Where does one draw the line when it comes to love? How would you know if your actions are just…way over the limit, too much for a person to do? How do you know that you’re investing yourself too much in love to the point that you’ll literally do anything just to keep it?

I don’t know.

I don’t know if I’m toeing the lines between love and just pure…idiocy.

I don’t know if I’m just a person still clinging to love, or just an idiot.

It’s funny how I’ve always preached about not losing oneself just for love to my friends, to my younger students, to people I know, but now…

I can’t recognize myself anymore.

I’m not the same Ryujin I have always been.

          I’m not confident anymore, I don’t even look at myself in the mirror as I know that my sickly blueish veins would be the first thing I would notice. I don’t feel so good in my skin, I sometimes think that they’re not even mine anymore. Signs of tiredness are written all over my face, Yeji once told me when she came to visit me. Everything seems to be black and white, my way of life, the way I look, the way I live.

Our friends told me that they can’t even see me anymore. They don’t feel like they’re with Ryujin when I started hanging out with them after our break-up.

And the funny thing is, it’s not even because of you. I’m not like this because of us.

          It’s not because of you, or the way that we just started to split apart when our touches went from cold to warm that was the perfect combination into something that’s the same. Cold to cold. Sometimes, warm to warm.

And the same thing doesn’t always end up looking pretty together. Both coldness leads to the search for warmth. Both warmness leads to the search for cold.

          It’s because of me. I did this to myself. Just like your favorite color. Blue. Because it reminds me of you. I made myself turn blue by letting myself hold onto that fake hope that we’ll be together again. That my cold touch would turn into a warm one when I hold your cold hands. By making myself think that I can adapt to whatever it is that suits you, just so I can keep you by my side.

          But, I can’t keep holding on to you, if you don’t want to hold on anymore, right? I can’t keep holding your hand when all you want, is to let it dance with the wind, touch the flowers, without me. Probably hold another person’s hand, but I don’t want to think of that much cause it adds more to the pain.

          I bet if you would ask me what was the most painful day for me, I know you would expect me to say the day when we broke up, but in reality, it’s not. No. It isn’t the day of our break-up. Though I did feel the pain that day, extreme pain, mind you, it doesn’t equate to the pain I felt when I coughed up my first flower. That day when I was sitting all alone in the same apartment we’ve shared together for 4 years, reading a book that I knew you always loved by the windowsill I personally looked for in all apartments of Seoul because it was one of the things you had in your bucket list, still waiting, still hoping that you’d come back to me. That your hands had returned the same cold ones perfect to my warm. But I never expected was my love for you to visit me.

That first flower changed me.

          Chaeryeong, the itch started out small, like a worm crawling on my skin but instead of being outside, it was inside. I ignored it because I thought it was just a normal itch and that it would go away, but it didn’t. It grew into a monster that wrecked my whole throat, the monster that pulled the right strings to push all the tears out of my eyes as my whole pharynx burned like it was going through a pandemonium. And then, I coughed.

And then, there it was. That blue flower. Your trademark. My nickname for you. My Hydrangea.

          The same flower I’ve always given you. The flower I always hid behind my back as I step inside our shared apartment, the flower I always bought from that flower shop a block away from your dancing studio, the flower that told me that you…stepped out first of our own haven. The flower that told me you had finally set yourself free from me. The flower that told me, that you, had left our ship of dreams.

          And for a few months, I ignored them. I ignored how they blatantly screamed at me, whenever they would come out of my mouth, that you’re never coming back. That the ‘we’ I was so desperately waiting for to come back in my life once again, will never step foot near me. I ignored them whenever they would make their presence known by climbing up my throat, pricking the walls of my pharynx with their rough texture that feels so foreign because what I know of hydr