the most brilliant darkness;; jwy, csan

02

the first several weeks of your stay with your aunt and yunho are spent doing a lot of the same things. some days you'll go out for dinner or to an arcade with yunho and his friends, but you don't do it much. you don't really have anything better to do; evenings alone are spent cooking for your aunt or in bed watching whatever you can find on the television. you meet seonghwa on the day marking your fifth week here. he's pretty enough to be a model, eyes soft and happy when they looked at you, and you felt a strong sense of nurturing care from him just in a short interaction. it's no wonder he's striving to be a nurse. you don't see him nearly as often because of his heavy schedule, but when he does come out with you guys, he always lingers near the edges of the group or the room and watches from there. sometimes hongjoong goes over to stand with him. you asked him — seonghwa, that is — why he doesn't engage with the group as much, but the only response you got out of him was a gentle shake of his head that made a few of his long bangs fall into his eyes. you figured it was enough of a clue to not bother the subject further.

hongjoong sometimes misses your weekly outings (although occasionally when you're feeling bolder you'll go along with yunho two or three times per week). he gave you his number after that dinner when you met, so you sent him a text the first time he didn't show up to a dinner that you attended. what you got in response was three days straight of pure radio silence only to be awoken by a shrill ringing from your phone at five o'clock in the morning on a saturday where hongjoong explained that he was overcome with inspiration for a commission from one of his patrons and it turned out so nicely it would be featured in an exhibition show later on in the week. the following friday, you all (seonghwa included) packed yourselves into yunho's truck and drove down to see the exhibition.

around week five or six, you begin to wonder if san and mingi truly have nothing better to do with their lives based on the frequency of the texts flowing in and out of the group chat you were added to, all notifications about them going to various places in case anyone else wanted to join. yunho works what might as well be a full-time job but is apparently only part-time, an assistant at the local elementary school, and it really makes sense for someone like him to take up a job like that. mingi claims to have a job as well, although you have yet to figure out what exactly it is and don't feel quite comfortable asking yunho to tell you. as for san — there's not much to be said about him. he's loud and quiet at the same time, in two starkly different ways. boisterous in public, always talking and playing around, but not once have you ever heard him talk about something personal. granted it's only been a little over two months since you met the man, and of those two months, you've seen him maybe a dozen times at best. none of those instances have ever found you having a one-on-one personal conversation with the man.

during your eighth week, you meet jongho, who swings by the town on his way through quickly, but long enough to greet you and say he looks forward to getting to know you better later on. he's sweet and friendly though, mature in a way that leaves you surprised when you recall that he's supposed to be the youngest amongst the friend group.

week nine has you meeting yeosang, and it's actually a long conversation that you share with him on a rusted bench outside the arcade that the others in your little new friend group are inside (aside from seonghwa, who has another late shift at the hospital). if someone were to ask you to recall the exact contents of that conversation, you would have a hard time simply because it was so much while also being nothing at all. he gave you his number in case you wanted to keep in touch before admitting that he's terrible at responding and one conversation could take several days to get through.

week nine also brings about another oddity, one that stands out a lot more in your mind at the end of the day for two reasons. one: it's terribly embarrassing and humiliating and whenever you think about it there's this chill that goes down your spine because it's that horrid.