stay in the middle, like you a little
A long time ago, I had a dream. In that dream, I was lost in a great labyrinth. The walls surrounding me were full of photographs. I stepped closer and plucked a photograph from the wall. It was a picture of us, standing side by side in our white and dark grey uniforms. We were eighteen at that time. She had her hair tied into a high ponytail and I made a victory sign with my fingers. Behind us, the school's old cherry tree was in full bloom, its fallen petals rested on our hair and shoulders. That picture was taken at our graduation.
I studied other pictures: they were all of me and her.
And I remembered what I'd forgotten; the little prayer I used to whisper.
"I heard a boy from class 3 confessed to Senior Sister."
We put our books on the desk and piled them into a pair of twin towers. She took out her bunny-shaped pencil case, then pulled out a pink ballpoint. She opened her chemistry workbook and started to scribble an electron-transfer equation.
"Which Senior Sister?" I grabbed her math workbook and flicked the pages open while stealing a glance at her. She tilted her head and put her cheek on the palm of her left hand. Her eyes were round and bright, framed by long eyelashes. She had applied eyeliner and a small touch of peach-colored eyeshadow on them—I wouldn't notice if she didn't tell me. There was this faint scent of clean soap and strawberry when I inhaled the air. I realized it was not her usual scent. She must have changed her shampoo.
"That Senior Sister. Music Club Senior Sister."
"Oh? Really? Which boy was it again?"
She frowned and rasped her finger on the edge of the desk, impatient. "That tall boy from class 3. The basketball captain. You spoke to him about the gym schedule last week."
I remembered that boy. He was quite good-looking and had real nice personality—at least I never heard bad things about him. I thought of Senior Sister of the music club, who was very pretty, with that dark chocolate hair that fell around her shoulders. We talked to Senior Sister several times last year when she mentored our class for the school's annual choir competition. Senior Sister always had this certain tone in her voice when she spoke. It almost had the quality of being tranquilizing.
They were a good match, in terms of appearance, at least.
I continued to check her homework. She did a better job than I expected. But then I spotted a mistake: she messed up the partial derivative results. I marked the number and returned the book to her.
She took the book and started to correct her answer. Her lips pursed tightly when she concentrated.
"So, are they together now?"
"No, I don't think so. Rumor had it, Senior Sister dated a guy from another school."
"Poor that basketball guy."
She sighed and puffed her cheeks. "Young love is too fragile. It ends almost too easily."
Was it, though? I looked around the classroom. Students had filled the room. Their white short-sleeved shirts were crisp. Their skirts and trousers were dark gray, the color of hurricane. Their voices melded together into a kind of strange cacophony: someone hummed the melody of a popular song, others chatted in casual tones, a girl shouted angrily at a boy.
But she and I were safe in our bubble of shared placidity. I pulled out an English textbook and started reading. She had just finished correcting her math and chemistry homework before tugging on the hem of my shirt. When she opened her mouth to speak, her voice was soft, filled with melancholy.
"Hey, if you have a crush on someone, would you confess to them?"
Would I? I'd never thought of that question before, so I didn't answer. She waited, and waited, and stared at me with her curious eyes. When I clicked my tongue and laughed quietly, she scoffed. Our conversation stopped when the homeroom teacher came.
But that question lingered. Would you? I wanted to ask her, too.
Senior Sister was indeed going out with a boy from another school. One afternoon when I walked home from my tutorial class, I saw her walking arm in arm with a boy in a different uniform.
I didn't know what made me end up following them. Perhaps it was the ambiguous hues of the sky, rose-tinted clouds and purplish-blue and murky orange. Or the illumination that spread from the streetlights and the windows of buildings. Or the way their bodies were so close together. Such intimacy, wasn't it suffocating?
They turned to a small alley next to a Japanese-style restaurant. The place was poorly lit save for a lonesome lamp hung from a metal pole that glowed pale yellow, creating a pool of light on the concrete pavement. Senior Sister and the boy walked past the pole. I tailed them in silence, only noises from the hustle and bustle of the main road could be heard. But my heartbeat was loud as they stopped under the shadow of the brick wall. They faced each other, then the boy raised his hand to touch Senior Sister's head. I couldn't see the expression on Senior Sister's face, but then I saw her arms circling the boy's neck. The boy wasn't as tall as the basketball captain, but Senior Sister still had to tilt her head back when he lowered his head and kissed her.
I froze in my place. This wasn't the first time I saw people kissing, but somehow I felt embarrassed.
I turned my heels and started walking away from that alley. My heart was beating fast, blood rushed in my veins. Before knowing it, I started running on the tiled sidewalk. Past the row of shops and cafes, past the pedestrians in their various faces and clothes, past the blurry scenery of cars and trees and spaces around me. I tried to banish the image of Senior Sister and her boyfriend kissing, because now I started thinking of something.
Something I didn't quite understand. And it was so dense, so tight it burned my lungs.
Someone grabbed my arm. The action made me lose balance and had to cling to that someone. My breath was ragged and uneven, but when I looked up, I almost choked.
She was standing there, frowning. Her uniform was creased and she pinned her hair into a messy bun. There was a tinge of red on her cheeks and lips. I took a step back and peeled her hand from my arm.
"What do you mean, 'what are you doing'? You're the one who ran like a criminal."
I debated whether to tell her what I saw before, but there it was again, that uncomfortable feeling creeping down in my lungs, like a moth crawling between alveoli. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, demanding. I could never be able to resist it when she looked at me with that kind of stare: curiosity sparkled in her eyes, her lips parted slightly, her head crooked to the side. In the end, I told her about Senior Sister and her boyfriend, but I didn’t tell her how I followed them and saw them kissing in the back of that dim alley.
"How nice it is, isn’t it? Having a lover. Walking together, linking arms, talking to each other like you two are the main character of a play, and all other peoples around you are just supernumeraries," she murmured. I didn't tell her my discomfort about the disappearing spaces between lovers. She looked so optimistic, so full of wishful thinking, and I realized I liked it when she beamed like this. We resumed our steps. The bus stop was just around the corner. We would part there. Our homes were on different routes. I would board bus number 44 and she would wait for bus number 15.
She pulled my arm and we stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. My eyebrows rose as I watched her fiddling with the zipper of her bag. She took out a small plastic bag and asked me to hold out my hand. I squinted my eyes but complied with her request. She dumped the content of the plastic bag on the palm of my hand. It fell with a soft thump.
"I got this from a buy one get one free promotion. This is for you," she said. I examined the thing on my palm.
"It's perfect for you. Look, I have the other." She showed me the magenta wristband on her left hand. The wristband in my hand was pink, several shades below her own. It was made from opaque silicone and the color reminded me of strawberry milkshake. That thing was plain saved for a small white C alphabet embedded.
"What's this C stand for?"
She was deep in thought, brows knitted together and lips pouted. Then she replied in a cheeky tone. "C, for Courage!"
We cracked at her answer. As we walked side by side, she started to recount one incident in her tutorial class involving a girl, a teacher, and a whiteboard eraser, I slipped my hand into the wristband. It fitted nicely around my wrist. I didn't know it before, but the pink looked not too bad against my skin.
She was right. It was perfect for me.
We had been deskmates since the start of eleventh grade, but before that in tenth grade, we were in the same class.
I supposed it was the choir competition back then. My singing was terrible even among the terrible and I was tone-deaf to the point of impossible. The class president gave up on me and said in a tired voice. It's okay if you don't sing. Just move your mouth, that'll be sufficient.
But she was furious when she heard that. That day after school ended, she dragged me to the music room. She sat down at the piano and started pressing the keys, playing the melody of the competition song. Listen, you're gonna sing in the choir. I refuse to abandon you. Now, pay attention to my voice.
She had a beautiful voice. Not too high-pitched but there was a hint of certain weight in it. When she sang, it was stable without being too piercing. I stood next to the piano, watching her playing and singing. Everything around me turned into a hazy scene but she. It was as if her voice cast magic and I was swallowed whole, drowned in her ocean.
So many people in this world, I'm blessed that we have us.*
We practiced the song over and over. Every day after the last class ended, we stayed in the music room. Sometimes, Senior Sister would come and help us. But most of the time, it was just the two of us. Her persistence resulted in my rapid improvement in singing. I was still terrible and tone-deaf, but at least I could sing the competition song without being out of tune.
On the day of the choir competition, as we climbed up the stage, she winked at me and whispered, good luck.
Little did she know, in this lifetime, I had the greatest luck of meeting her.
A year passed by and suddenly we were in eleventh grade. On that morning of the first day of the semester, I stood in front of the announcement board, looking for my class placement. She was also there, scanning the printed list pasted on the board. I saw our name in the table for class 1. She must have noticed it too because she elbowed me and smirked. Eh, we're in the same class again.
The desk selection was not determined by the teacher, so whoever came first that morning got to claim their preferred seats. When I arrived at the class, almost half of the seat was already occupied. I sat on the desk on the foremost left side, near the window looking out to the corridor, two rows from behind. Nothing fancy, but it was empty.
I looked up, and there she was standing with her neat blazer and skirt, a friendly smile on her lips.
I guessed some matters came as naturally as breathing and in my case, she was one of those things.
"Did you know that Mozart is pink?"
She loved to throw the most random unimportant things at the most random times. That afternoon, I was staying behind in the deserted classroom to do my math homework. She just came back from the music room and dropped a music score unceremoniously on the desk. I raised my eyebrows and glanced at her. The corners of her lips were downturned. That meant her practice didn't go well and she was pissed off.
She pulled the chair and sat there facing me. "Aren't you curious?"
I indulged her chatter. She seemed to be in a great spirit when she talked about things she found interesting. I heard a few whispers about how she's quite self-centered, but I didn't think so. Maybe it was because I found that I liked the way she brimmed with energy when she talked. Or that she eased the burden of filling the spaces with the conversation that always weighed down on me. Or it was simply because I always wanted to hear her musical voice. Or all of those things. I guessed it was all of those things.
She said the first Mozart she heard was his first variation of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It happened when she was a toddler, two or three years old. She didn't remember anything, where she was, with whom she was, but she remembered the music. "You see, when I heard that, I didn't see sparkling stars. Instead, it was a garden of flowers, and they're all different hues of red. Magenta, coral, rose, poppy red."
Later, she saw Mozart's portrait in a book, wearing a red coat and hideous white wig.
She took out a walkman from the compartment under her desk. Its metallic black surface was covered in heaps of stickers. She held out one of the earphones and gestured to me to plug it into my ear.
It was a piano piece I'd once heard when she played in the music room. I didn't know the title or anything about it but I remembered that room, bathed in the pale light of midday sun, with its rows of folding chairs and musical instruments, and the white curtains flapped in the breeze. It was as if I was sitting on the floor again and watching her play the piece on the black Yamaha piano.
I didn't know much about music, but that day in the classroom, somehow I knew that the piece in the walkman was played by her. That moment lasted without any words spoken. We were drenched in the sound of music and when our eyes met her smile bloomed. Her fingers were dancing in the empty space between us as if she was playing piano. Her nails were translucent pink.
When the music ended, she told me it was Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 8 in A minor. She asked me how was it but the only thing I thought of was the lingering tinkling tunes and her pink fingernails.
"I guess you're right." She had this smug look once I replied, as if saying, told you so.
"Mozart was in deep agony when he composed this piece. In 1778, his mother passed away suddenly and it was one of the most tragic moments for him. Thus, this sonata was in minor keys, which is rare for him. His sonatas generally have this certain cheerfulness in them. So people were like, speculating that this was written to express his sadness."
"But, you see, even in his most somber piece, we can still hear the light and airy tone. Kinda romantic, isn't it?"
In the second semester of eleventh grade, we had a new math teacher.
The new math teacher was a guy in his late twenties. He had a slender build and jet black hair that always seemed messy and a pair of crooked glasses on his crooked nose. He didn't like to teach according to the textbook. Instead, he'd ask his students which problem they wanted to learn, or which topic interests them. He was a little bit eccentric. Other teachers secretly dubbed him as a troublemaker, yet students liked him for his carefree manner.
She had a crush on that math teacher.
It was the small things, but I noticed. She stopped playing with her phone when it was time for math class. The way her eyes followed him as he stepped out of the room. Often, she would deliberately pass by the faculty office to catch a glimpse of him.
"You're gonna burn a hole in him, you know."
She was bewildered when she heard those words come out of my mouth.
"Was it obvious?" Her voice was layered with both panic and amusement.
"I mean, with your newly found enthusiasm for math, it's quite obvious."
Since that moment, suddenly my days were filled not only with her, but also with that math teacher. She always had something to share about him. Today his shirt was blue. I think he trimmed his hair. I saw him playing basketball with the boys from class 3. What did he say earlier? Do you know who's Euler? He said his favorite mathematician is Euler. He also said something about the most beautiful equation in the history of math. Eh, you know it? Tell me, tell me. Hey, hey, today he talked to me. When he found out that I play piano, he discussed the relationship between math and musical notes. Sounds cool but I don't really understand.
It was fascinating listening to her stories about him, yet there was this strange melancholy growing in my chest. I didn't want to hear about him, but I also didn't want her to stop telling me things. It was frustrating. I felt like I'm stuck in an equation with no solution.
I had never understood why most people associated romance with pink. I was sick of seeing pink everywhere when it was February and everyone seemed to bathe in the euphoria of Valentine's day. There were so many colors in this world, how could a feeling experienced by different people be the same? I'd heard how red was for passionate love or blue for platonic love, but pink dominated them all. They said it's the color of pure love, something that bloomed in the heart of those untainted souls.
I'd never understood it before. And yet, I came to understand.
It was the way she laughed at someone's joke. The look of serenity when her fingers danced across the piano keys. That smile she secretly had when she saw that teacher walk past our class. The frown she had on her forehead when she sang out of tune. The way she tugged on my shirt when she tried to get my attention. There was this tickling sensation when she leaned closer and whispered in my ear. Her breath was warm on my cheek, her voice was soft and clear.
I stole a glance at her, who was standing near the window, chatting with a classmate. Wind brushed past the window and flooded the classroom with the scent of fresh-cut grass and salt and dusty ground. Her long, black hair fluttered against her shoulders. Sunlight fell on the side of her face, printed soft gradation on her skin. I closed my eyes and let out a sigh. Warmth crept on the tip of my fingers, my arms, bloomed in my chest.
Hey, did you know that every time you walked, the ground you'd just stepped on turned into a carpet of cherry blossoms? The petals were in various shades of pink. Just like the wristband you gave me and your favorite ballpoint. The blush on your cheeks, the pale rose under your translucent nails, the strawberry-tinted balm on your lips.
It was the kind of pink Mozart's Piano Sonata no 8 carried.
The cherry tree in the school's backyard was old. Legend said it had been there since the days of our great-grandfathers. But of course, it wasn't true. Cherry trees didn't live long. Their average lifespan was only between fifteen and thirty years. But our school's tree definitely looked old with its huge, wrinkled trunk and dense branches. There used to be a row of cherry trees along the backyard fence, but time killed them all year by year and this tree was the sole survivor. Maybe that was how it got its weathered look.
Not long after it shed all of the flowers, the tree started to cover its branches with green leaves. Even though it wasn't as scenic as the blossoms, those leaves were charming in their own way. Students liked to sit under the shade of that tree, eating their lunch or playing around or practicing their talents—public speaking and singing and dancing. We liked it there because despite the number of people, it never got too noisy. Perhaps it was the wisdom of the tree. Under the embrace of its shade, there was only a strange sense of serenity.
"A girl from class 2 confessed to him and got rejected. She cried and stayed in the infirmary the whole day."
She straightened her skirt and sat next to me. I leaned back on the tree and brushed off the fallen leaves on my hair.
She sighed. "It would put him in a difficult situation, right? It's not like he seduced her, but still, he'd be held responsible."
There was a palpable sadness in her voice and it made something in my chest clenched in pain.
I asked her if she would confess her feelings to that teacher and whether she would be afraid of rejection.
"My crush on him doesn't matter. At one point I realized it was ridiculous. But you see, it's a fascination. Adults are so sparkling and beautiful. He's that kind of adult who radiates certain rays. So you always want to bask in his brilliance. He makes my heart race. He makes me look forward for the coming days. That kind of energy, that kind of warmth, I want to treasure it. This is my kind of love: silent, sacred, and enduring. But you don't understand, do you?"
She was right. I didn't understand her fascination with adults. For me, adults were all the same: a tangled root of mess and desolation. They were very tired, dissilusioned, very busy telling themselves they're alright, okay, you got this sweetheart. And I didn't know much about love. I knew the logical sequences. It was easy. You fell in love, you confessed your love, the outcome was either your feeling was reciprocated or you got rejected. Love should have been easy, in theory.
And yet she walked the other way around.
I guessed it wasn't a terrible choice. To stay in the middle ground, not afraid of being rejected or burdened to give more. To have your love preserved in gentle hues. Young love should look like this. Young love should be kept pristine, unbroken, until time washed it away.
Young love should've been fleeting, but also the one with the deepest engraving.
And you? She hummed that question while combing her hair with her fingers.
She blinked innocently. "Got someone in your mind?"
I shrugged. She clicked her tongue and shook her head. Stubborn, she muttered before taking a bite of her curry bun.
I tilted my head back and looked up at the looming shade of the cherry tree. Sunlight fell through the gaps of its leaves, rendered lines of rays rained down on us. My gaze followed a green leaf floating down, down, then landed on the top of her head.
I wished I was that leaf and all of its mess. I wished I liked her a little less.
Often, I dreamt of us standing side by side in the middle of a great labyrinth. In those dreams, I bared all of my secrets to her, all my feelings and desires. Of the colors I saw surrounding her. But every time I demanded her reply, she only smiled and disappeared.
Sometimes I fiddled with my wristband, turned it and saw the lone white C among the pink. I remembered that time we stood in the middle of the sidewalk, under a darkened sky and the last bit of rose-tinted clouds got swallowed up by the night. I remembered how city lights poured illumination upon us as if we were the main characters of a play and all the people, all those buildings, those vehicles speeding on the road—they were all mere background noises.
I remembered her face. I remembered her voice. I remembered the shape of her smile.
I remembered what she said, C for Courage.
But I never had that courage.