“Next stop, Wondong Station. Next stop, Wondong Station. Please proceed to the front of the car.”

            Arms reach over a rhythmically bobbing head, with a black earbud stuck in the left ear and another dangling from the right, to grab a small purple backpack, in which a purple notebook always rests, its pages wedged open by a purple pen, from the racks overhead. Hoya passes by the passengers, the decelerating scenery reflecting in many of their glazed eyes, while others sleep uncomfortably.  The train smoothly slides to a halt, and when the door opens the heat sweeps in, enveloping the disembarking passengers.

            Emerging from under the shade and off the cement floor of the station, Hoya’s feet hit familiar dirt roads, roads that beg to be danced on. He slides his feet in a quick experimental flourish, new yet strangely familiar, and the road joyfully gives up clay orange clouds in his wake. Hoya kicks up small clouds with his bouncing step as he walks through the streets, each site pregnant with intertwining memories of childhood and dance.  Night spent learning how to break dance on the unforgiving concrete in the parking lot of the grocery store which sold soda for fifty cents to students within an hour after school was out; the rows of square wooden houses, painted alternating fading shades of yellow, pink, and blue, where they lived by day and imagined to be elaborate music video sets at night.

            He looks down the streets for someone he might recognize, perhaps an old compatriot he used to dance with.  The sky, though, is a dusty gray blue, still dotted with a couple quickly-fading stars.  It’s too early for most to be up and about and too late for the young boys to be dancing in the streets.  There are a couple early risers, watering their lawns or dutifully walking in quiet solitude, but other than that Yangsan looks empty.

            There’s a familiar house down the road, a metal plate faintly gleaming on one of its wooden porch beams, white paint cracked but not yet peeling.  The house slowly grows as he approaches until he can make out the numbers on the metal plate: 328. Inscribed underneath those numbers: Lee Family.

            Hoya reaches the porch stairs and tugs his earbuds out of his ears, stuffing them into his jeans pocket with one hand as he jogs up the stairs.  In front of the screen door, he hesitates. His right hand, previously occupied with the headphone cords, rubs its thumb idly on the corner of a photograph in his pocket: a family portrait with a declaration written across the back.

            The plan had been to return in a blaze of victory which would be strong enough to reduce the nauseating disappointment of this place to ash.  It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. 

            It’s been eight months since Dongwoo passed away. Even though they knew it was coming, it rammed through Infinite like a wrecking ball, shattering them. There was a brief hiatus for grieving and the funeral, but too soon they were pushed, staggering, back to work. No one in the dorm wanted to bring it up, but it was everywhere. Myungsoo, Dongwoo’s roommate, usually so carefully organized, threw his stuff into the living room and began sleeping there.

            Slowly, really because they had no choice—time, after all, stops for no one—the members began to put themselves back together, piece by piece. They remembered what it meant to be Infinite again, remembered the immersion and life of a performance, life which slowly bled back into them. They slowly began to remember the things that had made up their lives before. Still, there was something that hung over them, some restrictive film stretched over everything that left something perpetually caught in their throats, and that’s when Hoya took it upon himself to clean out Dongwoo’s dorm room.

            The room had been untouched since Dongwoo’s passing.  About a week afterwards, a manager had tried to go in to begin cleaning out, but there had been a silent but definite visceral antagonism from the members, so strong that two words from Sunggyu—“not now”—were enough to stop him.  Now, the members grudgingly let Hoya enter that sacred place, seemingly untouched by time.

            The room was in its usual state of disarray. The only notable change was the skeletal coat hangers on Myungsoo’s side of the closet. It almost looked like Myungsoo had been the one to pass away, and Dongwoo still lived there. The feeling was so strong that Hoya had to stand in the doorway for a few minutes before he could even hope to touch anything. 

            He started with the basics, sorting Dongwoo’s belongings into trash and boxes to give back to the family.  Everything in that room still seemed to carry Dongwoo’s feeling, everything Hoya held was a physical reminder of loss, and even worse was putting that item down into a box to be sent away. Eventually, though, he began to find things so characteristic of Dongwoo that he could not help but to smile: the foam football buried in the bedsheets, which he had probably absentmindedly kneaded between his fingers as he fell asleep at night, the clumsy pile of pants in the corner of the room and the rings carefully arranged in a box beside them.

            The process was slow, halting for busy weekday schedules, and then resuming during the weekends. Sungjong was the first to join Hoya in the room.  He had silently opened and closed the door behind him, and then began sorting things into their appropriate boxes alongside Hoya.  Sunggyu had been the last. All together, they began pointing out the quirks of the room to each other, finally allowing themselves to remember, allowing themselves to laugh and cry. It was like Dongwoo was in that room with them, no longer a dull depressing vagueness but something that encouraged them to let themselves live with the past. It was the first moment that felt like they had finally ruptured that inescapable film, and they felt alive and unburdened.

            The next morning, the film was back, but it began to become frayed, showing holes and breaks with more and more frequency. As that pressure slowly released, though, Hoya gradually became aware of something else tugging at him, something else unspoken and unfaceable.  He had tried to ignore it for months but, finding that he couldn’t… well, that’s what brought him here. No blaze of glory, no burning sun, just a dusty morning after a long night.

            Hoya breathes deeply through his nose, then presses the small white doorbell. 

            The house is silent.  Hoya wonders if he should press the doorbell again, or perhaps just leave, when he hears the soft padding of slippered feet coming down the front hallway.  The rusted brass handle of the faded white door turns and Hoya feels himself tensing, awaiting the tall dark monolith dominating the doorway.

            The door opens and there’s a man dressed in loose-fitting gray pajamas, well built but with his back bent a little from tiredness and his head showing the first signs of thinning gray hair. Under furrowed thick eyebrows and behind thin metal spectacles his bleary eyes squint at Hoya in the dim flat light.  Looking at his tired eyes, Hoya is suddenly reminded of Mr. Jang. Both men who, in some way or other, have lost a son.

            “Hi,” Hoya says. Hearing his own voice, his fear is replaced by nervous awkwardness.  He clears his throat.

            “Howon?” His voice is a dry whisper.

            “Yeah, Dad. It’s me.”

            “Oh my god.”  Hoya’s dad suddenly straightens and envelopes his son in a hug. Hoya, surprised, stands still for a second before carefully wrapping his arms around his father. The father pulls away, smiling softly with closed lips.

            “Come in!  I have to wake up your mother first but come in!” Mr. Lee disappears down the hallway.  Hoya whisper calls for him not to wake her up, but Mr. Lee just waves his hand above his receding back.

            The shock slides off and Hoya suddenly feels relieved of a weight, a weight that’s been sitting on his chest for so long that he had forgotten about it many years ago. But Dongwoo had made him remember.

            Dongwoo. 

            Hoya jerks his head back as the sudden relief and memory make his eyes sting and his vision is blur.  Slowly, though, the tears recede, and the gray sky fills his cleared eyes. A vague pink has already begun to spill across it.  The sky is so vast and beautiful that, for a moment, Hoya feels that he could fall into it.

            A breeze, momentary respite from the sweating heat, sweeps through the street and curls around his ears. In it Hoya hears the echoes of a clear laugh, immediately recognizable; a laugh fearlessly honest and open to all the pain and joy of the world.