Big cities.  Time-eating, smoke-breathing big cities: the hives and hearts of humanity. Only a fool would want to become city-dweller if they had any other choice, Kyungsoo thinks as he pulls his coat a little tighter. No one is really happy here, not that it matters. The city forgot to care centuries ago.

 

Just breathe... take a step... one more... just... thoughts tangle into messy knots in the sweat-soaked, heavy morning air. He watches as bodies stumble across each other and shuffle to get off the tram and dive into their daily routines head-on.

 

It’s okay, you’re not like them. Just a random thought too often repeated, a shard of some half-truth or half-delusion fattened up for slaughter, the angle at which all truth bends. Just... breathe... 2 more hours.

 

Compared to the masses milling around in the crowded space he feels too clean, almost clinically so. Do Kyungsoo is a man of folded clothes, perfectly ironed collars, instantly washed dishes and societal solitude. Despite his freshly dyed red hair his real colour is white, the empty kind of white that keeps sentencing the traces of the previous day to a slow and meticulous death, erasing faults and blame and disgust. It is just his way of dealing with urban nightmares that never seem to stop haunting him as he commutes on flawed rails of yellow, metallic, rattling wrecks. He wasn’t always like this, it’s so easy to forget that when one’s trying so hard to attain perfection and purity. Inerasable traces of coffee stains and creases remind him from time to time that no matter how hard he tries, his own concealed stains will never truly fade on the inside.

 

His breath paints the smog-filled space just a shade whiter, just a bit warmer. There is beauty all around, little snippets of horrible beauty in the filth. He has the perspective that allows him to see.

 

But the others, they cannot see. Even in the midst of this asphalt, metal and carbon monoxide trap, there’s so much beauty hidden in plain sight. The coughing, pneumonic love of mothers working two or three shifts in the windy, frozen night, and the soon-to-be-ruined innocence of children passing by as they have a taste of their breakfast, already on the move, already dragged along by impatient, blue-veined adult hands in the greyscale morning light. There is the tragedy of late-night tasteless love under a sky robbed of its stars, and the rule-bending stolen touches on rooftops and sometimes just barely outside the spotlight. There is the broken attraction of homeless people crawling in dirt and mud under heavy iron doors and sleeping on death-cold cobblestone. There is beauty in how they curl up into a warming mess of limbs and slowly exhaled hearts. There is beauty in how their soul starves the same way a well-fed soul can starve.

 

The summer haze is long gone but Kyungsoo is the kind of person that still stands with one foot in its caramel wonder, always running away but never quite letting go. He likes to keep his yesterdays close, but his todays even closer. He misses how sunlight melts on rooftops like kisses and fingertips on the curves of collarbones and he misses the sighs as they melt into sheets before the night evaporates into blazing light. He misses the ability to laugh out of the blue and look at the world with wonder, the brightness of mornings, and the smell of coffee his landlady used to make, but she died during the last days of an Indian summer so many years ago and coffee hasn’t tasted the same ever since.

 

It’s winter now. It’s cold.

 

He misses the first tram. There are so many things missing these days

 

It’s the third day of December and the morning light is way too weak. The next tram arrives and it looks hollow and bleak from where he stands on the slippery platform. ‘It’s the saddest month’, an old man coughs into his tattered newspaper, then walks away. One of his shoes is missing and Kyungsoo tries to forget how to feel as he steps on the tram just before the door could shut him out. It’s a whole different world of wonders, full of emptiness, sadness and shallowness, full of bored faces and newspapers and earphones. Everybody smells like sinful addiction and white-washed lies, everybody looks like walking misery and bitterness dressed in a fancy, colourful disguise. But confined to such a small space, if you just stand close enough, their masks of normalcy starts slipping off, the ties loosening way too easily. They never even notice.

 

Kyungsoo used to watch and listen; he used to gather strength from looking into their soul. ‘Used to’ means all the difference in the world now. Everything was reshaped along the lines of his new urban life. Minutes pass and the vapour of alcohol, morning breath and body odour shoves Kyungsoo into the abyss of utter apathy. He doesn’t feel like observing anymore.

 

When the tram stops to let another wave of faceless people pour into the already stuffy confined space, he lifts his gaze more out of habit than curiosity. He can see the middle-aged man standing next to him glaring hungrily at the young underdressed girls in short school uniforms, and Kyungsoo turns away with a disgusted frown. He doesn’t care enough to scowl at the man. Instead he directs his eyes to the door in front of him and the last person to catch the tram catches his attention, as well. He’s barely visible behind the curtain of sleepy people trying to grab whatever object they can hold on to. Kyungsoo finds himself trying to peek at him through a gap in the wall of bodies, sometimes catching glimpses of the man with crimson hair just like his. The colour stands out from the crowd, earning barely concealed glances of disapproval, something Kyungsoo’s all too familiar with.

 

It’s always a game, always a puzzle to observe one single person in the middle of a crowd and Kyungsoo enjoys putting the separate pieces together like children enjoy playing games. A glimpse of skin heated from haste or one piercing glance here, a blushing cold-bitten ear or a slight smirk there: fragments of human imperfection he’d always found so endearing about strangers. People tend to lose their magic after you’ve figured them out, so Kyungsoo tries to only observe but never to quite figure out. When their eyes meet for the first time only half of his face is visible and Kyungsoo thinks he sees the ghost of a smile lingering about the corner of his mouth. He forgets to check the eyes because the smile tosses him into a stupefying fog of memories, something carefully buried under a rigid philosophy he’s been working on for years. It reminds him of why he’s the most lonesome creature in this part of the town. He’s not supposed to make eye contact with these people. He’s not supposed to taint their morning with the infection he is. He shies away from the curious glance, ashamed of having been caught. He doesn’t deserve to be noticed.

 

If he deserved any better, he wouldn’t be standing on this tram in his tattered tweed coat with dried coffee stains on his collar and his sleeves. If he deserved any better, he wouldn’t be living in the middle of the worst district where blood is plastered on walls and tortured sobs fill the air at night, where misery clogs the rotten pipes as shadows of people retch it into tainted porcelain after their failed attempt to digest what life had given them. In that district even sin is looking for a way out.

 

Had he been born as someone else, he’d be driving through these streets in his million-dollar-worth, deep-red sports car, in his perfectly tailored suit, grabbing some blonde’s bony, diamond-filled arm and maybe – probably – he wouldn’t be Kyungsoo anymore.

 

Maybe – probably – when all these turned out to be a merely fancier side of a sad reality fuelled by bitter pills and other bitter kinks, he’d turn to the unfamiliar, the dangerous and the thrilling, he’d spend his fortune on buying happiness in bars and hotels and on the dirty corners of dark streets until he’d finally end up where his money truly came from: down below.

 

Only then would he sell the remainder of his glorious wealth, the buildings, the cars, the islands, down to the last book, they’d all be thrown to the wolves and the sharks dancing with each other on Kyungsoo’s imaginary – social – carcass in the moonlit graveyard. He’d definitely sell his soul, too, because that’s what sells best behind run-down bars and in the jungles of hypertext.

 

He’d probably try to stand up again when he deems the punishment adequate and find a job like everybody else, but it’d be just enough to sink to the bottom of humanity and still not die. Yes, he’d probably end up just like that. He’d move to the worst district at the worst time to fill the sewers with his empty heart and to gulp down corroding dreams of starless nights. He’d catch the first tram every morning and the last one every night, and nothing better-than-yesterday would ever happen. And yet he’d crave this different kind of emptiness for its beautiful taste of utter defeat. He’d eat it like a disease.

 

Hot, suffocating air attacks his senses as he shakes himself awake from his chilling reverie. His heart feels translucent, his memories faint and his future imperceptible. He looks around with sudden panic and tries to swipe the stupid tears running down his cheeks. No one pays attention around him until the crowd shifts and he meets a sheepish gaze. It is closer than he remembers. Everything’s a blur, incoherency numbing his brain into submission to panic. He doesn’t know how long he’d been dozing off, how long he’d let his guard down, if it was long enough for this stranger to gaze into the gaping emptiness inside, to break his carefully constructed code of indifference and fake normalcy and see him for who he really is. His heart bursts into a fluttering frenzy at the thought. It is like living his life in reverse all over again. It brings back the times when emotions were not yet forbidden and money could still buy almost anything. It would be such a shame if he had to shed this old-new skin after so much effort to glue it on himself. It would be such a shame if all this fake suffering went to waste.

 

It is glorious how feeling nothing can turn into feeling everything at once. It is maddening to finally experience a sudden lack of much needed breath when most of the time you’re living in your head. But there are so many people and so little peace on this goddamn noisy tram and it is so intolerable when you unintentionally let people steal a glimpse and stare into your head. So Kyungsoo bites his lips just enough to draw the tiniest red and lets his head bang into the window behind his back, teeth still tasting heart-shaped lips and poisonous blood. His mind – as if it hadn’t tortured him enough already – wanders to the red-head standing still at the other door in front of him and sees a tear pathetically holding onto a sad little eyelash to keep itself from falling and Kyungsoo hates this moment all the more for that, for a stranger to send him glances of ‘I hate to see you sad’.

 

Like he cares, like he knows a ing thing about anything and yet... Kyungsoo can’t wait for the next stop to come and the door to open and the wave of clueless people to flood the isolated space of general morning tiredness, pushing him closer, and there’s no way he’ll fight against it. He’ll let his legs catch the wave and he’ll willingly drift closer and closer until he can stare into those sad eyes and put on his angriest and scariest mask, and let the expression fixed on its surface give off vibes of repulsion and judgement. He craves the feeling of control, to push away this alien gaze fixated on his private misery, silently caring from afar. He needs to make things right. He needs to escape its grasp.

 

Then the tram stops and the doors open on his side instead, and the people come pushing and cursing and hurrying and he’s being pushed across the space between them and it’s faster than falling and it’s unexpected and he breaks into pieces on skin and shirt and flesh. Pieces, pieces, pieces, drops of invisible blood and tears. It hurts more than a car crash on concrete walls and feels stranger than rushing down on some crazy serpentine in a drunken haze. But most of all, it’s a peaceful crash into hard emptiness, like a sleep without dreams, like slow self-destruction without the tell-tale pain. The stranger’s eyes are shut into tight lines and stay that way a bit longer than necessary, and Kyungsoo’s chest suddenly becomes devoid of material and the gravitation of the black soulless pit pulsates with December melancholy behind his ribs.

 

With a languid move of hands he’s drawn closer and a man with mountain-sized bags shoots an apologetic smile as he rushes to the opening door. They forget to part and the crowd gets larger, enough to fill up whatever little space was left behind Kyungsoo. The man removes his hands, but it’s impossible to move farther away from him in the mess of bodies and limbs and bags. Coats and hair and legs are tangled into indistinguishable motifs of mutual distaste, weakly masked abhorrence written all over the faces. He feels rather than sees the taller man – or more like boy – pulling his nose a little bit higher as if trying to avoid any more physical contact. Kyungsoo’s surprised at himself for feeling a tiny pang of disappointment.

 

He’s even more surprised to realise he scarcely reaches up to the other’s shoulder. He hates being reminded of his height. He turns his face to the side to give more space but people are pushing him from behind and he ends up even closer than before. It is ridiculous and miraculous at the same time, because now his ears can steal the sound of a heart beating in someone else, right under his ear. He can always blame others for the sudden closeness. He’s heard all types of music in his life but never heard a rhythm quite like this. It takes a half-hearted try to steal something else, too. His gaze glides across uncaring eyes and the difference from before shocks him into thinking he’d been hallucinating. Of course they wouldn’t care. Of course it was just wishful thinking. Cold dread settles in Kyungsoo’s stomach at the sight of those lifeless, inhuman brown pits. His eyes are empty as space. And if the boy has ever seen a falling star, he kept it a secret. He kept it hidden inside his eyes, at the very depth where streaks of light only go when they’re about to die.

 

Whenever Kyungsoo dares to steal glances, he thinks he sees sadness instead of wonders and hopelessness instead of dreams. His eyes never look down, not to where Kyungsoo stands. They roam a world beyond scratched glasses and foggy mornings, beyond cities and mundane worries, glimmering with an aura of loss and emptiness as they scan the space above a lost little head. Kyungsoo sighs and instinctively hangs his head. A gentle hand pushes it back and Kyungsoo gasps as the realisation hits him: he unconsciously let his head rest on the other’s chest. He thinks he understands why it felt so familiar, why he forgot to care. It is barren and hollow just like his, a barely fluttering soul imprisoned in a graveyard of a heart. His own ribcage suddenly feels like a birdless cage, but the other just smiles. It is clean and so painfully polite.

 

It all happens in a flash. A stray car cuts in and the momentum caused by the sudden use of brakes sends half the passengers flying, bumping into one another. Like waking with a start, a sea of half-asleep people gasps in unison, indignant noises leaving their mouths. They both fly to the closed door and the boy crashes into the hard glass with a force that leaves him shocked into open-mouthed silence. At first every muscle in Kyungsoo’s body stiffens for a second before going perfectly limp again. His shoulder is resting against the other and the sharp rising and falling of his chest causes the shorter boy to move along with every sharp exhale. Kyungsoo can feel the other tense up under the expensive coat he’s wearing, but unlike Kyungsoo, he doesn’t relax into their new position. The hurt rising in his throat only stings for a little while before his thoughts are turned towards the serenity of the scene.

 

He doesn’t care if the other thinks he’s a lunatic, he doesn’t care if the whole tram stamps words of scandal on his forehead. It’d take too much effort to extend his hands at the sides of this stranger and push his body away from the glass. His fingers feel numb, a nice vibration spreading through them, starting from the tip and wandering up in his arms. Maybe if he’d scratch hard enough he’d find pigments of red under his nails and fibres from someone else’s clothing or skin, and it might be too intimate, but he likes the idea nonetheless. The unexplainable feels great today. When he lifts his head – hindered by drowsiness and a lack of belief – he finds himself staring into deep and unexpectedly warm irises slowly calming into the unavoidable. For all he knows, it might just be another mask, but he doesn’t care. Now that he’s caught the other staring with wide, almost scared eyes, it’s impossible to sever the connection.

 

The stranger has softly curved cheekbones, slightly accentuated by a faint blush that probably has nothing to do with Kyungsoo, but he’s fine with that. His crimson hair is carefully combed into a fashionable, youthful style that makes him look a lot younger than he probably is. There’s an odd attractiveness about his whole demeanour that most people must find attractive in one way or another. Kyungsoo associates the tone of his skin with a secret desire lurking behind the innocence of daydreams on lazy afternoons, the desire to get lost on a desert island and slowly melt into the sun-drenched shores, ceasing to exist in the arms of a stranger, scared but too famished to be truly afraid of approaching death. He associates the glint in his caramel eyes with sadness without reason and with coffee brewed during an Indian summer that ended ages ago. While fixated on the stranger’s face and standing in his personal space, Kyungsoo feels stuck somewhere between Eros and Thanatos, not quite sure whether the opposition of the two makes him scared or excited.

 

The boy knows he’s staring, but he’s trying very hard not to avert his teary eyes. He’s trying to prove to this short stranger he’s not the weaker of the two. He’ll not give in to social norms, ethics or routine. It’d be so disappointing if this silent exchange ended like every other eye contact people so often make and break with each other. It’d be such a waste if this – whatever this is – proved to be just another forgettable, passing moment on a morning like any other.

 

Kyungsoo thinks of distances and colours while contemplating on how creepy it is to stare into someone’s eyes from so close you can actually see the fibres and patterns. He stops counting shades of brown after reaching twenty. He concludes that the boy’s most mysterious feature is the colour of his eyes. It’s practically bursting from the diversity of nature and the dynamism of hues. While one shade implies gentleness, another implies hints of savagery. Where one shade fades into another, honesty and pretence melt into sun-kissed confusion. If he was the character in a newly discovered legend, he’d be the symbol of damnation just as much as salvation. Like this, they keep pretending they don’t care about the message in the other pair of eyes, avoiding labels of description and chasing honey-scented lies.

 

The shiver starts as a faraway rumbling before storm. It starts low and deep, slowly crawling up to breach the edges of perception. A pale expanse of skin, kissed colourless by winter dawn’s dim light and the neon gleams pouring on them from the ceiling above, touching bronze and gold, a patch of skin that could outshine all the riches of the world. The sickly glow of his own skin contrasting the expensive layers of the stranger’s pitch black coat reminds him of the surface of the sea: calm and serene with just a hint of dying sadness before the storm hits its stillness with whipping force. The Quartz watch on the man’s left hand shows numbers in bright red light. The clock is ticking and the end of their travel is already in sight, its position predetermined by the end of the hypnotising red countdown. There’s no reason, no chance to find out, no opportunity to let their mutual disguise fall to the ground.

 

For all he knows, the man could be yet another simulacrum of nature, an anomaly in the original design. Goosebumps are spreading on his skin like wild fire, but the sensation is ice cold, the cold of morning city air, the cold of metallic touches under his palm, the cold of shuddering breaths on his shoulders. He doesn’t mind the crowdedness of early trams as much as he usually does when there’s so much to explore with half-lidded eyes. There is a cryptogram of possible decisions engraved on tanned skin, uncertain but curious eyes stealing glances from behind the curves of a warm silky scarf. Kyungsoo’s bleached skin is burning under their scrutiny.

 

He’s about to take the silliest step in his life and reach out to touch the red scarf – and maybe the texture of skin under it – when the tram stops and he’s reminded by a toneless, impossibly bored male voice that this is his stop. Without thinking he ducks his head and jumps to the door under an extended arm. He only looks back when the tram starts moving again, but the glance searching for him burns into Kyungsoo’s retina like a vibrant, painful flash of light. The chain of movements is so mechanical, so defined by routine that his brain throws free will to the side of the curb like useless, crumpled pieces of paper the moment his legs start to move.

 

 

-------

 

 

It is almost too easy to leave without looking back, to throw logic and bags and sanity to the ground. He might be beyond reason and he might not even like men, but the pain sure feels real when his ankles twist, his soles still rooted into frozen concrete and frozen time. Of course, it doesn’t ing matter, because they’ll never meet again, and though he really doesn’t know what it feels like to love anymore, he still remembers what hope and longing taste like, what lips against lips feel like. He can’t get it out of his head, pale moon and scorching sun, the contrast of their skin and the difference of their height complementing one another, the perfect balance that no money can buy. He’s torn between reality and possibility, his mind racing from one to the other like the swings of a pendulum.

 

What is waiting for him back home, back at his old, mouldering apartment surrounded by rundown alleys and squalor? Is he ready now? Has he finally forgotten and forgiven? Oh, but you can’t move on, not from self-inflicted poverty and misery, not from self-hatred and wretchedness. It’s not like running on your own two legs, it’s not something you can just shed like lizards shed their skin. It’s also not like throwing diamonds into the river or showering the streets with money from your luxurious downtown hotel suite. It’s not like crashing your car just to have a reason to buy a new, more expensive one. And it’s certainly nothing like letting yourself believe it was all just a horrible dream of splendour and luxury, of grandiose plans and ruthless superiority. It’s nothing like erasing the images of golden fountains and crystal chandeliers, of plastic beauties and the glittering of casinos. All of these are easy to do, easy when you already wish it all to hell, when you’re suffocated by the weight of your own importance, the social expectations, and the endless disgust. Once you let yourself forget who you used to be, you can’t just put the pieces back together. That ‘you’, that repulsive, less-than-human ‘you’ simply ceases to exist.

 

Allowing yourself to feel again, to hope and dream again after years of insignificance and self-punishment is much, much harder than all of these together. When you’d already convinced yourself of your own worthlessness, your own impurity and wretchedness, there’s no turning back. Kyungsoo knows that. He knows it all. For all the clean-cut, well-groomed façade, he feels filthier than most people on the tram he takes every day. Those stains, like old coffee stains, never truly fade. He’ll always be different. He’ll always look down on others, even when he’s worth less than their shoe. He’ll always think he’s better, even when he’s poor and starving, even when he’s sick and tired of being alive, even when he hates himself, and even when he marvels at how insects seem to have more self-respect than he has.

 

His lungs are screaming, myriads of tiny needles poking them as gulps of oxygen are forced down his throat, one after the other, one more painful than the other. The door is so close, so terribly close. He feels like he could connect their hands if he just reached out.

 

The man is watching him, curiously at first, then intently, his hands hovering over the door, closer and closer until his fists are banging on the glass, mouth agape and eyes wide with shock. Kyungsoo can pinpoint the exact moment the man changes his mind. He can see the sudden realisation, the crushing wave of dread as he understands that they’ll never meet again. He’s not from this neighbourhood, not from this life, and Seoul is bigger than all the possibilities combined, bigger than what any miracle could overcome. The man’s breath fogs up the glass as he starts shouting soundless pleas into the door, surrounded by indignant passengers trying to move away from him as far as possible.

 

Kyungsoo can feel fatigue overpowering him, overwhelming waves of defeat and panic clashing above his head. His steps gradually slow into a jog, then a walk, then finally--- nothing. He stops like a car hitting a wall, stumbling on his own foot and almost falling face forward. He’s staring into nothing, eyes fixated on some faraway distance that can’t be perceived, the afterglow of red taillights burned into his vision like embers. He can see the images disintegrate like old photographs in the fire: a finger poking his face, a mop of red, wet hair blocking his vision as someone leans above him, droplets of water falling on his cheeks and trickling down like tears, a smile against his lips, the violent hammering of a heart against his chest. There are so many things haunting him, teasing him, mocking him. Would it be possible? Would they even speak? What would he say? Would he be able to make him laugh? Would they end up kissing, touching, wanting? Would they end up on the couch? The bed? The street? Would he even want that? Would the man tell him his name, or leave in the dead of night never to be heard of again? Or would they wake up next to each other, awkwardly smiling and giggling, eyes gleaming with mischief? Would they go on dates to the beach or feed disgustingly salty popcorn to each other? Would they last? Or would they broke up like most people these days? Would they have arguments and petty fights? Would they ever laugh? Would they get tired of each other, sick of domesticity and routine? Would they end up with scars and hurtful silences over empty cups on Sundays that feel too long with nothing to do, and with only thin walls and mutual understanding – or distaste – to separate them? Would they hurt each other just to feel satisfied, to feel strong? Would they caress and the wounds right after or end up screaming in a pillow fight? Would they make love that he only ever saw on TV? Or would it be like old times, emotionless and necessary, satisfying and depressing at the same time? Would they laugh on the couch as an old couple, joking about dentures and farts and corny soap operas? Would they compete to outlive the other so that he wouldn’t have to see them go and grieve alone? Would they be buried next to each other? Would they be remembered long after they’re gone by friends and children and their children? Would they be famous for beating all odds?

 

He’ll never know.

 

The tram whooshes past the last grey pole, already on its way to places far beyond his reach, to places he swore he’d never visit again. As the last car gets swallowed by unreachable distances, Kyungsoo feels a foreign sensation in his chest, a tug at his heart that was never there before. It gradually grows into a constant pulsating cluster of pain and grief and anger. He can feel the shaking in his knees, the nervous trembling in his shoulders and the burning ache in his lungs. They sigh white carbon dioxide into the chilling morning air, a fresh poison with each exhale. He kneels down, trying to catch his breath, but he’s not sure he ever wants to get up. It felt like something written on the pages of books, something unexplainable and terrifying, but hopeful and exciting at the same time. It felt real, truer than anything he ever experienced. It was stupid, illogical, insane… but it was also possible. Now it is irrevocably broken, a summer fragrance blown away by autumn winds and taken by vast seas to places no man can reach.

 

 

-------

 

 

The tram arrives exactly at 4:59. It’s still a dark night. Kyungsoo forgets to have coffee that morning.

He catches the first tram.