MVV | YG [✔]

05. Beomgyu/Yeonjun

Beomgyu

I was bred from death, and maybe that's why it seemed to follow me around—why I couldn't ever escape it. Some children were just born with tragedy in their blood, and I think that's probably what happened to me.

For a long time, I was envious of it—death, and in some ways, I think I still am. The only two people I'd ever cared about, the only people who'd ever cared about me, were somewhere inside of it, existing in the place that came after all the tragedy.

Wherever that place was was where I'd wanted to be.

It was interesting to think about... almost sad. I knew how to make Hell feel like home, so much so that the threat of the actual underworld didn't frighten me. Not even a little.

The tip of my pointer finger lost color when I pressed it against the chilled granite. My movements were slow as that finger dipped in and out of the ridges, tracing the smooth letters of her name and the date she died.

It bugged me that there were no flowers here—no other tombstones or souls for her to rest with.

She was all alone.

Just like me.

The late January wind turned my tears into glaciers, slipping down my cheeks and splashing against the thin sheen of ice that decorated her tombstone.

My arms were heavy—weighted down with exhaustion and grief when I wrapped them around the granite slab and squeezed its frigid edges with everything I had.

It was the closest I'd ever come to hugging my mother.

Park Yuna died the morning of my first birthday. My father had explained her death to me in almost picturesque detail, as though it were a fictional horror drafted and reenacted for the screen. He sat on the edge of my childhood bed, cruelly and callously recounting the moments before her stroke and all the ones that came after. He described her rose-colored nails to me, and the way they twitched in his palm when he cradled her feeble hand in his.

Her light eyes were filled with fear, and he'd promised that he would hold her until all that frightened her had drifted away.

I'd since come to learn that my father's promises were nothing more than sugar-coated lies.

The actual truth was that he cared about my mother the same way he cared about me—minimally and abusively.

It was Felix who'd found the evidence, hidden in the only photo I had of her. The film captured the smile painted across her red lips and the shiny pins holding back the dark curls in her hair. My chubby face was buried in her neck as she held me in both of her arms. It was those arms that guarded the truth of everything I suspected.

Five, barely there bruises were wrapped like jewelry around her slender wrists. They matched the ones I often wore around my ankles.

I'd inherited all of my mother's wounds... as though the pain of them was stitched throughout her DNA.

The thin weeds and overgrown acreage around her tombstone often treated me like a friend, concealing my cries and protecting my grief the same way they protected my mother's soul.

My father had attempted to disguise her memory with the thick of the forest, burying her between the trunks of two trees, a mile from the house she died in. He wouldn't admit it, but I think he was trying to keep her locked behind these gates forever, trapped beneath his proverbial thumb.

It was the same thing he was doing to me... except no.

Not anymore.

My jacket made a soft noise when I peeled my arms from her memory and slid across the cold ground. Draping my body over the spot she lay, I pressed my cheek to the frosted blades of grass that covered her and listened as though she might have something to say.