Woohyun was a scorched cordiality. In fact too scorched on his part, he could have cut some slacks.

Upon my entrance as I clicked on the pendaflour lamp’s switch, Woohyun arose from his messy futon on which he had been lying at full length, in the middle of his room and greeted me with his liveliness which had this falsehood going around much to it. It was surely overdone; Nam Woohyun who was certainly not an actor was doing rather a less than stellar job to cover up the fact that he was the most jaded man in the world who had ever lived at that very second.

          “Hi.” I said. I don’t know how he constrained effort on to his mouth to turn into a big, broad grin and towards his swollen eyes to open themselves in order to swallow my appearance. “Hi back,” he replied. Much to my chagrin, his crescent moon eyes greeted me, hiding the broken orbs behind the lids. However, this is just how the way Woohyun would function in everyday life, at his countenance towards people in general. He feigned emotion every second counted. Deceitful part of him that made me fell hard and later severely wounded me to the bone with it.

           I sat down on a square cushion that he humbly put on the floor adjacent to a broken radio. I believed, in my selective memories of ours, it was my first gift for him on our hundredth day anniversary almost three years back. The amount of dust on the supposedly sleek and shiny surface was as thick as the wool of the carpet on floor. It was clearly left untouched for more than thousands days. It was abandoned in the most spiteful way. It wasn't kept away from one's eye but it didn’t put up for a useful purpose either. Like a forsaken old plaque that you still display albeit it already lost the sense of excitement and now just held an insipid meaning for you. For transitory minutes of silence while he not speaking, I let my eyes gazed upon his form with a feeling of being torn in between of uncertainty and comprehension. In so brief a moment, as had Woohyun’s eyes on me it was difficult that I could bring myself to see him again, still wonderfully intact in one piece. The wan being who was now slumping back into his thick duvet had me realized that he was surely the same man whom I had loved, the same companion of my early adulthood.

          For a few years of separation, I realized his face has gotten much defined, the character of his face became more remarkable than the last time I saw him. He had matured tangibly; he developed so much in my absence. A ghastly of complexion; small but distinctly sharp set of eyes that look like molten ice, very luminously clear and possess the depth of a lake, them eyebrows that reminds me of the great moon bows; patently thin and admirable, those pasty lips that somewhat remind me of hydrangeas showered with cloudburst bettering of beautiful curve, a nose of a delicate Yunani’s sculpture, proud and strident on its place,  a vivid and finely set of jaws that were loud of masculinity, luscious strands of downy jet-black hair that breadth above his temple ever so effortlessly, like a tapestry of luxurious silk, these features that altogether formed a presence that was not easily to be forgotten. Woohyun indeed wasn’t easily to be forgotten. With the profound description of my past lover whom now visible in my sight, the yet uncovered characters behind those features and his facial expression of untruth, I known doubts in prevailed the differences I was after.

          “Woohyun, you look terrible.” His rosiness of the skin and the now sallowness one, the past astonishing lustre of the irises and the now dimmed ones, despite the changes happened they still awed me to whom I spoke. The unnecessary length of coarse hair that hide his ears included all, even with denial on my part, brought me back the old memories when we were still together, when we were entitled as lovers, when he was still a boyish man that made me temporarily forgot the cruelness of the world.

          “It’s strange but it does feel good to hear that coming from you.” Woohyun indeed in the way of being a living enigma seemed to customarily affect my coordination as well. I was too caught up with analysing and comparing his past and present that then it let me at once struck with confusedness, a discrepancy. I soon realized that this had ascended from the succession of inadequate and vain struggles to overcome this old wall which I thought I already crush them down into possible wrecks. Thus, for once more point of realization on my part; I had never prepared myself for another meeting with him. Especially this kind of meeting; which the reminiscences of his adolescent existence were stronger than what was I have been witnessing a solid physical confirmation and temperament of an almost unfamiliar person.

          “You are drunk.” His action was consecutively jolly and sullen. His speech mottled hastily from an apprehensive hesitancy to that of peppy concision. That heavy and light, self-conscious and self-condemn and perfectly articulatory to slurred guttural voice, became a bewildering sight to see. “I know. I know. How are you?” Still, his eagerness to see me was nothing but an immanent vanity that hedged the thoroughfares of our history together. That, I conclude absolutely gave me a bitter aftertaste.

           The hammerings of my heart in the space of my ribcage traversed the severing reasons of my stopover, the fact that he reached me for a meet as he spoke the object of my stay, his plume yearning to see me and the consolation he expected from me. “You’re playing with fire Woohyun. And fire could never be men’s best friend.” His face flickered with a smile he forced on his lips. “Hanna,” he said, pausing at my name like he always did, making my heart falter at each beat it went. He had me (again), fully by my attention and compassion of his imminent revelation. He elaborated at a percipience stretch of the nature of his sickness.  It was a casement idleness in which he said of giving up finding the cure as his body was too tired of fighting and striving. He added again with a gaunt breathing (for I supposed was bleak) that he has despaired to get a remedy for so long so he, in advent morn roamed anew over other choice.

          He told me that the choice was there among other options thus if there are conflicts that may arise over the process of execution; they soon will pass off too. The excuses and reasoning among others as he detailed them put strenuous tidings, baffled and ploughed my faith for seconds. The weight, the semblance of his narrations I believed successfully affected me in a way I never want them to. His sufferings and acuteness of the illness that spread within his blood veins and cells of meat had him obscured of blanching indentations thus he ordained (as he thought, and almost made me thought the same) that he was okay with current realm.

         To an uncharacteristic of idea I found Woohyun to be a slave rather than a fighter. Just in few hours of inundations between us, I felt I was walking on a stagnated path with bending limb. Like complying with his situations, I let myself to be bounded of blunders and dreading over the failures in future, not in the body of that matter but in the outcome. I shudder over the blithe and ignorance of us both, which may upon this intolerable tension of daze and confusion. In make-believe of no detestation, I did feel that the dangerous period that will sooner or later come and greet us with severance for the term applied. I must abandon life and be submissive together, despite all the grandshire of past living tempt me not to leave. In some struggle and unnerved condition, the benighted chase will then be cut of and disconnected from my soul. I will be no longer eligible of making mistakes and find way to correct them and no longer qualify to taste the heaven after I acquired hell. I figured I fear the spectre of uncertainty. I guessed Woohyun was too.

          In the hearthside of my present self however I learned this again was considered of impassioned flings, I could at least feigned my façade while I still able to do it. ‘What could I do to help? What should I do to fix it?’ were the things that I would like to say to him but of course I didn’t. The drowse soon aded me take another glance on Woohyun, and moon on his mental condition although the lack of his self-balance was obviously shown. With a stoic face I managed a ‘stop it’ with a lenient exclamation gracing in the end of my voice. “You still a selfish bastard,” I muttered softly. A broken smile adorned his lips and by that I registered him more in my awareness. In autumn wrought partition, Woohyun was holding a mass of ruptures that tying him to oblivion. He was enchained and had long stopped making effort to free himself. He lost his bearing to an escape door. He lost his vigour of holding on to the buoy that will keep him afloat. He stopped venturing forth or walking forward. In his says, he conveyed that everything was too shadowy for him to prod the path, the eclipse was too severe for light to pierce through. By long sufferance he told me, everything has been slowing him down and now as I could see by my own eyes, Woohyun was indeed at the down low, if not for the worst, he was fixed and unmoved.

          He continued again with hesitation apparently interlaced his words, that obvious despair that had consumed him wholly to the very tips of his toes and to each bristles of his hair to the colour of his skin. It did tug on my heartstrings, assembling every bit of compassion in me to empathise him in one way or another. It was either I’m too kind or he was too derisible. Nothing so intensifies a sober person but an impassive opposition.  For my curiosity and dire growing of impatience, then I urged him to prove of what he had thought of impossible to be resolved by his judgement. I had asked him to allow himself a leap, to retract of a boulder that illimited him in a self-created purgatory so I could see how his nightmares looked like. The insecurity reflected in his wild gossamer eyes and with that much of peculiar sadness, I reconsider all of my action on him.

          It afflicted me like I was doing a vile plucking over a wilting laurel. I let the silence shingled his emotion and by waiting, I move my eyes to follow every gesture of the faltering man in front of me. My vision particularly was secured on his balled fists, too much of tremors and little bit of self-assurance. Without a second thought, I scooted closer towards him and reached for both of his rough hands that settled faithfully at his sides. Ever so slowly, I opened one of his pinky fingers and then I continued doing the same thing on his ring, middle, index fingers until his thumbs. As I realized how he quietly looking on my working hands, I let my palms to warm his and later, all of his fingers are straightened and abloom by the time I let them fall on his lap. I shook my head warranting him of my company and reassure him that he was not alone now.

          A tinder spark concealed his pallid skin and with much of hesitation in his croaking voice, he ripped the brooding curiosity of mine with an importune revelation. His cosy chaise of a tenderly beloved lover—his soulmate for more than a mere thousand days, his make-believe of last and the only person he had gave all his heart to, had broken and burnt to ashes. “My Soojung,” he said, with agony which I can never forget, ‘cheated on him (him; the miserable and the weak) for a better man with more money, with more beauty and posh looking car.’ While he spoke, his love ‘My Soojung’ (for so was she called) left him for good through a phone call and --without having any speck of mercy in her tone he said, she asked to be freed from his love which to her is like a cage.

          I tried to gauge the placid memories of our dates where Jung Soojung was fairly a dweller. Despite there are no obvious traces of a solid form in my nigh memory of her, I somewhat knew she did exist. I reckon that in amidships of me and Nam Woohyun becoming estranged of each other's companionship at one point of time, the theory of her existence through the downfall was not impossible. She was there all the time. As I was packing and trying to leave, she was already in the room that I was exiting, became the occupant that managed to erase every single trace that I have yet leave behind. She was the epitome 'love that conceded all'. She made Woohyun forget me like it was the most natural thing to do.

          In the aftermath of me and Woohyun, he did not even get his feeling close to remorse and regret while I was the opposite of them all. I was dying in the whiteout knowing he was living with greens and flowers dancing around him. Jung Soojung offered him an eden-like garden while Woohyun presented me with a bare desert. I hated him with all the fibres of my being as much as I loved him. I considered her with a sheer wonder not knotted with trepidation, and yet I found it’s impossible to account such feelings. Because I before, was the current Woohyun. I was broke like how Woohyun had been broken for her leaving him. Woohyun finally was having his turn to walk out of the parching garden towards the sweltering desert.

          The indolence was robbed off me, catching a muffled sound of anguish moans as my eyes followed his gestures of being in a great pain. He was covering his leaking eyes with his hands. When a hand fell onto his lap, at ineptness, accidently he showed me his ruins as tears flowing generously all the way to his chin. My glance sought instinctively and keenly at the visage of a broken lover; but he had buried his face in both of his hands back again. The passionate tears that had fallen to his laps I perceived are more than acquainted brokenness, for such tears trickled his skin thus further embalmed the love he was in pain for. I wish I was a better narrator, a fine speaker who has her words as refined as ripe apples. So I could tell him that he could always have a way on how to stop this nightmare, the sadness that was enveloping him without sounding overly fake and such a try hard. 

          I sat awhile with my lips pursed in agitation. My mind rallying on the occurrences I was having; the brewing conflict in my body as well as the ones my eyes could see. It occurred to me that Woohyun still had so many things to say, well I could guess that. I sent him a look that demanded him to speak, requesting him to talk so it will be less heavy; the weight of our co