Butterfly Effect
Banglo
Oneshot

Shakily, I take the journal in my hands.

We had just been out for a drive because it was sunny and my dad had the day off. That didn't happen very often after I had been born – one more mouth to feed, and all that. My brother was sitting in the front in between my mother and my father and the radio was playing loud. Mom was singing along, and my dad had his arm out the window, flinging cigarette ash to the wind. I scooted up to the front of the seat, doing my best to be included but all the noise swallowed up my voice. I can't help but wonder now, that if they had heard me, if things wouldn't end up differently.

Bad things aren't supposed to happen on nice days, so I hadn't even wanted to put on my seat belt, but dad had insisted. My brother made a comment about how I always fought doing what I was told, and I guess I kind of regret that a lot now. I think all kids do that – regret treating their parents bad when they're young, but I guess I just never expected things to change. There are these blinders on your childhood that you have to wait to fall off, like the scabs after you have your tonsils removed. You don't feel it, they just dissolve in the background while you go about eating your ice cream and missing school; or, it should be that way, anyway. For most kids, I think it's that way, and I guess you could say I resent most kids.

Dad was watching mom, that's what did it. He had this hazy look in his eyes that I didn't understand as a nine-year-old, but in retrospect, was a look of love. He was listening to her sing off key and laugh and he loved her so much in that moment. My brother was laying his head on her shoulder, and he had reached over to take her hand. They were the picture of a happy family, and I was in the backseat.

I resented that, too.

But one lovely moment was destroyed so fast when a loud horn ripped through our family holiday. The breaks screeched, and it was over. It was like those roller coasters that start a thousand feet in the air and then plunge into a dark cavern before they go back into the light, except there was no light at the end of this roller coaster. I hit my head so hard I passed out, and that was the end of it. When I woke up again, I had bruises and stitches on my chest, right over my heart where some glass had cut me deeply and my family was dead. All of them, just like that. One moment there, and gone the next. That's a feeling I can't explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. I guess if I tried, I'd say it's lonely, but it's more numbing – like Novocaine in your head and in your heart, except you know your dentist is literally cutting you to pieces, you just can't feel it, or stop it and you aren't left with much of a choice but to just die.

Though, I didn't die.

My family spent their last minutes laughing and smiling, all wrapped up in each other, and they died. I was alone in the back seat, and in the aftermath and I resented that. I resented a lot of stuff when they died. The shift between there and here is boring: a year filled with paperwork and therapists, and ending ultimately with an orphanage in Incheon. I would have stayed in Mokpo but the government thought that a ten-year-old probably wouldn't be able to manage the tax payments, I guess. Instead, they took my house and sold it for me so I'd have some money when I turned eighteen, which seemed pretty pessimistic to me. I knew from the moment I got the letter that it wouldn't be like the movies; I would not be adopted. And thus, the next eight years became suspect.

Or they should have been suspect.

The orphanage wasn't bad at first. There were a lot of kids, and the teachers who took care of us were nice. It wasn't as gloomy as the media would paint it, but I didn't know any better. I was on the younger end of the children, who were all pretty much a family. I didn't want to be a part of their family, since I had a family – just a dead family. They were unwanted kids for the most part, abandoned at birth because people are bad at their core, but I wasn't like them. I didn't belong in those colorful rooms, playing with donated toys and misfits. I belonged in the country, playing with dogs and stealing bugs from my brother's collection to play pretend. The first few months were the hardest, because I missed my bed and my mom. Never, I vowed, would that orphanage feel like home, and it never did.

Yongguk felt like home, though.

I met Bang Yongguk on the day of a field trip that all kids took to Hwaseong fortress. Everyone had been buzzing about it for weeks, but I refused to leave my room that morning. During the transition from son to orphan I had been forced to ride to various places, and since arriving at the orphanage I had decided never to step foot in a car again. It wasn't that I was scared of them, exactly – the feeling that over came in vehicles wasn't quite fear, more like weight. Like something heavy had been push on my chest and it made it hard to breathe – doctors called them panic attacks, but it wasn't panic. It was sadness. It was longing. It was the weight of memory, ten times the weight any man, let alone a child, could stand to bear.

Since I wouldn't get of bed, regardless of how gentle the prodding, someone had to stay behind. I expected it to be the one of our teachers, but instead it was the oldest boy. His name was Yongguk, and I had only talked to him a few times. He was always playing basketball alone, or reading books at the breakfast table. He seemed quiet, but everyone liked him from what they said. He was best friends with the joker of the island of misfit children, Kim Himchan until he got adopted six months after I came. Two months had passed since that, and the thirteen-year-old had gotten even quieter.

I had been there for almost a year and I knew the conduct to adoption. See, I hadn't really made any friends by that point, but everyone else had at least one person they couldn't live without – someone that made them feel wanted when they clearly weren't; and, when this person got adopted it tore them up inside. They pretended to be happy, but on the inside they were filled with bitterness and hate – both at their friends for leaving, and about the fact that they were back to being unwanted. When the teenager quietly took a place in a chair by my bed, I assumed that was happening to him, too. I didn't feel much sympathy for them, even though the counselor thought that I'd be b with empathy. Their losses were no where near what I had lost. There was a light at the end of their plunge; they were selfish.

“I went on the field trip last year,” he had assured me, like it made a difference to me. I nodded and just rolled over. People made me antsy, and I didn't talk much since the accident. I blame my caseworkers, mostly, treating me like I was a broken bird. Everyone around me knew what had happened to me, and they all looked at me with these sad eyes, but I saw hunger in that. People thought that maybe if they focused on my sadness, then they could forget their own, but I didn't want any part of that, or of them. I wanted to be left alone, but Yongguk was different. Yongguk was always different.

My breathing hitches at the name on the page.

He didn't really say or do anything special, he just was special. He honestly just sat there and read his stupid book all day long while I laid in bed until I had to pee so bad that I couldn't hide under my blankets anymore. When I came back he didn't even look up, and I took the time to glance at the title of his book.

“We don't learn about psychology in class,” I pointed out, taking a seat back on my mattress. He looked up and shrugged his shoulders.

“We don't learn a lot in class,” he replied simply.

“What does it say?”

I expected him to tell me ten-year-olds couldn't understand psychology, but he didn't.

“I could read it to you, if you wanted.”

I didn't let many people interact with me, but as I said, Yongguk was special. I nodded.

We spent the day on my bed, with him reading about post traumatic stress and strain theories, all of which were explained in big words while they weren't very complicated things. I couldn't do algebra when I was nine, but I understood a lot about psychology. My therapist had a file an inch thick with different disorders and they weren't that hard to break down. Basically, I was messed up in a hundred different ways, but instead of fixing me, they just had me talk about it as if it'd make it all go away.

It didn't.

But talking to Yongguk was nicer. He smelled better, and was less intimidating since he was only a few centimeters taller than me, even as a teenager. He didn't offer me stress toys or giving me sympathetic nods, he just read in a nice deep voice that occasionally cracked and made me laugh. “I have anxiety issues,” I said eventually, twiddling my thumbs on my lap. “That's what they say anyway. When it comes to cars, and people in charge, and families. But that's what makes up life, right? Families, and people in charge, and cars to take you back and forth. So, I think I have life anxiety. Does your book have anything about life anxiety?”

Yongguk gave me this weird look then, like I had either said something stupid, or profound. I never actually knew which, but he shook his head regardless.

“Sometimes life just .”

“That sounds so smart,” I teased, and he laughed. Yongguk's smile was more gum than teeth, but it stirred something in me that hadn't been touched for a long time. I found my smile again that day, all thanks to him.

I think about that day all the time. About how differently things could have been if it had been someone else who had stayed, or a different book he was reading, or a different statement that had come out of my mouth. I think even if I had taken a breath out of time that day, it could have destroyed everything we became – and maybe that would have been better.

My chest feels heavy.

After that, I became his Himchan. I ate with him almost every day, and he taught me how to play basketballl – which, in retrospect was a bad idea on his part, since it only took me another couple of months to be eleven and a half and taller than him. Life seemed a little less scary after that point, but it became centric around him. We did our homework together, and he taught me how to do algebra and make a scientific table.

When I turned thirteen I asked him to close his eyes and I kissed him. It wasn't really a gay thing, but more of a thank-you-for-making-life--less sort of thing, and I think he understood that since he kissed me back. He was sixteen then, but that didn't really matter at midnight. We were already breaking rules with him in my room after hours, but it was my birthday and Yongguk was an angel. They'd never yell at him. We kissed until the sun came up and we spent that Saturday sleeping in late in the same bed. That happened from time to time, and it had become known to everyone that were just “Yongguk and Junhong” who did everything together, never apart. My therapist thought it was good for me, and at the time it was. I felt alive, and he felt warm. Yongguk was my unforeseen.

After that, we didn't kiss anymore. I wasn't sure why, but no moment presented itself quite as readily as it had that night. We were both lonely boys in our teens, me just getting into the hormones and Yongguk having battled them three years strong already – so I blame it on that. It was hormones that made us kiss until sunlight urged us to sleep, and nothing more. When you get down to it, a lot of what we do as people is caused by hormones. Good, and bad. We're not even really people, just all these chain reactions in the brain and Yongguk lit my limbic system up like an epileptic seizure. He was just perfect. I can't explain it. He was kind, and cool, and charismatic. He was caring, so caring, he seemed to have no faults. He was never sad, he never really got mad at me. He was an eagle, and I was still a broken bird.

“I think about it sometimes,” I told him when I was thirteen and a half. We were celebrating Yongguk's birthday his way, which was to say a winnie-the-pooh marathon in our pajamas with a whole pan of ramyun we stole from the kitchen. It could have been a thousand things, and at the time, I didn't even know what I meant to reference. Yongguk glanced over as Eeyore's house collapsed once again, and nodded a bit.

“The car accident?”

The kiss, I meant to tell him. I think about how you kissed me every single day since you did it, you big stupid angel. But, instead I nod.

“I have a scar, right here,” I told him, putting his hand over my heart. I wonder to this day if he felt how hard it was beating, pumping young love through my veins. “But it's all that's left of it. Of them, even. Pictures got lost in the shift.”

Yongguk traced his fingers over my chest, feeling for the raised skin beneath the thin fabric of a tank top and it looked like he had something say, but he never did it. I wonder all the time if I should have kissed him then – maybe that would have changed it all. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. That's the problem with the butterfly effect, I'd like to tell Edward Lorenz, there's no way to prove it, because once you do something it's done. Your future is set, and the past can't be altered. I didn't kiss him that day, even if I wanted to, and the moment was lost in time as the topic shifted to scars and he showed me one on his left shoulder.

And then Yongguk was seventeen and three months and he was wanted. The adoption process is a long one, but they had met him months ago. He knew for months, but he didn't tell me. I guess he didn't really lie, but “issues trusting others” was readded to my file immediately following his departure. When I was ten, I had scoffed at the left-behinds, but suddenly I knew how broken it really left you. See, your family dying while you pass out when you're nine is one thing. You can only process so many things at nine, only understand so far. Someone who becomes your recovery is another thing – that's why some writers say you can't make homes out of humans.

I wanted to, though. Yongguk always felt like home to me; but suddenly he was gone, bouncing away to a life as a son of a doctor and his wife. He was old to be adopted, but Yongguk was a beautiful person and it wasn't a surprise that he was the one to break the pattern. I had accepted my unwanted status to be unwanted with him, but I had always wanted Yongguk; they had always wanted him – he was unlike us.

At the corners of my eyes, tears threaten.

Yongguk always had this thing for Tigger, see, since he had a speech impediment when he was a kid. His parents thought he was autistic since he didn't speak until he was five – but they never even saw his first words. He came from a poorer family, he confessed to me, and he had a twin. In the end they could only afford to keep one kid, so they chose the seemingly neurotypical one. He was only two when he came to the orphanage, so he said he never felt sad about it really but whenever he did he just thought of Tigger, who was all alone, too. He was like Tigger, bright and confident, always pushing himself to jump higher than the last time.

We all want to be Tiggers.

But me? I was an Eeyore, and I had built my home out of Bang Yongguk's ribs. In him, I hid from the life anxiety that I had self-diagnosed as a kid and I felt so warm and safe. I loved him, I came to realize when it was too late to tell him. I loved him with every ounce with which a kid could love another kid, but he was gone. He was off to bigger and better things, like he deserved, and I was still here, waiting to get the money from my parent's house which was sold against my will. There was nothing waiting for me on the outside of those colorful walls; no ambitions, no future, just a lump of money and families, people in charge, and cars. Life beside Yongguk and life without Yongguk are two very distinctly different scenarios, one of which I think through Edward Lorenz' theory I could have achieved.

See, I have this picture, of an alternate reality where I kissed him that day. Where I told him that I loved him, and that he meant the world to me and he kissed me back. He confessed that I was an anchor to him, too and when he left he gave me an address. He waited the several years for me to get out with my lump sum and we took on the world together.

He made me who I am, but Edward Lorenz must not have accounted for the people like me — the ones who are too insignificant to shape those who we love. We're the ones the world forgets and leaves by the wayside. I tried to hold what was not mine, and the boy who had fixed my broken wings, and snapped them into many convoluted shapes – so severely, that they would never heal correctly, only growing, misshapen, around his image and memory, burned into my mind.

I, the butterfly, tried to beat my wings toward the hurricane, but to compare two things like that is stupid. Inevitably, and predictably, the butterfly that was me was torn to shreds by the hurricane that was him.

No correlation. Theory, disproven.

“This was all he left?” I ask the woman who had once given me books. She nods quietly, holding a small box labeled “Choi Junhong” that contained only his old case file. My heart quivers.

“He just told us to make sure you got it someday, and he left.”

The thing about butterflies that Junhong never knew, was that they're doomed from the start. From the moment something holds them, man or hurricane, they begin to lose their ability to fly.

Junhong was my butterfly, and I killed him without ever even trying.