When does one lose their mind? Not through the act of slow collapsing madness, enlarged pupils and shaking lips. Not through extreme mind-wrecking, throat-aching and heart-breaking. They’re not the misfortune ones. They’re the broken, perhaps even the shattered, but not those who suffer utter misfortune. It’s a different string you pull when you want disaster to crawl inside a person and at the peak of it all, right before insanity creeps inside your own mind, you find such catastrophe happening around you entertaining, daring you to play people like a chess game.

My name is Kim Yerim and until the day I turned eighteen I knew only of one love story. With flowers and letters, the moonlight and a forever, but then, through instant madness of lovers, I was taught that forever was only half of the time a heart had to spend in sugar-coated poison, which eventually became suffocating for a sane mind.

I learned that some people have too much love to recklessly use. Some don’t have any, it being lost in the void of their callow chest. I’ve met those who have found love in spring and their lovers who have lost love in autumn, the only spring they’ve known made of flowers they place on a deathbed. I’ve seen love being murdered and I’ve seen love murder. I’ve heard love carelessly play on broken strings and a while after, when forever was cut in a half and letters were burned, I believed I knew love all, but I had never shivered to the sound it made when it ruthlessly consumed a mind to its core.

Not until the heavy doors of my family’s maison were opened by the fading soul of Kim Jisoo.

The world we live in has been bending through years and as time flied past us without a notice, the doors of this place learned to be more shut than opened. Nobody believed in the four walls of this coven anymore and even if they did, nobody ever needed it. This place had taken the form of a mystical coffin, never to be opened, fear making people who walked past it shiver in the power of unknown. The witch cult within it being nothing else but a lost legend.

If someone was scared of the unknown of this place where I was brought to live in when I turned eighteen, they’d be terrified to know the stories its walls held. That’s when it bended, my world and my idea of love, when in every room of my family’s maison where this cult was centuries ago built, there was a different story told.

Park Sooyoung was the first to approach me back then when I came in, joyful smile dancing on her rose lips. She was made of sunkissed daydreams that blinded me instantly, the thin line between reality and imagination vanishing in the vagueness of her words. Her scent lingered in the room like stars hanging on the sky and it made me want nothing more than to tie a knot and hang along with them in adoration.

She had too much love to offer, a bright momentary spark of it making you feel like you’d be the one, but you were barely one in twenty four. So much was she given, it couldn’t be caged inside one heart, so she walked around wasting it on strangers and it never occurred to me there could be someone as alone and empty as the ones who had the most to give they couldn’t ever take, couldn’t ever entangle their heart with another.

Unlike her, Kang Seulgi was a shadow, whispers and cigarette smoke, slipping in and out of your head, waltzing in and out of your life, uncertainty floating in the air each time she came around, but I didn’t ever seem to mind. She was rarely around anyway.  

She was one of those who had no love, who never knew about it, never felt it rush through their veins. Her barely audible voice was the sound of a sinner praying in church as thousands of bells chimed in desperation, her begging to have something more than a heart dripping in her mind ideas of feelings she’d never have.

In the darkness of my own head I’d wonder, could these extremes of people ever balance each other without killing one another? That was something to ponder over, to entertain myself in the emptiness and boredom of this forgotten cult, until I was faced with a different love story and I got the answer of that question, and answer that today I’d never wish to have known.

You see, it was tricky for people who didn’t have blood connections with the cult members to join. Once you’d walk through those doors you’d have to leave something behind that you could never take back, but then there was Bae Joohyun whom I came to know a while after I came here, not completely and wholeheartedly. You could only know Bae Joohyun through pieces, for she was already shattered completely.

She was the marble statue of Aphrodite filled with the insides of Sappho, twilight eyes so cold they burned you. Her features were carved by nightlight and her laugh resembled the wind-chime she hung in the backyard, above a neat piece of ground where flowers were supposed to grow, the never bloomed seeds being the last thing Seungwan left behind before she died.  

Son Seungwan, blood related to my family she was bound to live inside these walls. I was told she and Bae Joohyun had the ordinary love story you hear about in children’s bedtime tales, cliché and dreamy. They were neighbours and Joohyun would occasionally tell Seungwan about her boring mundane days as Seungwan took care of flowers that never bloomed. She’d rarely share some excitement of the coven with the lonely neighbour of hers, telling her of Sooyoung’s new lovers and Seulgi’s old ones, neither of them lasting.

“What are you planting?” Joohyun had one day asked, her eyes beaming with light behind her glasses, her hair up in a bun and an oversized sweater covering her body.

Seungwan never thought she’d have her heart hammer against her chest at a simple look.

“Daffodils,” she smiled.

“It’s late winter,” Joohyun beamed again and Seungwan’s ears could almost tickle at the sound of her neighbour’s voice. “I hope I see them bloom soon.”

“I hope so too,” but it was unlikely and Seungwan knew, however, she didn’t want to burst Joohyun’s bubble and deep down, she still prayed for the flowers to fight the cold ground and make their way out. “Better have them here than somewhere else,” she chuckled and Joohyun didn’t seem to get the joke, nor Seungwan’s tears that briefly covered her eyes.

Then spring came around and Joohyun’s sweater was replaced by a simple T-shirt. It was yellow, the same colour the daffodils were supposed to be, but they never bloomed along with Joohyun.

“You’re not taking care of your daffodils today?” she asked and Seungwan shook her head, an ounce of pain wrapping her chest, but she didn’t let the other girl know.

“I don’t think they’ll ever bloom. I never liked daffodils anyway,” she forced a smile and walked towards the fence.

“Were they for someone else then?” Joohyun asked, her voice barely heard, making Seungwan miss the beaming of it.

“They were,” Seungwan replied, but before Joohyun caught her falling tears and faked a smile, Seungwan twirled her hair in a fake ponytail and jumped the fence, her shoes creating a loud thud as she landed in front of Joohyun. “Do you know of the hanahaki disease?”

It would be hard for me to imagine Joohyun widening a pair of child eyes behind round glasses if it weren’t for the images Seulgi had sketched on her diary along with conversations and moments that were supposed to be lost in time, but were in fact conserved inside leather notebooks along with other love stories Seulgi witnessed and never experienced. It would be hard, because the Joohyun I got to know when I came here wasn’t Seungwan’s garden, but the cold ground where flowers couldn’t bloom.

She got poisoned, Son Seungwan. The chemicals she used to make the daffodils grow had taken a hold of her body and four years after the day she jumped the fence, she jumped again, this time on her deathbed. Joohyun cried her soul away and now she was nothing but a walking shell that got lost inside the four walls of Seungwan’s old home.

She entered these doors with nothing to leave back, because the only thing the lonely neighbour had was already gone. There were times when her soul would gush back in and shatter her into pieces, in memories, but lately, even the shoe box filled with Wendy’s belongings was left stuck beneath the bed, even the wind-chime in the garden didn’t sing, even the Joohyun I knew had disappeared, transformed into dust, one blow away from Neverland.

“Do you know of the hanahaki disease?”

The words lingered in my head for the longest time, because after I came to know of Joohyun’s and Seungwan’s story, everyone in the house had disappeared. Suddenly Sooyoung didn’t come back from her late nights and Seulgi didn’t leave her room. There was an unwritten rule about Joohyun and her mystical aura. You weren’t to talk to her unless she talked to you, even if you wanted to reach out, she’d only reach for you if she knew she was needed.

Those words lingered in my head as I ticked the days away, until one night I found a piece of paper on my bed. It was a messy sketch of a girl who I didn’t recognize. I reckoned she was beautiful, raven hair and heart-shaped lips. Her eyes made me shiver as the moonlight danced in them and for a second I believed she was staring into my soul, searching for something I didn’t know I had within me. I wanted to ask Seulgi about her, but her room was as quiet as it had been for the past time I’ve tried talking to her, no sign of life in there.

I looked at the sketch again and in between the broken lines of the portrait the question that kept suffocating my mind was lingering, written in undistinguished curves.

“Do you know of the hanahaki disease?”

There was a soul desire the night fired up in me as I looked from the paper towards the window. I could almost see that faint smirk of Seulgi urging me to run outside, her childish chuckles daring me to follow this gut feeling that was turning up my insides. I’ve always had that, a sixth sense, a hunch, a need for something I didn’t know and couldn’t process, but which always turned out to be bigger than me. That’s how and why I was forced to leave England and my boring teenage years and lock myself up in this house along with the others witches.

I’d question it for the most, this hunch I had, because it always had me tripping in situations I wanted to avoid, but in that moment I didn’t even take a mere second to contemplate it. In a blink I found myself running out of the Victorian doors into the velvet covered night, looking for a girl I wasn’t sure existed, asking myself questions that didn’t make sense, skimming on a story that had slowly taken up my mind.

I didn’t meet the girl that day. There were teenagers laughing on the streets of Seoul as they entangled arms. An old couple passing the street. Flaring neon lights of shops that didn’t lure me in. There wasn’t much outside. I hardly found anything I was looking for, but maybe I wasn’t expecting to find anything in the first place.

I was on my way back when I saw her, a nightlight ridden drunk walker, radiating in her cloud-like skin the neon colours of the shops, for she herself was colourless. There was this vagueness in her, warm like a lit candle, blinding as you looked for too long, fainting and dying down each second that passed by. She seemed to be in pain with every step she took, her knuckles turning white at how strongly she was gripping on her jacket, as if the soft wind of spring was relentlessly stabbing her chest. She was coughing when I saw her, which is why I brought my attention towards the petite figure of the girl and she kept coughing for the longest time I spent looking at her, scared she’d break down, the clock ticking in slow-motion.

“Are you okay?” I asked, fastening my steps to walk in parallel with her.

“It’s just a fever,” she answered, pulling on her jacket more. “Thank you for asking,” she gave away a gummy smile that briefly made her baby face glow like a sunrise, but it didn’t take long before it was replaced by a wince, her body crouching down like she was punched in the stomach.

“Are you sure? Do you want me to walk with you?”

She shook her head, but I found it the more interesting how her eyes seemed to plead for the opposite.

“It’s okay. I was just walking around, anyway,” I reassured and for a second I saw her want to reject again, but another shock of pain made her bite her lower lip and settle for quietness.

We walked like that for a while, in uncomfortable silence. I and the girl who had pulled some kind of string inside me, making that gut feeling explode. She coughed and apologized and from time to time she’d close her eyes in pain.

“The cherries will blossom soon,” I mumbled while looking up at the trees, attempting to start a conversation that was made from more than ‘Pardon me’s and ‘It’s nothing to worry about’s.

“I know. I can’t wait to see them,” she looked up, following my vision towards the empty branches. “Jisoo will be so moody during the whole time.”

There it was, this feeling of mine, in between the name, the clock finally ticking at its normal speed again, reality crashing against me as I gave the petite girl a confused look, wide eyes and raised eyebrows.

“Jisoo?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated again, but this time she chuckled and the need to apologize wasn’t because of the coughing. “There was a sense of familiarity that I completely forgot we don’t know each other.”

(“You know, Yerim,” Sooyoung had said a while ago, “you look like the younger sister I never had. It’s quite easy to mistake you for someone you’ve known for your entire life.”

“It’s just her charm, Sooyoung. Don’t let it carve too deep,” Seulgi had added while rolling her eyes. “The sense of comfortableness in her is just a state of mind.”)

“I’m Jennie Kim,” the girl, Jennie, gummy smiled again, cutting short the memory that was playing in my mind. “Jisoo is a close friend of mine,” she added, but her voice had taken a light shake which I ignored.

“Kim Yerim,” I introduced myself. “This friend of yours doesn’t like cherry blossoms?” I asked, because in my head I could hear Sooyoung's voice ring and remind me that I could strip someone from all their secrets with that sense of familiarity.

“She used to,” Jennie smiled again. “She likes all kinds of trees honestly,” she added, before collapsing in a fit of coughs again, which stung on my chest.

(“What’s the downfall of it?” I had asked Joohyun that night. “Of people feeling familiarity in me?”

“You feel familiarity in them too,” she monotonically stated, her voice artificial as it left her lips. “Your sense of empathy grows the more they feel comfortable with you. You don’t only understand their pain, but also live with it.”)

“That sickness you have, it’s not really a fever is it?” I asked, because inside me I felt my stomach turn upside down and my chest tighten, almost in suffocation.

Jennie smiled faintly as a response and I realized that I shouldn’t be asking any further questions, but they made their way through my mind and into my vocal chords effortlessly, however they didn’t get to play them as a pair of hands gripped on my shoulders.

“Yerim-ah, there you are,” the exaggerated voice of Seulgi scratched my ears as it pretended to engage in a normal conversation, as if we had chosen to know each other, not being forced by fate and other gambles of people. “We’ve been looking for you.”

“We?”

“You’re almost like a child,” Sooyoung’s laughter ringed. “Always getting lost.”

It felt unsettling that they had suddenly appeared in my life after being away from it when I wanted them around.

“C’mon now, Joohyun wants to meet you,” Seulgi added and all the ways to reject leaving with the other two went forgotten from my mind as Joohyun’s name was mentioned.

Jennie coughed, getting unwanted attention. Sooyoung and Seulgi eyed her briefly, a knowing look dancing on the latter’s eyes as some image dangled in her head. I could feel it in Jennie’s uncomfortableness. I knew Seulgi was stripping a story from her which she’d later sketch in her notebook, but I couldn’t read it.

I looked at Jennie who was still gripping on her jacket too tightly, her gummy smile still present on her face even though her features looked confused.

“Will you be okay?” I asked and she simply nodded.

“It’s just a fever,” she said again, lied again. “My house isn’t far anyway,” a gummy smile danced on her lips. “See you again, Yerim.”

In my head I knew it was unlikely, but there was that hunch again that I’d be hearing a lot about Jennie Kim.

The road back to the maison had taken the same dull quietness of the past days. I asked questions that didn’t get answers, heard senseless words that were exchanged between Seulgi and Sooyoung and thought over a situation I had no idea how to deal with.

Joohyun wasn’t your typical social butterfly, so if she asked to meet you, you didn’t quite expect a tea party with biscuits. She was strict, precise words that came out of her lips artificially, leaving no room for discussion. They were an ultimatum with which you agreed without asking too many questions. There weren’t any alternative ways, no short cuts, no choices to be made. Meetings with her were simple, plain and effective. You were to accept them as they were presented.

However, that particular night, as I entered the house, there was a different aura surrounding Bae Joohyun. Her usual glowing beauty had fallen dull, pale ghost skin and dark eyes that seemed to be carved in her face, blood painted lips that didn’t curl up in their usual half a smirk. Her tight black dress, wrapped around each curve of her body seemed to be faded, not giving off the over-confidence I was used to see her have.

Bae Joohyun, the woman who the more you knew, the less you understood.

“Tell me, Yerim,” she approached the conversation, not wasting time on greetings and fake smiles, “what has been on your mind lately?”

My mind?! You, Son Seungwan, the hanahaki disease, daffodils that never bloom…a lot really. There was a lot that was bothering me, invading my mind and it all started with the woman who stood in front of me, the night veil on her hair and shut stars on her eyes, but I couldn’t tell her that.

“There’s nothing particularly,” I settled for as an answer, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Joohyun who sighed and walked towards that soul mirror that was hung in the living room, an object I’ve despised since I came here.

“Have you ever loved?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you ever had someone love you?”

“No, not that I know of.”

Sooyoung’s wicked chuckle made its way in my ears, but Joohyun seemed to have brushed it off, completely ignoring the sound of it as it invaded the house and echoed in the walls.

“I have loved and been loved,” Joohyun said, her voice nostalgic, but not broken in memories. “But I bet you already know of that,” she turned to Seulgi who hung her head low, however Joohyun was smiling, barely genuinely, but still a smile.

I found myself contemplating an answer I’d never give, because Joohyun was quick to cover the deadly silence with her voice again.

“What’s your favourite flower, Yerim?” she asked and I doubted she was asking questions out of curiosity, in a get-to-know-you manner.  

“I don’t have one.”

“Really?” she lifted her eyebrows, her voice sounding for the first time unsettling, but she was quick to cover it. “Seungwan liked daffodils. You know that daffodils are narcissus flowers?” I shook my head. “Seungwan was the most selfless person I’ve ever known and yet…” she stopped, pondering over her next words, whether she wanted to tell the rest of the story or not. “They say that when you love someone who doesn’t love you back, their favourite flowers start growing inside you along with your feelings, until your suffocate.”

“Is that why Seungwan told you it’d be better to have daffodils growing in the backyard than somewhere else?”

She curled up her lips in another disingenuous smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“They never bloomed,” I added. “That’s what the hanahaki disease is about?”

Her smile faded in melancholia.

“This is a cult Yerim. We have our privileges, our curses, our blessings, but not even witchcraft can come above love,” she let silence settle in along with her words before speaking again. “There’s another way to survive the flowers, to cut them off by surgery before they cut your breath off completely, but in cases like that you’d have to take to the slaughterhouse all your feelings, severe them in pieces and burn them in flames, emptiness being the only thing left inside you.”

Joohyun massaged her temples, her eyes rapidly blinking as a drizzle made its way through her body. It was quite different from the one that wrapped Jennie Kim before and I could tell, because unlike with Jennie, Joohyun’s pain came from inside her own thoughts, not from her body.

“The person who loved Seungwan, she went through surgery and now is a walking corpse, more dead than alive, even though she’s still breathing,” Joohyun sighed, regaining composure and taking her eyes off of me, as if she was done conversing with me and was talking to someone else, her vision directing towards the door. “There’s one thing I want you to learn, understand, forgive,” she paused, her voice ethereal, echoing in the deepness of the night. “Even the most selfless person can become selfish when it comes to love.”

I saw her turn around, the usual untouchable aura covering her body, the echoing steps making their way to her room.

“Joohyun,” the name slipped past my lips in a mere whisper, but she heard it anyway, stopping on her tracks and waiting for what I was about to say.

The thing is I wasn’t too sure. I didn’t know what made me want to call her, which of the thousand questions I had had won the inner civil war inside my mind and was begging to be heard. I wasn’t sure at all, but I could still feel Joohyun’s pained thoughts faintly and it kept reminding me of Jennie’s coughs and white knuckles.

“I met a girl today,” I pondered over whether to continue the story or not.

“I know,” Joohyun sighed, the heaviness of her breathing letting me now she was worn out for more stories. “You shouldn’t have,” she added before resuming her tired steps.

“I think she has the hanahaki disease,” I said from behind, but this time Joohyun didn’t stop walking, her answer coming cold and distant.

“I wonder.”

I didn’t sleep that night and between broken thoughts, I came to the conclusion that I should meet Jennie again, just once more. It was that gut feeling, but this time it had taken the form of a need I couldn’t ignore. Just like that, involuntarily, I’d promenade the same boulevard where I met her the first time each afternoon, but I didn’t ever see her there, not until the fourth day of the last week of March. The cherries had already blossomed.

She seemed paler, sicker than before, the whitewash of her jeans resembling the blue veins on her arms that popped out desperately from the skin. However, she seemed happier, lovelier, the pink of her sweater blending her with the fuzzy atmosphere of cherry blossoms. I smiled, too faintly, too little, because it was quickly replaced by a deep sadness I didn’t believe was mine to feel. I wondered what kind of flowers had bloomed inside her.

She turned her head and so thin and delicate was her neck I thought it could snap, but the only thing snapping was her gummy smile, her cat-like eyes curving upwards.

“I’d never thought I’d see you again,” she said and I shrugged, not sure what to respond.

She coughed. It was dryer than before, probably scratching angrily down , making it burn like hell flames.

“Are you getting better?” I asked and her smile brightened.

I knew she wasn’t, I could feel it, but I couldn’t understand the warmness that danced inside those eyes as she answered.  

“Jisoo’s taking good care of me,” she hummed, looking towards a dark haired girl who was on her phone.

I followed her vision and I heard Jennie’s voice die down at the back of my head as I underlined all the features of the girl standing in front of me. Heart shaped lips and raven hair, eyes as empty as Seulgi had drawn them in the sketch I found on my bed. She was real after all, as real as her empty eyes allowed her to be.

So immersed was I in Jisoo’s figure and the thousand questions that all of a sudden hung in my mind, I didn’t notice that Jennie’s words started breaking in coughs, tender at first and lung breaking the next second. No, the sound of them would’ve stayed in the back of my head if it wasn’t for Jisoo moving from her place, ruining the daze I was in, her hands gripping on Jennie’s shoulders, voice like a broken record repeating the same word: Breathe.

I snapped out of it when Jennie crouched down in pain, the feeling of the stomach being punched returning in her and just like that, making its way in me too. I knew she wanted to throw up – from the way she pursued her lips and closed her eyes, to the way she held her arms around her stomach as if to shut it down – but was trying the hardest not to. Her lungs barely had any air inside them, her once rosy cheeks had turned burning red at the intensity her veins were working.

One last cough, deep and dry and there were blood tinted cherry petals leaving her lips, making her fall tiringly in Jisoo’s arms, her already pale skin becoming almost ghostly, her warm eyes closing in exhaustion.

“You have to breathe Jen, please, just try breathing,” Jisoo continued chanting the same demand as before, begging almost. “I know it hurts, but you have to,” she mumbled, pulling the girl closer. “Breathe, yeah? It will be fine,” but I couldn’t make out if Jisoo’s voice was simply as empty as her eyes or if her words lacked faith and were only sweet nothings being said to calm down Jennie’s aching chest.

“I-I c-can’t, it burns,” she shook her head, bursting in another fit of coughing and it felt like each inhale of air was a drag of cigarette smoke being fed to a pair of already consumed lungs.

It took a while for Jennie’s breathing to normalize, her loud coughing turning to light chokes and a tickling throat that felt like it was set on fire. The sensitivity of it so deep even I couldn’t speak.

“Can you walk?” Jisoo’s voice came to me like a faint buzz, incomprehensible. “Jen, we have to get you inside,” she mumbled and as I let the sound of it drown in me I noticed the lack of emotion in it, the robotic rhythm, almost as artificial as Joohyun’s.

“Here, I’l