Pitch black.
 
Eyes unhelpful and speech reduced, he fumbled and tripped.
 
On his own two feet, on the (his own) jeers in his head,
 
on a broken spirit.
 
Into the same vacuum over and over and. Every single time it would be the same. A cycle formed from rejection and ineptness.
 
He would be on his two feet, in his element – his studio. He would lift the slender worn outline of his best companion – his everything – and frown. It did not rest on his fingers entirely, its well acquaintance seeming to have dematerialized and its brown, a glaring mismatch against the pale stretch of his skin. But he would raise his arm in a practiced angle, and run its coloured tip against the woven fabric and watch.
 
Watch lifeless lines fill the white like a circle with no end. His arm would veer off harshly, jaw tight and face a permanence of worry lines. The brush was sure to leave a stain (the same as those on his clothes, walls and possessions) as it clanked noisily by his feet but he made no motion to clean. He just stood there, fingers twitching and weight on his heels.
 
He reached out but something pulled him back and his body followed suit. Gravity is an evil thing.
 
It was in his eyes, mouth and nose and breathing became a forgotten function. His arms are spread out in suspension and.
 
And then he would resurface. Arms flapping, mouth opening and closing, fingers clawing at air.  
 
Repeat.
 
–
 
The wood was pressed into his palm. Again and again and again but the number of times of his arm falling limp to his side was more than the number of attempted . He does not keep count. Sungyeol preferred to keep to knowing necessarily.
 
Dark tones splattered against bold lines as he pitched his palette against the supported canvas, wood board descending before meeting the ground with a loud thud. The features on his face contort as he eyed the ugly trail of dark mix obscure the legs of his easel.
 
He had to turn away. Look at the bare white walls, uncapped bottles of oil paint littering the floors – until he could look no more. He took slow steps backwards. Step away until the screaming stopped.
 
–
 
He had envisioned an endless stream of people brushing shoulders, faces blurred. Get lost and stay unrecognized. Yet the platform had been empty save a few whom were ignorant of his presence. He stalled his way over to the front, choosing to stand by one of the pillars instead. He almost lapses into another episode of swallowing darkness when someone tapped his shoulder, easing into his personal space.
 
It was jarring to be so close with an unfamiliar person. Sungyeol remained grey. Politeness seemed unnecessary.
 
The following tap sent his neck snapping to his right. It was a man with a face most would find attractive, eyes slightly uneven and a smile a bit too bright for their world. His face twitched.
 
When he began to point at the shirt – similar to the rest of his other shirts that has seen the many days of clumsy hands handling tubes of colours carelessly – with his thumbs up in an act of compliment and features unnaturally too expressive, it became apparent that he was incapable of speaking.
 
Sungyeol had recognized the Korean alphabet when he followed a lone finger make out a word – a name – Myungsoo in the space between them. As he rolled the syllable with his tongue, the relief that came with the realization that Sungyeol had understood him reflected on his face almost instantaneously. Sungyeol regarded him for a moment as the latter looked up to him in a silent pursuit of the other’s identity.
 
(‘I’m an insignificant existence.’)
 
A shrill whistle cut through the air, signalling the approach of the awaited locomotive and in turn, saving him from the need to answer. The doors opened but they remained rooted in their spots. His consciousness bubbled as a thought sunk in, followed by another and another. Until he was suddenly running, heartbeat erratic and his train of thoughts halts.
 
That was when he recognized Myungsoo’s grip on his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’
 
But Myungsoo was too busy pulling along to regard the possibility that Sungyeol would have preferred to be more absorbed in something other than boarding.
 
‘Stop,’ he said. The blinking red was in his irises. The platform was empty.
 
He offered resistance, heels digging into the ground. But Myungsoo paid no heed. There was only space for one to slip in as the doors began to meet.
 
‘Stop,’ he iterated, brows knitted in annoyance. The black rubber brushed against his pads. He jerked back, legs following.
 
His back collided into closed doors, hands scrambling to hold onto something as the train lurched forward. They almost fall because Sungyeol was not accustomed to holding up the weight of two people.
 
The lopsided grin on Myungsoo’s face was hard to miss as they shared body heat, the inability to stand straight and unaccompanied only vexing him even further. Sungyeol heaved him aside, lips drawn in a tight line.
 
It did not take long for him to learn that Myungsoo was an agonizingly persistent person, having forced Sungyeol into his seat with no room to refuse. It was arduous to keep up with obstinacy so he chose to keep his sight trained on the coloured meld outside, absentmindedly running his fingers along the cool frame. The metal was brown with age and wholly bent, paint peeling like wilted flowers. He mused if being reminded of oneself was a fool’s act of kindness or a kind man’s cynical thought.
 
Blurred greens and blues filled his sight. If he squinted hard enough, he would be able to discern meadows that measured past his peripheral vision and sheep flocking. He blamed the sun for being in his eyes.
 
But Myungsoo seemed to think otherwise as he rose to meet Sungyeol in the eye. Such a beautiful person – if he reached out he could almost trace his beauty – whose warmth was intrusive and stubbornly close, almost habitual.
 
Myungsoo brushed a tear away.
 
But it was a futile act: the tears were the vestige of a forgotten motivation. 

When he inched closer, Sungyeol was suddenly reminded about how soap dramas had always been one fat lie. Strangers did not kiss. Acquaintances were no exceptions either.
 
Myungsoo was an indication of that.
 
Instead, he turned to the windows and breathed onto it. Blew hard enough for it to fog up until there was no more pale light flitting through, dust particles no longer visible. With his index finger raised, he ran careful streaks through vapour.
 
Don’t cry. 
 
Quick blowing misted the words and he was writing again. Sungyeol wished he would stop.
 
Didn’t you come to run away? Let’s run away together. 
 
He stiffened in his seat when Myungsoo closed into his breathing space again to author something else. He was becoming proficient at rearranging his thoughts and breathing intervals.
 
It’ll be better. 
 
When he smiled, Sungyeol thought that maybe touching the moon was impossibly possible and real. (‘But I can only admire from a distance unreachable.’) He stuck up his hand in dissent and furiously rubbed till the glass squeaked underneath – till Myungsoo had to grab his hand and yank him back. He yelped at the sudden contact, retracting his hand as he did so.  
 
‘It won’t be better,’ he said, head low and gaze on thinning soles and darkened rabbit ears. ‘It just won’t.’
 
–
 
Its arrival at every subsequent station brought strained screeches and sharp jolts that seemed to unnerve the battered seats and send the handrails wagging helplessly. Sungyeol thought about alighting at the next station – or the next.
 
He wondered if it would ever come. Myungsoo was not an obligation.
 
–
 
They sat opposite each other throughout the rest of the journey in undisturbed silence.
 
(Myungsoo would watch dark eyes look past him from underneath overgrown bangs. An empty vessel he wish he could fill.) 
 
–
 
He had long lost count of the number of stations they had passed by the time Myungsoo had finally stood up and grabbed him by the wrist and alighted. The station was near deserted. There was no need to stay linked but the other only tightened his hold. Sungyeol bit the insides of his cheeks. A distraction he had reasoned to himself. The logic worked.
 
They sat atop a hill, wind bouncing off their hair and faces. Sungyeol had swiftly took to leaning against the curve of an old oak tree as he pressed his fringe back into place, obscuring his eyes as he did so. An endless amount of greenery was all the eye could make out. Any sort of keenness that had built up throughout the entire journey only met halfway through and his long frame deflated. Expectancy was turning out to be his biggest disappointment. Returning to idly done works seemed to be an attractive thought.  
 
But not when Myungsoo would reappear and to Sungyeol’s horror, lodge a daisy behind his ear. He aggressively reached for the flower causing Myungsoo to throw his entire weight onto the former, mouth opening desperately in silent protest. Their bodies were twisting against each other, arms rough and actions frenzied. Myungsoo dug in impossibly deeper and in his flurry, their foreheads met in the middle and rendered them immobile for a moment.
 
‘Get off me,’ he groaned, shunting Myungsoo to the side for the second time that day.
 
As he rubbed the small bump forming on his forehead, he threw the white blossom in Myungsoo’s direction. ‘If you had liked it so much you could have done me a favour and just worn it yourself.’
 
Sungyeol pulled his knees close, imprinting the image of small hands and a hunched back amidst the bed of perennial wildflowers in his mind. It would make a nice painting.  
 
–
 
It was silly to think that putting fantasies onto paper was any sure way for them to be granted. It lacked effort and a chaser. Sungyeol had been reluctant, lips an upturned line. But Myungsoo had forced his pen into unwilling hands and shoved the yellowing paper into his arms.
 
He was deliberate and careful, almost purposeful. Even if he did not believe in such trivial matters – like losing the world – it was difficult to say no to an all too forgiving man with eyes as bright as the stars at night. He had owed him that much. But that in itself was a trivial matter to Myungsoo. He would always pull him forward and something clicks and suddenly.
 
Suddenly, he found himself resurfacing and arms thrashing around emptiness. He trembled and shook, trying to remember how to let oxygen into his lungs – breathe, breathe, breathe – but it was as if his head was rammed downwards. His chokes are as soundless as his screams.
 
Myungsoo’s fingers were on his face and his eyes snapped open. He was crying again.
 
(He pushed black bangs back furtively – Sungyeol might not like his hair disarranged – and looked into wavering glances, into something he was so accustomed to. He saw his reflected gaze, full of broken dreams and the lack of realization – a dimming desire. 
 
He wanted to cover the distance of borderless and reach.)
 
Their noses are brushing, lips parted but Sungyeol was still stationary.
 
(Like Myungsoo’s heart but.)
 
There was a glint (faint like Sungyeol’s heart) in the deepest pit of his eyes and he recognizes. His head tilted (like the axis of his heart) and Sungyeol thought that he might be contemplating for too long, subsist in the shadows of certainty for too long and –
 
Myungsoo decided for Sungyeol, gold light lining a striking profile.
 
When he felt wet hollowed cheeks shake underneath dry pads, Sungyeol willed himself to run to the other end of the world.
 
It was not supposed to hurt this much. Myungsoo was not supposed to hurt this much. He was no acquaintance. He was no (living) soap drama. Myungsoo was no lie. (He did not know how to lie.)
 
Sungyeol screamed and abused till Myungsoo could taste red.
 
'You’re not it.'
 
–
 
Sungyeol only realized too late that Myungsoo had lit his lantern alone and watched it lift to become a single pale speck against the night.   
 
He turned away and did not sleep that night. 
 
}
 
The smell always stuck, the sheen of sweat collected at his brows an unappreciated accompaniment. Sunggyu would raise his arm in a bid to shoo tiredness away, armpits darkened from sun and effort.
Reform was a route he often trekked and it was sufficient – he forced himself to believe so, there was nothing else to hold onto – as long as he was achieving something, reaching somewhere.
 
Be someone.
 
His dependency on familiarity was something more than just a consolation. It was a drive or perhaps – always – something more. The oil fizzled, golden remains afloat (like he was), as though in assent and there was a wry smile on Sunggyu’s face. He needed to become something more.
 
More, more, more.
 
Being Kim Sunggyu was never enough.
 
–
 
The fire had long been put out; smell faint on his clothes and skin when an odd pair showed up in front of his stall. They had asked for a spring roll each – the last two – and Sunggyu thought that it was a situation too aberrant for his liking.
 
He gave them his best smile: wide and teeth showing. It was always the same smile he gave to every customer, new or returning – a smile that barely reached his eyes.
 
There was nothing extraordinary about his spring rolls the gangly one had bluntly remarked, much to the flurry of his companion as he violently shook his head, smile apologetic. But Sunggyu saw otherwise. How typical his spring rolls were. How ordinary he was. How he was just Kim Sunggyu, the guy who sold spring rolls every morning. A man whose life gyrated around fried pastries that no one saw nothing more than just an appetizer. Just like how he was not the main course. He grinded his molars, eyes forced into small arcs.
 
‘I’m Sungyeol,’ the taller one said as he wiped his fingers on his jeans before motioning to his left. 'He’s Myungsoo. He’s the one who wanted to try your spring rolls.’
 
It took him a moment too late to mask his surprise as he voiced his own name, words almost ill sounding in his mind. He cringed inwardly.
 
He had expected them to leave as every other before them had. They never did. Instead, Myungsoo had busied himself with hastening the closing of Sunggyu’s store, looking pleased at his handiwork. Sungyeol had only distanced himself to the side, arms folded across his chest in diffidence.
 
There was nothing remarkable about Sunggyu’s town. It lacked vigour with the elderly making the majority of its population. It was quite simply, an uninteresting town with no spark.
 
‘It’s small here but it’s home.’ He slurred, tongue seemingly numb at the word home. A blush stained his cheeks as he ducked his head in embarrassment. Not for his lisp but his inability to lie.
 
He brought them out to an open area just a little out of town, a place where he spent the remainder of his time at scrawling phrases that grew into paragraphs but never into anything full-fledged – a place that harboured his unspoken dreams and secret expressions.
 
The ground was warm and hard as they lay underneath the dimmed skies flecked with white pinpoints, arms tucked underneath their heads. Myungsoo raised his arms to the heavens, face focused as he tried to identify every ball of gas.  
 
‘It’s impossible to count them isn’t it?’ Sungyeol asked, breaking the silence between them.
 
‘I’ll let you know when I find out.’ He knows that it was useless but Sunggyu tried counting anyway. He stopped at his seventh try.  
 
He wanted to make a list of things that were impossible for Kim Sunggyu but it would probably be just as endless. Someone – Myungsoo – shifted on his side, rolling on his stomach and resting his chin on his hands with his cheeks puffed out.  
 
‘I’m envious of you,’ Sungyeol piped up a few moments later, a pregnant pause following suit.
 
Sunggyu’s brows shot up to his hairline. It transpired that Sungyeol was exceptionally good at ambushing him with such an indiscernible intent.
 
‘You’re free to do whatever you want.’
 
It was unnerving when it seemed as though every one of thoughts had been laid out for the world to hear.
 
‘How exactly are we different again?’
 
‘In every imaginable aspect,’ he replied straightaway, sounding slighted.
 
Sunggyu was unhesitant in resuming to his silent state. He shifted his attention to the firmament above them, fingers tapping along to an unsung tune. He wondered if Sungyeol knew. That it was not hard not to fathom a person like him to allow Myungsoo to tag along.
 
Or vice versa – orientation mattered little to him.
 
They ended up watching the sunrise together, faces bathed in its orange glow. It also meant that it was time to go their separate ways. Sunggyu walked them to the end of the path, a small frown on his face.
 
'Come with us.’
 
Sungyeol’s voice disrupts his composure but he tried to mask his anticipation, faking the widening of his eyes and gaping mouth – an easy act. He had thought of leaving normalcy, of venturing into the indefinite – thought of everything that he was not. He spared his feet a glance. Sungyeol had seen right through him.
 
When he resurfaced and met eyes with the pair, he smiled as wide as he could till his eyes were almost slits and his jaw hurt. He would eventually forget the faces of a pair of two odd men, eventually forget about perpetual dreams. Eventually Kim Sunggyu would forget and be forgotten.   
 
'No. This is where we part.' He reached up, pushing at dark strands. He offered a small smile. ‘I wish you the best of luck Sungyeol.’
 
‘And you too, Myungsoo.’
 
(This was the end.)
 
}
 
'I’ve lost it Myungsoo. I’ve lost it all,' he whispered into warmth and sealed lips. Lips that told no secret, kept every lie close to his heart. Of things humanity shunned but made – represented – them.
 
Hope that maybe the galaxies that lit the skies would take his worries and troubles away. To bring closure and something else: a treasure that would embed itself into his spirit and be his sight, speech and everything else that made him human.
 
And Myungsoo,
 
his fingers would cross over to curl around rigid lengths and stiffness that succumbed to a raging war of conflicting feelings and wrong risks taken.
 
Even if he wished to the brightest star and prayed on broken knees, Myungsoo was too small to fill the hole in his heart (a void too big for him).
 
(He can never be it.)
 
He wanted Myungsoo to grab his wrist and pull himself to his demise. He wanted Myungsoo to watch him break and put him back together. He wanted. He only wanted.
 
Attach. Attach. Attach.
 
The thought that maybe that too was what Myungsoo wanted filled him up to the brim till his lungs constricted and bled. He might have stopped breathing a long time ago.
 
Only dissatisfaction occupied the hollowness in his chest.
 
–
 
Sungyeol thought about running to the end of the world. Run till he was sure he was going to fall off the face of the Earth if he was not careful enough. Fling his body off level ground and plunge into a cycle of never-ending.
 
Or explode and die.
 
It was a more fortunate situation when compared to being anchored by disbelief and seeing beyond bleakness.
 
He awoke screaming.   
 
–
 
Their fingers are interlinked.
 
‘Ready?’ Myungsoo was too amenable, crooked smile a bit dulled but eyes wide and too eager. It almost sends him screaming.
 
Sungyeol was nearly nothing but cavity. The door creaked under their weight and they enter.
 
–
 
Myungsoo’s role was to fill – no matter how paltry – and only to fill. Until he dims and dies.
 
Sungyeol drowns. Until he chokes and dies.
 
Repeat.