Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER FIVE ( Stone In Sea, She Can't Float )
THE EARLIEST MEMORY of Ahn Suho that resides within Cha Jaehwa is perhaps that of six years ago.
It is a memory severed from her end, crumpled like a piece of paper and thrown into a trash bin. Ahn Suho is the only one who can recall such a day.
It is befitting of the two that they should meet on the border between Spring and Summer — On a warm afternoon in late March. When Jaehwa had been a cacophony of pollen and petals, swept up by the wind and embraced by the coming summer heat. Before she became the raging winter, encompassed in melancholy and the faintest air of deadening flesh.
Ahn Suho had been a measly four-foot-seven, mocked for having a slight lisp as a 10-year-old boy. Cha Jaehwa was tall for her age, standing slightly above five feet. She was easily the biggest kid in her grade, and sometimes self-consciousness weaved its way into her head.
They were both odd little misfits in a world made to fit every piece, every shape within the puzzle of life. Unfortunately, Cha Jaehwa and Ahn Suho had never been part of that puzzle — They were the spare pieces that were swept beneath the rug and left to sit and collect dust.
But Ahn Suho was destined for greater things than an overly complex puzzle and he couldn't contain all of what he was within that small body. Perhaps along the way, he grabbed Cha Jaehwa and molded her to hold his every bit of grandness, using her as a jar to store what he was so that he could be the Ahn Suho he was meant to be.
Cha Jaehwa let him, because she was torn by the knees and destined to be a slave to education, buried beneath piles of textbooks and repeating the same formulas like a mindless being. She was destined to perfect scores and cram schools, paintings that were all too perfect and smiles that were all too fake because Cha Jaehwa had never once been herself.
She had been Ahn Suho, and sometimes she had liked to pretend she was Yeon Si-Eun ( Whose lips seldom twisted into a smile, but he would forever be infinitely more than she would ever be ) who did not need to hide behind a smile because at the very least he knew the fate he had been assigned to.
Cha Jaehwa had lived a life mirroring those around her — And now that she is forced to recollect the fragments she had so carefully crafted together, there is nothing left to call her own.
Cha Jaehwa is a piece of blank paper, and she needs someone to make her into something that is more than emptiness.
JAEHWA FEELS AS though the axis of the world is tilted, for one shoulder droops further than the other, and her back aches and everything feels slanted.
