swearing whispers

There’s a secret passage that connects my room and Su Ji’s storeroom. Mostly during the night, she’ll sneak when no one is looking from her room to mine through that cramped hole with that slender body of her. Every time she appears from behind the lid that closes the hole on my room she’ll have the same solemn expression on her and when she looks at me she will smile, the kind of smile that shows her teeth.

We’ll spend hours talking in the dark room with only my dim bed light, sometimes she’s on my shoulder, sometimes she’s on my lap, some other times I am on hers. And if the witching hours is over and we are already too tired to lean on each other, we’ll climb up to my bed and sleep side by side under my cover. When it comes to this, she’s is always in my wrap. We’ll start whispering as if outside the cover, the monsters are watching, and we don’t want them to laugh at us as we tell each other what hurt us today.

Two years ago Su Ji’s cheating Father left her house. The first time Su Ji’s showed up in my room was when her parents started to shout at each other. When everything started to scream in her dream, my bed was the only place she could mute them down. It lasted for three years until her mom couldn’t take it anymore and filed divorce. So when I was the one who came to her house that day, crying, she just lay there on her bed and said to me, “It’s kinda peaceful here.”

But it didn’t last.

“I thought it’s over when dad’s gone. I thought the screams will stop and finally my mind won’t be filled with any ugly jumbled assumption. I thought I could finally.., breath.”

Everyone is hurt there from the previous long-lasting war, some goes limp, some goes handicapped. Some is already dead. No one comes out as a winner; war doesn’t breed tranquility. It only destroys.

“My mom is still screaming, not to dad now. To us. My brother follows her step well. I told myself not to end up like them. But I am screaming too. I have always been screaming. This will never be over, Baekhyun. There’s no end in this.”

Tonight, buried on my chest, I could feel that she’s crying; just like any other night when such thing as a fake teeth smile is cast away by the wicked night. I want to her tears away but that’s not what childhood friend do. Instead I whisper dreams that I don’t even believe myself just like what bestfriend does.

During each silent, I secretly fill it by swearing to myself one promise. “I am not going to scream at you.”