“What’s the matter?” the boy asks, but I just answer him with continuous hiccing and sobbing, as I cover my face, streams and streams of tears skidding down, falling onto the picnic cloth. “Heebin, Heebin!” I try to peek between my fingers and Zelo just eyes me with this slightly worried smile.

“I—“ no, no words could actually convey what I am feeling right now. My dream was so, so bad, but I couldn’t remember a scene, just the senses. Sense of dread, the sense of sadness, the sense of death. I’m sobbing like crazy, like this is the last day I could ever give myself to cry. I’m making howling sounds that greatly disturb the peace of the dawn.

“Why are you crying?”

The question, somehow, makes me look up. The tone, the face it is accompanied with—this may have happened before. My howls minimize themselves now into mere mewls, until my hics are as loud as the cries of a choked kitten. “Zelo, I—“

“Heebin,” he’s calling me softly, oh so softly it’s altogether too sweet. “I know it’s not okay for you, but what’s there is there.”

“What do you mean?” I squeeze out, between my squeals of sadness.

“Are you not familiar with it?” he situates his face closer to mine. All he needs to do now is hold my cheek, but he doesn’t. “What’s done is done.” I’m pretty sure he has no idea what I’m going through, but his words seem appropriate that I believe in them, regardless he knows what’s running through my mind. “Look up,” he says, and I turn my head to eye the sky above. The deepness of the blue of midnight is starting to become lighter now. In the horizon, as I look further, a slight development of white and yellow colors are rising, but only very little. It’s obvious. I had slept through the night with Zelo.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“It’s past five o’clock.”

I continue to look at the heavens, but the pain slowly creeps back up to my chest again. It slowly rises, like the gradual bloating of a balloon when air is blown into it, and then it exceeds what it can bear, and could only contain so much.

Another tear rolls down my cheek.

“You should seriously stop crying,” he says, with a faint vestige of annoyance on the edge of his tone. I turn to him.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” I say, curling back to my former position. I embrace myself, as if that could actually help. I try to hold back my tears, it slightly works, but what I need is comfort from another human being right now. I wish Bunhong was here. She would really know what to do with me. But then the realization dawns. While my lip is trembling, I look at Zelo who’s still looking at me with not even a single trace of concern. Why? I try to talk with him through what my eyes can say. Why can you not tell me it’s alright? Can’t you really feel what emotions are? Are you mocking me? Here I shut my eyes. My loathing towards him is nothing if not getting worse. Damn, I’m actually wishing he would hug me right now. A dozen other things run through my mind, all words of how much I want to hate him. But then I feel something light, air-light and cold—ice cold, even, poking my forehead.

It’s cold, really cold. I swear. “Why is your hand cold, Zelo?” I ask, like a child.

“It is?” he just chuckles, and removes it. He slips his hand back under his cheek. We stare, some sort of deeply, into each other’s eyes and after a mute minute he says, “Bad dream?”

“Very bad.” I answer, and curl back up again.

“What was your dream about?”

They say that upon ten minutes after waking, ninety percent of the dream is forgotten. Sometimes this applies to me, sometimes it doesn’t. The more horrible a dream is the less do I remember, but it comes back later, a few hours after I wake up.  “I don’t exactly remember. But it was scary.”

“Was it a nightmare?”

“A nightmare.” I keep my eyes closed, and sniff. “But I’m quite sure you were in it.”

It takes him a lengthy moment to speak again. “What was I doing there?”

“I don’t remember.” I mutter. “But it was really, really scary.”

“Good thing you still woke up.”

“Sure I have.” I want to sleep again, maybe to come back where my dream had stopped.

“Are you going to school today?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t.”

“Why?”

He doesn’t answer until I open my eyes, and look at him. “I don’t need to, Heebin.”

I knit my brows, still thinking of whether I should prod on, and ask more. I turn in my position and lie prostrate, supine. I look at the sky; it’s gotten much lighter than it was a moment ago. “What time is it now?”

“Six o’clock.”

I sit up straight and fold my legs in a pretzel shape. I clutch my feet with both my hands.

“It’s pretty,” he remarks, rising as well. “Many people want to see the sun set. But I think sunrise is better. It feel