But every day,
I’m fixing myself to want you
I think my love
will endlessly continue

Luhan smiles at the old woman handing him a package of products and goes straight home. Honestly, he doesn’t know why he still does this – why he still pretends that she’s here every day when it’s obvious that she’s long gone.

Well, Luhan knows the answer. He believes we all do, the answer to our own questions. It’s just that maybe, we don’t want to admit it to ourselves or we don’t like the answer itself.

He wants her – badly and madly but that won’t change the fact that she’s gone now.

“Why do you always put so much stuff to your face?” he asks, waking up at six in the morning and already seeing her at the stool in front of their mirror. “At this early? Seriously?”

She doesn’t answer and continued putting some white cream on her face.

“Well, if you’re not going to answer me, I’m not going to ask anymore,” he continues, dragging himself out groggily out of their bed. “I will just say that I don’t like it. I don’t like seeing you look like a doughnut because you’re face is so white or a vampire who just blood out of somebody because you’re lips are so red.”

She still doesn’t answer hi and proceeds on the blood-red lipstick he is talking about.

“Hey, are you even listening to me?”

She is about to put lipstick on before he holds her hand, stopping her for motion and making her look up completely at him.

“Hey, are you even listening to me?” Luhan repeats.

“I am,” she answers softly.

“Don’t put too much makeup on,” he says, as if not having said the same thing to her before and as a matter of fact, so many times already. “It doesn’t look good on you.”

“Thank you,” she says, smiling at Luhan.

“I’m serious,” he insists when he lets go of her hand and she still puts on that blood-red lipstick.

“I know,” she looks up at him again and smiles. “Don’t I look beautiful?”

Luhan sighs in defeat and proceeds to their bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth because it will be another long day for him but before turning the knob, he looks at her again and says, “You know what? You look beautiful the most when you’re not wearing any makeup on, just the way you are.”

He closes the door and she bits her lips as her hands trembled, the memory of her older sister flashing back on her mind.

“When are you going to tell him? He deserves to know, you know that.”

“I know. It’s just that…”

“What? You’re going to wait until your face finally burns and you’ll look like a living corpse?!”

“I want to be beautiful for him until I die…”

He closes the box of beauty products he just bought, unminding of the truth that he has no one to give them to. Is this his fifth box? Or sixth? Maybe seventh? Luhan doesn’t remember and he truly doesn’t care because he’ll continue buying the same kind of products she used before she goes away, wishing to all gods in heaven that one day, he’ll run across her and he’ll be able to give it to her.

He ties a pink bow around the box and remembers her the last time he saw her, when her skin has decomposed on itself and her face is almost unrecognizable and her sister’s right, she really looks like a living corpse.

“Don’t look at me,” she cries, struggling to look at Luhan’s opposite side to hide her face. “I look like a monster! Please, don’t look at me!”

Luhan embraces her through besieged arms and kisses her burned forehead. “You’re beautiful,” he whispers to her. “You’ll always be beautiful for me and I’ll always love you no matter what.”

Three days before Christmas.