“Excuse me, are you Lee Sungyeol’s brother?”

The white-aproned doctor was frowning. Daeyeol knew from experience that it wasn’t a good sign. He wore the same frown when he had told him that Sungyeol needed to undergo a complicated surgery, with a very low chance of survival. He looked older when the frown lined his forehead - Daeyeol had been meaning to tell him that. But maybe it had to wait.

“Yes,” he replied.

How could the doctor have forgotten him so quickly? It had been only three days since Sungyeol had had the accident. The day Sungyeol had been brought in here, the doctor had sat Daeyeol down in front of him and offered him coffee. Did doctors always forget the people they had coffee with?

“I’m really sorry but he’s gone into a coma. He’s on artificial ventilation,” the doctor said gravely.

Daeyeol didn’t understand what he meant, but he knew it was bad. He knew it in his bones…but Sungyeol couldn’t have – he didn’t…

“He’s alive, but barely,” the doctor explained briefly, without going into the details. Daeyeol would have liked the details. He was never much of a Science student, ever since Sungyeol's accident, he had been learning what complicated part of Sungyeol had gone wrong, which part of his body refused to keep him alive, how much of him was working like nothing was wrong...

When the doctor had left, having completed the task of delivering bad news, Daeyeol looked up coma and artificial ventilation on his smartphone. For the last three days, he hadn’t set foot outside the hospital. He now knew every single grime and spot on the white walls of the ICU corridor. He had wondered why they paint hospitals in white; hospitals should be painted black – death was everywhere around this place, in every corner, every crack; death and pain, horrible excruciating pain.

Tired from training his eyes on the small screen of his phone, Daeyeol fell asleep and had a nightmare about coma. Coma was an ocean-deep black hole and Sungyeol was sinking further and further into its depth, while he was precariously balanced on the edge, trying to lend a hand to his brother.

If only one other person was here  to help him, he could have done it, he could have pulled Sungyeol out. Only if Sungjong were here…

Dearest, if I had a time machine, I’d go back to the time when we met and make us ‘unmeet’. Because the way I see it, that’s when it all started.

Walking down that deserted highway in the cold October wind, I saw you standing under the streetlamp, muttering to yourself. You were dead drunk, but the way you held yourself even when you couldn’t see anything two feet away made me stare at you, half-amazed, half-amused.

That’s probably the memory I cherish the most – when I approached close enough to listen to you ranting to the lamp post about how no one appreciates poetry anymore, I chuckled to myself.

I remember it so vividly, how I could only see your side profile but I was still tragically in love with you, how I walked toward you like a hyptonised snake drawing closer to its charmer. And then I remember seeing your face and thinking how, even though dulled by intoxication, your eyes were like the ocean and I had already fallen into them.

From the very beginning, there was something about you that I couldn’t have, not in a million years.

I could have told you how beautiful you are, how your jawline was chiselled, how your lips are so kissable, but it wouldn’t be something you didn’t know. No, you’re too smart to not know that, and I wasn’t going to be the one to bore you with clichés. So I got on my knees and told you that the mole on your nose looked like a dewdrop resting on a petal.

Even today, I cringe when I think that the first thing ever I said to you was absolutely moronic. But that got your attention didn’t it, through the haze your mind was in? You took me by the shoulder and made me stand up, saying that you’d just knighted me.

I giggled like a girl – in my head, I was your knight in shining armour!

Back then, I’d thought that come morning, you’d forget it all and this would be a precious memory just for me. Yet the next day you saw me (later you forgave me for following you to the pub), you called me your knight. I chuckled nonstop when I got back home, red in the face, because you remembered that night as much as I did, every bit, and you weren’t embarrassed about it like I feared you would be.

I wonder how you made a person like me feel very ordinary in your presence; I used to believe I was quite extraordinaire.

Ah those memories – they rise like a wall of fog and engulf me, even as I lay on my deathbed. If only you were here with me, I’d have tricked death in any way possible and come back again, to you…