not like other people markhyuck

five

It's a quarter past six and Donghyuck is sitting alone in his living room spread over the chair of his desk in casual relaxation. The sun behind the filmy glass of the window dribbles down the tall bodies of buildings, houses with sloping roofs and miniature balconies. Descending, the gentle rays of light iluminate single wisps of smoke, curling down to a burning tip of a cigarette, the short tip of the cigarette keeps approaching the fingers that are holding it but the fingers don't bother, their owner stands with his elbows propped by the railing of his balcony, his back elegantly slanting, his legs thin and pimp.

"The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental—true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is hushed up", he drags out, in a stable, even, quiet drawl. He sits leaning over the book on the table, his limbs pleading him to return to the state of physical rest. He pulls himself tight. Such texts should have been analyzed and examined in school, such texts should have been handed out by teachers. He and Mark were attending the religious institute, The Convent Of The Sacred Heart in Manhattan. It was the best school in the area, it was considered prestige, a luxury.

They never learned the stuff that mattered. They never learned that what h desired to know. Mark compensated for that.

Having found out about Mark's pay system Hyuck, after days of thorough contemplation, decided to start a correspondence. He was acquainted with works of Hermann Hesse, he had already read several of his books and listening to the biblical passage Mark had recited during the service, Donghyuck instantly knew the full meaning of that which he shared. It was the long-discussed controversy of God's behavior towards one of Adam's sons, one that he didn't punish severely for murder, one that was considered (not only by Hesse but by various other critics) to bear a mark of intelligence, not of vile cunning.

Haechan went to the school's library, marked the passage in Demian which he now keeps rereading, and writing the number of the page on a paper, pinned it to the toilet ring where people exchanged money for weed. After a few days followed Mark's response. A similar piece of paper with a page number.

H reads,"You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think."

Haechan answered with:"I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me."

Mark with:"An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led."

Mark, as Donghyuck later discovered, was an inexhaustible source of knowledge. He knew absolutely everything and had an answer to anything, there was absolutely nothing that could startle him. They upheld their correspondence in form of borrowed paragraphs of thought, in form of text torn from pages of books, first only Demian, later all kinds of literary works. Sometimes it was the events they were both witnesses of that they referred to. Sometimes the outbursts of single teachers. "If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!", Mark would quote Mary Shelley after the angry outburst of a random teacher. "The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.", he would quote Oscar Wilde after another sermon about a man's soul.

"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?", Hyuck would answer in Ayn Rand's words.