16. Chapter Sixteen #4
I thought about that a lot. Thought about it in the dark of my room, in the tunnel of the playground, in the alleys behind the market where I slept with my jacket balled up under my head.
Thought about whether I was already turning into him.
Whether the anger I felt, the impulse to lash out, to break things, to scream until my throat bled, meant the poison was already in me, already taking root.
Whether it even mattered if I fought it.
Whether the kindest thing I could do for the world was just disappear from it before I hurt someone the way he hurt us.
Those thoughts came at night mostly. In the quiet, in the dark, when there was nothing between me and the worst parts of my own head.
But even during those times. Even when I was in so much pain that breathing felt like a chore and staying alive seemed like an act of pointless stubbornness and I lay in the dark genuinely wondering if there was any reason at all to see morning.
Seyeon.
A hand reaching down to pull me up when I fell.
A face appearing at the end of the street, walking toward me in the grey morning with his school bag over one shoulder, spotting me and breaking into that beam that lit him up from the inside.
Standing on the corner of the crossroads where our streets met, waiting.
Always waiting. Every single morning, without fail, no matter what.
Rain or heat or freezing cold. Seyeon stood there and waited for me.
He didn’t look at me with pity. That mattered most, I think, more than the fights he jumped into or the nights he sat beside me or the food he brought or any of it.
Seyeon looked at me the way he looked at everyone.
With the same expectation, the same demand, the same stubborn insistence that I could do better and be better and that he wasn’t going to let me off the hook just because my life was shit.
He’d throw himself into a fight I started and come out of it swinging and bloodied and furious, then ten minutes later he’d crack me across the jaw for being an ass and not feel a shred of guilt about it.
He followed every rule. Studied until his brain leaked out his ears.
Teacher’s pet, model student, polite to every elder, never cut in line, always said please and thank you.
And then he started smoking just to fix the rift between us, hacking up his lungs behind the school like a dying cat, eyes watering, face bright red, wheezing through every drag.
He never once asked me why the rift was there.
Never demanded an explanation. Just showed up at the back of the building with his hand out and said give me one, and choked his way through cigarette after cigarette just to spend more time beside me.
His mother beat the backs of his legs raw with a broomstick for it and he still didn’t stop.
Seyeon was smarter than anyone I knew. Smarter than every teacher in that school, smarter than the kids at the fancy academies in Busan, smarter than anyone in this town had any business being.
He’d study until his eyes bled and starve himself to death over his textbooks and come out the other side at the top of every class, every test, every competition, and he never once stopped trying.
Never once looked at his empty fridge and his mother’s tired face and his dead father’s empty chair and said what’s the point.
He just kept going. Kept pushing. Kept building something out of nothing with his bare hands, and he made me so ashamed of ever thinking about giving up.
Because if Seyeon, who’d lost just as much as I had, who carried his own kind of grief and his own kind of hunger and his own kind of loneliness, could drag himself out of bed every morning and try, then what excuse did I have?
When things got hard I’d wallow. Sink into the black hole and let it swallow me.
And then Seyeon would come along and sit himself down beside me whether I wanted him there or not and start talking.
Prattling. Going on and on about ancient Korean folklore or the history of Buddhist temples or the migratory patterns of birds along the southern coast, pulling out his textbooks and showing me pictures of goblin masks, tracing the painted lines with his finger and launching into a thirty minute informational ramble about the role of folklore in traditional Korean culture.
Voice animated. Eyes bright. Hands gesturing as he warmed to the subject, pointing at the page and saying see, this one’s Dokkaebi, the trickster spirit, there are over forty regional variations documented and each one represents a different element of the human condition, isn’t that incredible?
Talking at me whether I wanted to hear it or not.
And I’d sit there pretending to be bored, groaning, telling him to shut up, and listening to every word.
I survived every broken bone because Seyeon would be there the next day.
Walked through every long painful night because the morning meant the crossroads and his face and another chance to run through the streets at his side.
Took every hit and every scar and every sleepless howling hour in that house and buried them all in the hours I spent with him, let the sound of his voice write over the screaming in my head.
And it was worth it. Every bruise. Every crack in my ribs.
Every morning I woke up wondering why I was still breathing.
It was worth it, all of it, for one more day beside him.