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Hyeon,
I've never pegged myself much of a writer. Knowing you, you'd probably second that without as much as a stray afterthought, and just beamingly resound, that – yes, the weird lanky dude sucks at expressing feelings.
You've always been more expressive, with your shrewd artistic flair, and the candid photographs you develop every Tuesday (now gallingly sellotaped all over my bedroom walls), and maybe you'd even laugh at me, at the way I'm foolishly writing to you like this — but then again, I'm also feeling more feelings right now than I've ever felt in my nineteen years of staggering this planet.
And it's no thanks to you.
All I know is that ever since your things have found themselves on my shelves and some residing inside the boxes under my bed, I've found myself having more and more words that taste like you that I have nowhere else to profess.
My room brims of you, and my mind mirrors this too.
And if you only know where I'm writing right now, you might just whack me upside the head and chuck the same book I'm scribbling on square at my forehead. Maybe it's even the sole reason why I'm writing this. It's funny, because it's not like you'll ever know anyway, let alone read this mess – but I like the thought of you mad at me for vandalizing something you've treasured. Because, as much as I'd like to deny the fact that I haven't moved since you've left, some absurd part of me bitterly wants you to taste a bit of my anger.
Oh, and I want you to be mad. So riled up that you'd have no choice but to chase me down wherever I run to. That you'd have no other option than to face me again, and hurt me with your own hands and not with your lingering touches that I still feel in between my fingers after you've left me out here in the dust. I—
I want you to haunt me back to life.
What's funnier is how much you've treasured this thing. Drastically better than how you've taken care of everything around you in comparison. You even reserved a specific place on your bedside table for it; which makes me wonder. Did I even have a place? Somewhere I could stand next to you? Maybe not. And maybe that's why I'm feeling more petty than I've originally intended, ruining all the pages of this beloved astronomy textbook, that at times I would even think you memorized each word printed onto every page. And maybe, just maybe, I'd somehow find a space in your heart where I can squeeze into. Even if it's only my feelings and lousily expressed words infiltrating these pages, pushing my way past between these lines and paragraphs so I can somehow feel like I'm a part of your life.
Because I wasn't, was I?
And yet, even if the thought of you floating away is harshly bitter, and you've decisively killed something in me without as much as a forewarning — I still haven't forgotten. Your whispers, your questions.
I still can't drown out the time you offhandedly muttered how you wanted to exit this earth and float to a place where the sun can't follow you. When I asked what you meant, you just waved it off and shifted to face me, retelling the same memory of how you once wanted to become an astronomer when you were younger, before you realized that it required a lot of math and you were absolute rubbish when it came to numbers. How you tried, but somehow the closest you could ever get to the galaxy outside of our own, is in your own head.
I also haven't forgotten how I looked at you that time and realized that the supernovas couldn't possibly compare to how your eyes shined as you dazedly pointed at a speck in the sky called Venus – not like I've ever seen a supernova firsthand, but if I did, I'd assume its intrinsic luminosity won't be able to shine as bright as you. Maybe it wouldn't even compare.
You talked about the universe like it was your purpose, unfolding the world like it began for you to unravel in the end – and maybe you did unravel it somehow.
My world, that is.
I'm not much of a writer, as I said. And I can never truly explain how beautiful you were to me, Hyeon. How much you've grown in my heart, how much you've made me feel alive – as if there's so much more to the universe than we think we know or begin to comprehend — and how much I'm hurting and dying all at once right now because of you.
I wish you'd come back to pick up the pieces.
And tell me why you bursted and burned out like the stars you admired so much.
Yours, Jun
(—the lanky dude who can't write for shit but somehow because it's about you, suddenly can.)
