The Rite of Spring

Cha Hakyeon Citizen, Market Research Analyst June 30, 1990Seoul, South Korea

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cr: Summerspring ♡ please do not edit.

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Appointment | &Taekwoon

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There is something oddly comforting and yet heartbreaking when Taekwoon is assigned a shift in the pediatric unit. He is considered backup to the NICU nurses who handle infants with incredibly tender and light hands, something he can only try to mimic as he gently cradles their tiny frames. It’s enlightening to hold newborn life like that in his hands and yet down the hall and around the corner the air is much different.

Here is where he Taekwoon dedicates his time helping children suffering from more serious ailments, the ones who he knows by name and says hello to day in and day out. It’s these children that both inspire him and break his heart in a multitude of ways. How can children who have not yet reached their prime continue to be so strong and passionate? Even when facing unknown certainty? But these children are the a big reason Taekwoon became a doctor in the first place. Although he had originally thought his hands had been molded to create music, he sees now they can also be used to mend bones and stitch up wounds. But that doesn’t mean that this line of work isn’t exhausting.

Today is one of those days that he can feel his exhaustion down to the center of his bones. It seemed to weigh heavily on his shoulders and Taekwoon can’t help but to feel sluggish. The nurses had already made several comments to him about his ‘zombie-like’ nature multiple times throughout the day but Taekwoon can only shrug his shoulders in response. Being a doctor felt like he was perpetual in a state of sleepiness. Even when he was off and catching up on sleep, those 12-13 hour shifts seemed to catch up to him quickly and sucking away years of his life and his youth. The page of his name over the intercom brought him to attention though and he slowly shuffled his way to the nurses’ station.

It’s only when he saw Hakyeon did the weariness’ seem to slowly seep out of his skin and he wanted nothing more than to bury his face in the slope of Hakyeon’s shoulder. It’s the coffee, and the fact that they’re in public that stopped him in his tracts. Taekwoon easily accepted the cup, his fingers lingering a bit too long against his before pulling back. When was the last time he slept? He honestly was too tired to even begin to count the hours but he knew that his shift was slowly winding to an end. “I don’t remember,” he murmured out as a hand came up to touch at the necklace hidden beneath the neckline of his scrub. It was less of a nervous gesture and more of a habit of reassurance and comfort. “Thank you for bringing this to me. I really needed it.”

There was always something uncomfortable about hospitals to Hakyeon. Too sterile and washed in pastel to feel anything other than stumbling apathy, running headfirst into anxiety. It’s that atmosphere that doesn’t fit with it’s purpose and he thinks of it to be a little like drawing a tragedy out in crayola crayons. It’s still terrible and people are sick and no amount of candy-colored, opal stained anything would cover up the unfortunate purpose of the medical facilities. Although he admires the attempts to, especially in the pediatric unit. Children were handled far differently than the adults and for good reason. Hakyeon assumes that childhood deserved some form of honor in itself, innocence and the unfathomably vast imagination of adolescence can only live a small shelf life and for what it’s worth, there were no limits to how the older generations took to preserving it. What comes after the warmth of youth is convoluted and unforgiving. He can only look back at how it felt to lose himself to the process of maturing;  piece by piece there are rituals that fade out of neglect, the love he felt constructs itself into glass, people leave and die and forever is a term that fables use to stimulate a lie of happy endings until everyone finds out how happiness dependent on perspective. In the end he still wonders if his take on happiness had always been like this; the simplicity of small gestures when Taekwoon acknowledges the ring sitting gently between his clavicles like a promise, the feathery quality of his voice when his gratitude permeates more than the object he mentions. “Looks like someone is going to come home and head to bed again?” A smile starts like the bud of a flame and spreads, understanding and valiant across his visage. In any other atmosphere he knows he would fit a palm to the other’s cheek or run his fingers through his hair, an action he picked up again out of habit. “Not that I mind, though,” he continues quietly and brings the lip of the cup to his mouth, testing the liquid in it tentatively as to not burn his tongue like he’s so used to doing when he’s rushing to get back to his office. The steam is enough to pause him and bring it back down, expression complaint as he resumes his act of patience. “I just need to know when I should start cooking so the food isn’t cold when you get home. Don’t worry about Hongbin either, I’m sure he’ll snack on everything while I’m preparing it anyways. You know how he is.” Their eyes meet again, overhead luminescence like stars in the stirring amber and Hakyeon sighs, contented. “I’m not going to let you skip eating even if we have to hold your head up and spoon-feed you like an infant. How else are you going to get the energy you need for the next day. Would be kind of hypocritical of a doctor to be caring for all of these kids and simultaneously forgetting to care for himself--ah well, anyway I didn’t come here to nag you. I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?” 

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Safe and sound | & Hongbin

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“It’s nice,” you offer and you mean it, you really do. But you don’t dare look at him to confirm if he believes your words, if it is more than small talk and trying to buy your way back into his life. If only things were that simple; if only years could be spliced together in some coherent narrative and the missing ones could be excised from memory. Life is never so simple, especially when it is a seed you’ve sown yourself.

You look around the place, a few steps away from the door, feeling like the elephant itself. You don’t mean to inspect but curiosity is a driving force as you attempt to derive clues about his life from the apartment. Useless. You wouldn’t be here if you were more perceptive to begin with, if you were better at reading in between the lines as a child. And assumptions — wasn’t it assumptions that led you here in the first place?

( your eyes linger at the form of his retreating back. it’s been too long. you force yourself to turn away. )

You wonder if it is impolite to seat yourself or explore the scenery the windows provide, see what Hakyeon has been gazing upon all these years. Deliberate as you watch him busy himself in the kitchen. Old habits die hard. You can’t help but wonder if this is mere gesture of a good host. You smile. You no longer have a right to question.

You feel the couch dip under your weight as you seat yourself, half hoping for a shawl so that you could present yourself as a character from one of those melodramas: a soft gaze towards the expanse of a city, poise as you turn with a soft ‘oh’ when the beverage is presented to you, grateful hands that receive and a staged silence that is less awkward and more comforting.

It is impossible of course. Fiction does not become reality by sheer will alone.

You curl your lips into a semblance of a smile and then come to the realization that it is the same expression worn when your bed becomes too empty so you seek for someone else’s. It falls and you pray he doesn’t catch it. A nod, a murmur of thanks, and then you praise whatever kind divine being has kept your hands steady as you received the cup. It must be the steam pricking at your eyes.

You wonder if he retains, with the same fondness you hold, memories of crisscrossed legs and tea cupped in small hands and plots that unravel through the screen. About the way you would blow into your cup, lips flirting with the edge of the porcelain cup until you braved a sip. His laugh that caused you to flush and swell with warmth at the same time. The way you sometimes had to ask him to elaborate on the plot or repeat what the characters had just mentioned because you lost focus while watching him. It is always the little things that seem to matter most.

There are words caught, stuck to your palette and refusing to be dislodged ever since he waited for you to close up shop. The lighting under street lamps and road side stalls that beckons you to speak but you’ve built the dam well enough over the years. There’s a pause between moments and you want to ask do you remember… ? but the timing never seems right or you become too afraid of the answer. A coward you once were; a coward you shall always be.

Yet still unwilling to part, to call this a day, to bid the other goodnight as if you’ll see him again.

The index finger traces the rim of the cup as you nurse the tea like the coffee you had hours ago. You’ve fallen so short. Another look around the apartment as if you are trying to imprint this into memory, familiarize yourself with the years you let slip through your fingers like sand.

There’s a DVD half tucked away. Suddenly half tempted to tell him about the time your mother caught you crying over the happy ending of an animated movie and how you didn’t bother to explain to her that this was the favorite to watch with Hakyeon hyung and that it feels empty without his voice to narrate or his laughter or his hand bumping into yours while fishing for popcorn in the bowl. You retrieve I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Okay and shatter both the silence and any attempts at filler conversations. “Do you mind if we watch this?” Habitual the way you fold your knees and bring them closer to yourself, hoping that this provides an excuse to continue to skirt around the elephant in the room, the questions that have yet to be addressed.

You wonder if he can see through you, the insecurities almost transparent — making you out to be as fragile as your sugar sculptures — afraid that once you leave, the wrong clip or pull leaves a misshapen lump of sugar in the palm of your hands. You still can’t say a word. You barely know where to begin. Do you mind if I stay?

It’s a minute into your eyes focusing on the bundle of dried leaves that come to life within the teapot before you, pink blossoms unfolding and turning the water similar hues, bleeding out in tendrils of denser color much like smoke would unfurl into the air from the end of your dying cigarettes. You don’t think he knows you have that nasty habit yet, because it was one you acquired long after he left the picture. But that’s not true is it? Hongbin wasn’t in the picture as much as he was the picture, in every detailed line that you’ve created, there was a bit of the both of them influencing your hand to move. Influencing you to push forward no matter how hard your feet would try to stay in the same place so they could catch up to you or maybe look over their shoulders to find you waiting for them at nine years old, swaying slowly on the swing-set, at the park you frequented near your houses when time never passed you by and days were measured in intervals of when you were together and when you were apart. No hours or emptied minutes. You had no concept of time back then just as you cant seem to find it now, but the feeling is different and you can’t ignore that much longer, how uncomfortable you never thought you would be finding him again; imagining it, there was always a little part of you that was blind and that was the part where you tried to fill him in with ghosts, with the child you remembered, as if the years apart never existed but in reality they do. You knew they did and still you tried to be ignorant and now he’s sitting on your couch, as real as ever and there’s no laughter and no tremendous inner peace that you’ve been searching for and you’re coming up empty in so many ways that you never thought you could or would.

This is another one of those incidences, you think, that you’ve romanticized so much that you can’t handle the real thing in your hands. Kind of like love, in general. Kind of like all of the fragile hearts you’ve held and dropped and repeated thinking you wouldn’t break it this time, but in retrospect you do. Then you look back at the couch and you see, clear as day: your heart dancing precariously on the edges of your fingertips and your hands quivering as you walk back two full cups of tea, ushering one into his palms hitherto retreating to the other side of your sofa, too conscious of yourself to actually get comfortable. You catch the edges of his smile and it’s not something you recognize because you’ve been so good, up until now, reading in between the lines, but his lips curve in other languages you can hardly read; it’s all warmth, heavy in the center of your chest. It’s the hours that have made Hongbin a stranger to you in the simplest of ways and the people who have shaped him, the incidents you were absent from that would make his gestures like a cheap game of charades. The details are the hardest to conform to. From the moment you looked back into his eyes for the first time in years, you could see the little boy that made you his sun and maybe that was the worst part of it all. Maybe rediscovering destroys the facade that he is the same person, but neither are you. “Oh uh, sure” you reply, a bit flustered at first because you forgot that the movie was laying out so blatantly, but in your defense, you weren’t expecting company. You weren’t expecting him to stay. You weren’t expecting how your throat tightens up when you take it out of his hands to slip it a bit disjointedly into the player. 

Even as the screen lights up and you flip through options before beginning the actual film, you can feel an unavoidable presence between the two of you like time itself suspended from the moment you reconnected, and the chances you will be paying any attention to something else other than how it pushes you further into the cushions turn slim. A tentative sip of your drink, liquid lukewarm from the minutes of neglect as it runs down your throat. You cant bring yourself to look at him again, nerves accumulating at the thought that when you turn your head, he’ll be there to meet you and the floodgates would open to a world where silences become tangible and the two of you are lost beyond words, where you raise your voice and tell him to leave because your heart is breaking and you can’t tell him why because you don’t know and maybe he doesn’t know either and you’re both sitting here, years later on a sofa in a familiar situation, but everything is different even if it’s the same. Adulthood has taken you both by the throats, made you hollow and selfish and Hongbin the sculpture of what could destroy you, change you ( back to who plummeted into love with his eyes closed because he knew the hands who would catch him ) but now you’re thinking about how many fingers have laced into Hongbin’s like he’s as precious as life itself, wondering if the voices and the smiles and the shadows of the individuals after you have held the same importance because you sit with these years on your back, crushing you under their weight. All screaming how you made yourself into a monument of them, of all the memories and promises that they’ve lost somewhere in the distance they’ve created. How your pathetic heart has yet to move on from the day he left you.

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Five More Minutes | JTW & LHB

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Propped up on his elbow, Hakyeon watches the way both Hongbin and Taekwoon curl into the morning, slow and gentle and fighting the way it will inevitably separate them from the warmth of this simple luxury. He meets eyes that are half-lidded under the swathe of tender sunlight, the room standing still around them. A wall clock ticking in the backdrop of their syncopated breathing, hushing as the air leaves his lungs and he’s left with the residual glow that Taekwoon kindles in his abdomen. Then the reminder; a gentle churn before him, dragging the sheets and dipping the mattress. He looks down and feels his chest swell, a nose bumping into his own while fingertips graze his cheek. Lips too gracious to collide ,but artful, as Hongbin normally is to mimic the tides they would visit as children. The ocean gives way to euphoria, vignetted with the haze of mornings. Hakyeon presses into the cashmere, his knuckles untangling from the lock that both he and Taekwoon created sometime throughout the night, to find a place on the youngest’s shoulder where he applies pressure, maneuvers him onto his back in harmony to the tug of a bottom lip betwixt his own. He pauses to nurture the action, supplementing two or three presses to Hongbin’s cheeks before he finds himself looking up again, searching the eyes that graced his own only seconds prior as if to say that there is an opportunity to be taken here, as if to say that he would never neglect a request. And it’s then the smile blooms, small as it is humble, with one hand still tracing Hongbin’s shoulder. 

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Five More Minutes | JTW & LHB

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Warm, he’s so warm. its the first thing he registers as the god of slumber begins to pull back the veil of slumber that had clouded his mind only seconds before. His eyes flutter once, twice as he begins to take stock of haphazard limbs and memories of the previous night. Taekwoon was cocooned in more comfortable surroundings than the hospital break room couch could ever offer. His arms were splayed without room for rhyme or reason. Surrounded by the scent of paper and spun sugar, he could feel the phantom echoes of heartbeats against his chest matching in tandem. But it was all the whispering tendrils of sleep that tried to tantalize him back into slipping under and down into the slumber once again. But the slight graze of skin on skin contact pulled him back to awareness until his eyes were finally fluttering open to reveal the innocent and relaxed face of the youngest occupant of their rather large bed. The continued movement of a gentle finger brushing against the top of his hand confirmed the location of his eldest lover. Making soft noises under his breath, Taekwoon couldn’t resist shuffling closer to them both, bringing his nest of blankets with him as he claimed what little space of the bed that was left.

@spxhongbin

It is warm, but not uncomfortable the way he is nestled between two other individuals, almost as if protected on both sides. It induces memories, just shortly out of reach, something like déjà vu but imprinted into his soul. The first thing he notices is the contact: the part where there’s skin against his own legs or the texture of silk, where his arms are placed, where the edge of the scapula presses against his shirt, where the chest of the other fits against his spine, where entanglement is a form of fondness embodied in a physical sense. The dreamer in him wants to document it in some abstract sculpture; the lover in him wants this to become a ritual. He refuses to open his eyes, screws them shut when lips touch the nape of his neck, allowing a low whine to slip from his lips as he burrows his face in the other direction. A stronger whiff of last night’s shampoo and the hints of body soap mingled in. Hongbin rests his forehead against the bare skin of Taekwoon’s shoulder, the arm already settled around his waist drawing him closer as if he was just one giant teddy bear. He is, to some extent. Both of them are. So he inches back, taking the other along with him until he meets a solid mass, allowing the spine to relax, wondering how long he could get away with postponing reality.

This is where he keeps his eyes open and watches the world unfold to life that is both his own and entirely out of his possession, leaving him a bystander, a stranger to the beauty it withholds in the simplest of actions; hair over pillow cases, strewn about in ways that only sleep can produce so effortlessly, soft skin washed in eggshell light. Church bell voices steal his attention, one proceeding the other and falling back into comfortable silence, and he takes it as a subtle warning before he’s pulled closer--closer than he dared to bring himself because he is a man that thinks far too much before he speaks, even more so before he acts. The life he’s lived in solitude has conditioned him to look for signs that may never come, but they need not to when he’s secured by their decisions. Relief eases in thereafter, subtle but substantial all the same, a quiet reverie of no obligations pricked with the curiosity of if he were alone in this freedom, which wouldn’t be considerably appealing. Hakyeon hardly stomachs the thought of being reacquainted with loneliness when he’s been cured of it, pacified by the steady exhalations that have long since fallen in time with his own, and the thrum of hearts answering the one behind his ribcage. “Taekwoon,” he manages to breathe out, soft and brittle along the youngest’s hair, “ do you have a shift today?”  

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Five More Minutes | JTW & LHB

His eyes open, then close, then open to soft sunlight and vision blurring together at the very edges, clarity seeping in slow and lethargic to the imagery of sheer curtains that stir as the ventilation system creaks on. The instinctive desire to stretch is subdued with the knowledge that there’s a back fit firmly against his chest, noted when he inhales and warm pressure pushes the breath from his lungs. The scent of shampoo fills his nose, sweet and heavy as if it had permeated the room itself in their slumber. A brief smile settles on morning lips, turning up at the edges once he sees whom is peacefully positioned across from him, a rather gratuitous book end who’s hand he had intertwined fingers with long before coherence brought attention to it, perched conclusively and lackadaisically on the waist of the body between them. Spine form fit to his torso as it had before, like a page from a diary that had gone missing and although the shoulders were broad they hadn’t jarred him awake nor proved themselves to be deterring throughout the night. Possibly, he thinks with a thoughtful glance down, they had only represented how the youngest could carry the weight of two worlds and in appreciation, too vast to not be acknowledged, he presses his lips to what skin is exposed, only hoping he doesn’t draw the other from sleep prematurely, and still without much realization, his thumb sweeps across knuckles in tandem. A soft squeeze absentmindedly to follow.   

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Safe and sound | & Hongbin

“So,” you start with the intentions of sounding more flattering than you do, voice ornamented with a drabness as its escaping the cusp of your teeth, and you’ve never thought you would sound this grey or get the opportunity to. All of the exchanges that have left your lips so far are nothing compared to what’s in your chest and the feeling is beginning to grow teeth. Incessant gnawing. Something like a force pushing you in no particular direction. Something like waiting for a cliff to appear and for yourself to plunge into darkness. Any second now, you tell yourself. The season robs you of the control it takes to not shiver in front of him like you’re hollow, like you’re aching for something to cement your feet to the ground and have been for quite some time. “This is my place.” You say while pressing enter on the pin pad next to your door, one hand already fastened around the knob as you mull over the idea that if it were unappealing to him in any way then nothing would be stopping you from shutting it just as quickly. But then you open it and the thought hits you like a freight train. 

Shutting doors is what got you both here, a little intoxicated and brokenhearted and so you force yourself to welcome him in and only shut the door if you both were conclusively standing on the same side. You look around stupidly at first when it’s just you and Hongbin and the quiet hum of traffic through your fifth-floor windows, mapping out your own apartment in the lamplight, almost as if you hadn’t lived in it for the past few years; the dining table is gathering dust and one side of your couch dips in from all of the nights you’ve spent mistaking it for a bed. Or maybe it’s not a mistake, but you convince yourself momentarily that it is and that your bed has never felt lonely. Of course, the moment is short-lived and you digress for the sake of not being poor company, which is a weird feeling because you wonder if he would think you to be that, if he could after all of these years. It’s plausible that separation paints larger pictures and what you've shared has become a detail not nearly as important as others; the way he looked at you like you were invincible is a painful reminder that you are anything but. “It’s not much, really, but I don’t have a desire for physical possessions unless I absolutely need them.” A pause where you send him a quick glance, nothing that lingers too long because you wouldn’t want him to inquire why you’re staring, so you refrain. “And since it’s just me, I don’t require a lot.” 

Habitual courtesy drives you towards your kitchen before you pause and wonder aloud if it’s still proper to offer a beverage at this time of night. Between call and response there’s incubation time for you to wonder if he remembers the way you would roll up your sleeves when you made tea or how you would ghost over his hands when he would pour a cup, extra careful to make sure that he never experienced what it was like to spill hot liquid all over his fingers or onto his lap and a piece of you waits for it, paused mid-step when you relive them yourself, a bit selfishly so, as if he would wind up like some ancient device coming back to life from the power of a single memory. Maybe you’ve counted on this one too many times tonight, on trivial things, hopes pressed into the nooks of everyday occurrences because they were special once but you’ve yet to teach yourself that so were first steps and words and you have yet to feel the need to honor them. Especially now, when it feels like you’ve walked so far away and that your tongue can no longer form a language that Hongbin will understand.

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Appointment | &Taekwoon

The hospital doors slide open and Hakyeon welcomes himself inside in company to the gentle gush of autumn that sees him through, a few stray leaves stirring in and around his feet when they make home on the welcome mat. From here he’s looking for a particular face, albeit the gaze is directionless until some nurse, that he’s positive he’s met before, takes pity upon him and decides to escort him to a completely different floor of the establishment, considering it must be somewhat of an issue to have a stranger holding two steaming cups of coffee in the ICU with no intentions of sharing them beyond one specific individual. And she knows this too, he figures as he arrives with a lulling bell from the elevator to the pediatric unit, all suit and tie and hardly someone who would belong there in the first place, but that’s an arguable statement, considering how quickly the other associates seem to pick up on his presence and how that correlates to a certain Dr.Jung. It’s all basic math and problem solving, he muses with a small smile as he sets the coffees aside on part of the reception counter. When you’re in love with another individual it’s as if your lives click into an equation that everyone else can see, how he is one half of the two of them and how putting them together is an undeniable, subconscious want, a want to make things whole that every human seems to possess. 

Out of the corner of his vision, far gone into eyeing some seasonal decorations adorning a few of the patient’s rooms, he notes how solace feels when it enters one. Warm and lethargic. The feeling you would get if a pair of gentle hands could wrap around your heart so it would know how to be handled with the care you’ve never shown it. Then looking in that direction, he meets eyes with Taekwoon, sincere as he sweeps over the rest of the doctor and how exhaustion clung to the fibrils of his being, before picking up the coffee again and gesturing it in his direction. A small detail; the hand extended showcases a ring, thin as to not call attention to it in a crowded room, but noticeable nonetheless. “When was the last time you’ve slept?” he says, first off, tonality drenched in the ambiance of solitude even as nurses shuffle by and cast inquiring glances. He offers nothing more in terms of conversation, at least not now. A simple smile curving in place of words, with his free hand now tucked, save for a thumb, into his pants pocket, but only after a notable glance to the watch upon his wrist. Time was far too precious in these meetings, it nearly felt unfair of him to begin that silent, looming countdown of the minutes they would share before they inevitably have to separate once more.