02

quintessence

The idea of an ‘extra cupcake’ was something the young girl bouncing about all over the deserted pavement found exceptionally thrilling news. Mister Blue couldn’t understand what it was about the towering pink frost on a baked mound of flour and milk that seemed as appealing as she made it out to be; her comical chants reaching new heights as she skipped ahead of her mother, munching on the extra cake for the day.

‘Mi-jinnie…!’ her mother cried, however her lips formed an amused slant. ‘If you keep jumping around like that, you’re going to drop it!’

I shouldn’t be here, were the floating man’s words the moment he set foot outside the park. But the more he dwelled on the thought, just where was he meant to be anyway? The playground in which he had come to seemed safe. A place he felt oddly tied to, like a sea turtle returning to its place of birth after a lifetime’s worth of voyage. The empty white room. Closed. Safe. He felt compelled to turn back the moment he found himself unwillingly agreeing to the child’s request, but alas, such an option now seemed incredibly far away.

Besides, what was he doing here? Ever since leaving with the two, all he managed was a dismal trail behind the mother and daughter who seemingly immersed themselves in light chatter.

I should go back, Mister Blue’s thoughts ran amok in his mind, and just as he settled for doing just what he’d been plotting to since the preposterous deviation in his routine, the sound of Mijin’s plastic shoes crunching ahead of him stopped him short.

‘Ne, ne, ahjussi,’ she started, turning to a halt; her voice muffled by the shiny mucus dripping from either nostril.

‘Ya don’t like sweet things? Then, ya like spicy stuffs? Or coffee?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Huh?’

Kleenex. The word blared in his mind like a siren watching the girl, and with a strained sigh, Mister Blue spoke a little louder. His agitation was a byproduct of a gnawing paranoia to turn back. To return. To indulge in waiting he wasn’t quite sure how long would last. And it was evident in his low voice of the frustration these inexplicable details caused him.

‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged; mouthing each word slowly; grimacing. ‘I don’t know what I like, OK?’

Mijin’s mouth fell open. ‘Ya don’t know? How don’t ya know? Don’t ya eat stuffs all the time?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yah, ahjussi, Ilkwon said to me that a person will die if they don’t eat for one whole day.’

Mister Blue shrugged again; his voice thin and distant. A change from his usually loud way of speaking. So much so, that it sounded foreign to his own ears for a moment.

‘Then maybe I’m dead.’

The riposte was meant to be a playful one. But his drastic change of tone was evident that such words were plucked from somewhere deep beneath the surface. From a depth he was unaware of, and a depth that Mijin was far too young to notice because another cherry grin painted her face. She began to run, followed by her mother who squealed with concern, leaping in her heels to catch up to the girl, but Mister Blue remained behind. His form a looming, detached, black and white cut-out in a world surrounded by verve and colour.

Who is Hoseok?

Ever since the above incident, it had occurred to me that perhaps such words were not at all lost. Uttering them filled me with a sense of dread, but also comfort. It had come to me one day when Mijin, Hayoung – her mother, I learned – and I were sitting at the dinner table in their home at around sunset.

It had taken me a great deal of fending off the anxieties tied to the park bench to instead spend the waiting I was seemingly so fond of with the female pair. The first three days consisted of an overwhelming sense of panic and despair upon leaving the playground.

The result: return to the bench.

When I’d stopped doing so as of late, however, I discovered that the park did not equate to the blank room. It was still there. Ever so present in my mind. No windows and no door. The blasted balloon growing, expanding like a bloated crescent within it, sometimes deflating but most times, never letting up.

‘Like some honey on yours, ahjussi?’

Mijin’s questions were never quite questions. Perhaps they were a courtesy or a habit. Because despite how often she asked me things pertaining to meals, she always acted on her own accord, response or not.

‘No,’ I said for the sake of amusement, but I knew Mijin better than that.

Barely a second after answering her question, the girl pulled out a wooden honey spoon from a bottle of something gooey and the colour of her mother’s hair, not wasting any time swirling the contents all over the quarter of a waffle in the plate in front of me. I propped an elbow beside the plate and put my cheek in my palm, watching with some measure of fascination as the honey took on an ethereal translucence under the warm glow of the drooping lamp above.

‘Sweet stuffs makes me happy,’ she explained, pausing only to let her mother’s manicured fingers draw the wayward bangs falling into her eyes back over her head to not get sticky.

‘Right, momma?’

As insufferable as I found Mijin when she first began hanging around me like a fly, I didn’t want to accept it just yet, but the more I learned about her, the more she grew on me. She had become surprisingly tolerable over time, and perhaps there were instances when I had receded into the white room that I missed her commotion.

The