Seventeen years old.

It’s been three months, two weeks, and a day, that Sejin has been away in Japan for a movie called, ‘Tokyo’.

Daehyun is losing a little bit of weight. He’s losing a little bit of taste. He’s been living, buried in textbooks and workbooks and guides. He’s got himself a goal. He’s got himself a goal to go up to college in Seoul. That way, she won’t be so, so far away.

He smiles like an idiot for no reason. He’s helping a teacher carry supplies for the science lab, and the colorful bottles in the crate remind him of the colorful sandcastle builders Sejin had triumphantly brought back from a trip to the shopping mall, when they were six or seven. He smiles, staring blankly at the bobbing head of the science teacher in front of him.

Someone shouts loudly from down the hall, and Daehyun recognizes it. The stupid smile that he didn’t think he could wipe off of his face, falls off, just like that.

Sejin’s friends cling onto her arms, telling her how much they’ve missed her, badgering her with question after question about the handsome actor she’d gotten to work with again. She’s smiling brightly at her friends, clean, crisp school uniform catching bright sunlight from the windows. They walk like people who’ve been stuck together with glue. They walk toward Daehyun. She sees him, and her smile falls off of her face too. Just like that.

But it’s all within the blink of an eye. Daehyun shakes himself out of it, shoves his mind back to that sandy playground and those colorful toys, and paints that silly grin on his mouth again. He looks straight, at nothing but the science teacher’s graying head.

The smiles we smile. The things we say. The things we hear. The things we touch. The things we feel. Sometimes they’re just not real. Sometimes they’re just not real, and that’s okay.

And with that dumb smile that’s not real on his face, he walks on. He passes Sejin. Passing that white blurb that she is, as she and her friends pass him.

Daehyun knows she’s an actress. A damn good one. He knows, that the smile on her face isn’t real either, and that’s okay.

This is how they are. Without anyone knowing, they think of each other. Without anyone knowing, they love. Its love that only two people in the entire earth knows about.

But they’re seventeen years old. What the hell is love to them?

He can’t do anything so trivial as to greet her around a crowd.

He pities him. He pities her. That rather than following their sensitivity, he and she live burdened and entrapped by the absurd excuse of rationality.

Love, the damn thing. Is it pain, or is it shame, it doesn’t matter, whatever it is. The two of them are standing in it; time will just keep on flowing by. And there’s no one here to blame.

-

It feels, like walking on miles and miles of solid, white ice. It feels like, flying high above the sinking blue and the fuzzy white of the sky.

His burning, boiling, beating heart. Love.

Her. Brighter, more searing, more enrapturing than the sun. Him. Colder, more rigid, more pale than the ice he walks on.

“We can’t ever, ever tell anyone? Ever? About You, about me, about us?”

Daehyun’s shoulder shake from his laugh. He runs his free hand over his face, stretching his legs out. The other hand, Sejin suffocates, with her firm, unrelenting grip, tangled all the way down to their pinkies. His hand is bigger, but it’s the one suffocating from her little hand’s grasp.

“No, Sejin, eventually, we’ll let the world know. We just have to wait. We’re only seventeen. They’ll think we’re crazy.”

Crickets cry in the grass beneath them. The dirt is cold and maybe even a little damp at their bottoms. The single, tall street light from beyond the brick wall surrounding Sejin’s house, on the far side of the street, overexposes them in yellow a little too harshly. But at least this way, they can still see each other. They won’t fumble around for each other in the darkness.

“I am crazy. How could I not be crazy. I’m always going crazy all the time. I have no choice. I pretend to be people that don’t exist, and the world loves me for it. But when I want to be the real me for once, just once, I can’t. They will never know me. They will never, ever, ever know the real me. You know why? Because they don’t know you. How can anyone know the real me, if they don’t know you?”

“Sejin… are we still talking about the same thing here?”

He wriggles his hand to try to let it breathe a little. In half response, half just frustration, her forearm thumps his forearm defensively, her knuckles tightening his. Really, it’s just all her building frustration. She chooses to ignore his question altogether.

“Daehyun, where ever we go, when we muster up the courage and find the farthest, most isolated place, we still sit in the darkest corner. Whatever we do, we can’t take a picture together. We have no pictures of the two of us together after the age of fourteen. And you can’t count the ones from school where we take class photos.”

He looks at her. She looks at him. They’re so close, he’s afraid of how she can see all of his imperfections on the surface of his skin and flesh. He’s very afraid, but yet, he’s still the dumb, proud, son of his dad that he is. So he musters a smile.

“Does that matter that much? What matters, is that you’re with me, you’re next to me. Whatever we do, what’s most important to me is the time that we’re together.”

Her pupils tremble in the brilliant light. She purses her rosy lips, just like she does in her movies and dramas.

“We jump when we catch someone’s passing gaze. We cower in terror that someone will shatter this fragile secret of ours, Daehyun. It stings. It stings like a .”

“Does it matter that much..?”

He leans his head even closer, close enough that their noses might touch.
 

“You’re right here next to me. And this time that we spend like this, me next to you, you next to me… we value it more than anything, don’t we..?”

For a moment, she holds her gaze, stopped in time. But only for a moment, because after that, her eyes dim and her lips part. Daehyun’s forehead beads with sweat; his heart is racing. He’s sure she can feel it. It’s not even worth it to think about, how unfair it is. She’s practiced on at least five or six different guys. Him, he doesn’t even ever get to practice on her.

She tilts her head just ever so slightly, pressing those slightly parted lips over his. She makes his body rigid, the way the moist, soft texture of her skin touches against his. There’s pressure where they hold their breaths together. There’s a spark where their fitted pieces tug and then pull apart with gentle, withholding friction. And then, there’s a flurry, where she breathes the reply over his lips.

“You’re right.”

They kiss again, and again, and again, and Daehyun thinks about a lot of things. He thinks about whether or not she ever thinks about those other guys she’s kissed, when she kisses him. Whether she compares him to them, or them to him, or any other way it can go. Whether her experience, and his inexperience, entice any sort of distance on her part.

She’s all about controlling her dynamic energy with strict, Spartan dominance over herself. It happens when she’s leaned so far forward toward him, that her legs begin digging into the side of his thigh. So that’s when she pulls back, letting her head touch the brick wall behind them.

“But…”

“I…”

They start together and pause awkwardly together. She untangles her hand from his so she can cling onto his upper arm, and lean into him, warm head using his shoulder for support.

“But I still love just you. But I still think of just you. No one else in this world, Jung Daehyun… What were you gonna say?”

He hesitates, rubbing his lips together, before letting his head down on hers slowly.

“I… I love you more than I love me. I think of you more than I think of me. I don’t care if no one knows, Sejin. I…”

She makes him be quiet with unseeing fingers sort of roughly brushing down against his nose and lips.

“It’s never gonna change, okay Jung Daehyun? Because you’re the only thing I need to live. To be who I am… it’s what I’ve been talking about all along.”

These are the kinds of senselessly exhilarated conversations they have, two seventeen year olds who probably know nothing about love, sitting hidden in the latest part of the night right under Sejin’s bedroom window. Brick wall to their backs, grass at their bottoms, the cautiously warm light from Sejin’s parents’ window, out of their sight. 

-

*Nell - 'Tokyo'

*Nell - 'Standing in the Rain'