Sanity repels her. The candour she keeps coming up with because she seeks of every little chance to articulate what’s been prevailed before her eyes ever since. She wants to believe that she’s one of the chosen, the special one amidst the ordinaries, the one who is unique enough to have her words daunting the people around her.

Just like any invisible particle suspending in the air, just like how she can hear desperate voices begging for a second chance, her pair of clear doe-like eyes aren’t merely creation for nothingness. They are to watch and witness, they are to see what normal people can’t see. It’s the veil she believes which prevents a clear view of what they have yet to see. The shield that has been lifted up upon her from the beginning yet is still a hidden mystery for them who don’t believe.

Im Yoona can see ghosts.

Or phantom as they call it, or even lonely souls wandering the streets because repentances are holding them back to what it seems like eternity. They used to scare her but these days not anymore. She passed the early tests, the breaking down point because nobody believed this once terrified little girl back then. The times when she desperately clutched on to hands even those of the strangers because the sight scared her, the view she never wanted to envision, the sadness and grief of those desperate souls that kept haunting her every night. She’s never alone.

The clock’s ticking and it’s ten past two. She hasn’t gotten the luck to even bat an eyelid let alone put herself to sleep but something new, it is not. Im Yoona is nocturnal or at least she happens to turn into one but this doesn’t bother her anymore just as much as it doesn’t bother her befriending darkness and staring at those hollow eyes of the dead crouching around the floor every night. She has come to find company in those frosty invisible hugs and touches, the ones that suffocate her, the ones that don’t.

Yoona feels the chill seeping through her skin when the sole of her feet brush against the cold cemented floor, leaving the bed occupied by those of what people can’t see and decides it’s time to take a walk. The hours between midnight and dawn are particularly her favourite time and the black of the night is gradually becoming her preferential backdrop.

With a knit shirt on top of the cotton fabric, plugging of music and the world disappears behind her in every step she makes, within every breath she takes that is left hanging in the air. Yoona watches how each shoulder she bumps against dissipate into hazes and smokes, tears up over the whispers of the unfortunates, the view of a lifeless child with apparent scars on her body, asking for reasons Yoona can’t provide.

Throughout her life, all she does is listen. She’s not the storyteller, not the one who narrates even her own story because she believes she doesn’t own one. Her whole life revolves around the tales of the departed, her six senses that have come to adapt to the poignant voices telling her histories, pleading for explanations –reasons as to why death exists when all they truly seek for is happiness, a rationale on how a mother could bear the heart to kill her own child and even reasons to why God would allow an innocent soul of a teenage girl ended up with a slit over . The vivid strangulations aren’t the ones smothering her. It’s the stories that do.

Desiccated dry leaves detaching themselves from above the tree made of strength and nature, she allows the glimpse of a young man in plaid confines her vision. He stands, still as a stone underneath the darkness that coats his presence and silence when he returns a gaze back at her, expecting a similar stare of what she happens to bump into whenever –of despondency and despair. Im Yoona closes her eyes upon him because he’s not what she hopes he is. He’s just another ghost. This man is just another one of those miserable souls who will continue haunting her in every second of her arduous breath.

Her steps light and effortless when she walks off the gravelled path, heart in mind and cautious as she leaves midway to return back to where she begins because despite the utmost desire to flee, another chance of a glance gets her lodging on the same ground again. The breath that hitches to a peak, a sensation that catches her deliberation and this fire which burns through her skin when those cold fingers reach over the circumference of her fragile wrist, Im Yoona pauses her breathing.

Those eyes don’t exude anger and seethe but tranquillity when she fixes her gaze on his, the damp touch that doesn’t evaporate along the elements of the wind. She scans the physique that floats in front of her but acknowledges the contact of his feet to the earth’s ground and the way he shifts from one side to another within a blink of her eyes. He freezes time for her having his different aura lingering on her skin and when she turns away to leave, she fails to. He doesn’t have a story to tell, not even a word to say except for the silent bobbing of his head and those invisible circles he traces and finger snaps into the air.

“Who are you? What’s your name? What do you want?”

She utters the set of questions, completing the first part of her normal encounter with any soul. She expects truthful answers which will naturally take them to the next phase – night haunting and persistent whispers of regret. Ghosts don’t have patience, they just don’t and Yoona knows that better for the past ten years of handling them as a part of her life has taught her all the things unwritten in textbooks.

The five minutes interval lags between the contact of their eyes and fuzzy whimpers of his voice as if the words are stuck unable to be freely spoken. But Yoona learnt a lot back then; she reads mind clearly as easy as she sees the imperceptibles. His trembling eyelids and shortness of breaths exhaling white mists, she falls into his point of view. His hazy past, the resonating voices of his loved ones and a heart of no soul –she subjects herself to all of it.

Yoona awaits for the moment he’ll strangle her (like they always do) and whispers the desperate words while eradicating her conscience in the process but he closes in, he does yet he doesn’t murmur not even a syllable.
Kim Jongin is or was his name. (He doesn’t tell but she knows.)
It was a heartbreak which killed him. A pathetic life of one young man in the midst of the billions. He looked for warmth, looked for everything that could hold him back but there was none.

“The tree.” He barely speaks and Yoona engages herself to the restricted pain evaporating in the atmosphere.
A tree where he had his last memory of a childhood –the tree that came flashing before his eyes by the time the warmness of his blood dripped down from the slit skin of his wrist and life pulled out of his body.
Society killed the teenager, they say and perhaps it’s perfectly applied right now.

Because unfortunately, suicide kills no one. It’s the heartbreak that does.

Lonely, cold and lost; he hugs her. If he wants to tell, he will tell because Im Yoona always listens.
But this time around, maybe all he wants from her is just her presence. And someone who acknowledges his.