The birds are there again.

The cool wind blows, ruffling their feathers. The gust forces them to huddle close next to each other to share the warmth of their collective body heat as they perch on one of the strong branch of an exceptionally bushy zelkova tree. Little do humans know, how their black, beady eyes see and observe everything. Humans just never realize it.

So inherently, the birds see.

Out in the park, they see the usual morning commotion and hear the low hum of people bustling around and making their own ways to start the day. A teacher cheerfully shepherding a line of excited kindergartens in their fluffy coats and square randoseru school bags. A group of friends in uniforms walking together and playfully bickering as they walk to their school. A mother taking her baby for a walk with a stroller. A wife lovingly giving her husband a good luck kiss before he goes to work. A folded newspaper, which is left behind by the man who not long after he finished his morning coffee walked away from his wife all grinning, tells the birds it’s October 5th, the second month of autumn. The early mist and the soothing wind the third season of the year seems to carry love around in its particles.

Be that as it may, the birds chirp to each other still: does love live forever? As crazy as it sounds, they have known all too well, as their black beaded eyes have been silently witnessing, how people take precarious twists and the love they were so loudly confessing changes.

Away the black orbs of the birds’ eyes drift. This time, to the bedroom’s balcony of a house at the far end of the road. The windows are open and the white linen portière are all tied up, giving way for a lone ray of the golden morning sun to pass through and for the line of their vision to slip in.

Inside, the birds see again.

As if trying to show our quiet watchers something, the sun has its bright finger pointing to light up some objects in the middle of the now empty bedroom. It arrived upon a clean and neatly organized desk with only two things sitting on top of it: a framed family photo in the size of a postcard, and a black leather-bonded journal.

The photo looks like a family photo. A tall man with a dimpled smirk, who has one arm draped over the shoulder of a slightly shorter man whose warm smile sets the tone of the photo, is hugging the latter tightly. The sitting men are carrying two toddlers on each of their laps, a black haired boy and a girl with hazel curls who are both laughing with their innocent, large round eyes focused on the camera.

Next to the memento, stand two people, the same ones as the little children smiling on the photo—even though all grown up, very much older and wearing black, with the jet black haired man holding close in his embrace the hazel haired woman with red rimmed eyes.

The birds see, but they don’t know why.

So away they fly, taking a closer peek when the two humans have left the room. They settle themselves on the balcony’s railing, their bodies changing colors under the sunlight that passes through canopy of leaves ablaze in colors sprouting from the lining maples, alders, zelkovas, and birches. Again the cool wind blows, but this time to open the seemingly heavy cover of the shut tight journal. It seems to understand and approve our feathery friends’ doing, as it flicks the papers of the journal to open a particular recto verso, which keeps one detached paper.

The birds see again.

 

 

***

 

December 24th, 2041

It’s a nice evening.

I don’t know what this writing is supposed to be. A love confession letter? A last will testament? A blind date advertisement?

But anyway, you may want to marry my husband.

Why am I doing this? All I want in this world is for my husband to be happy. I need to find someone to help me make my husband happy when I no longer be able to do so, hence here I am looking for one.

As the story goes, today marks exactly nineteen years, eleven months, twenty seven days, sixteen hours, and fifty six seconds I’ve spent with an extraordinaire of a man (or so the calculator said, haha).

Forgive me for the little pun, since all I know is that for twenty years I’ve played as one of the two main characters of a wonderful story along with Baekhyun, the other main character, and coincidentally, my husband also. All I know is that I want to spend another twenty years with him, and even infinite times more of it.

Despite me knowing the aforementioned admirable fact, sadly, it was only true until six months ago, since recently I no longer know how much years I’ll have the honor to play the role as Baekhyun’s husband.

Don’t worry, we didn’t fall apart, split up or divorce. In fact, as greed is intertwined and bred in the deepest core of human nature, I want more. More chances to tick off the things in our bucket list: see our kids happily marry the loves of their lives, travel the world once our kids have families of their own. More of our goals to be turned into achievements. More quality time to spend with my family once me and Baekhyun had grown so old.

But no matter how much humans plan, there will always be a greater force to reckon. God’s will, fate, destiny… you name it all. Because again, it was six months ago when signs of an end of our story started to show themselves in front of us.

With the cuckoo clock that’s obnoxiously loud both in sounds and appearance ticking my seconds off, let me begin. I need to finish writing this piece while I still can discreetly do so without my husband knowing about it, and of course, while I still can remember clearly the memories of us (I’ll tell more of that seemingly annoying clock that me and my husband actually love dearly later on).

I started fainting. I would always woke up with Baekhyun right beside me, hands clasping mine. But one day, I woke up from yet another episode fainting only to find out that an untreated and late detection of grade 2 astrocytoma which had been dwelling in my brain and showed no symptoms had developed into something much worse.

My friend that has been living in my head turned out to be glioblastoma multiforme or the GBM. Hard to spell, I know, I can’t spell it correctly either. But Baekhyun helped me to understand (for example, he knows how much I love Harry Potter books, so he told me to say for Muggles it’s more commonly called a brain tumor if people ask! Haha).

On that note, it reminds me now that it’s time to list the qualities my Baekhyun has (enough about me, I’m pretty much boring). I guarantee that you’ll love him by the end of this letter.

I’ll start the list by telling you that my Baekhyun is smart. Back to when we first met, at our university days, Baekhyun could make sense of love with his mathematical theorems, and together we could find love even amongst the dusty books, deadlines and exams. Baekhyun knows the exact way to cheer me up, one of them being every day he manages to tell me at least three different trivial facts. My favorite one, the one that makes me smile all the time is how he knew Park is the 110th most used surname in the world compared to Byun as the 5,328th, but still he chose to use Park as our family name. Even when I refused to acknowledge the existence of that so-called ‘new friend’ in my brain, denied that I’m sick, and even despising my own existence, Baekhyun was the one who came into my aid. He diligently studied about my condition, did researches on how to cure me, and made me see the light that there’s always hope.

Baekhyun is strong. He can make our kids understand their other father needs some time. At first he hid his tears. But just like he has known me for a quarter of a hundred years, I’ve known him for just as long. One day I caught him letting his tears out and we talked, and since then he turned his sorrow into his number one reason to fight, which later on not only became his strength but also mine and our kids’. At home, he used to cling onto my arms and I’d give him piggyback rides, but now that my legs are barely able to stand still, without me as