when you wake up | sunki

fourteen.

"Hi, yes, it's Kim Sunoo!" The poor young man looks tired, and Sunoo's sorry to have awoken him at such an early hour on a Saturday morning. "I'm here about the confirmation for the apartment rental we talked about last night- yup!"

He had no choice but to leave some of his stuff behind in the hurried move, but he supposes his essentials are all with him. He takes his bags into the new flat. It's a studio apartment, a wide room with a bed in one corner, a kitchen and an attached toilet, and a sitting area with a television. The rent is slightly higher than the previous building, but Sunoo can afford it.

He sighs as he unpacks whatever he has left of his things again.

─

Sunoo sets his guitar case down. The new student he's picked up in recent weeks is agreeable and enthusiastic, but he's nowhere near as cute as Jungwon was, and as much as he tries not to let himself think about the past, he can't help but wonder how Jungwon is doing. Jay has been messaging him every couple of days, waiting for a response since the day he left, but Sunoo doesn't have the heart to explain.

He can't bear to tell them that he's running away again, like the coward he always was.

He wonders if Jungwon still practices the Pororo theme song on his guitar, and all that fills him is an overwhelming sadness that he had to leave the boy behind without a goodbye.

A knock sounds at his door.

He tells himself if it is who he dreads it to be, he will actually laugh. A person cannot possibly suffer so much bad luck within the span of a couple of weeks, can they?

The new apartment's door comes with a peephole, thank the lucky stars. Sunoo looks out through the peephole, but the person standing outside is so improbable he steps back to open the door within an instant.

"Sunoo, it's you!"

─

There is too much that has happened in the past three weeks for Sunoo to comprehend at one go.

"So you're trying to tell me the injury you sustained that night at my house didn't harm you severely," Sunoo begins, trying to make sense of things. "Instead it fixed something inside your head, and removed your memory block? What kind of k-drama am I living in?"

Riki laughs, sitting back. "I wish I could say I was lying. I'm really not."

"But it just stopped you from forgetting," Sunoo points out. "It didn't bring back anything from your past. How do you still remember me, then?"

The younger boy seems hesitant to answer, but he replies in the end. "I started the journal a while ago," he says. "A while after we met. You asked me why I never wrote one. The truth was that my days were so empty and worthless that I didn't think there was anything worth remembering anyway."

"That night you sang to me," he continues. "For the first time I felt like there was something worth remembering. And so, I wrote."