He waved.

It was cute.

The way he moved his hand with that stupid smile on his face and its funny how we’re saying goodbye but it seems so happy. And before he left he said 再见 and he mispronounced it and I swore I wouldn’t cry because he was such a baby and when someone cries he’ll cry too.

But I guess swearing wasn’t enough and as I blinked and blinked, I remembered the many lessons we had to work on his Chinese and I remembered the first time he tried saying hello and I had laughed because it sounded all weird and he had rolled his eyes and threatened to steal my soft-toy ducks if I didn’t stop and if I thought of that before today I would have started laughing.

And soon enough his eyes were as red as the strawberries that he once brought over because he had cycled past the fruit store and he knew I loved strawberries, and his nose was as red as the last time we went out into the snow without our winter coats on as it had just started snowing and he had been impatient.

And a teardrop danced its way down his face and I’m reminded of seven years ago when I had told him I was going away for a week and he had started crying and at eleven, he understood goodbyes as his mother in the hospital and at eleven, I was blunt and didn’t know how to comfort people and I had left his house with an awkward I’ll be back.

And in the time in which he could have walked over to my house, like how he did whenever he was hungry, or bored, or almost whenever, his eyes had dried, and were as bright as ever, his nose was no longer red and his face crinkled up like how it always did.

And it left me wondering exactly how many times this had happened.

How many times he had faked a smile. How many times he had lifted up the corners of his mouth. How many times he had flashed his teeth.

And before I know it, the speakers announce his flight number and our eyes meet and I wrap my arms around him, like how I always did when storms arrived because the crybaby is afraid of lightning and I was always there for him and I start panicking because no matter how much it seemed like he needed me I was the one who needed him more, but I grabbed those thoughts and I stuffed them into a pretty red jar and with a marker I wrote Woohyun on it and closed the lid and hugged it real tight.

As soon as I was done I took a step back and looked at that grin on his face and after I was sure I had every smile line, every eyelash, everything memorized and stuffed into the red jar,

I let out a yeah.