It had been raining again; silver liquid droplets descending down from the skies, kissing the earth and sinking into its embrace. A young boy was sitting on a park bench, feeling the raindrops upon his cheek. There was a gentle smile on his face as he glanced to the grey heavens, as he listens to the soothing rhythm of pouring rain.

Some people feel the rain, others simply get wet.

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2004:

Sehun knew what they said about him. They called him a freak. An oddity. An aberration. Maybe not the last two though, they haven’t learnt those two words yet. Sehun had read them from a thick dictionary in the library.

That’s okay though, it doesn’t bother him. Labels are for canned food, labels are for clothes, labels are for filing. Sehun knows who he is. He is Sehun. That was all there was to it. He didn’t want to be defined by a word, his life crammed and summarized as a label.  He was himself.

To define, after all, is to limit.

The kindergarten teacher wasn’t quite as accepting as Sehun though, and cancelled playtime amidst groans.

He couldn’t connect with the other kids, they just didn’t click. He couldn’t help it, the way they lost interest in him, in what he was saying. So he spent his time with the teacher, and they talked; speaking about the funds being raised for the flooded west coast, of the new draft of the parliament. They talked about many things, and the teacher looked to him with a gaze akin to wonder.

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2008:

Sehun was different. Not weird, just different.

He’d spend days pouring over financial books from his parents’ study, sit his room reading Stephen Hawking’s works, and read Homer’s epic poems late into the night.

His parents knew he was different from his elder brothers. They called him a prodigy, a genius; beaming as they proclaimed it to relatives and friends. His brothers detested being compared to him. They were bright too, just not like how Sehun was.

Everyone hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders. 

It went on until he was ten, when he said he wanted to be a photographer, an artist.

“That’s not a job,” his parents said. “You have so much potential,” they cried. “Why waste it all,” they asked, “for nothing more than a recreation?”

But why shouldn’t Sehun crave knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Knowledge, or rather learning, is one of his great pleasures in life. He enjoys reading extensively in various fields that would not likely be of practical use to himself. One of his dreams is to spend his life acquiring obscure degrees in fields that he has no intention of