Electrolytes Bloom
Electrolytes BloomNote: I frequently reference to many books. I have a list of books I constantly allude to, and I have incorporated them into my story to reflect Myungsoo's love for books and how he uses them as his own escape from his color blindness. Anything marked with a (#) is a reference to that book, if it is not cited or stated. I'm sorry if this complicates things! My work is not for naught!
(1) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina
(2) Vladimir Nabokov Ada or Ardor
(3) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
(4) Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha
(5) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
I was born and I met you -
and I have loved you to death.
My cold heart that has been dyed blue.
Even with my eyes closed, I can't feel you.
Myungsoo, a character of apathy and stories, is who one expect least to harbor such an obsession to see the difference between violets and lavenders ("Both are flower names, so shouldn't they be the same color?" or a variance of those phrases), yet, at the same time, the most obvious one could expect. He is a Picasso, at best, and an actor, at worst. The face of indifference and ambiguity and the delicate, feverishly infatuated mind within.
"Morning, 'Soo."
"My name is not 'Soo'."
"To me it is."
She comes in waves. A peep in the morning and then drifts away without much sound. When she arrives, there's a crash. When she leaves, it's like she was never there at all. Evaporated.
He prefers it that way.
He's a voice of rain and syllables and light, even if his appearance and demeanor suggest otherwise. He sees life in a rose-tinted glass, obsessed with the pastels and anything that is the opposite of black. He's a dreamer of colors and life and adventures and fairytales. He's a sign of mystery and his character is nowhere near captivating flowers or dreamy adjectives. It is jagged and sharp, a bitter tone concealing the ever pressing desire for life to knock on his door and whisk him away. He runs in tangential circles, stopping to ask the melodies of life a question every now and then. He loves life, but at the same time, he loathes it with such a fervor amounted to ten thousand star-shaped fireworks. All he ever wants is to explore it and cherish it and see it and ask it ten thousand questions on why fireworks light up the sky and why stars shine brighter than he ever could, even how in the name of physics could fireworks be shaped as stars, but all it ever seems to have done was answer him by cruelly taking away half of his questions and leaving them strictly black or white. Curiosity did kill the cat, after all.
She's a voice of jasmine and chimes and honey le. She's a dreamer of colors and life and adventures and fairytales. She also sees things in rose-tinted glasses, but probably with more champagne bubbles and gold halos. She would finish reading her book before allowing her body to die ("It's a complete crime to stop in middle of a book and drop it!"). She's a carousel, spinning round and round with a pretty little crown on the head of painted flowers and historical images and gems and shimmer. Little Suzy, who has a — rich — name attached to it; who has the darkest stain of tinted black — that Myungsoo had ever seen — as replacement for hair; who always has a single — according to Suzy, pink or red, nothing else — satin bow in her waterfalls of braids; who has stars in her eyes and enough imagination to make her and you run wild. It was hard to keep up with this Suzy, but Myungsoo who has always been apathetic, found Suzy vexing to a certain degree and had no intention of matching her pace.
She comes in thrice, everyday: one for the morning pills, one for lunch, and the last one for the night pills and a book.
He enjoys stories of varying genres — of valiant empires and warriors, myths of faraway lands and faraway ideals and faraway characters doing faraway tasks on faraway journeys, legends of beautiful wonders of the world, hauntings of fake families and fake people, books of love and happiness and how political figures and social innuendos tear life apart. Suzy, for some odd reason, loves, in complete specific and absolute explicit detail, romances of fake families and fake people, that, of course, include warriors, who live in valiant empires of faraway lands with faraway ideals with faraway characters doing faraway tasks on faraway journeys to the beautiful wonders of the world, but political figures and social innuendos rip the seams of happiness and shred life to mere sheaths of illusions. But of course, there are few books that combined all of those plots.
He constantly teases her, more harsh and rude than Suzy would like it to be, pokes fun of her aloofness and silly ambitions, makes snarky remarks when she shares her thoughts and opinions. The moments he does care for her, but all last very briefly, he likes to remind, is when there are stories in front of him or around him or near him or in the air or choking in his throat and Suzy just 'happens' to be there to read it aloud for him. That's Myungsoo's way. Halos of stubbornness and stupidity wrapped with a pretty head.
When he wasn't flushing down pills and receiving his daily doses of some miracle chemical combination, he read about people he could never be on adventures he would never have. Adventures he would not yet have, at least. Life was good enough through text until one day it wasn’t. And on that 'one day', he gave everything he had to books. The books didn't demand or even ask politely. He sold himself before they offered. He decided to live in books, through books, and expect everything from books, a journey to thirteen different dimensions and back.
Because he could never see it, Suzy paints it for him. Every vivid detail, every contour of light, every shade that she knows. By the end, he could always see it. All the little girls and their dreams, all the men and their bravery. Paris, at night, with rain piled high on the windows, the iron lattice Eiffel tower glowing radiantly above the rest of the city's glistening bath; St. Petersburg, peak of the morning, gold and pink ribbons of clouds and sun panning from the empty cobblestone streets to the tips of the snow-capped colorful summits of the French and Islamic baroque inspired cathedrals; Jodhpur and it's great Umaid Bhawan Palace and Jaswant Thada, the blues and golds and oranges in swirls of triangles and religious depictions.
He loves how Suzy could make him feel whole — in the biological context.
—
He wishes he has a wardrobe to disappear into a whole different world like Lucy Pevensie had.
He pops two pills into his mouth and shudders in distaste as they foam around his tongue. It was an awkward sensation that had never happened before, and Myungsoo should've taken it as a warning, but was too invested in the night's story to notice. Suzy hands him a quick glass of water to wash down the black toxin without a single glance off of the night's book. Tonight's literature session consisted of Vlamdimir Nabokov with Suzy's narration.
What are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life.
He begins coughing. Suzy looks up, eyebrows arched in distaste. "Are you really going to relate an eighty year uous love affair to your condition?"
The wardrobe comes, quicker, darker, damper and colder than he expects. Feels a bit more morbid and black than he expects. He swears he sees black crows and vultures dancing around his head. He closes his eyes and hears the secrets of nebulas and the whispers of the deep seas.
He makes a secret wish that someone would drag him out to sea and leave him at the shore for the waves to take him and carry his body out to the deep unknown. The pain was too much to handle.
Let the poison and acid bloom and plant its roots in his skin and tongue.
—
He wakes up on a shore of somewhere and someplace - north of hell, south of heaven - waves of clouds lapping on the air holes that his body's weight creates in the sand. He remembers a scream, a flatline sound and the rush of black, a woman weeping; now, his ears only catch the colossal orchestra of bleeps and blips, the sign of a life hanging in the balance (he does not know it is his).
He is dead. Dead as can be, he knows that. Or, so he feels so.
Death has its scent of finality. It has its own flair of defiance. And he feels like his past life had reached its final stretch and ended. But the unsettling symphony of blips and weeping makes his heart an eerie place.
A wave rolls over his body as he sits up. It's a dark, ominous place, and then suddenly, the clouds drift apart, eager to share their work. The clouds reveal oceans of even more clouds, made up of silk as much as water.
It makes his body feel uncomfortably electric and suddenly he feels alive again. The grogginess and aches seeps away and it's pure, unadulterated torture to feel this alive and free and colorful when you're dead. But then he blinks once or twice, and he swears he can see life right in front of him in a fever dream of shades in rose, violet and chartreuse.
He sees snakes slither across the skies with scales that are delicate flakes of jade, obsidian and lapis lazuli. His great heroes stand atop columns of white marble and green ivy. Trees and flowers bloom on ceilings of magenta mountains. Carpets of feathers lay home to thousands of birds and insects on the chalice of flowers and become high off of the fragrant aroma. He blinks again and it's like he steps into India and all of its marble architecture embraces him, and he finds himself at Punjab staring at the Harmandir Sahib shining its golden coat across the water, then at Jag Niwas Island marveling over the white pillars that contrasts the murky water that surrounds it. He blinks again and he's now swimming in the cranberry waters of Senegal's Lake Retba, waving to the others that were dyeing white sheets of the finest cotton into the bright pink surrounding their twig boats.
All of his dreams comes true, the colors, the adventures, the natural wonders of the world. Life, if this is what he could call this, is beautiful and colorful and lively and vibrant and he doesn't dare begin crying in fear that the tears would wash the mirage away. His reality could never live up to his fantasy, and now, suddenly, it did, and he wishes that he had someone to share the awe with.
He doesn't know what to do, so he begins walking (in all shades of ungraceful, he stumbles around the feathered floors). Every time he blinked, the waves of clouds would draw together and swallow up a piece of mountain and replace it with a new building from his dreams.
—
He's not sure how time goes by here, not sure how long the days are. He counts four, thinking of the nights where he'd watch the waves being pulled by the moon and be lulled to bed by the soft beeping of something, somewhere. There was always something to look for in the canopy of bright lit white stars that seeped through the dark blue cloak, staining it with an array of spectacular glows. It felt different every time. Everything felt different, feels different. As beautiful as everything is in this paradoxical world, it lies in a shroud of confusion. Here was not the world. Here, societal rules and physiological theories was laid to rest.
Every other day there was a war to witness. He'd sit, concealed by the shrubs of peacock and other gaily colored feathers, on the cliffs, dangling his legs off. Two days ago he finally witnessed the Battle of Troy (in which Homer was completely inaccurate of). He'd watch empires fall and rise, harbors burning down, men steal possessions and women from one city to another.
On one particular day, he decides to cross the desert. He could be hallucinating, but the constant mirage of a girl popping out behind a rock or standing atop a sand dune in the distance seemed real enough.
For some reason, she frightens him. He turns around and steps down from the hill, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he sees her, like the sun, even without looking (1). After a particular amount of time, he looks beside himself and notices that she had been walking beside him all along.
A dark shade for hair, cheeks that crawl blush pink, the classic white broderie anglais sundress, waiting to be sullied, that every innocent character wore in films, a silk bold red bow wrapped around her small head, and a blaring sun kissing her lashes with light.
He knows her. Like the veins that crawled upon his hands. His favorite book. He had studied her seasons once, he recalled. He played with her, poked fun at her, but it was his way to watch her bloom. He loved her, from somewhere. He did not know where, but then again, he didn't even know her name.
"Hi," she giggles, soft and melancholy. "Who are you? What's your name?"
She was like a song he'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in his mind ever since (4). He doesn't know what to say, his mind is only reeling, so he stutters out an embarrassing 'what'?
"Your name."
He tries to recall. "I don't know it."
"Oh, good!" she claps her hands together. "I don't know mine either."
She wears bright stars on her feet, like the ruby red slippers that Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz, except they were gold. Someone had read him the story a long time ago, and he liked it.
For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. So she grabs his arm, hooks it around hers, and they walk across the desert in complete, comforting silence.
He did not know he had been lonely before. But now he knew. Now there was someone to always share a memory with, to awe and ogle over fantasies with.
—
"Have you ever felt that you don't belong anywhere, and want to go to a place where no one knows you exist?"
"Yeah. I guess that's why we're here."
"Yeah. I guess so."
—
King would be his title and forevermore in this land. He doesn't know what he had done in his past life for him to stride so proudly on the ground below him, but he still continues to do so. He doesn't know anything really - just that he's following a girl he had met in the desert. And she could just possibly be a hallucination.
Yet still, they wander aimlessly around their limbo, building new worlds and having innocent, naïve adventures. Once they skipped rocks across the ocean and watched them smash into glass bottles with ships inside of them and laughed when the ships came crashing out and drowned in the sea. Another time, they took one of the ships and sailed to their magical version of China, leaving no weeping lovelies on the faraway shore. And on another, they wandered through forests of flowers, stepped on branches of trees and flew away in parachutes of petals.
It seems like there is never anything not to do in this world. And that's just it. It was all aimless in the end.
It leads him to say the despicable.
"I'm lonely."
"What kind of loneliness?" she asks.
"Every kind. I feel disconnected," he whispers back. "I don't know who I am. You don't know who you are either."
There are questions unanswered in his head and when he doesn't ponder on them, they continue winding and winding around the inner skull and outer workings of his brain, making spider webs and patterns for him to translate and memorize. When he did think on them, when he tried to connect these thoughts, they become spears, threatening to cut at him. (Whose memories are these?)
"Why do you need to know? It doesn't matter to me."
"I don't know where I am. When I woke up here, I didn't know who I was. Hell, I still don't know, but I want to. Why do you not care?"
"You always wanted to run away. Now you don't have anything to run from. You can go anywhere. You're as free as you've always wanted."
"I don't want to go anywhere, I just want to be happy."
"I've always been happy."
He leaves it at that note and stares out at the ribbons of pink and gold that stretches beyond the clouds.
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before (1).
—
He:
"Do you really not remember your name?"
She:
"No."
—
He:
"You remind me of someone."
She:
"Oh?"
He:
"Yeah. I liked her a lot."
—
For some reason, ever since he told her of that mystery girl, things took a turn. Between the two of them, everything was much more magnetizing. Everything she did made his eyes spark. Everything he thought of was just of her.
She'd hold his hands a few times and he'd play with her hair a few times too.
She became upset after a long while, after he endlessly prolonged conversations of their past lives, their identities and their memories. So she forced them to come up with their own names.
He couldn't think of one, so he chose a letter. A single letter, L.
She thought up Sue Ji. It sounded like a Chinese cartoon superhero to him. He told her he liked Suzy better. She disagreed and named herself Sue Ji.
But in his arms she was always Suzy (3).
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight (1).
To love beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone.
When he looks at her, he is sure that they have met before. Long before now, he met her and had the same dreams. He compared notes with her. He found strange affinities with her (3). For who could forget someone with a voice of jasmine and chimes and honey le, stars in their eyes and enough imagination to make you run wild, and a pace that was impossible to keep up with?
He feels like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes (1).
He sings a childish hymn (rain, rain, go away, come again another day). It's unlike him. But he's happy.
He is simply and shortly - and sweetly - in love with Suzy.
—
He has dreams of her. Dreams of her body. Pale, white, soft. Her hips swaying in the melody of the wind, sheets thinly wrapped around her waist. Her drape of hair covering her back, yet allowing her shoulders to peep out. He'd lose himself in those dreams, and when he wakes up, she's there next to him, cheeks stained bright pink and blue robin feathers in her hair. And his heart would stop with a dull thud, but he wouldn't reach out to rouse her.
—
He forgets about identities and memories for a while and knows only of melodies and desires.
He identifies her as Suzy, even with the constant nagging that she was, in fact, Sue Ji. ("I just really like the name.")
On one night, after their bones tire from the day's adventure, they decide to lie on the ocean's shores and stare at the skies. As the clouds lap at the space between them, he thinks how this sensation is like a whiplash of déjà vu and now everything's eerily uncomfortable.
"Can you imagine it? Every single point of light is an entire galaxy. Worlds unexplored, universes we'll never know," his fingers find her hair and entwine themselves in it to calm his nerves. "A bit depressing, don't you think?"
Her hands reach up and scoop the stars from the sky.
He wonders what it would feel like if he just reached out and kissed her. Kissed all the loneliness away, and maybe, just maybe, the discomfort would leave with it. Uneasy of a thought as the moon catching fire, but he continues to think of it anyway. "Kiss me?"
She chokes on the subtleness.
In the blue gardens of his mind, sporadic glitches of incandescence and bright, hot flares came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars (5). Her overwhelming laughter is too familiar.
"You know, 'Soo," she looks to her side, to a stiff man rigid with ambiguous memories. "'Soo."
He's quiet for too long, so she kisses him (off guard, of course, yet he wants to vanish inside of it). Red, red hot, gold, the gold of stars, white, the color of life and love and hatred and everything combined together into one prism and a kaleidoscope of hearts and one shade of just simple life and desires and hopes and dreams and lust and sins, and good god, colors, real colors, the greens of the birds' wisps of grass and wings and the blues of the sky's stunning cyans of lakes and oceans, all those colors on all those words and all those books and myths and legends and stories, they would never, could never, ever, ever, have as much meaning and liveliness and boldness and vibrance as this one, tiny, small kiss had.
And then he suddenly remembers.
He never knew colors.
He only knew stories.
"Suzy—"
"My god, even now you still call me Suzy."
"No," he sits up straight, a fierceness in his voice that shakes this Suzy. "You are Suzy. You're the Suzy I remember."
"You're—"
"You're the Suzy I know, the mystery girl!" he pulls up to his feet, voice going in jumbles and words rapidly firing. "You're Suzy, the one who read all these books to me! Everything we've ever done together was something you read me! You even called me 'Soo!"
The Suzy who he liked a lot, the possible Suzy who he might've loved, the Suzy who he knew like the veins that crawled on his hands. His Suzy, his favorite book Suzy.
And with this fantastical realization, there came others. And suddenly all of his questions were being answered.
- Who are you? Kim Myungsoo.
- What is this place? A dream.
- Why are you here? Because I'm not dead.
- Who is this girl? Bae Suzy. Someone I used to know.
—
He doesn't remember how the rest came to him, but he knows Suzy left him.
He doesn't worry.
She would come back, she would have to.
—
He remembers the blips and beeps when he first arrived here. They had become mute as time passed with Suzy, as he fell into Suzy's wonders.
They were his.
A life was hanging in the balance, between life and death, and yet it took him all this time to realize:
It was his.
—
Death knocks.
"Boy, you've lived too long down here."
"I know."
"So? You going back up or you staying?"
"I don't know."
He takes his leave.
Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.
—
He watches pirates fight in the distance. The wailing of the EMR grows louder, and he knows his previously unlimited time in this alternate universe is now limited. Death's growing impatient.
He stands on the edge, just enough for the waves to tickle his toes. Everything, seemingly beautiful as it is, is valueless. Without Suzy, his companion and sunlight, loneliness strips the face of appreciation. His fantasty-turned reality could never live up to his fantasy with Suzy.
Even if Suzy does not come back here, Suzy is not there up there. Or anywhere, for that matter. The whole world is divided for him into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness (1).
—
The image of Death. Myungsoo's only heard him before, but he astonishingly looks exactly like his name. Concave cheeks, dried, withered fingers, sanguine colored blush. Lightweight, feather-light. The image is sad, inevitable. It couldn't be any other way.
Death remains silent.
Death does its sickly sweet dance, and does it again.
"Death," 'Soo croaks. "I'd like to stay here."
The devastated angel laughs. "But of course. Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece—"
"And the rest is rust and stardust (3).” Myungsoo finishes.
The eternal cloak waves his hand goodbye. The irony nearly kills Myungsoo, but Death is quicker. He 'lives' long enough to see the last curtain fall.
The ocean's waves engulfed his ribs, soaking into his lungs and molding under his skin.
Dangerous things existed underneath and swallowed him whole. Everything was pitch black until he awoke on the shore with clouds around his head. A shadow blocked the sun's streaming rays from cracking his skin. His very own sunlight.
(ocean. suzy. light.) If heaven was this cruel, let it be just this.
—
The sixteenth unsent letter from me to you, Myungsoo,
I suppose I don't know you very well. But I do know that your hands are empty promises, yet still nourish me, and that your scent is of freshly fallen rain, and that your presence is that of a perfect warm, sunny spring day, and that my head fits in the empty cracks of your collarbones.
Love, Suzy.
—
The soft, faint sound of a constant, high-pitched beep lulls her awake. The following breeze of bodies rushing past caresses her cheek, blowing kisses to make her brown eyes flutter open. The light humming and several chirps of abstruse words rouse her into an upright position.
She was just talking to him, the boy named Myungsoo.
All the pink confections and luxurious drapes close before her, all the wines and champagne bottles spill empty, all the mirages and illusions return to their mirrors, until everything bleeds black and white. Three black shadows surrounds Myungsoo's pale, white skin.
Three steps closer, the skin turns into a sheet.
There is a boy named Myungsoo who lives here, do you know where he's gone off to? Know where he's went?
(Grim faces and eyes cast down.)
There is a boy named Myungsoo. And this is the end of the story. He doesn't receive a royal death, the reapers don't allow him that privilege. He gets a sheet gently placed over his facial features that stretch and cover his whole body, some sign of remorse and pity, and then the grief that existed a moment ago is out with the swift exit of white lab coats and shuffling feet.
She's scared to open her eyes and have the only thing to see is Myungsoo, black coffin, black dresses, black veils, an irrefutable truth. Myungsoo, still as can be, but had a mind that was always running.
Everyone realizes, from watching the way that Suzy walks, as if Myungsoo was still beside her, that the poor girl, who was once a dreamer of colors and life and adventures and fairytales, would now never wake up from her nightmare. Myungsoo died and killed her dreams with him.
—
This is our story.
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't (3).
This is life. And this is life shredding his love apart.
It is a twisted ending, perfect fit for the twisted circumstances in which he fell under her spell.
Back up in the surface, who would wait for him?
Here, in this limbo, this repetitive hell, there was one.
The book has ended.
It's time to die in the finished book (2).
I was born and I met you and I have loved you to death.
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