forget-me-not || lee dohwa

𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐎𝐟

You are What Dreams are Made Of

Gyeoul had first picked up a pencil and a sketchpad when she was six.

While Kyung had a plethora of hobbies, Gyeoul had yet to find something that held her interest. Her mother had signed her up for ballet lessons using the discount coupons she had procured but Gyeoul was too shy for stretching and twirling in front of an audience. She had accompanied Kyung to his taekwondo classes but they came back early, her latching onto her brother's arm, crying because of a bloody nose. She was too scared for sports, too slow for piano, too clumsy for baking, too panicky for chess.

Until she saw a caricature artist run the nib of her pen over a sheet of paper during a trip to the amusement park.

This is it. This is what I want to do.

"But I don't want to learn how to give people heads in the shape of a turnip," she told her mom.

Her first attempt at drawing a human was disastrous and it took her mom ten minutes to calm down a laughing Kyung. He saved the sketch and put it up on their refrigerator until Gyeoul threatened to stop speaking to him forever.

But Baek Gyeoul was made to draw and sketch and paint and create.

At ten, she began winning prizes in art competitions.

At eleven, her permanent goal was to be a famous comic creator. She would leave a mark on the world in the form of her art.

At twelve, she was the best in class and nobody, not even their art teacher, could capture an image on a sheet of paper as she could.

At thirteen, she moved to digital art and earned pocket money through commissions. She could still remember the way her mother's eyebrows nearly flew off her forehead when she saw how much she had been paid to draw her senior with Ji Changwook under a waterfall. 

But it wasn't until she was fifteen that she found the courage to pick up her pencil and draw him. It took her multiple attempts to get him right—the cherry blossom-shaped eyes alone took her two days. Then the nose, and the hair, and then the mouth. She gave him the hands of an artist—of a musician—and the elegance of a prince. He stood tall, proud, confident.

When she was finally finished, Gyeoul decided that she would never share him with the world. The boy's gentleness would be for her alone.

Moments later, Kyung burst into her room, asking if she had seen his jacket. He bolted out clutching Gyeoul's sketch, cackling, "Mooom! Gyeoul's drawing a boy!"

At sixteen and a half, she named him Lee Dohwa. He was an amalgamation of all her dreams brought to life through charcoal and paper and paints. She sketched him walking, playing the piano, sitting under a tree, reading, laughing, running—

"You realize that's creepy, right?" Kyung sat across from her at the dining table, picking out the cooked onions from his food while Gyeoul scrutinized her latest piece on her tablet, "You, sketching some guy doing stuff. If people find out, they'll definitely call you a pervert. I think you're a pervert because it's always the quiet ones."

"He doesn't exist, Kyung," she rolled her eyes, "so it doesn't matter." She wasn't going to tell him that she prayed for Lee Dohwa to exist.

"What if he does? What if he finds out that some weirdo is drawing him doing all kinds of things and calls the cops on you?"

Gyeoul gathered her cutlery and bowl and left her seat, "Well, he can't. I created him and there's nobody in this world who looks remotely like him. I made sure of that."