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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ( Chemical Fragments )
JAEHWA HAS ALWAYS perceived the ache of loss to be something that runs a fire through her, a feeling so powerful that she cannot stand against it, but it is quite the opposite.
Loss feels like the tide, washing her out into an ocean she has become so familiar with, only to pull her back to shore, feet adorned with glass shards that sting hardly enough so that Jaehwa knows she is really alive.
The faintest memories of being reborn atop a hospital bed, wearing a thin gown that smelled of linen and strong chlorine still linger in a young girl's mind, nightmares that rip her apart so she is nothing more than a body without a soul, empty like a carcass left out for the vultures to consume their nightly feast upon her rotting flesh.
And Jaehwa recalls the feeling of loss, the existence of being between herself and someone that isn't her but isn't anybody else. She remembers it to be empty, lackluster. She cannot mourn what she cannot see, and therefore the scars inflicted on her body have faded away, and she knows not of the ache they had once brought.
Perhaps if anyone should know of loss, it is Cha Si-woo and Moon Boram. Their eyes swim with fragments of loss when they think Jaehwa is unaware, she hears their guilt and mourning in her head when she closes her eyes, and she finds she cannot fall asleep. The warm bed turns cold, and she is back to the needles digging into her fragile wrists, back to the bleeding wound against her neck, back to the cold floors and frigid air, back to the hospital.
Gradually, the clamminess of losing what memories she thought one day she could recuperate begins to seep into her skin, a mellow feeling where Jaehwa becomes the intermingling days between Winter and Spring, only to be consumed in a flurry of snow and ice, and she becomes the opposite of what she knows.
The seeds of doubt and rage and every negativity that have been unleashed into the seeping wound embedded into Jaehwa's head are sown back into place, too rigid and too rapid to stay in their place, threatening to burst by the seams of her horrid existence.
Piece by piece, ache by ache, Cha Jaehwa gathers enough energy in her rotting corpse of a body to learn the meaning of love. Her heart unfreezes from its perpetual cage, and a girl who knows nothing begins to learn.
She had thought merely growing was enough. That everyone else molds to her needs in the way her parents had, places a soft hand and eases the ache in her soul. In the way Ahn Suho and Yeon Si-eun had. They massage her aching bones and connect their jagged pieces to her own, and together, they are whole.
But the world continues to rip them apart, and Jaehwa slowly gets left behind in a flurry of kaleidoscopic emotions, intermingling between her own and those she has long forgotten.
