy and who you’d been with. There are little snippets of memories you can catch, none clear. Then there was that story they’d shared, at that place… where was it again?

You can’t remember where, but you recall it, nonetheless. You also remember being happy.

At the way he smiled, swung hair out of his eyes. Your breath catches in your throat as you remember the eyes. How they’d shone in your presence, the dark brown orbs that seemed to continue on forever. The way he’d held your hands between his own and blabbed on while you tried to tune him out.

You wish you’d listened.

Yes. It was all the greatest moments you find hard to recall. A face you could once map with your eyes closed was estranged, foreign even. It was all the details of him you could no longer remember.

A hurried brush tip touches the canvas as you try to create something, anything, before any memory you still have of him slips away. You think of the eyes, the mouth, the strong jawline and the rather offensively large nostrils. You back away and see the man you’ve painted is a total stranger to you and you almost want to tear it apart because it was not him. It came nothing close to him. He was so perfect, so unique, he was everything, and how could you forget? In anger, your palette is tipped onto the ground and you grab a pocketknife and drag it down the taut fabric of your canvas, first puncturing the eyes that came nothing close to his, then down the nose that held no resemblance.

You drop everything and run out of your own studio because that room, that place, suffocates you with all the memories, taunts you with how despite clinging onto the past so hard, you’ve forgotten. The barrier you’ve created between and present and past thins out as everything you remember disappears and so you vow not to paint again, never to enter the accursed studio again.

5 months later, your back, holding that same brush and palette in your hands.

You drop the brush as you realise you could no longer remember the way his lips caressed your neck, how they lay tender kisses along your jaw and how they held that fullness to them. It strikes you with a pain. You spend a day in there, just painting lips, mouths, tongues but nothing looks the same, nothing compares and once again, you leave, in disappointment.

The next year, you forget something else.

You forget how that voice pronounces your name, how the word ‘Kibum’ falls from those beautiful lips. He swears he can recall it. He describes it to himself. It’s velvety, deep, but higher, when he sings and it’s husky, low, when in lust, and endearing when he wanted. He can describe it but he can’t hear it and his own voice soon rides over the one he’s trying to remember.

Three years later, you forget what it was like to be in love.

Your mind no longer registers that fast beating and the pleasurable flutter. You’ve been with others, so many others.

You’ve felt soft, rough, brushes of skin against your own, but every touch, that you once pretended were his, no longer held anything. In fact, you can’t even remember what his felt like.

Five years on and you begin to realise you remember absolutely nothing at all.

It’s been almost twenty years since you first met him. That day, the sun had shone and the person in front of you had been real, to touch and to taste. Now all you have left is a fuzzy outline, vague shape of the one you’d once loved and could never part with. Now the smell, of ocean and rain, the hair of soft, brown-gold locks are gone. All that’s left is your own imagination as you struggle to convince yourself that it hadn’t all been a dream.

Those twenty years ago you’d met him on the sidewalk and he’d offered a hand.

Five years later you’d carved on that oak tree in his backyard.

At eleven he built you that swing on the lowest, thickest branch, with that dusty old tire his father intended to throw.

At thirteen he made you that ridiculous and horribly catchy song. He’d sing it as you sat on the swing. How’d it go again?

Fourteen and he started dating that girl. What was her name?

Fifteen, he kissed you. Do you remember?

Sixteen and things became all too real. Can you hear it? It rings in your head like sirens. It’s like you’re living the nightmare again. You’d been foolish, careless, with intention of surprising him after school. One kiss turned heated in the school corridor, lasted only ten minutes but they’d seen. Do you remember afterschool? When they came, fists banging on door, spit flying from mouths, from ugly faces contorted with hate. Do you remember hiding with him behind the tree, throat closing as a sob broke from his chest?

You wanted him to stay but you knew better. He would not have listened.

He’d ran at the first sight of flame, tearing his hand from yours and pushing past the old tire swing as the house began to burn. He’d screamed for his parents and they turned at first sound of him and grabbed him, one behind as another gripped his head and smashed his face against a knee. The clouds had darkened, rain fell but could not quench the thirst of fire. The house was consumed in flame, the frames crumbled with a blackened groan as he too screamed from the pain.

You were scared.

Now suddenly you remember. You remember everything and it’s all too much. You can hear the homophobic taunts, the groaning of a burning house and his agonised screams as he was beaten to death. You knew you had to go back.

You drove to the place you’d sworn to never return to, yet you knew there, you’d find peace.

As you step out of the car, the street is deserted, like a ghost town that seemed to have just died with time, with no one left to care. The hot wind blew dry any tears that threatened to fall and the arid, summer gust seemed to blow you toward the house that lay in blackened shambles. You inhale and realise hardly anything has changed. You experimentally tug at the swing and finally decide it was strong, taking a seat on the worn tire and scuffing your shoes on the dirt as you swing back and forth. You see his bag, which he’d left that day, lying crumpled in the dirt.

Thieves had long searched the house and emptied the bag of its valuables too but you pick it up anyways and sling it over one shoulder. As you walk in the house, you look up, through what had once been a strong rooftop, up straight to the open sky that lit up the insides like a honey-lantern. His guitar lies, untouched and dusty by the dead fireplace and you wonder how it managed to survive. You run a hand along the rusty strings and a slightly creaky sound rings.

You find it comforting.

You reach his bedroom and stand right outside it because suddenly you remember that song he’d sung. It sounds in your head like a treasured record long unplayed and you hum it out loud to yourself, finally grabbing the doorknob and twisting.

In your head you can hear him singing, see his lips moving like it was yesterday.

You find a pair of sneakers you’d once adored, sitting, slightly charred on the edges in the corner of his room. You remember how they’d gotten there and you smile.

There’s nothing much left in the room to salvage, you take your own shoes and nothing else. The bed creaks under your weight as you lie on it, fingers playing with the burnt cloth as you stare up at the open sky. You can picture his face, the eyes, the hair, you can hear him playing and suddenly, you can feel him, as if he was right next to you, running fingers down your side, where he knows it feels best.

You turn, inhale and close your eyes as you remember.

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A/N: Um, first story, hope you liked it. Apologies for any careless grammar mistakes, English is my second language and it's still not my strong point.