Jongin is a clumsy child.

There is not a day where he doesn’t tumble off a chair, or trip over the dog, or skin himself on some sharp edge. After 3 older sisters his mother is a little too tired of running behind a kid who seems to begin and end the day by hurting himself. And by the time he is 4 years old Jongin learns to recognize that distasteful, resigned look on his mother’s face whenever he presents her with a new cut, bruise or wound to clean. 

On some days he does everything in slow, measured movements to make sure he doesn’t mess up, figuring out the placement of his limbs in thin air or curling up into a ball in a corner of his room. His mother barely notices his existence on those days, busy fussing over his youngest sister’s tiny skirts or the oldest one’s new boyfriend.

And on some days Jongin just lets go and flies about the neighborhood with his friends who sometimes have to support him back home because he is clutching a sprained ankle or sobbing over an arm scraped from top to bottom. On these days, his mother does notice him, but only to scold and sigh in disappointment.

But he can’t help it, he thinks, but doesn’t know how to explain. There is always this energy trapped right underneath his skin, pounding against his rib cage, struggling to burst out – so much so that sometimes Jongin thinks he is going to implode.

After a while he learns.

He grows tall enough to reach for the first aid box himself so now he doesn’t have to listen to his mother say that if he keeps growing like that there will just be more space for him to get new wounds. The scabs of his cuts and scraped never quite disappear because he is always getting hurt but after a while the pain becomes second nature. He learns to bear the pain as he runs faster and faster, jumps over walls and speeds over intersections in his bicycle on the way to school as he tries to find a way to let lose the seething heat trapped in his rib cage. 

Nothing ever seems to work.

But his tears stop and so do his smiles.

He is 6 years old when he discovers that he can hang on to the window pane in his room and swing up to the roof. He likes sitting there and watching the world go on beneath him, without him. His sisters come and go, with friends or boys. Sometimes they are giggling and whispering to each other and Jongin sees and hears a whole lot of things he wished he didn’t. Sometimes it’s his mother, walking down the street to the supermarket or sitting in the garden chair with one of his sister’s head on her lap. Sometimes it’s his father returning from overseas business trips, stumbling in to the house half asleep without really even saying hello to anyone in the family.

Sometimes Jongin thinks he is too young to feel this kind of loneliness but then his hands grazes against a fresh bruise on his body and as pain shoots up his leg he thinks that maybe he was born into this world with that loneliness.

It is not until his 7^th birthday that things start to change.

His mother forgets his birthday again as she spends all day and night with his oldest sister going through swatches of white fabric that all look the same to Jongin, trying to design a perfect wedding dress. He is left alone home that afternoon with a carelessly tossed comment that said to make himself some ramyeon if he was hungry.

Angry and upset he runs to his room to climb to the roof. But there are tears in his face, stupid tears, stupid, stupid, stupid because he shouldn’t have expected anything else anyway and he wipes them away furiously, wetting his palm. One moment Jongin is swinging up to the roof and the next second as errant tear blocks his vision and his wet palms slip on the roof tiles and suddenly Jongin is hanging off the roof with his bony arms, legs kicking at thin air in panic, trying to find a foothold.

He gasps as calls out, “omma! Omma!” before he remembers that no, nobody is home for him to call. His small hands feel too weak to pull him up to the roof, his legs are too short to reach the window ledge and the way he is hanging on off-balance he is going to fall anyway.

His grip is slipping and the ground seems far away so Jongin squeezes his eyes shut as tears, now of fear, stream down his face, and his arms scream in protest.

When he opens his eyes, Jongin’s idea of letting go stops immediately. There is a butterfly, yellow with white edged wings with light black dots, fluttering it wings, having landed right between Jongin’s two hands that are gripping desperately at the roof edge. On any other day, Jongin wouldn’t look twice at the tiny creature but today he is enthralled.

It looks so small, so fragile, like the smallest of breezes could blow it into smithereens. But there it is holding on to the precarious edge that Jongin is with perfect, seemingly unintentional balance. Jongin wonders how that is even possible.

As Jongin watches, momentarily forgetting his panic, the little butterfly spreads its wings evenly away from its thin body to counter a stiff breeze. And he thinks, this is not so hard. He doesn’t know what it’s called but he had that thing too right? In the middle of his back, a long line of bones just like the butterfly had connecting his wings in the middle? He would grow up and later learn that butterflies did not have the same kind of spinal columns as humans but right then nothing mattered but how beautiful it looked, perfectly balanced, perfectly even.

Jongin forgets, in that moment, how the muscles in his arms scream in protests and how he might fall to his death, and instead straightened his body and spreads his legs and thinks, even, even and balanced.

It’s strangely exhilarating how immediately his body feels so much more lighter than it had a few moments ago. The butterfly flutters his wings at him, encouraging him and Jongin uses his new found balance to swing back down into the window ledge. The butterfly flutters down to him, hanging on air for a few seconds before it disappears from view.

The memory of hanging in thin air and the bright yellow of the butterfly’s wings against the roof still vivid in his mind, little Jongin cries himself to sleep that night after a long time because he feels alive again.

The butterfly is back 2 days later, sitting on top of a jar of marbles on his nightstand, when he opens his sleep-heavy eyes in the morning. Up close it is even more beautiful than Jongin remembered. It’s a weekend and Jongin is free to spend hours on end watching it as it flits from place to place in his room, his face alight with childlike wonder.

Jongin never gets tired of it.

Sometimes the butterfly is all fast, quivering movements and sometimes it is all slow, languid flaps and Jongin revels in watching the precise perfection of those movements. Sometimes he follows the butterfly around the garden, arching up to the air and spreading his hands. Many years later he learns that it is called a grand jeté.

Days pass Jongin by.

The butterfly bobs up and down in air caught in a rough breeze and Jongin bends to follow it - plié - the butterfly taunts Jongin by coming close and then suddenly rising up to the air - pas de chat– it flits around a flower in a dizzying circle – pirouette- it lands on a branch too tall for Jongin to reach and Jongin stands on the point of his toe with one leg stretched behind for balance to reach for it –arabesque. All that energy that had been threatening to implode on him bursts out and dances along his skin as he moves to the beat of the wings of the butterfly.

Jongin names it after a dream he sees of a boy with hair too long and a deep single dimple with eyes as bright as stars – Xing, a star.

It is a few months later while he is taking a shower that Jongin realizes just how much things have changed. He catches sight of himself in the mirror and he smiles at himself because water is dripping down scabbed over or completely healed wounds and there is not one bruise or bleeding wound in sight. It has been long time.

When his mother tries to restock the medicine cabinet and finds that the antibiotics and bruise creams are mostly untouched, Jongin stands close with hopeful eyes. She merely clicks her tongue and complains about the waste of money as she tries to pile bottles on each other.

Jongin hangs his head and wonders why he even bothered to care.

The butterfly flutters agitatedly all around his head until Jongin notices it long enough to smile at it. It leads him outdoors into the thick of the trees in the garden and Jongin thinks he hears music in the trembling of its wings. So he dances.

He dances and dances and dances. He dances until his calves hurt and his muscles ache and his body is soaked in sweat and he still keeps on dancing because he thinks it makes him feel as light as Xing, yellow smidgens of light reflecting off its small wings in the sunlight.

And so Jongin dances his way through middle school and high school, as his friends are busy with teenage rebellion.

He dances his way through numerous auditions until the Korean National Ballet Academy snatches him up and he dances his way into the hearts of onlookers in St.Petersberg, London, New York and Paris. But he always comes back home because he never feels lighter than when he is dancing with Xing.

In  between stretching his body beyond its limits to for the love of rhythm Jongin sometimes wonders what the butterfly is doing in his life, always waiting for him to come back, always being around to flutter its wings soothingly against his face when tears streak down it.  It’s been years, Jongin is now 23 years old, and yet the butterfly has not disappeared after spending a short lifetime inherent to butterflies.

                    One night, in the busy streets of Seoul there is a terrible accident. A car swerves off the highway and careens into a shop, showering shattered glass all over the young man leaving the shop. There is a brief flash of burning hot pain and then one more lifetime comes to an abrupt end. 

It is then that Jongin understands why the butterfly had fluttered its wings at him agitatedly as he had tried to leave the house that night, frantically hurtling into the skin of his face trying to hinder his movements. Jongin had smiled at it indulgently and brushed it aside thinking that it just must have missed him while he had been away on tour for 3 months.  

Jongin only thinks of the burning bright yellow of its wings, as light and glass explodes in front of his vision before everything comes to a stop.

It is then that he knows that it hadn’t been a mere unwillingness to let him step out of the house; no, it had been a goodbye.

After the fire work-like shower of glass there is a lot of darkness and in between eternal moments of blackness Jongin sees a little boy. With a dimple on one cheek and eyes that shine like the yellow sun, the boy glides behind a sapphire-winged butterfly as he moves his body to an inaudible beat in a small studio in Changsha. His movements are nothing like Jongin has seen before, and at the same time everything like what he has learned from a yellow-winged creature too. Jongin watches the boy smile at his grandmother –flash of black – kissing his first girlfriend – flash – strumming a guitar – flash – small feet sliding across a polished wooden floor reflected in glass – flash – smiling at the screen of his phone while absent-mindedly stepping into the incoming traffic on a cross section – Jongin tries to reach out and pull the boy back but finds that he doesn’t have a body to do that anymore – flash.

When he opens his eyes again, the world is in colors that he has never seen before. Sunlight pours through a dew drop on a leaf and the world lights up in 18 primary colors. Next to him on a fat leaf of a lotus flower encircled by water is a yellow butterfly fluttering his wings lazily against another pink-winged butterfly. Jongin shakes himself and feels his own wings flutter in the breeze, gossamer soft. They are the color of trees seen through tear-drenched eyes, like on the first day Jongin saw his yellow butterfly.

Jongin spends his days learning to be one with the wind, resting his frail self against Xing at night and watching a little boy called Taemin learning how to walk and then how to step, step, and move his body, light as a content butterfly and sharp as the edge of broken glass. The pink butterfly, Irene, goes dew-drop hunting with them occasionally but keeps away most of the time, furiously shy with stranger and busy with a girl named Hyoyeon who dances like a dream and gets herself into too much trouble.

It’s a curiously never ending succession of life and death, he understands. Destined to dance to the beat of butterfly wings, and destined to die not faded and grey but bursting with youth and life. It is not so bad, he thinks, when he comes across hundreds of others like him – if he was to die so young, he is happy that he had a thread of life that always danced to inaudible music of butterfly wings, and that he was reborn as that very inaudible music.

On the eve Taemin turns 19 both Jongin and Xing light on his shoulder and stays for hours there fluttering, brushing against his skin dotingly, sadly as he writes a bucket list of things he will do when he debuts in a boy band someday. That night his friend smuggles bottles of Soju to their noreabang and doesn’t even realize as he drives both of them off the bridge into the murky depths of the Han River in a drunken haze.

It’s bittersweet, Jongin understands, to see Taemin later, his wings shimmering in its pearl aqua glory.

Even though there are a lot of things he can barely understand or remember anymore, he still comprehends rhythm, he still feels affection, and then loss in never ending cycles. And Jongin still remembers all that energy trapped beneath his rib cage threatening to burst one day and thinks he understands why. Maybe he knew all along, that he didn’t have a lot of time on earth assigned to his name, and he had a lot to do, to feel, before it all came to an end.

Time leaves no mark on them, only the amount of people they bid goodbye to.

And on one balmy summer day when a man accidentally crushes Xing while running a lawn mower through his overgrown garden, Jongin too leaves the human world – never to return again.