Anywhere but Here

Since I was a kid I was already attracted to beautiful things; the stars, the moon, the night sky and as soon as I added the boy next house I came to realize that one thing they had in common were those things were never meant to be reached.

I was only twelve years back then when I saw the painter’s son, Baekhyun, who was already four years older than me drew in the backyard of their house. They praised me for being tall but I had not understood what was special about it before I used it to take a peek of him through the wooden fence that separated our home.

But more than my height I was gladder by his tendency of looking at me back. That despite I brushed off my feet from climbing the fence, he then helped me to clean up my wound. And in that moment, the twelve years old me could only think of one idea that it was okay to bleed as long as I had him to heal it.

But as I grew older I realized that Baekhyun wasn’t a doctor but a painter just like his father. His job wasn’t to heal other’s wound but to offer imaginary concept on a piece of paper and just like that when people thought the beautiful dream had became their possession, they would realize just like that dream itself, what they had was also nothing but a fraud; a beautiful imaginary.

And, surprisingly, that was enough. Living in a war with the sight of corpses and blood, with the hearing of cries and mourns, such atrocious things like dream and illusion were the best thing that the Painter’s Family could give to us.

When I was seventeen, for the first time Baekhyun painted in my bare shoulder blade. For the last five years he would only paint on my hands and arms. Stars and flowers graced my skin and when the water wiped them clean I had to fight my tendency to feel hollow and lost.

That time I asked him to draw what he thought of himself. He kissed my skin softly right on his own painting after he finished it and when I asked him what he had painted, he told me it was a butterfly.

Butterfly symbolized exquisite beauty but at the same time short lived being. I came to understand why he had drawn himself as a butterfly a week later when the news of his calling to join the war broke.

The night before his departure he kissed me on my lips, from gentle to desperate, from love to longing, and trailed the line of my neck but he stopped himself before he touched me any further. We slept side by side, under the night sky with the moon and the stars and once again I was reminded that these things I thought I possessed around me would never be mine.

The next morning I sent him off and at the same moment too, I thought, he allowed me free. Before he drifted, he bent and whispered to my ear, “Let’s meet again someday, Su Ji. Somewhere where there’s no war and we’ll be safe and sound. Anywhere. Anywhere but here.”

The sight of his back lost at the end of the street was forever my last memory of him.