goodbye, you.

When I first met Luhan, Sungjong and I were already well acquainted. We saw him under the trees near our usual sitting place, and invited him to sit with us because Sungjong thought he was lonely. He was half right; half, because everyone is. Everyone is lonely.

Sungjong and I were not the good friends people assumed we were when I spoke to them about the incident. We were the kind of friends who met when it was convenient to us, who met out of necessity than any real sign of affection. Sungjong and I did not sit together in class, and when we passed each other in the hallway, we barely gave each other a second glance. We were not close friends, so much as intimate strangers. One time it slipped out of my mouth that I knew Sungjong when I was talking to Yoojin. She asked me, with a cheeky grin on her face,

“Were you in love with Sungjong?”

“No. Of course not.”

It was half true. Half, because we are all in love with the people we treasure.

There was a maths teacher I really liked. We called him Mr Jang, and laughed because sometimes we thought he was fit to be an English teacher, since he moulded so well into the stereotype of the young, male, spunky English substitute. He was at times profound, but always kindly honest. I found it amazing that he was able to emit the same kind of sincerity that I’d searched for all my life, and later I wrote him letters which he never received. I think he was one of the most intimate teachers I’d ever had.

When we first met Luhan, the first thing he said was, “Don’t you think Mr Jang is lonely?”

Sungjong was the one who spoke next. “It’s not really our business.” He shrugged, letting his bag slip from his shoulders. “I don’t really want to know anyway.”  

Luhan looked at Sungjong for a long time, before he said, “Don’t you have a heart?”

And Sungjong said, “I do. That’s why I don’t want to know.”

It was then I knew that Sungjong and Luhan would be great friends. Sungjong was cold, bitter and full of vulgarity, but in the times that he was intimate, or honest, you knew you had him in the palm of your hands. He’d taken into Luhan so quickly that I didn’t even realised we’d become a crowd of three til Luhan began meeting us at the beach, his tone soft and inquisitive, shoulders holding the weight of the world. He felt too much, and we told him this frequently.

“You’re going to fall,” Sungjong said, “If you take everything to heart.”

“I don’t know how to stop feeling,” Luhan confessed. He said it with his shoulders hunched, his body threatening to fall upon itself. “It’s everywhere. I can’t stop it.”

He looked genuinely hurt then, as if he couldn’t really hold the weight of the world as he had done before. Instead he let himself sink, let the feelings sink, and it engulfed him.

When I was fifteen Luhan begged me to kill him.

And I was so afraid because I realised that we never really knew how fragile we all were til Luhan decided to show us for himself.

That was the incident. It was literally that. Luhan killed himself, and we couldn’t stop it. That’s where we end. That is our end.

Except we kept living.

I didn’t know what to do when it happened. It was the kind of news that spread around the hallways – you didn’t know it til it reached your ears. It reached mine first. I remember the shatter it created. The loud shriek in my mind, the numbing of all senses as I focused on him, Luhan, all there, all dead, nothing to do. I wondered how such a delicate, timid boy had done so; but then I remembered the weight on his shoulders, and it was easy to see that, as predicted by Sungjong, he had fallen.

I wondered how Sungjong felt about that, and I didn’t have to ask for long.

“How do you deal with grief?” Sungjong asked me. We met at our meeting place, as we always did, but without Luhan it wasn’t the same. “How do you deal with the feeling of something about to burst out of your chest?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, and I think my vision got blurry, because Sungjong told me:

“Please don’t cry. Please, I don’t want you to.”

There’s a lapse in my memory after that. I just know that I’ve never missed and hated someone more in my life then I hated Luhan.

“You can’t bring people back,” was the first thing my mother told me.

She, like everyone else, had heard from the news circulating around the school. The whisper of the suicidal student who took his own life. I couldn’t look her in the eyes when she said that, and when she brought me in for a hug I couldn’t latch onto her. He hurt, Luhan had hurt – I’d been there, and I’d done nothing. It was the gap he left, the empty space, the screaming hole begging to be acknowledged, which had left me numb. Death was here, death had been here – you can’t escape death, only endure it. Everyone dies, everyone meets people who die – there was no difference, my mother told me, flattening my hair. You can’t save people from themselves.

You can’t save people from themselves. I thought about this for hours, staring up at the ceiling as if my answer lay wedged between peeling paint.

When we ate, we ate in silence. I didn’t talk to my family for awhile, and I stopped talking to my friends as well. This was my way of dealing with grievance. Sungjong had once told Luhan, during our many talks, that if you didn’t try and feel everything, you would sleep sound.

“How do you undo knowing though?” Luhan had asked him. “I can see unhappiness everywhere. It’s in the air we breathe.”

“You just have to know that everything will be over,” Sungjong replied.

“It hurts,” Luhan murmured quietly, “Everything hurts.”

He carried the weight of his heart in his words. We were silent for a moment.

“You need to stop thinking that everything is your fault.” Sungjong said finally. “You need to understand that you can’t solve everything; that you cannot let yourself sink when other people do. You have to learn to grow a shell, because if you’re too soft, you’ll bleed.”

That word alone made Luhan freeze. He brought his arms to his chest.

“You’re too soft, Luhan,” I told him myself, because Sungjong spoke so much about coldness that you would’ve thought he purposely traded away his heart. “You really do need to give yourself some breathing space. Why hold onto all of that? All that sorrow and pain.”

Luhan looked at me desperately, as if somehow I could fix him. I could not. This is why he died. “It’s so sad to watch people destroy themselves. I can’t let that sorrow out.”

And he didn’t realise he’d described the feeling that we felt when we watched him on the floor, bleeding to death but refusing to let us help.

“You should have told someone,” is what the school counsellor said.

She gathered a group of us – Sungjong, Minah, Jongdae and me – and sat us in a circle. We’re all Luhan’s connections; his close ones, at least. I didn’t know Minah had known Luhan til she walked through the door, introducing herself as Luhan’s girlfriend. I didn’t know Luhan had a girlfriend, since he never really spoke about her. To be honest, he never really spoke about anybody. He wasn’t the kind of person who told stories. Luhan’s girlfriend sat next to me and held my hand, squeezing it tightly as she tried not to cry.

“He was so bright,” she said, half sobbing, “He shouldn’t have ended the way he did. Why didn’t he tell anyone?”

I wondered why Luhan even dated her in the first place. Did she know him? I let my hand run through her hair in some sort of assurance as she gave me a feeble smile. I hated Minah. She was too much of Luhan’s soul – she held his honesty and his sincerity and let it burn through my throat. I turned to the counsellor, sitting collectively on her plush chair.

“You need to tell us if someone’s in danger,” she continued. “You have to understand that you can’t solve every problem. There are qualified people out there, people who can really connect to these people and get them out of their situations.”

“Luhan was killing himself,” Jongdae said. He’s one of Luhan’s closest friends – attached by the hip since eight. “How could you guys fix that?”

“We could talk to him,” the counsellor replied.

“That’s what we did.”

“But they’re qualified, Jongdae. They deal with these situations all the time.”

“And they’ll never really know him.” Jongdae frowned, and when he did, you knew that he was not pleased. “They’ll think he’s just some sad suicidal kid who’s so pitiful that he needs to be fixed. He’s not even a person in their eyes.”

“Whatever helps them sleep at night, Jongdae. We can’t all die.”

That’s the last thing she said. We can’t all die. Luhan can die and others can die but we can’t all die. Let’s have the sadness kill people, have the sadness destroy people, but as long as they don’t destroy us all, we’ll all be happy. Won’t we? I watched Jongdae, and I think that, at that moment, something was eating him up on the inside. Jongdae took it the worst. His eyes looked like they haven’t slept in days, and his usual bright, chirpy tone was replaced with a drier, monotonous one. He sounded like he’d given up.

I met with Jongdae afterwards, and he said, “Luhan really tried to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders, didn’t he?”

I nodded, and he looked like he was about to cry.

“Isn’t that sad? That he was trying so hard, and in the end, it just ate him.”

“I try not to think about it,” I said.

“Why? He was your friend as well.”

“He doesn’t mean to. He never wanted to, but right now he’s destroying me,” I confessed. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I hate death,” Jongdae said.

“Me too,” I replied.

“The saddest bit is,” he continued, “We were in every right to stop him.”

And the question which lingered between us was: why didn’t we?

Minah asked to meet me a week after the incident. I met her at a small, cosy café, and she nearly cried her eyes out because this was where Luhan had taken her all the time.

“He was really such a sweet guy,” she told me. “Always so kind, gentle and happy. He never stopped smiling.”

Luhan never showed us that side of him, but I realised that it was unimportant. I nodded.

“You know he used to always laugh. He called you Envelope, and Sungjong Letter, because he liked a bit of mystery. I used to laugh with him, and beg him to tell me who these brilliant characters were. He’d never tell me, of course.” She sighed. “I guess that’s when I should’ve known, wasn’t it? When he told me the answer I’d always waited for. If only I’d caught on. Then we wouldn’t be dying like this.”

Minah looked at me, intimate and honest. “That’s what we are, isn’t it? Dying people; all collapsing because of one sole person.”

I didn’t reply. There was nothing for me to say. Minah dried her tears unsuccessfully.

“You know what I really loved about him?” She looked up at the sky, as if he was still looking back at her. “He was so charming, so playful and so mysterious – a story waiting to be told. He used to laugh fondly at me, and sometimes he would humour me. He always seemed to know how I was feeling. Sometimes he’d say, ‘You don’t have to hold it all in. Just let out how you feel.’ And I’d end up ranting about another girl, or something which had bothered me, and he would listen, and make it seem alright.” She looked at me, and I think she finally understood. “I should’ve told him the same thing.”

“It’s alright,” I told her, “Luhan was the type of person who wouldn’t say even if you asked.”

“He must’ve told you things though, didn’t he?” Minah leaned in. “He was always so honest with you, always so sincere. I mean, he’s always sincere, but sometimes – oh, I don’t know – sometimes when I spoke to him I felt like he was hiding from me. As if he was pulling a veil between us and I was getting a blurry, less defined image of him. Sometimes he looked like he was far away, as if he wasn’t really speaking to me, only humouring me. I wonder why we stayed together. Why didn’t we break up? Why didn’t he leave me for you?”

I sat up immediately, frozen. She shook me up.

“Luhan didn’t like me in that way,” I told her. “That’s why he could be so honest.”

“But you must have liked him, didn’t you?” Minah frowned at me. “You did, didn’t you? You loved him, and he deserved you, and instead I got in the way.”

I couldn’t make her understand that the reason he confided in me and not her was because he valued her, he loved her, and he couldn’t bear to see her hurt. I was someone he knew who would not crumble under the weight of his words, but when I thought about it, I could only see myself falling apart at our parting.

“He didn’t love me,” I repeated for the rest of the afternoon. “He couldn’t. It would never work.”

She titled her head. “But you wanted it to, didn’t you?”

I didn’t like answering that.

I told Sungjong about what Minah had said. We sat like lifeless dolls, toying on the swings with our hands cuffed by the wire. It was in no fun, only pity. We had stopped going to our usual meeting place, because Luhan’s voice hung heavily in the air. He was everywhere, just like the sorrow he had always spoken about.

“He could never love you,” Sungjong said honestly. There were good things about Sungjong, and then there were bad things. This was one of the things that were both. “She’s silly, to think Luhan could fall for you. You don’t have the galaxies he was looking for. He was looking for someone who could be sincere and full of love, happiness, feeling. You don’t feel as strongly as he did.”

“I know,” I told him, and sometimes, I wished he hadn’t said that. Sometimes, I disliked the way I was so detached. Luhan was looking for a girl of love, a girl who shone. I did not shine, and I didn’t break, either. I was nothing explosive, and I think he was looking for something, because he was a bright boy, someone full of energy and ideas, and I just wasn’t what he was looking for. “We were good friends.”

Sungjong acknowledged that. “Sometimes, the people who we confide in, and the people we want to spend the rest of our lives with, are very different people.”  

I wanted to tell him that they were fifteen going on sixteen, that they were young, full of passion and a dying spark. But that was too cruel. Luhan was too cruel. The boy who held the weight of a thousand burdens didn’t realise the weight he held on others. I thought about discussing this with Sungjong, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about Luhan. Sometimes I thought about him too much, and how he would’ve liked this, or that, or something amusing that happened in class. Sometimes, I think, Minah would turn to her side, as if she wanted to lean on his shoulder and cry, but there was no boy next to her. She was a beautiful girl. She would let up.

“He wanted to protect us,” Sungjong laughed, humourlessly, because we were still so dead. “How funny it is, how the only thing he did was pull us apart.”

He didn’t mean to, I wanted to say. He didn’t mean to cause a burden. He was just too small, too absorbing, he had to hold onto everything, and that let him disintegrate. It was his fault, but it was mine, as well.

“Kill me,” he begged in my dreams.

I remembered the first time he had looked at me, so lost and so dazed, holding onto something non-existent, the spark in his eyes gone. He was so dead, so lifeless; his soul no longer inhibited the body he owned. He was no perfect boy – he was flawed, he was a liar, he couldn’t keep his emotions in check – but we loved him all the same. I was walking home from tutoring when I found him on top of the playground, looking out at busy Seoul as if it was something he’d only seen in a dream. He looked down at me, and smiled.

“Hey Envelope,” he grinned. “Kill me.”

I remembered pausing, his voice ringing in my ears. I had to walk over. “Luhan, what are you doing?”

He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said. “Kill me, Envelope.”

“Luhan,” I told him, “this isn’t funny.”

“I’m not joking. Kill me.”

“Why would you want me to do that?”

And when I said this, his eyes became so vulnerable, so weak and child-like that I think all he wanted was a home where he could be free, where no distress tied him down. I watched him choke.

“It hurts everywhere, Envelope. It hurts in my soul and at the side of my heart and I can hear the sounds of my chest threatening to give up. I can’t do this Envelope. Everything about me hurts.” Luhan looked passed me, as if I was no longer there. “There’s no one here for me, Envelope. There is no one I can run to. I’m losing control, Envelope. I can’t hold on any longer. I feel like I’m about to fall.”

And he nearly did.

He nearly flung himself off the playground – a fall which would not kill him, only hurt. Luhan was terribly afraid of heights, so he stopped himself before he could do any damage. I stood at the bottom of the equipment, ready to catch him should he fall. He was not a muscular boy; I knew I would be able to manage his weight. He had half of his body hanging off the equipment when he laughed, then he cried, telling me that he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t fall, that everything should end but it wasn’t, and I found myself looking up at him.

“Don’t go Luhan,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

“But you said so yourself. There’s too much going on, and everything demands to be felt.” He looked up at the darkening sky; a representation of the storms brewing his head. “If I was omnipotent, I would be able to live through all of this. All this sadness and conflict and distress. They can’t bother me once this happens.” He frowned, as if he’d come across one of the only questions we find in life which demand to be answered. “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

I remembered waking up to his voice. Night after night, his tone haunted me, his shrieks louder til I could hear nothing else. This is grief, I told myself, covered in cold sweat. This is what grief does. It consumes you at every moment, has you tied in every knot. You do not defeat grief; you only learn to accept it. I spent nights thinking about Luhan, wondering what else I could say to make everything better. I wondered if there were words, sentences, phrases – things I couldn’t say before which would’ve helped him, stop this grief and had him turn his life around. Why didn’t I tell him about all the good things which had happened, the good things that he had done? I don’t know why my voice had choked and refused to speak, I don’t know why everything was ruined.

I used to try and scream at him, “There is more, and you are it.” Sometimes I would try and scream to tell him that it was alright, that he didn’t have to feel responsible for everything, that we chose our happiness, and he could find his own. I wondered why all the sadness always overcame the grief. Perhaps not always, but when I found him, he was in a ditch he’d dug, where not even the brightest flower could save him. How does one get into a situation where happiness can no longer make up for all the hurricanes in the world?

Sometimes I saw happy Luhans, the Luhan who was charming, alive, the life of everything, the heart of none. Sometimes I saw the boy who shone, who was so exciting and bright that he couldn’t help but make you smile. Sometimes when he called me Envelope he grinned, and then invited me out of ice-cream, because he could feel so happy, and who could not? He felt nothing but happiness, it was the highest peak – he was a body filled with emotion, and he shone when it did. He would tell me to enjoy my time, and then he’d say he’d have to leave. We are always so silly in dreams, I’ve found. I would scream in my head, begging him to stay, because if he didn’t, he’d go away and he’d never come back. I could only wave him goodbye in those dreams. It would only hurt.

One time I dreamt that Luhan was sitting on the floor of my living room, pulling apart gold jewellery for fun. I remember standing there, frozen, at the entrance of the room, just watching wordlessly as he tore apart everything my mother had valued so much. It was the expensive jewellery she kept in her box, the kind she would keep at the bank because it was too precious. In the dream, I did not notice how strange it was that a ghost was in my house. I was only occupied with why he was trying to break the delicate gold chains. He looked up at me at one point, and there was nothing comforting he could say.

“Goodbye,” he whispered on the floor. “Everything, goodbye.”

I asked him again, what are you doing with that? He couldn’t really explain it.

“Goodbye precious. Goodbye, you pretty thing. How much were you worth? Five hundred – six? Oh well. Goodbye.” At this, he pulled at the chain, watching the bracelet split apart.

It was like watching him tear apart himself.

“Do you understand, Envelope?” He asked me. “Do you now understand?”

I didn’t.

I told Sungjong about this dream once. It was when my world was falling apart and he was holding it together, only barely, his hands struggling to catch parts of his breaking heart. I think the saddest thing about grief is how consuming it all is. The empathy eats at you, gnaws at you, shrieks at you til you have to acknowledge it, say that it really is there. It was ironic that when Luhan left, he brought the grief that he had felt onto us. We felt about him the way he felt about other people – loneliness consumed us, and so did the after-effects of his death.

People passed us in the hallways and gave us shattering looks; some accusing, some kind. They stung all the same. It was our fault, wasn’t it? I knew it was on the tips of Jongdae’s tongue, the sides of Sungjong’s bitter smile. We were the reason he had died, and this made the accusing looks hurt. We had been there, had been in his confides and knew all about his plans – yet what had we done? What had we, as people, done to avoid it? We’d only let the darkness consume him, whispering empty words, and nothing had been achieved. I wondered why they all had to look at us, all demanded to know what had happened. It wasn’t that nice, once you knew the truth. It was only shattering.

Sungjong thought about the dream for a long time.

“I dream about him too,” was the only thing he could say. “We dream of the interpretations of a person, I think. We dream of them not as how they are, but how we see them.”

“What kind of dreams do you get?” I asked.

Sungjong shifted his weight. It took him a few seconds to register a reply – eternity when it came to him. This was not something he could freely say. “Lots of clocks, lots of blood. He smiles sometimes, but mostly he just cries. He crawls to me and begs for a release, but all I can do is stand there and watch him bleed to death, useless at its most subtle.” He sighed, and I knew we had crossed too many lines. “He bleeds in every dream. Even when he laughs, he bleeds. I can’t imagine seeing him without the blood covering his face.”

I asked him if he had seen Luhan’s body.

“Of course not,” Sungjong answered. “That’s just what makes it worse.”

I wanted to ask him about grief, since we’d confided in each other for so long, and it was funny how the arrival and departure of Luhan had caused rifts between us. How his disappearance led us to be once again secretive, unable to reveal how we really felt. It was hard to say what was on my mind. I let it choke at the back of my throat, refusing it air, waiting til it died away. I learned later that you couldn’t choke away feelings, because they’d only come back to haunt you once again. Luhan was very much the same.

“Do you ever hate him?” Sungjong asked me.

“Hate him?” I bit my lip. “Sometimes. I wish we’d never become friends. It wouldn’t feel as bad then.” I paused. “Do you?”

“I hate to admit it, but I do.”

“Often?”

“As much as I think of him. It’s such a selfish thought, isn’t it? Someone has taken their own life, and all we can think about is easing the guilt.”

I nodded, because it was all true, and there was nothing to do but agree. “I think I hate myself more,” I told him.

“Yes?”

“Yeah. It was my fault I got too close to him, and it was my fault he’s not with us now.”

Sungjong paused. He didn’t bother to refute me.

“I hate grief,” he told me. “I always thought I wanted it, thought it was necessary to write, but now I realise that it’s just a burden.”

“It’s a heavy one,” I agreed. “Sometimes, it makes me want to die.”

“Don’t,” Sungjong said, and he never said anything more seriously than he did with that one sole word.

Yoojin asked me once about what happened with Minah, because I had a habit of skimming over important details and paying attention to things which held none. I told her that Minah grieved, that Minah spent days locked in her room, whispering to herself and crying a lot; so much so that her mum had to call me over, because apparently I was the only person she thought who knew how Minah was feeling. That wasn’t true, and it pained me at every moment that I would never know what Minah was going through, that even though I sat next to her, even though I played along with her and threaded daisy chains and played hide and seek with the monster under her bed, I’d never really understand why her nails were so chipped, why her hair looked like a monster’s nest and why she could never really look me in the eyes without seeing Luhan and bursting into tears. That was the thing about grief. In the way that we all dealt with it differently, we all experienced it differently as well. I learned this when Minah had fallen asleep, when her mother was too afraid of let me go home, and I could only stay awake.

I wondered if Luhan was looking over us at that moment, and I hoped he wasn’t as much as I hoped he was. I wanted him to, because it was his fault, because I wanted to know he still cared – that we were still one of his favourite people even as he descended into another world. But at the same time, I didn’t want him to, because no matter what he said, the term omnipotent wouldn’t save him from his own emotions, and if he saw Sungjong, if he saw Minah or Jongdae or even me, I don’t think he would’ve been able to handle it. He was delicate like that. In tune with our feelings, out of tune with his own.

Minah spoke to me about Luhan a lot. She said it helped her remember that he had existed, once, and that they had been together, once. It didn’t matter. She could move on, we both knew, but now, at this very moment, it felt as if she could not. There was nothing noble about holding onto lost love; there was nothing noble about moving on, either. Nobility was not possible in the form of death; there are only bad choices, and the lesser evil must be set. Sometimes she would stare out her tiny window and start smiling, because Luhan had done so, and he used to bring picnics into her room, because it was so warm in there. Other times, he’d grow bored, and he’d want to leave, to go out, to find somewhere where they could coexist but not belong, a land where he could dance and play and then disappear – without so much of a trace to be remembered. Perhaps this is the way Luhan wanted to be to us.

“If Luhan were here,” Minah said once, “What do you think he’d say?”

“Don’t remember me,” I told her. “He’d tell us that it was time to move on, that he was never permanent.”

She looked at me. “But he was, wasn’t he? He was here, he was with us, and he could’ve been permanent, here forever, always together with all of us.”

What if’s were not my favourite area to venture, so I paused, unsure if I should continue. Minah was a fan of what if’s, but there was no way to blame her, because now her life just consisted of them. Was there anything beyond this? Eventually there are no memories to remember, so we would seek to create our own. False memories, dreams, wishes, scenarios – things which could’ve been, but weren’t. It was a dangerous game to venture into, and if I had been in my right mind, I would’ve told her that this hurt so much more. But I wasn’t, so I listened quietly as she spoke about who Luhan could’ve been.

“And it could’ve ended well, couldn’t it?” She eyed me, seeking approval. Yes, yes it could’ve been. Yes, that had been how things were going to turn out. Sungjong had told me that we never appreciated who people never were til they were dead. I supposed this was how we viewed Luhan.

I nodded, because there was nothing else to do.

One time Sungjong knocked on my window in the middle of the night. I was surprised, but I let him in, because it was him and he was never anything but rational, so if a one AM visit to my bedroom was what he wanted, it was what he would receive. He wore a loose shirt and some dark jeans, dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he wanted to talk.

“Go ahead,” I told him, closing the window after he had entered. His shoes were muddy, but he looked so desperate to speak that I thought against reminding him. I would just have to clean it tomorrow morning.

“Jongdae’s been speaking to me, about Luhan,” He said, tone fluctuating and rising with every breath. He wasn’t stable. “He’s been seeing me a lot, talking about Luhan, how he was, what kind of person he was, it’s all too much.”

He tore at his hair, trying to pull out his roots in an attempt to numb the pain.

“I hear him now, everywhere. Jongdae can relate everything to Luhan, and now, now I can too. Luhan was rubbish, he’s the crap I see littered near the roads, and he’s also the child running across the road, desperate to call after his best friend. Luhan is everywhere. He’s his favourite ice-cream shop – God, does everything have to franchise? – He’s the air around those bubble-tea stalls. I see him in my eyes; he haunts me in the reflection of the shop windows and at the corners of my glasses when I look both ways to cross the road. It’s too much, Envelope,” I winced when he called me that. Sungjong tried not to, nowadays. It was too much of a Luhan thing. “It’s all too much, I’m about to fall.”

Sungjong was the kind of person who always had his two feet firmly planted on the ground. I found it hard to believe anything could really shake him.

“It will be gone in the morning,” I said to him quietly. “You’re being irrational.”

“I’m not Envelope,” he said quickly. “I’m not. I’m scared. I miss him, Envelope – I miss him so much. He’s everywhere, and he won’t go away, and I don’t want him to, but all he does is haunt me. It’s our fault, isn’t it?” It hurt when he said this. “We caused his death. We were the reason he went over the ledge, over his edge, crossing lines he shouldn’t. We were too dreary and dreamy that we forgot that we were still humans, that we are still children, so we played around with fancy words and made Luhan die. We caused this Envelope. We were too much ourselves.”

“It’s not like that Sungjong,” I whispered.

“It was.” He insisted with so much force that I could feel Luhan within me, taking the blow just as he would’ve, swallowing all Sungjong’s sorrow and making it his own. “We weren’t the people he needed. He needed firm people, he needed people to tell him this wasn’t the answer – people who were responsible and sensible and not at the edge of their lives. We are radical, aren’t we? We used to laugh over it, but now it just seems tragic. Radical means death; radical means losing friends – radical is the word you use to describe children in heels smoking pot for fun.”

“We couldn’t control who he was around. It wasn’t our choice.”

“But we could’ve changed, couldn’t we? To be the people he needed.”

I thought about this. Could we? Can we change ourselves to prevent others from falling apart? I supposed we could; that so many crazy figures in history and in life could’ve changed themselves to resist hurting other people, to prevent them from falling apart. We don’t need to be the people we are if it means that we can save another. I thought this was reasonable, but this wasn’t the kind of question I answered often because Sungjong didn’t usually ask these kinds. He was everything honest and all himself – but now, he would’ve changed if it meant Luhan would live.

“You hold onto all of that sorrow, why?” That’s what Sungjong had asked Luhan so many times, after we found him on the swing, detached and demented, ready to fall apart.

“It’s the only way I know of,” Luhan always replied, and that’s usually when he dies.

I had only held hands with Sungjong once, and the first and last time I did was that night, when he was lonely and scared and full of grief, and this was the only thing he knew. My bed was tiny – I was a fan of empty space – and how we managed to fit without falling off was a miracle within itself. Sungjong a sensitive being was the other miracle. Some time after that, I wondered briefly if the killer that had taken Luhan’s life was now collecting the fees, and if our killers were the same as his. There was no answer to this.

“You still didn’t answer me,” Sungjong spoke in whispers, his voice falling apart. The sun had barely risen, but it made no difference. We were up all night regardless.

I looked at him. “What didn’t I answer?”

“Do you think we could’ve changed to stop Luhan from dying?”

I hated his questions, and I hated Luhan more.

“We couldn’t then,” I said. “But we can now.”

“It’s pointless now, isn’t it? You can’t undo death.”

“But you can stop grieving.”

“How do you stop sadness from eating at your soul?”

“You realise that crying over ghosts doesn’t make them come back.”

Sungjong looked at me, his eyes teary. I supposed I had made him cry, but it wasn’t me. I was not a reason for him to cry – Luhan was. Luhan made us cry. He didn’t mean to – he never wanted to – and it hurt his soul to know this, but his death was not just the cease of his existence. It was the burning and death of a population, the mass murder of everyone he knew. Sometimes you had to wonder, did Luhan, who couldn’t bear to see anyone fall apart, really consider all the side-effects of death? It wasn’t a selfish thought, I think, because it was what mattered the most to him. Because we were the reason he broke. Our sadness and pain and how he demanded to feel everything broke him down, and there’s nothing we could’ve done. You can’t undo sadness, you can only endure it. Luhan did not endure.

But we didn’t try and save him from drowning.

Of course I missed Luhan. I missed the way he smiled and his eyes crinkled; I missed the way his voice would playfully sing ‘Envelope’, as if it was my real name. I missed the way he was always happy, but he was always hiding behind a mask. I missed the way he would take us out, telling us about happiness, and I missed the way he smirked; because he was not evil, he was brilliant, and his half smile was an accident, not an invitation. In ways, Luhan was cruel. He left us drowning, he brought pain, and in the end, I hate to acknowledge, he didn’t want to cease sadness so that everyone could be happy, but rather because he himself felt every inch of sadness, and all he wanted was for the madness to stop. There are terrible things about this world, and sadness is one of them.

“I’m sorry,” Luhan said to me on the day of his death. “But this is where we part. Goodbye.”

I think the cruellest thing about his words was that he said them everyday, every moment when we parted ways to get home, and that must surely mean that he had been contemplating death for a long time. It was an idea I tossed through my mind for several days; and even though I told myself I wouldn’t cry, I did so anyway.

I met up with Sungjong, Minah and Jongdae at Luhan’s favourite ice-cream shop, the one everyone had gone to with him at least once. Jongdae still had his dark circles, and Minah’s eyes were still puffy, but they were all getting a little bit better – or, at least, their pain was numbing. I wondered how many nights Luhan’s ghost had haunted them for.

“Too many,” Jongdae answered when I asked. “Too many for me to count.”

We sat around idly, eating ice-cream and discussing Luhan. The only thing which brought us together was Luhan. We were held by Luhan, chained by his memory. There was no laughter at our table, only weak smiles and large sighs. That, and huge tubs of ice-cream.

“Do you think he misses us?” Minah ventured. “I mean, do you ever think about him and wonder if he would miss us, up there, wherever he is?”

“He better,” Jongdae had lost his sharp tongue. “We’re all suffering without him.” He looked through the shop window bitterly, eyes threatening to fall asleep. He hadn’t slept, I observed. I don’t think anyone truly had.

“It will ease,” Sungjong murmured. “Everything eases in time.”

I wondered what more there was to discuss. Luhan had so many things about him; Luhan was a topic which made all of us smile, even if only remembering fond memories; photographs from a long time ago. It didn’t last though. There was only so much you could remember til the photographs started burning, and their eyes would tear up, and we’d end up sitting here, all crying, yet all knowing that we couldn’t bring Luhan back. No matter of tears could bring him home.

“Luhan,” Jongdae said quietly, “If you’re with us now, I hate you.” He paused. “But I really miss you as well.”

We nodded sadly, because it was all that we could do. We always parted half-teary, half dead, but with a small grip on ourselves. It was enough, I suppose, because it was all we could ask for.

“Was it our fault?” Minah asked recently. “Do you think we killed Luhan?”

No one could really say anything, because no one really knew. We exchanged uncertain looks.

“No,” I said finally. “No, I don’t think we killed Luhan.” I watched as Sungjong looked away. “Luhan kills us though. He doesn’t mean it, but he does.”

“We should’ve protected him from death,” Jongdae clenched his fists. “We should’ve prevented his death.”

“We couldn’t,” Sungjong whispered. “We weren’t made to do that.”

“What were we meant to do then?” Jongdae looked frustrated, half-angry, half-upset. There was nothing we could do. That’s what we had to understand. We couldn’t have saved him, we weren’t made to save him, and we couldn’t hang ourselves thinking about it.

“We were meant to keep existing,” I said weakly. “That’s all we can do now.”

And that’s what we did. It was pathetic, sad and sometimes it felt useless, but it was all we could do. We knew Luhan, and Luhan was flawed but kind. Luhan wanted us to keep living, so that’s what we did.