𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐨𝐬 | 𝐭𝐚𝐞𝐠𝐲𝐮

༺ 𝟒𝟖 ༻

Saturday, 3:23 pm

Beomgyu has never been that much of a crier.

Not that he remembers much about his childhood days, as his grey old memories always liked to skip the process of building a home inside his brain, and that way, they instantly became incapable of tormenting him, like a shield protecting him from all the unwanted trauma and lack of love. So usually, his memories would choose the easy path of getting lost in time and fading into glimpses of innocent remembrances, not clear enough to be understood, and consequently not accurate enough to hurt him. But there were times when a simple scent or a familiar view triggered some of Beomgyu's old fragments of recollections and he would find himself falling into the dept of thought and intellectualization. In those times, he could count with his fingers the times he cried.

He remembers thinking when he was younger that everything in his life was much more complex compared to the others around him and that his childhood years weren't as peaceful as they should have been. He would often find the refuge and the safety he never felt from his parents in Sol and Mori, his cat and dog that had been staying by his side since he was born. And the first tragedy Beomgyu ever recalls was waking up and realizing that the dog that used to snore him to sleep every day was lying lifeless on the foot of his bed, his eyes closed and body wholly petrified. Beomgyu remembers how much he cried back then when he saw his uncle bury his precious old puppy, the golden fur disappearing from his sight as the workers shoveled soil and dirt on top of him, and he can say with confidence that accepting Mori's death was one of the toughest challenges he had to go through in life.

Nighttime was hell for him. Every time he went underneath the blankets he would have a panic attack, fictitious shadows and turbulent thoughts catching hold of his dreams and turning them into nightmares that involved the traumatic flashback of finding his dead puppy on the foot of the bed. And he would always wake up in the middle of the night crying and screaming for his mommy. But mom never bothered coming to his room to check on him, so Beomgyu would always find comfort in his family's tuxedo couch in the living room, where he cuddled his orange cat and cried himself to sleep. And on one of those miserable nights, Beomgyu recalls walking next to his parent's room and overhearing a conversation where the only sentence that stayed craved inside his brain was one that left his dad's lips in a monotone "Your child will never be a real man. He always cries like a girl."

By the time he was thirteen, his grandmother from his dad's side died of old age, and Beomgyu was forced to attend her funeral (despite him saying many times that he didn't want to go, as he wasn't ready to attend such a ceremony). It was very melancholic and hard to breathe inside and he couldn't help crying when he saw the resting face of his grandmother, the old nice lady who used to always look at him with big shiny eyes and a gentle smile. And now looking at her body nicely placed inside a coffin, Beomgyu realized he'd never see her again and would never be able to eat her food anymore, as all of her recipes passed away along with her bright spirit and kindness. Beomgyu remembers some discreet tears falling from his mother's eyes as the choir sang one of grandma's favorite songs and he couldn't help but cry too. It was at the end of the performance that Beomgyu felt his father grasping his arm and glaring at him with a disappointed look on his face as he spat the next words with little remorse "Real men don't cry".

He remembers forcing himself to swallow all his tears as his father's pressuring eyes would always follow everything he did for the rest of the funeral, but he knows he let some of them escape when things got too sad, as his suffocated cries couldn't bear the pain any longer. And seeing that his dad hadn't cried a single tear at his own mother's funeral was the hardest thing he had to endure that day.

Soon it was no surprise when Beomgyu got the news that his older brother left the house for good, as he knew that the older one hated living in this house. He heard from his mom that he caught the first plane to Busan to continue his studies at a university very far away but Beomgyu has no memory of his brother ever telling him his goodbyes and surely hasn't seen him since that day. To be honest, Beomgyu didn't even know if he was able to recognize his brother again if he ever came across him on the street. And he was sure it was the same way around.