"You are shaking fists and trembling teeth. I know: You did not mean to be cruel. That does not mean you were kind."
— Venetta Octavia
—
There is a knife in Goh Haejoon's gut, a blond boy holding its hilt: Baek Eunyung. A name Haejoon could never forget in all the years gone and passed. The death of a star: a runaway course of nuclear fusion; a boom; a light. It was a newfangled story, its branches bore fruits of novel in spite of the tangled rotting roots — yet it would grow. A supermassive and monstrous fragmentation of nature and yet, as the wind shook its leaves, the bittersweet smell of hope infected the air.
The meeting of Goh Haejoon and Baek Eunyung was no kind tale. The stream it ran was nothing but a torrent of vexation and deplorable need. Yet it was need, the driving force. The Fates had lost their strings; the two boys would write their own stories. They would leave out the name of their other — labelling immaterial and meaningless — but their bodies would not forget. There was nothing to hide the marks of claws they dug into each other's flesh. It was vicious and carnal, it was soft and lovely: it was nameless. Homeless.
A newborn phoenix shakes off its maternal ashes — it takes flight.
—
The 'Ghost Dorm': personified through its violence. A cavernous thing, an empty thing — wanting, waiting. Goh Haejoon slept beneath its ceiling, its bleeding walls was solace to an abominable boy. He tossed. He turned. He tore at the Sandman: he could not sleep. It was not an uncommon event, sleep did not come easy to those with death in their brains. Haejoon's mother once told him he was strongest when he was weakest. Desperation was steadfast in the face of talent. But what help was that here? He couldn't fucking sleep.
The light of Haejoon's phone lit up the same old four corners of his room, checking the time, it read -02:07-. Haejoon did not perceive the groan that he let out as he ripped himself from his bed. The night was too old for any kind of meaningful introspection. The door screamed open, as it always did, and Haejoon walked the long hall to the bathroom. Its fluorescent lights blinding him briefly as he flicked them alive, padding to the sink. Haejoon washed his face, locking eyes with himself as his saw droplets of water slinking down his bare shoulders and finding their way to the scar on his abdomen. It had been over a year — it had felt longer — since him and Baek Eunyung met their gazes to one another for the first time. When the storm had first begun the brew. When they saw the likeness of their loneliness in the reflection of that eye.
There was not a name to be placed upon the relationship between Goh Haejoon and Baek Eunyung. The intertwined abhorrence of their shared lives could not be called so easily. But as it was, these days, Goh Haejoon thought about that less and less. It was less anticipating wonder there, more sour familiarity. They were to each other what an ant was to a fungus. A dirty symbiosis: a cultivation of greed and growing. Abandoned abandonment.
However, lately, Baek Eunyung had not been the familiar face he usually was. Goh Haejoon could have mistaken him for a ghost the way the blond haired boy slunk around the halls of the dormitory like an act of living avoidance. Despite this (or perhaps in spite of this), Haejoon couldn't help but notice the way, whenever he caught a glimpse of the other, Eunyung was looking more and more like a wanderer from Death's door. The sickeningly sweet smile he brandished was enough for most people to believe — but that something between Haejoon and Eunyung banished all possibilities of him being 'most people'. It curled jaggedly in a way that made Haejoon's abdomen throb like a fresh cut. Haejoon saw him, nevertheless how maddening and horrid that thought was, he did. Somehow, he'd always seen Eunyung.
Though naive as ever, Haejoon didn't know what it was that possessed him to care enough about the way Eunyung's bunk was growing dusty; the way his clothing didn't seemed to sit right on Eunyung's frame as it used to; the way a certain sheen to Eunyung's eyes seemed to banish all light in the reflection of a mirror.
