Part One
The Painter
The gentle sounds of a piano drifted through the room, the sweet voice of a women audible behind it as she sang in a line of notes, her fingers pressing against the sleek keys of her instrument. I had always found this song quite soothing - the words always seemed to have had this calming and serene nature to them that managed to cool me down when I was most upset or angry. Ever since my mother had sang it to me when I was a child, I found myself turning to it whenever I needed to cool my head, calm my thoughts from the troubles that I was having.
I even found myself singing it softly during the end of year exams once, at a time when I didn’t know the answers, when I felt most vulnerable because I knew I was going to fail if I didn’t write anything down. The words seemed to have found their way to me and I sat there for a few moments, glancing with curiosity at the peers that sat around me while the lyrics slipped from my lips. The answers to the questions followed soon after, my pen scribbling against the page urgently until we were told that our time was finished. I passed the exam in the end. Thanks to the song, of course.
Now, I chose to listen to it for another reason. It kept me company as I brushed the paint along those sheets, my eyes staring out of the window every few moments as I captured the sunset in my eyes before glancing down at the canvas in my hands. It was a repetitive task, looking out of the window before capturing what I saw on the page. Many people seemed to ask me if I found it boring, drawing and painting all of the time, but how could it have been if I was accompanied by the music?
I was an artist. I loved to draw and paint what I saw before me, and I always seem to have found myself scrambling for a sheet of paper whenever I found something that looked worthy of my time to draw it out onto the page. And, if I didn’t have enough time to do that? Well, then I took out my camera and captured it in there for later. It was essential to me to always have those three things - a pencil, paper and my camera - I never knew when I was going to need them and well, I felt bare without them with me, as if they were a part of me that I always need to have, like my clothes or air and food or water.
We lived in a small town an hour away from the city, my father and I. My father had bought a house there for my mother - the doctor had told him that it would have been better for her to be away from the pollution and the bustling atmosphere that the city had to offer, saying that she would live longer in a place where the air was cooler and fresh, where she would be able to relax in the calmness and the serenity that a place like this would have to offer. It was a large house, I remember it well, with an oak door that you could still smell the forest from if you pressed your nose against it, and a fireplace where we burned logs of wood and the fire sizzled upon it while the smoke drifted up and out of the chimney. Mother and I used to roast marshmallows when the fireplace was lit during the winter and we would make smores while my father complained that they weren’t good for my mother’s health.
The thing I remembered most though was the Oak tree out in the field in front of the house. We hung a tyre swing on it the first summer that we lived there - I remember the day vividly. We tied the rope onto one of the stronger branches of the tree as tightly as we could while the tyre hung from it. My mother suggested that I should go and try it out, sipping lemonade out of a glass with an umbrella in it. Her head was covered by the summer hat with the large pink rose on it, casting a faint shadow upon her face. I did as I was told and climbed onto it. It swung for a few moments, my mother laughing as she watched the amusement upon my face, and for some strange reason, the rope we used wasn’t strong enough and it broke. The tyre swing broke while I was swinging on it and it dropped to the ground, taking me captive in the process. I can’t really remember what happened next - I had hit my head pretty badly in the fall - but the doctor was called out from the city to our house and my father wasn’t very pleased. I suppose the thing I remember most about that day was the way my mother laughed, I hadn’t seen her so happy since before she had became ill, and it was just so nice to see her so happy for once, not frail and tired like I had grown to know her to be.
Mother died one year after we had arrived at the house. The same doctor that had tended to me that day came to our house when my mother wouldn’t wake up from her sleep, despite the many times I tried to shake her awake and call out to her. He announced something to my father within five minutes of his arrival and I remember my father crying out to her hysterically as the doctor put the blanket up over her head. I was too young at the time to realise what was actually going on and I didn’t understand anything until my father had explained it to me.
I was eight years old the day she died. It was my birthday.
We never went back to the city after that. Father said it had too many memories, painful memories that he couldn’t go back to. I suppose he couldn’t go back because he had met my mother there, they got married there, she gave birth to me there. He couldn’t go back to a place that only reminded him of her. I didn’t know how that house could have been any better for us to stay in since it too had memories of her inked within the walls and contained within each part of the house. I didn’t know how it could have been better if she had even died there, but I couldn’t make a judgement on my father’s choice and of course he wouldn’t have listened to me. He always said I was too young to understand anything properly.
So, we stayed in the town, and I didn’t seem to mind. It was quiet and serene, there was no danger or crimes as far as we knew, so it seemed like the perfect place for a child like me to be raised in. It was also the perfect place for my new found interest of drawing and painting to grow in. When I was 10, my aunt gave me a painting set for Christmas, suggesting that I should find a new hobby, and from there I travelled around the town, capturing the different sceneries onto the pages of my sketchbook and later the painting canvases that father bought for me when I had finished too many sketchbooks to be able to count.
He thought it was the best way to keep me preoccupied and out of trouble, knowing that the more occupied that I was, the less able I would be to get involved with any troublesome kids in the class and join a gang or something along those lines. And it worked in his favour. I spent more time painting and drawing than conversing to anyone that I had became somewhat a loner, cooped up in my room busy with a new painting. I did have a few friends, two to be exact, Sehun and Kyungsoo, but I wasn’t all that interested in being friends with them since they had befriended me themselves.
I wasn’t interested in getting to know anyone until the year I turned 18.
I was painting the sunset behind the Oak tree one night in late July, an array of reds and oranges flooding the night sky as the sun slowly moved across the horizon. The scene in front of me grew darker with each passing second and I didn’t think I was going to have enough time to finish the painting before the scene disappeared and I would have to wait until the following night. My hand reached into my backpack and I searched through it for a few moments before I pulled it out and grasped the camera tightly within my fingers. I held it out in front of me for a few moments, opening my window a little wider so the window panes didn’t get in the way of my view, before my finger urges to the shutter and I pushed the camera forward.
Then, just as I captured the picture, a shadow appeared within my scene. The shadow was running past the Oak tree, their body swiftly moving against the sunset as their feet crunched upon the fallen leaves upon the grass. I was watching them, for some reason, my eyes following every step, every movement, every swish of fabric that was made as they ran past my house in the distance. And once they were gone, I wanted to keep watching them, watch until they stopped moving.
I didn’t know why I was so drawn to the runner that night, why I was so drawn to them that I left my painting lying aside as my eyes followed them. I had never found myself being so interested in something other than my art and I didn’t know whether that was a positive thing, for my interest to be drawn elsewhere.
I continued with the painting once my distraction had disappeared, following the colours and lines upon the small screen in my camera. My brush dipped into the different shades and mixed to form new colours, the paint dripping from the rough bristles onto the page as I dabbed softly into different areas of the canvas. I found the scene that I had been watching minutes earlier come back to life on the canvas before me, squinting my eyes every few minutes as my drowsiness beckoned me to go to sleep. I stifled the yawn escaping my lips as my eyes closed for prolonged periods of time, the seconds solemnly ticking away on the clock behind me.
“Jongin,” a voice called out to me some time later, when I felt the sleep clawing at me most intensely. My bedroom door creaked in the backdrop and I realized that the only light in the room was from the small lamp I kept on my desk, casting a faint glow upon my surroundings. I turned my head slightly to the door, the brush continuing along the painting as I upon it endlessly, my wrist beginning to ache.
“Jongin, it’s one in the morning. You should go...” My father spoke, his last few words hushing into silence as a yawn managed to escape his lips, though I knew what he wanted to say.
I turned and glanced at him as he turned away from the door, slowly leaving the room before he could hear a response. The door closed a few moments later, and I couldn‘t tell whether he was actually worried about my well-being or if he wanted me to turn off the light so I wouldn‘t use up too much electricity and increase the cost of the bill.
“I will. I’m almost finished.”
…..
I don’t know when I went to sleep that night. I can’t seem to remember when I decided to put my painting down and retire to my bed, but somehow I ended up between the sheets of my bed as the painting I had been working on sat upon the easel, the different colours lying untouched in a tray upon my desk, the brushes strewn along the floor. My head ached when I got up and I still felt a drowsiness within me as if I didn’t get enough sleep that night though the light was shining brightly, the rays streaming through the windows and into my room.
When I looked at my painting, it was seemingly finished. My fingers brushed along the smoothness of the material against the canvas, the colours dancing together as they blended against each other in perfect harmony. The painting was perfect, exactly how I would have wanted it to be. And then, in the corner, I noticed something that I didn’t remember adding the previous night. The runner had found their way into my painting, just as they had in the picture I had taken, a black shadow against the reds and oranges. I couldn’t help but feel a smile tug at the corner of my lips as I noticed it.
I sat in the same place that night as I had the night before, reading the book that we had been given for our English assignment over the summer. My eyes scanned over the pages, following the lines of words before I lifted the corner and to the next one and the one after. The process continued for at least an hour or so before a strange sensation started growing within me. I felt an urge to look up, my eyes staring at the scene behind the glass windows. They were there again, running past the Oak tree at exactly 9:05 pm, and I couldn’t help but watch as their body moved so perfectly against the beautiful scenery.
Throughout that summer, each night after the first time I had seen them, the runner ran past the Oak tree, past my house, while I watched from my bedroom window. I waited for them to come, leaning my elbows against my desk as my eyes stared out through the glass, and when they ran past at 9:05, my lips would curl into a smile and I would watch them until they disappeared from my line of sight. Call me a stalker, a weirdo, but I had a strange infatuation, a strange fascination with that runner that I couldn’t find the words to explain. There was something about them that seemed to draw me in, something that made me want to go outside and start a conversation with them.
I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to watch them run past and I always found myself sitting at my desk at 9pm, waiting for them to pass by. Some nights, I wanted to urge myself to go outside, maybe sit under the tree and wait for them there, say ‘Hello’ when they ran past. I never did wait for them outside. I stayed hidden from them in my room and I would be merely a stranger to them. I would never know the runner, and the runner would never know of the painter that enjoyed watching them as they ran past his house. It probably seemed quite tragic that I could never build up the courage to speak to them, but that was just my nature. I was never good at getting to know people and I never wanted to know anyone until I saw them.
Days passed and summer started to leave us behind. I painted throughout the season and without school or homework to get in my way, I managed to complete more paintings than ever before. I may have spent too much time by myself though, with only the piano song to keep me company quite pathetically. Sehun and Kyungsoo managed to convince me to go out and see a movie or two in the theatre and fish in the lake on the outskirts of town, so my summer didn’t pass without any socialism with my peers. I didn’t actually join them as they fished for the salmon that swam through the clear waters of the lake though - I sat on the lush vegetation and painted for the duration of the day. The two of them didn’t seem to mind too much and they became subject to a few of the paintings that resulted from that trip. There was one where the two of them sat side by side, staring into the water, shoulders slouched after sitting there for an hour without having caught any prey. I decided to call it ‘The Fishermen.’
There was also another painting, one of my favourites from the entire summer. Kyungsoo, after holding out the fishing pole for three hours unsuccessfully, had finally managed to catch a fish. He pulled it in rather quickly, the excitement rushing through him as he spun the wire back, and once he caught it in his hands, there was just this look of utter achievement upon his face, a smile of complete glee lingering upon his lips and I don’t think I had ever seen him so happy. I took out my camera and snapped a picture of him holding that fish, quite a large one to be exact, in his hands. I decided to paint it a few days later and spent the entire day trying to finish it. It was later called, ‘Three Hours’ and I think it shows a message that you should never give up because there is always something waiting for you at the end of the journey - Kyungsoo’s journey may have been the endless fishing trip that seemed worthless after waiting for so long with no luck, but he was lucky in the end and I think that is what matters most. He had the patience to continue sitting there, he didn’t give up like a coward. I’m not sure if one painting would manage to depict all of that but if it did for me then I asume that was more important than what anyone else thought.
Actually, now that I look back to it, the painting that I drew that night was probably my favourite one. The painting of the sunset where that stranger ran across the horizon. I wouldn’t be able to give you a reason and I don’t know exactly why, myself, that the painting was my favourite. It just was. There was something about it that always seemed to make me smile whenever I looked at it, even a slight glance could cause a grin to appear across my lips. It was special, maybe just because I had never planned on it looking that way.
We returned to school a few weeks after the fishing trip and in the days prior, we spent most of our time rushing to finish off the summer assignments that we had been given knowing that we would be in so much trouble if they weren’t completed on time. The teachers at my high school weren’t the strictest of teachers but if they had set a deadline for something then it had to be finished, otherwise there would be consequences. I had learnt that the hard way, forgetting an English Report once due to the fact that there was an art contest deadline for the same day and the painting was seemingly more important to me than an 2000 word essay on why the character of Jay Gatsby was admirable while having a fair share of flaws.
……
“We haven’t seen you for weeks. Where have you been hiding?” Sehun asked in surprise, draping his arm around my shoulder as I shoved the doors to the school open on entrance. He asked that as if he didn’t already know what I had been busy with, as if they both didn’t already know of the wondrous adventures of my summer.
“Come on, Sehun. We both know that he has probably been finishing off his paintings,” Kyungsoo shot him a look of disbelief, brows knitted together with surprise at how moronic Sehun could be sometimes. I couldn’t really believe it either. Kyungsoo and I both knew that Sehun did struggle in school most of the time, he was dyslexic and had a short attention span so he couldn’t really pay attention in class, but I thought he would have been able to tell what I would have been doing since in the ten years that we had known each other, most of the spare time that I had, I spent with my art. Maybe he was just kidding around with us but the way that he looked at me, as if I had abandoned him or something over the summer, was quite strange.
“Oh yeah. I forgot that you liked to paint.”
“How could you forget? He was painting on the fishing trip.”
“Oh yeah.” Sehun nodded his head in remembrance, a cheesy grin becoming visible on his face as if he was mocking his own stupidity.
I stopped off in front of my locker before the bell rang for our first class, held my bag out in front of me and started unloading books that I knew I wouldn’t need. There was no way I would have been able to carry all of that for hours on my back all day, no matter how strong I thought my shoulders were. It was as if the faculty thought that we were all athletes with the amount of textbooks and jotters we were given each year, which would only pile up as the semester progressed. I decided to only take my Chemistry textbook ,which was worn at the corners and graffitied with age, the pages yellowing and words fading, a notebook that too had been grafittied by inappropriate pictures that Sehun had decided to draw to spite me after I had indirectly insulted him and my sketchbook.
“So how many paintings did you manage to finish over the summer?” Kyungsoo asked, leaning his back against the neighbouring locker. The lockers had been freshly painted over the summer and retained a vile stench of a strong chemical concoction that made my nose wrinkle in disgust.
“I lost count after about 10.” I pinched the tip of my nose as if it would be able to block the strange smell from travelling through my nostrils again.
“Really? What are they like?” He asked, glancing up at me with a glimmering fascination within his eyes.
Kyungsoo was one of the only people that had ever seemed genuinely interested with my artwork. He admired my paintings whenever he saw them and would always try to attend any art shows that my work was being displayed at. He managed to find something within the paintings, see them not as sheets of paper with colours splashed upon them, but as stories, stories hidden between mixtures of paints and colours. I think Kyungsoo would have liked to have become an artist if he had had the chance, or a writer even, but he had never been good at it, painting or writing and so he gave up almost entirely. He wanted to bring meaning to life, allow people to search for the hidden messages within his work but he couldn’t do that so he supported others who did, other people like me.
“There are so many of them that I can’t even remember what exactly they are like.” I shrugged my shoulders and directed my eyes forward, finding myself staring at a jumbled mess of letters and sheets of paper plastered upon the wall, advertises for different sports teams and events.
“Maybe I’ll drop by sometime and come to see them.” He heaved a sigh, dropping his shoulders before the bell rang in the backdrop. It echoed into the distance for a few moments before it hushed into silence and the hallway became full with the voices of excited peers rushing to their first class of the semester.
I bid Kyungsoo goodbye and told him I would meet him sometime later, asking him to save me a seat at lunch just in case I wouldn’t be able to tell him before then. He turned in the opposite direction and dragged his feet in the direction of his Calculus class while I headed towards Chemistry.
I didn’t realise until later that day, probably around lunch, that Sehun had gone missing that morning while I was talking to Kyungsoo, unaware that he wasn’t with us as the bell had rang and we went off to our separate classes. We later realised, when he ran over to us at lunch in excitement, that he had gone off to talk to one of the new exchange students from Maine and apparently didn’t have enough time to tell us that before he had chosen to disappear in pursuit of them. Sehun had reached that point in his life where girls were more important than everything else in his life and he had already managed to be in several relationships in that one year, ending each one of them when he realised that the girl he was with at the point didn’t meet his requirements and expectations, and everyone knew that Sehun Oh had lost his ity a long time ago.
Kyungsoo once said that I could probably be as popular as Sehun if I tried to get to know people more, if I conversed with them more often and cared about what they would say to me, cared about what was happening around me. He said that I was handsome enough to capture the hearts of the girls if I stopped hiding behind my artwork all of the time and uncovered myself to the world just as Jongin and not Jongin, the painter. I didn’t really understand what he meant by this since I had never thought of myself as being handsome before - I had too much hair that it was often unruly and curled at the ends and it was such a boring colour, a darker shade of brown that sometimes it almost looked black. My lips were too big, my eyes too small, my skin so dark as a result of the days I spent outside endlessly as a child. No, I didn’t understand what Kyungsoo meant at all.
The day ended like every other day that I had ever spent, painting in my bedroom. Somehow, I struggled to get to sleep at nights when I didn’t paint, when I didn’t have the time to spread the colours against the canvases. I hummed the tune of the song as it lingered in the backdrop, staring intently at one of the newer images that I had taken that day on the miniscule screen in my camera. At impulse, my head raised up, eyes tearing away from the screen as I stared out into the darkness. I waited there for a few minutes, a few minutes which turned out ten as I waited impatiently for the runner. They never came that night, and I couldn’t help but wonder why they didn’t. I couldn’t help but worry about their welfare, worry that there was something wrong, that they were ill. I couldn’t help but feel a range of emotions for someone that I didn’t know, someone that I had only seen throughout the summer, someone that was only an enigmatic silhouette that tore through the night air.
……
I didn’t see them again until early November, when the seasons were ready to change places from Fall to Winter.
The weather had become bitterly cold in a matter of days. My summer raincoat switched to a heavy winter jacket made from the thickest of fabrics. My lips started to become so dry and chapped that I had to start wearing lip balm, which I put on in secret to avoid anyone from seeing me and thinking that I was wearing lip gloss. It did smell quite pleasant though that sometimes it almost seemed quite edible. The tips of my fingers reddened with the coldness of the winter air and I was forced to wear the gloves that my grandmother had knitted me for the previous Christmas. They were unfinished when she had handed them to me packaged in sheets of silver wrapping paper, which glistened beneath the lights in the dining room - the left glove was missing the index finger and the right glove didn’t have a thumb. She had left a space for them but it seemed like she had forgotten to finish them, or more likely she forgot that she had to buy me a gift and decided to knit me a pair of gloves in the 4-hour journey from Vermont to our house in Michigan. That would probably explain the loose threads and messy stitching. Though I wasn’t exactly a self-conscious person that cared about what other people thought of me, I didn’t really want to wear those gloves in public. I didn’t want to myself seem stranger than people already thought I was.
I tried to leave the house as quickly as I could that morning, before father would be able to remind to take the gloves. I shoved my breakfast down my throat, washing it all down with a glass of orange juice that was too warm to be considered drinkable, as if it had been left out overnight. Before father was able to walk downstairs, I had escaped from the confines of my house, struggling to pull my jacket over my shoulders as my bag swung precariously within my hands. I didn’t even spare a single moment to look back at the house as I left, knowing that the more that I delayed, the quicker my father would be able to find me. Somehow, I wasn’t fast enough that morning. He found me just as I had reached the Oak Tree. I tried to keep walking as he ran over to me, and before I knew it, the gloves were shoved into my hands and I couldn’t escape from them. I didn’t have anywhere to hide them either.
Sehun saw them as I opened my locker that morning, falling out of my hands as I spun the dial and out into the hallway. He lifted them up and stared at them, his nose wrinkling in disgust before a laugh escaped his lips and he was jeering at me, at the gloves my grandmother had knitted for me. I felt my cheeks reddening at the sounds of his mocking, I wanted to bury my head in the ground, run away and hide before they could find me. You never would have thought that something so miniscule like a pair of gloves could cause such embarrassment for someone, but somehow, it did for me. It was something that not even I understood at the time, not until some time later.
I had too many assignments and too much work to finish that I didn’t have time to paint that night. Father had gone to New York for a few days for some presentation that he had to give for work so I was left to my own devices, left alone in the large house in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t seem to mind the fact that he wasn’t there though - I had more freedom, a world of peace and serenity that he couldn’t disturb. Ever since my mother had died, we had grown further and further apart with each second that passed, so much so that there was a large distance between where we stood. It was so far that I hadn’t been able to see him for so long, the distance was too large, and it would take months to walk back to a place where I would be able to see him. He didn’t understand me anymore and every moment I spent with him, it only seemed as though he was infuriated with my actions, always so angry with me that we couldn’t spend two minutes together without him making some kind of comment about me. It was in those times that I seemed to miss my mother most. I wanted her to protect me, but she was no longer able to.
A storm was brewing outside my window, the rain battering against the glass so rapidly that I began to worry that it would smash at the extent of the force. Flashes of lightening sliced through the night air, tearing through the clouds as the sparks of electricity flew across the scenery. The thunder arrived shortly after, rumbling in the distance and I could swear that I could hear dogs whining in amongst the sounds, as if it was crying out to it’s owner to save it from the frightening weather. I felt sorry for anyone who was trapped outside in that kind of weather, becoming soaked in the rain, becoming prey to the lightning’s rays.
I turned up the sound of the music, but could still hear the sounds of the storm beneath it, and I started to lose focus. There was only so much distraction that I could take and the storm didn’t seem to make any of that better. It was like it was intentionally trying to take me away from my work. I lowered my head, focusing my eyes on the words scribbled against the page in my hurried haze in class, words that were no longer readable. A few moments later, the bulb in my desk lamp started flickering and before I knew it, the light was gone. The storm was interfering with the electrical lines and I didn’t know where father kept the emergency switch in the house.
I glanced at my wristwatch from the corner of my eye, struggling to tell the time in the absence of the light. My eyes squinted, as if it was able to make anything better, and obviously, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Somehow, though, I was able to tell that it was 9:05, without having read the time from my watch. Something else was telling me. It was as if my mind still thought that the runner was going to run past the Oak tree, past my house though I hadn’t seen them in months and it was impossible that anyone would be outside in such weather, let alone running in the middle of nowhere.
I was wrong, and I had never been so glad to be wrong in my whole life.
I stared out into the darkness, searching for the Oak Tree in the midst of the rain and lightening. The branches had been stripped of their leaves weeks earlier, leaves which had been strewn across the grass in the storm after I had been told to rake them the night before. There was someone sitting beneath it, crouching under it as if it would have been able to give them shelter from the storm. They were yards away but I could tell that they were shivering as the wind swept around them, and something inside me was telling me that I should have let them come inside. I didn’t know if they had noticed the house with so much rain thundering against the ground, storms of wind blowing through the air around them, but I had a strange feeling in my gut to go out there and bring them inside. A few moments later, that was what I did.
I went out, after taking some time struggling to find my coat and a flashlight within the darkness of the house. My fingers tightened around the smoothness of the door handle, the sounds of the storm audible behind the door. When I opened it, I knew that I too had become a victim of the storm’s onslaught but that didn’t seem to make me go back inside and before I knew it, I had taken a step forward, followed by another and then another until I was yards away from my house. The rain was thundering against me, I was struggling to see anything within so many droplets of liquid that were crashing at the ground and I could feel my fingers becoming numb. In time, I would have become just like that runner, trapped out in such miserable weather.
“Are you alright?” I called out to them once they were in view. My eyes locked onto them, hoping that if I focussed on them, I wouldn’t be able to lose them within the darkness and miserable weather.
They lifted their head, scanning their eyes over the surroundings as if they were searching for the source of the sound. “I’m fine.”
I took another step towards them, my feet crunching upon the leaves strewed upon the grass as the sound became masked by the storm. But somehow, they had been able to hear it and turned their head in my direction. I couldn’t see their face though, I couldn’t see the face of the runner that seemed to have managed to capture my attention each night they ran past, but for some reason, I could tell that the mysterious person I had been watching was a girl. I don’t know how.
“Do you want to come inside? I live just over there,” I point my hand in the direction of the house, “It doesn’t seem like the storm is going to lighten up for a while.”
Her head tilted down, the voice slipping out of her lips so quietly that I struggled to make out the words she had spoken, “I hurt my ankle. I can’t move.”
I don’t know at what point I started to feel sorry for her - the part where she was trapped out in the rain or the fact that she couldn’t move to escape from the rain. I nodded my head a few times in understanding of her words, all the while wondering whether she actually knew the house had been there for the whole time yet she hadn’t been able to come over just because of her injury. Maybe I would have found her on my doorstep a while before drenched with the rain rather than finding them crouched beneath a tree while the rain continued to soak them. I wondered whether or not I would have been able to meet her so much earlier. I crouched down in front of her and told her to climb onto my back before rushing us both back into the warmth of the house.
…..
“I’m sorry it’s not very warm in here,” I apologised, lighting the match between my fingers, leaning forward to light the candles within the room, “The storm cut the electricity out and I have no idea where the emergency power switch is in this house.” They were only able to cast a faint glow on our surroundings but it was enough light for me to be able to see my guest properly.
“Its fine,” she replied, rubbing the strands of her hair within the folds of the towel I had managed to find in a closet upstairs.
I turned around, glancing at her slyly as she tilted her head downwards and tried to dry off the hairs at the back, her lips pursed. She had the brightest hair that I had ever seen, a pinkish-red that I was often able to find within the sunset. Girls in our town didn’t seem to dye their hair so it just seemed unnatural for someone to have suddenly decided to paint their hair in such a shade, and I became surprised thinking that I had never been able to see someone like that in school before, someone who stood out as much as she did, the pink standing out as a stark contrast to the paleness of her fair skin.
“It’s the hair, isn’t it? That’s why you’re looking at me like that, aren’t you?” she asked, tearing through the uncomfortable silence that I hadn’t noticed was within the air. “I could see you from the corner of my eye.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just… it’s so…” I trailed off, not knowing what else to say to her. I lowered my head, trying to avoid her as her head turned and her dark orbs were directed right upon me.
“Bright? Yeah, I know. My mother saw it earlier and she freaked out at the sight of me,” she replied nonchalantly, shrugging her shoulders as she lifted a hand and brushed her fingers through the damp strands. “She said girls look prettier when they stay simple, when they show off their ‘natural beauty’, whatever she means by that, not hiding behind a face caked in makeup.”
“That’s why you’re out here. Because you had a fight with your mother?”
“Yep,” she looked down at a bead of water that had dripped onto her hand, her voice so monotonous that it was as if there was no life within her, just a zombie. “How did you guess?”
“I’m good at reading in between the lines.”
I flashed a brief smile as she glanced up at me but all that was returned was an expression of pure blankness. There were no emotions within her face, as if she seemed completely disinterested with everything around her. I didn’t even know if she just looked like this naturally everyday since I hadn’t ever seen her before, though, I couldn’t help but feel as if there was something wrong that was causing her to be the way she was. No one could have been as monotonous as that girl was. I thought the runner would have been this amazing, interesting person within the shadow that I saw run past the first time I saw them from my bedroom window. The girl wasn’t anything like that. She just seemed so different from anyone I had ever met before, so strange.
“How did you know I was out there?” She asked almost soundlessly as I retired to the kitchen counter to make some tea thinking it would be able to heat us up after the excursion outside.
“I was studying and saw you from my bedroom window sitting under that tree,” I answered after a few moments, realising that I hadn’t yet help her treat her ankle that was supposedly broken.
“You go to the school?” She glanced up at me and I swear that I could see a slight interest glimmering within her eyes as our eyes met, a hint of disbelief within the tone of her voice.
I nodded my head, “Yeah, why do you ask?”
“I’ve never seen you around before,” she remarked, directing her eyes in the other direction as I leaned down to hand her the mug which was still scorching in heat despite allowing to cool for a few moments in the kitchen.
“Well I have never seen you around either.” I sipped my drink, my face wrinkling at the bitterness of the liquid. I began to judge how much sugar I had actually mixed in. “I’m Jongin.”
“Jongin? The painter guy?”
“How did you know?”
“I’ve heard about you. You’re like some kind of legend in the Art department. They say your paintings are amazing.”
For a brief moment, it seemed as if her façade had disappeared as she spoke to me, as if the initial view that I had of her was wrong and she was more than the monotonous person that I had began to think of her to be. Maybe there was something else to her that it would take time to drag out and I had to remind myself that this was the first time I had ever really seen her, the first time I had ever actually spoken to her. There is only so much that you can ever learn from someone the first time that you meet them, so there was still so much that I would have to learn before I could get to know someone properly. At that point, I didn’t know her. I didn’t know her at all.
I was never an arrogant person and I didn’t ever want to be one. “I don’t know about them being amazing but I’m quite proud of them, I guess. Do you paint?”
“Nope. I’ve got no artistic ability within me.” She blew the warmth of the air away, bringing the mug to her lips before taking a sip, her face wrinkling in the same way that mine did. She stuck her tongue out slightly, turning to me with her eyebrows furrowed in distaste. “What is this?”
“It’s tea.”
“Well, it’s the worst tea that I’ve ever tasted,” She turned her face away from the mug as if the scent wafting from it was as horrible as the taste. “How could you even consider that drinkable? It’s like you’re trying to poison me.”
That was the longest conversation that I had ever had with someone. Neither Sehun or Kyungsoo had ever managed to make me speak for as long as that girl had, and I don’t know how I didn’t notice the fact that the words that were once hidden between my lips were escaping from them as easily as the way I had managed to tighten them in for so long. And it was strange how I didn’t notice the whole time that I was talking to her that everything seemed just so easy to say, that the words could flow from my lips so simply, without any thought needed. It seemed like everything I had ever thought of my self was so false, like everything I once thought was difficult was not, and maybe I just needed someone to make me realise. Someone like her.
She left an hour later, once the electricity had managed to return to the house and she could call her mother, thinking that the initial shock she had had probably disappeared by that point and it was safe to return to her house. She carried her dampened clothes under her arm, shivering slight underneath the white shirt and black shorts that I had managed to find for her to wear as the lights of her mother’s car flashed within the darkness, and just as she was about to escape from the warmth of the house and into the rain, she turned to me and thanked me. I swear I could see a glimmer within her eyes and a slight smile tugging at the corners of her lips as she left.
I didn’t realise until some time after she had left that she hadn’t introduced herself, and in some ways, the runner still remained an enigma. Though I had met her, come into contact with her, spoken to her, there were still many things I didn’t know and obviously, those things would take time to learn. At that point, I was just hoping that I was going to have the chance to learn those things, that she wouldn’t be such a stranger to me anymore, that she could finally introduce herself to me.
…..
I saw her in school on Monday. I noticed her just as she was walking through the doors, that was probably one of the advantages of having a locker near the entrance, her fiery hair making her stand out like a sore thumb against the other girls. Her head was lowered, her eyes following the dust and the dirt as they swept against the ground, as if it could have helped her avoid the intense stares she was receiving from the rest of our peers. She had a book clutched in one hand, a Biology textbook, her bag slung over one shoulder as she ushered herself through the hallways and to her own locker. My eyes were locked on her for the whole time that she was in sight, and once she was gone, I couldn’t help but keep looking in that direction as if she would come back.
“What’s with that?” Sehun asked once she had completely disappeared.
“I agree, it is a bit overboard,” Kyungsoo nodded his head, glancing in the direction that she had left in before turning back to Sehun whose nose had wrinkled in disgust, eyes widened.
“A bit? Come on, who dyes their hair in this town, let alone dye it some colour like pink,” Sehun scoffed. “She must be some kind of weirdo. It’s a shame since she’s quite hot.”
Kyungsoo raised an eyebrow, “I don’t think her hair should change anything if you’re wanting to get into her pants or whatever you want to do.”
“It puts me off.”
For some reason, I couldn’t see what the big deal was. I couldn’t understand why everyone was so shocked by the brightness of her hair. Yes, maybe I had found it strange myself when I had first saw her, but I didn’t think it happened to change anything that I thought about her, I didn’t understand how it could symbolise anything else about her. Maybe, it was just my opinion, but I didn’t think the way that anyone looked changed anything about them.
“Since when has there been anything wrong with deciding to change your hair colour?” I asked, almost infuriated by the way that they were talking about her. “Everyone has the rights to do what they want. You shouldn’t just judge someone just because of something like that.”
They both turned at the exact moment and looked at me with confusion scrawled upon their faces. I could feel the anger boiling inside me and it took me a while to regain my composure. I just couldn’t stand the ignorance of people sometimes and it seemed like the people in our time were always quite ignorant in a way. The first time they saw something different, they would jump up and just say things. When they heard a piece of gossip, they would share it and it would spread like wildfire across the whole town. I had experienced that at first hand, when my mother had died. There were so many eyes, eyes that seemed to always pity me, so many voices of people offering their regrets though they had probably never even known her, so much falseness that I found difficult to escape from.
I knew how it felt for everyone to stare at you, treat you differently. I didn’t know her all that well but I didn’t want her to go through the same thing that I had so long ago. I didn’t want her to go through that torment.
I didn’t see her around for the rest of the day. It was like she seemed to have disappeared as I looked for her within the crowds of students that piled within the corridors, rushing to their next classes, shoving unwanted books into their lockers as if they were just piles of trash. She wasn’t in the cafeteria at lunch, at least I was pretty sure she wasn’t since I couldn’t see those strands of pink hair or those mysteriously dark eyes. I decided to wander around after I had finished lunch and see if I could find her, perhaps say ‘Hello’ and ask her how her day had been, as if I wasn’t such a stranger to her anymore. I couldn’t find her anywhere, as if she knew I was searching and was one place ahead of me, since I was pretty sure that my feet had carried me through the whole school and she wasn’t in one of the places that I had been in.
She, however, had managed to find me.
I was in Art department, finishing an assignment that I had for my art class. Everyone else had left, the bell had rang 20 minutes earlier, and the rest of my peers had fled the school grounds, leaving me isolated in Room 101. I didn’t seem to mind the emptiness, the loneliness though - I found it quite relaxing, especially after being suffocated in rooms of chattering people that seemed to endlessly find something to say. My earphones hung loosely from my ears that I was struggling to hear the sounds of the music flowing through them, but they still managed to be loud enough to block out the sounds of footsteps coming towards me, the sounds of an approaching person.
She placed her hand upon my shoulder, tearing me away from the trance that I had been put in. I turned too swiftly that the brush that was swinging loosely from my hand splattered paint droplets across the unfinished painting. I looked up to find her almost startled and worried that she had caused for it to happen, her teeth clenched, eyes widened.
“I’m so sorry,” she apologised almost immediately, her eyes searching around the room as if she could find some way to solve the problem.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” I reassured her, glancing down at my work from the corner of my eye. “It can be fixed - well, with time it can.”
“I didn’t mean to cause you any bother, it’s just that I was walking past and saw you in here. I just wanted to thank you for the other night and give you these.” The bag which was slung over her shoulders was suddenly in her hands and she rummaged through it before pulling out two neatly folded pieces of clothing, freshly washed that I could smell the fabric softener drifting through the air from it. She held them out to me and I took them from her hands.
“Uh, thanks…”
“Soojung.”
“What?” I asked in confusion, not sure if I had misheard what she had said as I heard the Korean name being spouted from her lips.
“My name is Soojung. Soojung Jung. I forgot to introduce myself to you the other night,” She replied simply.
Soojung. I had never heard a name so beautiful, a name that sounded so perfect as it escaped from her lips, that seemed to roll off of my tongue so easily. I could say her name so many times that I couldn’t grow tired of it. I could never grow tired of anything about her, as cheesy as that may have sounded to someone who had never felt something like that before.
I had never felt such emotions for anyone before and it was strange, strange that I felt like I wanted to get to know her more and I wanted her to know me more. I wanted her to be mine from that moment, to hold her in my arms and never let her go. I wanted to break through and find the real her, the girl beneath the pink hair and face hidden underneath layers of makeup. I wanted to find the emotions within her dangerously cold eyes and I would spend as much time as I had to to do so.
“This is beautiful,” The amazement glittered within her orbs as she leaned down, her eyes cast upon my painting as they followed through each part of it. “Did you really do this yourself?”
“Yep. I’m not smart enough to manage to steal someone else’s painting.”
A small giggle escaped from her lips, and I almost couldn’t believe that I was hearing such a sound from her. She didn’t seem like the person that I had met at first, the monotonous girl that I had found under the tree that night. She seemed like someone different, a good different, but still different. I started to think that I didn’t hear anything at all, as if I had only imagined the sound, but when I turned around, her hand was covered over and she was trying to clear , as if she wanted to hide it.
Her eyebrow raised in curiosity as she directed her eyes upon me. “What are you smiling at?” She looked down as if there was something wrong with her appearance before looking back up at me questioningly.
“Nothing.”
……
After that day, I found myself painting her, my brush leaving streaks against the blank canvas until it formed an image of her. I pictured her within my mind, sitting there with me that day, her elbow resting against the desk as she cupped her chin within her hand and slouched her shoulders in relaxation. I imagined a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, not a full, cheery smile where she flashed her sparkling teeth, but a contented smile lingering sweetly upon her lips. Her fiery locks hung upon her shoulders in tousled waves, standing brightly against the bleak white of the walls. She looked beautiful, as beautiful as I could have ever seen her.
I didn’t only paint her once though. I painted her many times, against many different scenes, in ranges of different scenarios. She was a prisoner, locked in a tall tower like Rapunzel, her hair hanging down by her side in a long braid while she looked out into the distance, frightened and afraid, hopeful that someone would come to save her. She was sitting upon the beach, the folds of her clothes housing specks of sand within them, as she dunked her feet into the water as if it could have saved her from the heat, waiting for someone to come and sit by her side. She was in a field, surrounded by lush greenery and flowers whose scent lingered sweetly within the air, and she was looking down at a single flower in her hand, a flower that had been gifted by a lover that had left her behind. There were so many, all of which had spouted from my own imagination. All but one.
I made sure that she never saw any of these paintings. I wouldn’t have been able to survive such an ordeal where she would come across them and she would laugh mockingly in my face. So I never brought any of them to school with me, knowing that she could have walked into the art room as I worked on it, and I kept them hidden when she came over to my house after requesting to see my paintings, my better paintings after she had ‘ruined’ the last one.
She was amazed when she walked into my bedroom and saw canvas after canvas coated in paint, looking through them so excitedly like a child that had just walked into a toy store. I had never seen someone so interested in my work except from Kyungsoo and I was surprised that I had managed to catch her interest. I was surprised that someone like her would have been interested in my paintings, that someone like her wanted to talk to me, wanted to be friends with me. It just seemed so strange.
She always managed to find me somewhere, whether it was in the Art Room at school while I finished off some work or outside on my lawn as I was forced to do my chores. I don’t know how she managed to find me or know that I was even there in the first place, but sometimes to it felt like every time I was alone, she appeared almost immediately, as if she would have been able to keep me company. That she did. She spoke to me, asked me things, and I seemed to do the same. slowly, I was getting to know her, and she didn’t seem to feel like such a stranger anymore. She was like a friend, but not the kind of friend that Kyungsoo and Sehun were. She was different, a secret friend.
Soojung avoided me during the day though. Whenever I walked past in the hallways and tried to say something to her, she would look away and ignore me, as if she hadn’t even noticed I was there. She seemed unwilling to talk to me in public, while there were people around, but once we were isolated, it was like she couldn’t find anything not to say. I didn’t understand why she was like this, why she never wanted to be seen talking to me in front of the rest of our peers. When there were people surrounding us, it was like she was ashamed or embarrassed to be seen with me and so, she walked away. It was like she didn’t want people to see her as a friendly or welcoming person that was on the inside, just the cold façade that she held in front of us all.
Kyungsoo and Sehun never seemed to have noticed anything. They didn’t notice the changes within me, the fact that I seemed to be talking to them a little more frequently than I used to, conversing with the two of them more, getting to know more people. They didn’t seem to notice any of it, but I do think Kyungsoo may have raised an eyebrow once or twice when I laughed with the two of them at a joke that Sehun had heard or said I would join them to the baseball game that weekend. He never said anything about it though, but I could tell that he did question my behaviour.
…….
The year was passing quicker than expected. It was already December, and while most people would have been excited about Christmas and the joy that the holiday brought, for Seniors, it was becoming evident that our time in high school was slowly coming to an end and we had to make serious decisions about what we planned to do for our future. College application deadlines were nearing so quickly that we didn’t have a single stress-free moment to spend, constantly worrying about the decisions that would affect us so much if we didn’t make them correctly.
I was applying to an art school, well quite a few to be exact - Madison, Carnegie Mellon and many more that ranked high upon my list. I was excited about the prospect of leaving the small town, a town that I hadn’t exactly managed to leave since I had first arrived there, and venture off into different parts of the country, experience new adventures, explore new places, meet new people. I was excited about the fact that I would be able to do what I loved most in the world for the rest of my life, in a place where people would be proud of the things that I did, proud of the paintings that I produced unlike the masses of people that surrounded me in the town.
The only problem with all of that, the only stress that managed to be placed upon me, the only thing holding me back, was my father. I hadn’t yet mentioned to him what my plans for school were and he hadn’t yet been able to ask me, primarily because every waking moment I spent in that house, he wasn’t there. But that wasn’t the only thing holding me back. I was sure that my father, like most other parents out there, wanted me to follow in his footsteps and enter the world of politics and law, perhaps work for the Town Council like he did. The issue that lay with that was that I didn’t want that kind of life. I didn’t want to follow in his footsteps or be like him. His job, to me, was boring and bleak. Who would want to live that kind of life? I, sure as hell, didn’t, but as some point I was going to have to face my problems.
“What are your plans for college?”
He sprung the question up on me one night at dinner, his utensils clashing against the glass plates as he raised his head and stared me in the eye. I didn’t know how to respond and I was pretty sure that he could smell the fear wafting from me and into his nostrils. I didn’t even know how we both managed to be in the same place at the same time, how we both managed to find our schedules intertwined that we were having dinner together, an Italian pasta dish that he had found on the internet and decided to try out.
“I’m not sure yet,” I replied, hoping that it was enough of a response to get him off my back so we could eat dinner in silence. Unfortunately, he wasn’t finished.
“Well, do you know what schools you want to apply to? You know, deadlines are due pretty soon.” He was saying all of this as if it was normal, as if this was just a normal situation for the both of us to be conversing with each other over dinner. It wasn’t normal though, not for me. It was far from normal, as if we had both entered a complex plane, an alternate universe where we somehow managed to get along. Sometimes, I tried to convince myself that if I had tried harder we would have got along so much better, if I tried to do the things he wanted me to do like try out for the Baseball team. I tried to convince myself that it was probably my fault that we were so distant from one another, but it wasn’t my fault and it never was. After mother died, it was him who started working extra hours in the office, who didn’t come home for dinner, who left me along in that large house. It was him, and at some point, he needed to know that. And I knew that I was going to have to stand up for what I wanted and tell it right to his face.
I raised my head, directing my eyes straight upon him as I cleared my throat. The words which would have normally been frozen between my lips escaped and I could never be able to take them back.
“I think I’m going to apply to an art school. Maybe Madison or Carnegie Mellon,” I replied, looking at him straight in the eye. “I’m still researching all of my possibilities.”
The shock washed over him, drowning out all of the other emotions on his face until it was all that I could see. Just shock, like he didn’t expect it to happen, like he didn’t expect those words to be said. “You’re what?”
“Applying to art school,” I repeated firmly.
“No. That is not happening,” He shook his head in disagreement, just like a child that was unwilling to do something. “I thought we both agreed that you were going to study Law and Politics.”
A chuckle escaped from my lips and echoed into the air around us. “You want me to study Law and Politics. I never wanted to.” I didn’t want someone else to force me to do things, I didn’t want to be anyone’s puppet, especially not my fathers. No, I would never want to let that happen.
“Jongin, you need to come back to reality. Are you ever going to get a job being an artist?” He asked a question that he already knew the answer to, that he didn’t need a response from me for. “No, it’s just a hobby.”
He was watching me, with that judgemental look that he always seemed to have in his eyes whenever he was with me. It felt like he was taunting me, cursing me with a future of being unsuccessful with the decision I would make to defy him. He was cursing me with a future where I would have to come back to him and plead for forgiveness because I had made the wrong choice and had nothing to make of it. I didn’t want to admit that I had made the wrong decision. Not yet. And I couldn’t handle being in the same space, sharing the same air as someone who was expecting me to fail. I stood up, leaving my cutlery idly on the table, my dinner untouched before carrying my weight across the room and out of the door.
“It might just seem like a hobby to you but it means everything to me,” I spoke almost soundlessly just as I walked past him, leaving the room behind.
“Well, don’t expect me to fund this delusion of yours.”
I left the house and escaped without a jacket or scarf to keep me warm in the midst of the cold night air. The wind carried arctic breezes, washing them over me as I felt a shiver run along my spine and minute bumps appearing upon my numbing skin. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t know where to go, my feet carrying me away from the house, past the Oak Tree and into the distance, a place where father wouldn’t be able to see me from the comfort of the house, where he wouldn’t have been able to find me.
I ended up walking into the town, past the lake where had spent that summer day unaware of the approaching problems and decision making. My feet carried me through the different streets, past places which were isolated as everyone had fled to their homes in attempt to escape from the winter weather. I wished I was one of them, someone who could return to a warm and welcoming home where people would accept them for who they are, who would let them choose what they wanted to do. I may have been too melodramatic with the way that I had decided to deal with the situation between my father and I, but I knew there was no way he was going to accept me for who I was. It didn’t matter how I would tell him that, he was always going to want me to be something different, someone just like him, someone that I wasn’t.
The tips of my fingers reddened the further I went, numbing with the cold. I didn’t know where exactly I was or how long it had been since I had left. All I did know was that my body temperature had drastically decreased and I was freezing cold. I wished that I could have gone home, to bask in the warmth that was held in the air, but all that would have been waiting for me there was a man who would continue to dishearten me from the path that I had chosen.
I sat down on a bench, the coldness of the metal piercing through me as I slouched forward and rubbed my hands together as if the friction between the surfaces of my skin could have created some heat within me. I wanted to scream, yell, cry. I wanted my mother to hold me in her arms and tell me everyting would be alright, I wanted her to be with me and protect me like she used to. She had left me too early.
“What are you doing out here?” A voice asked in shock as I felt their presence whisk past me. Before I knew it, Soojung was sitting on the bench with me, staring at me so intensely that it felt she was burning holes through me. She reached forward and touched my hand and I felt my breathing grow heavier with each millisecond that she held onto me.
“You’re freezing cold,” she whispered almost soundlessly.
She scanned her eyes around our surroundings as if she was searching for something before she reached up and tugged at the scarf around her neck. The fabric felt warm as she wrapped it around me and I could smell a heavenly scent drifting from it. She held onto my hands as if she would have been able to make me warmer, looking at me reassuringly. I had never been so glad to see someone in my whole life.
After some time had passed, I started to tell her what had happened and she listened intently to my story, nodding her head in understanding. She said she understood how I felt, she understood a parents disappointment and couldn’t blame me for what had happened. She said I was brave for standing up to him. She reassured me that everything would be okay with time and I trusted her words. I, too, began to think that everything would be okay with time - I just needed to wait and see what fate had store in for me. I don’t know how long we were sitting there together, I don’t know how long she stayed with me, but she stayed and that was all that mattered. She cared enough to stay by my side.
At some point, I decided to go home. I walked Soojung back to her own house first, knowing that it wasn’t exactly safe for a girl to be isolated by herself no matter how nice we thought our town was. She waved me goodbye and told me she would see me at school, and I travelled back through the town, walking through those same paths that I had been across merely hours earlier to my house. He wasn’t awake when I walked through the door, he wasn’t waiting for me with unsaid words like I had been expecting him to. No, he was in his room sleeping the day away, and I was grateful, just grateful that there wasn’t anything else.
At some point I decided it would be better if this was split into two parts, especially since the word count and length kept growing and I realised that nobody could sit and read a 22,000 word one-shot in one go, so here's part one. Part two is almost there and I am concious that I am so over the deadline even though I got an extension but part two should be finished by tomorrow and if not then, then by Tuesday.
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