The next week, the first thing that people were whispering about was Hanbin coming back. And, he was, in fact, there, sitting in his normal place, with his legs stretched out in front of him, leaning on the table with his elbows. I glanced over at him. A swath of sunlight was falling across his face, and his earphones were on, his head bobbing slightly. A girl walked past me, then slowed as she approached near him. Hanbin didn’t stir, and she scurried on.

I’d once felt the same way about Kim Hanbin; that he was dangerous. Everyone did. But there was something about our daily proximity that had made me relax. I knew now he wasn’t a threat, at least not in the ways I’d thought then.

Apart from Hanbin coming back to school, everything carried on the way they usually did.

I spent the whole hour of my lunchtime at the library that day, revising for the upcoming astronomy exam. For me, it was easier to get lost in revision than to do the small talk. Studying was useful, while conversations usually led to nowhere. Nevertheless, in a place like high school, it was important to keep the balance between the two. So I endured.

“Sup, loner,” a familiar voice boomed from the opposite way. I looked up from my notebook to Kim Hanbin peering at me, holding a two-finger salute. His eyes looked tired—perhaps bored. I wasn’t sure which. “You’re studying well. Must be a lot of fun.”

“What made you come back?”

“The house got boring,” he explained, cutting it short. Then, he asked, “So, did you listen to my radio show?”

“I did.”

“Well? How was it?”

“It was okay,” I told him. “Honestly, I didn’t really expect you’d listen to music like that, you know? You’re a softie.”

He scoffed, and reached out to ruffle my hair. “It’s music for the insomniacs. For the ones like us,” he whispered. “But I listen to different kinds of music, too.”

“Great to hear.”

“You really do sound enthusiastic,” he said, pouting with just the hint of a smile.

“Are you here just to annoy me?”

“Hell no,” Hanbin replied flatly. “I’m here to pass time!”

I looked at him. “I don’t see the difference.”

A smile embraced his lips, then he just put his earphones on, laid his head on the desk and said, “Wake me up when the bell rings, will you?”

. . .

Autumn posted:

How can you tell, just by looking, if someone’s an insomniac? Would you have to be one yourself in order to know? Is it as easy as being able to tell if somebody’s broken or not?

I wonder.

. . .

“So what’s high school really like?” Soohyun asked me later that afternoon. She often came into my room and just laid in my bed whenever she was bored in hers. Not that I minded a lot, though. Soohyun’s presence alone was enough to brighten the place up. “All the things that you and Chanhyuk have told me is about the workload! But, how about the people? Are they nice? Will I fit in?”

“You’ll do okay,” I told her.

“I didn’t ask about that! I’m talking about the people.”

“You’ll do okay,” I repeated. “You’re great with people.”

Soohyun just sighed with a defeated look on her face. And then she jumped out of the bed. “You know, I think that you should take a break from studying sometimes. Mom and dad are more worried about you than you think.”

“I know.”

“Maybe you can come downstairs, too—and not only when it’s dinner time,” she said, sounding serious this time.

“I can’t afford to lose time, Soohyun. I’ll do so after my exams.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go bother someone else.” She smiled and left my room.

Sometimes, it really felt like there was a whole world living inside Soohyun.

I didn't know anything about that world.

. . .

The next topic we had to study in social education was suicide. The subject of suicide somehow got me thinking a lot.

“This term, we’ll be tackling suicide,” Mr Kim began. “A whole topic on suicide, that’s how important it is. Now, I’ll start off. Who here has ever felt suicidal? Hands up.” The whole class kept silent for a long while, and nobody owned up. Everyone was just turning their heads to see who had their hands up or not.

A boy called Junhoe shouted, “Does it count when you have to get up in the morning, sir?” Then, a few people laughed.

“I beg you to take this seriously. It’s a very sensitive subject,” Mr Kim dismissed. Everyone sat in silence again. “I don’t believe it. Not one single person in here has ever wanted to commit suicide? Not even the tiniest tinge of thought of wanting to be dead?”

For a short time, the whole class stirred and when I finally got to see why: it was Hanbin who had his hands in the air. Mr Kim gave him a fascinated look. “At least we have one honest person in this class.” A few more hands followed after that, and then more, and eventually everyone had their hands in the air—including Mr Kim. “Which brings me to my next question,” he said, while writing a big ‘why?’ on the board. Throughout the next forty minutes of the whole lesson, Mr Kim explained how our country had one of the highest rate of suicide, and reasons as to why people did it.

Depression. Loss of hope. Bullying.

I was neither any of those. Then, I wondered if emptiness was a factor of suicide, too.

I hoped not.

. . .

“Hayi!” a voice shouted behind me. The rain made it hard for me to hear, but I could just barely make out that the voice was Hanbin’s. No one ever said my name in the same tone as he did. “Wait up!”

“What?”

He paused to catch his breath, and then he hovered an umbrella over my head. “Are you really walking home in this weather?”

I shook my head. “Just to the bus stop.”

“Take it,” he said. “My umbrella. Can’t you see that rain is pouring down like hell?”

The rain did pour down, and kept pouring. “As much as I’d love to—I can’t. Not from you.”

“You’re a stubborn one, aren’t you?” Hanbin scoffed. “Then at least let me walk you to the bus stop.”

“It’s far from here.”

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

“Hanbin—”

“I can’t let my only friend catch a cold from the rain, because that means I’ll have no one to annoy at school! So let’s hurry! The rain is getting cold as .”

What a funny boy, I remember thinking that time. How could he call someone his friend so easily? 

“Do you mind if I ask you something, Hayi?”

I joked, “I should really remember to bring my umbrella to school next time.”

“Are you okay?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Look,” he said cautiously, “I see you in class, with your friends, and you’ll sit there staring into space—completely uninterested in what your friends are saying—and then you’re suddenly laughing, like you were listening the whole time when we both damn well know that you’re not. I think ‘where have I seen this before?’”

“And?”

“My sister,” he replied. “Well, I’m not really sure what you call your dead sister. Is there, like, a past tense for that?”

Silence.

“My dead sister.”

He laughed softly. I wasn’t quite sure whether it was appropriate at the time, so I kept silent instead. “You act like she used to a few weeks before she committed suicide. I mean sometimes people can’t help it, you know? Spacing out and all. Pretending. It’s just you do it a lot.”

“Is it because we studied signs of suicide today that you’re asking me this?” One of the signs were: frequent spacing out. I tried to release the dark tension in our conversation, I think it worked because then, Hanbin looked at me with a smile.

“Partly,” he admitted.

“I daydream a lot and my friends talk about boring things. That is all there is to it.”

“I guess that’s what I thought.”

We walked the rest of the way side by side. And then he waited with me at the empty bus stop even though I told him that I was okay waiting by myself. “There’s a lot of creepy men in these kind of streets,” he told me.

We sat down on the bus stop seats, and watched the rain fall down, ten inches away from our bodies.

“What happened,” I asked him finally. “With your sister? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“It’s okay. And who the hell knows,” he said after a while. “She surrounded herself with plenty of friends, went to parties a lot, and got good grades on top of that. Then, one night, she just… she just ended it—her life. Two bottles of sleeping pills did the job. There she was, completely okay one day, then dead on the next. Isn’t that weird, huh?”

“We all say we’re okay. Not all of us are, though.”

Hanbin looked at me. “Not me. I don’t lie.”

“So you’re always honest,” I said.

“Aren’t you?”

“No,” I told him. This came so easily, so quickly, it should have surprised me. But for some reason, it didn’t. “I’m not.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s good to know, I guess.”

“I’m not saying I’m a liar,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. “That’s not how I meant it, anyway.”

“How’d you mean it, then?”

I was digging myself a hole here, and I knew it. But still, I tried to explain myself. “I don’t always say what I feel.”

“Why not?”

“Because the truth sometimes hurts,” I said.

“Yeah,” Hanbin said. “So do lies, though.”

“I don’t…” I said, then trailed off. “I just don’t like to hurt people. And sometimes, I won’t say exactly what I think, to spare them that.” The ironic thing was that saying this out loud was actually the most honest I’d been in ages.

“A lie’s still a lie,” Hanbin said, “even if you mean well.”

The real truth, I realized as the rain wore on, was that even though I hardly knew Hanbin, I’d actually been more honest with him than anyone else in a long time.

. . .

do you love me still // 

sorry im so bad at angst and being able to proofread this because im lazy as hell