Anterograde Tomorrow

prologue: daisies

Sunlight drifts into Kyungsoo's dream, refracts into something cool and salty and maybe involving heels digging into the soft overlap between ocean and beach. He turns and the wet sand transforms into cold linens.

When he opens his eyes the cocktail of seagull wings and shades of blue is replaced by a ceiling, meters too low, a small window at the end of a narrow bedroom, and peeling wood floorboards under worn rugs. It's his room, albeit not exactly the same as it were yesterday, because there are green sticky notes pasted over every inch of every wall that he can't recall having placed. Second skin of colored texts and diagrams, numbers and dates. A breeze lifts the curtains and ruffles the notes, plays a melody in the tune of drizzled paper applause.

The sight is unfamiliar but not strange, like something that must have happened once before and slipped through his memory. Maybe there has been a day between today and yesterday. Maybe there has been more than a day. Somehow he doesn't have to read the notes to know that they will explain how many days has passed, and what he's meant to do today.

But the little specks of yellow notes amongst the green, some on the floor and walls and table and one on the pillow next to his, strike him most. The handwriting is different. There are no dates. Just words.

Kyungsoo props himself up slowly, habitually reaching to clasp the night table as he slides out of bed. Rug fuzzy under bare toes, scent of six o'clock coffee brewing in the café downstairs gentle on the palate. He picks up the yellow sticky on his pillow and reads it, "Your name is Do Kyungsoo. You have short-term memory loss, antesomething amnesia, so you won't remember what happened last night. But let me help you out."

And the one on the pillow neighboring, "Last night I put my head on this pillow and my arms around your waist. My name's Kim Jongin. I call you hyung. Yesterday you loved me. Today you'll love me again."

He takes a step back, eyes wide and mouth cracked open. His heel crunches on another. "This is where you undressed me."

"This is where I undressed you," is posted on the wall, right on top of a green note that says 'Mijin's no longer serves rice cakes—05/05/2008'.

A few inches beside another one says, "And here I pushed you up against the wall and kissed you really hard (approximately, it was kind of dark) and we thought we should have sex."

Over the table is posted, "Here you sat, dangling your legs. I put my palm on your kneecap and you bent forward and kissed me first."

By the treasure chest at the end of his bed: "We talked about ballet. You hummed a tune and my fingers did an arabresque here (because your ceiling is too low and I'd rather not hit my head, okay) here, grand jeté onto the floor, fouetté en tourant and then sissonne on the back of your hand. Pas de valse fast up your arm and you smiled."

At the back of his bedroom door: "I leaned on this and read your green sticky notes while you went around cleaning up invisible messes. It came to me that all the green looks like grass, and grass is boring without daisies. So I hope you like yellow?"

And as he opens the door, one smacks him on the forehead: "And here's Kim Jongin. Say hello to me?"

Kyungsoo looks up, gaze flicking uncertainly up the contours of sharp collarbones, tanned flesh, defined jaws. One millimeter at a time. The urge to slam the door and call the police because there is a stranger in his apartment and this stranger has written him unquestionably creepy notes hits him in the face.

Thick pulse and dizziness make his head light and stomach turn. He really can't feel his fingers, or knees for that matter. But everything settles down again—almost as if it were always meant to—when his eyes graze a dumb grin and a pair of glittering eyes.

"Hi, hyung," Jongin says, the corners of his lips falling, though features still soft. His voice is new, certainly, and Kyungsoo can't recall precisely when he's heard it before—if ever.

Still, it's almost too natural to rekindle Jongin's smile with a tiny "Hello," and somehow the syllables are perfect on his tongue, perhaps because he's said it a thousand times already. Perhaps because they're meant to be.