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Private Resort, Seoul

“I will return to Jeonju in ten days, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied.

He closed his eyes and she sat with him for the longest time till he seemed to sleep. His eyeballs rolled under the eyelids. His fingers rested. There was this peacefulness he felt sleeping next to her. For all she knew, that was the last time she has heard him breathe. She never stopped crying since.

There was no secret I didn’t tell him, there was no moment I didn’t share - and we didn’t grow up, we grew in, like ivy wrapping, moulding each other into perfect yings and yangs.

Ward 4, Jeonju Hospital

Jeonju, South Korea

          The following day, Taeyeon went back to the hospital alone and spent the day normally without waiting for him. His departure couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time. She feels anxious and she doesn’t know if she can wait ten days.

It has been longer than a week and she was scheduled for her eye operation. The night before she had thought of him and couldn’t sleep at all. Taeyeon didn’t know anything. Nothing regarding the world and how it works, how it looks. She only knows the way he whispered her name, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and cupped his hand beneath her chin.

The way he leaned in to whisper into her ears. Slow and cautious, but so quiet, so steady, like he had knew this was the only chance they’d get. She remember the way his hands shook, wouldn’t stop shaking, and she held her breath to let the moment settle into place. And she remembered feeling him, she could feel his pulse, she could almost taste his lips — sweet and slow and soft, almost poetic in all their furrowed perfection.

          Waking up from the anesthesia, she opened her eyelids to a bright light. With teary eyes, despite a strong blur, the first figure she had seen was her caretaker, as they slowly embraced themselves. “A fluke of nature,” everyone said.

When she opened her eyes, he closed his heart.

♦♦♦

          On her recovery her sight had returned. That's when she said she'd never blink again. She had been waiting each day sitting by her window looking into the world, waiting for the one person. Taeyeon had been envisioning his handsome face, sitting across her, with beautiful fingers gliding over hers.

Days after she regained her eyesight, Taeyeon didn’t say anything regarding her newfound ability. Instead she carried on her routines, only slightly taking notice of her surroundings. Reason was she had been waiting to share her experience with Leeteuk the day after.

“There are so many beautiful things in the world, but I can’t seem to be able to see them alone. Now with these new pair of eyes, it feels that the stars are just stars,” she told Nurse Hwang.

She had wanted to tell him, how she watched the clouds moved, how bright the sun was and the patterns of the stars she had seen. How at night she allowed her mind to balance their thoughts on Leeteuk’s face. Taeyeon had attempted to watch his hair ruffle on the back of his neck, his adam’s apple moving like a wave, fully see his fingers that ever so often wrapped themselves across her waist.

          A day passed and she waited the same way. Twenty days passed and no news of him. The moment she had begun to feel his absence she heard it. How there had been a war, the missing victims, the timeline…

When she saw Nurse Hwang’s devastated face, she knew. They all knew.

He was gone. Her Leeteuk was gone.

“No records of him. No body, none from the crash. He is reported dead.”

She had waited for weeks. And then he was gone. Like smoke and ghost. He boarded the plane, leaving crinkled sheets and weak-kneed confusion in his wake. And now here she is breathless.

Her heart sank. No depths could compare towards the bury in her heart. It was not prepared for this. She was not prepared for this.

“Please have trust in me.”

She shook her head and cried on his sleeves. He sighed and cooed her, calling her name. Gently, he cupped her chin whispered into her ear,

“Do you trust me?”

 “Completely,” she had said. Then he held her, promised to come back.

And how do you step out of a moment like that? How do you leave your only love behind and return to the vacant routines of whatever you might call your life? How do you call his death without even a proper burial, without any respect to lay his body in peace? How do you even begin to cry at this undeserved senseless tragedy?

When now she could see, all these colours that has ever existed in her life. Those oceans he spoke of, the night sky b with stars, the sight of little kids, her purple roses.. What matters now that he wasn't there to show her? That her only wish was to see him. The man she ever loved, out of anything else in the world.

“He showed me all the things that I thought I was incapable of seeing, all the while I was comprehending, yet captivated. I haven't the slightest chance of thanking him. I just, I don't know what to do without him,” she cried.

She wished for so many things right now. She wished time slowed down that she could've made more time to spend with him. She needed him, his touch, his scent, and his voice. She wished he could know how much he matters to her.

Her love for Leeteuk has become what the sunset is in her blindness.  She knows it is out there, and can sense the awe in his voice when he describes it.  But now she will never get to experience its beauty firsthand – the cascade of colours, rolling across the skies, or the soft radiance of the sun as it climbs below the horizon, revealing the brilliance of the stars above…  Being blind, she can only imagine it in her mind, in her dreams, her fantasies. Especially now that he was gone from her reaches forever. She was too late to see the sunset. Such is the sunset, and such is Leeteuk.

Incheon

"Who is he?"

"We found him by the shore. No passport, no identification, all perished from the fall. He's one of the survivors from the airplane crash. His face seemed to have just undergone treatment, still under healing process, Sir?"

"Whats your name, son?"

"Park... Park Jung Su."

Ward 4, Jeonju Hospital

Jeonju, South Korea

          Taeyeon had cried alone for twenty nights since she heard of his death. Nurse Hwang didn’t know how to help her. She held her in every way in attempts to mend her breaking heart, tried every way to coo her. But how could she come across the amount of love Taeyeon and Leeteuk had for four long years?

“I don’t want to believe it! No!”

“Taeyeon, please you know it is-“

“Unnie, bring me to him. Let me see him, please unnie...” she sobbed.

“His body,” she gulped and held her hands. “They were perished.”

The latter girl shook her head worning out her tears; “I’ll find him then. I swear-“

Stephanie held Taeyeon and tried to coo her to sleep.

She heard her whisper, “Then, let me die too…”

          Twenty-one nights had passed. Taeyeon hadn’t taken any food or drink. She never wanted to believe that she was mourning for him, but the tragic reality had been. Her eyes were useless and she found no greatness in them.

That night she had brought herself to an empty church, holding on tightly to a single white rose. Her body became so much thinner in such a short period; her voice barely audible but she presented herself before the altar in a long black dress. That night, she finally decided to accept his death, and remembered how there had never been a funeral for him, no grave to place his name, no family to recite a final eulogy, no goodbye.

She sobbed on the ground muttering, “Was there anyone to care for him, anyone to cry for him, to at least acknowledge his time on earth, had anyone even missed-“ she cupped and shut her eyes. “Leeteuk,” she breathed one last time.

As she wished for his body to be laid before her, she placed the rose on her chest. After days without food and drink, Taeyeon’s body collapsed and her head violently hit the ground. Within minutes, her nose had bled and she lay in the church, unconscious.

Somewhere halfway across the world, where a young blind girl opened her eyes to see the world basking in happiness and magnificence, there was her lover who had taken his very last breath and died senselessly. When she had dreamt and recalled this one last time, the morning after she had remembered nothing as if it only had ever remained as a dream to her. All those moments had become a mere memory.

~