GIRLHOOD /GODHOOD

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. my heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. psalm 22:14

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KANG YUNSEOL // For the gifts and the calling of god are irrevocable. Romans 11:29

intro / basics / bio / connections

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@4ntemortem But that wasn't what Yunseol needed right now. Jiyeon's sure it'd throw her off the deep end, lose her footing in reality and forever she'd be lost to the labyrinth in her head. "Laundry, mostly." Is what Jiyeon offers. "I was able to get this really nasty grease stain out of my dad's work shirt. It's like new, really." Listlessly, she continues going through the tasks of her day to day. It's not much she realizes. Where does the time go? "My dad's talked about going fishing recently. You should come with us. Y'know, get away." As much as Onyang will allow.

there is a unique sense of humiliation that comes with being around jiyeon - an electrifyingly cruel awareness of her own selfishness, uselessness, etcetera. maybe that's why she only goes to jiyeon, now, when things get bad enough to outweigh the guilt, like some kind of sad reckoning; anubis weighing weakness against desperation on the scales of truth. well, throw her heart to the crocs because here she is, back at the other's door.

life around jiyeon seems simpler, in a way, because jiyeon's life is so familiar to her, or maybe it is just that jiyeon herself is so familiar. yunseol wonders if this familiarity, this guilt, this complicated affection is what sisterhood feels like - as an only child she hadn't had the occasion to know. it sort of seems like it might be. jiyeon's hands are warm, friction at her shoulders as they rub against her, the heat spreading slow and comforting as she nods along with him, pressing her lips together around a shuddery breath. casting her thoughts back to when her mother had briefly attempted to get her help for her "trauma" (namely, a church approved counselor with little to no credentials), the breathing exercises that had been perhaps the only useful thing she'd learned from them, and she clings onto that, following the familiar counted pattern as she tries to ground herself. "well that sounds nice," she reasons amicably, her voice still raspy as jiyeon continues, hesitating. getting away - god, what a thought, what a wonderful thought. the idea of leaving onyang in any way beyond the momentary has always filled yunseol with longing but, much more viscerally, with trepidation. a brief foray out of the town, however, she can surely manage- and probably sorely needs. "never been fishing. do i need to touch worms?" she queries, almost joking, lips quirking into a ghost of a grin at the edge. "it sounds nice though. i always like being around the water. you know, lakes, beach, whatever." she knows she's rambling, but she doesn't stop herself - sometimes it's easier to just let her thoughts tumble out to fill up the tension, override the quiet.

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@ech0h he unwinds one end of it enough to half-run it up the length of the grave and into yunseol's hand so she can work on unwinding pieces of it from above while he saws through the lower layers of all those plants, his hands sticky with the sap of it buy the time he's worked his way through the majority of them.

yunseol’s eyes don’t leave the coffin- too big, too ancient, too heavy with meaning that presses down on her chest like the weight of a century of prayers unanswered. ilwoo’s voice echoes, and though it irks her, it also grounds her; a tether in the twisting shadows. she sighs, longsuffering, clearly having had this conversation one to many times. "i'm not asking you if you believe in gods or not, but something uses your mouth. something is in my head. something is in that coffin. and it wants us to cut those vines," she tells him, coarse and a little bit frustrated- she's spent her whole life whispered at about this god and that, browbeaten with the promise of saints and devils, angels and demons, presences omniscient, omnipotent- and silent. she stopped trying to figure out, long ago, what it is that speaks in her skull, but the understanding is clear as far as she's concerned. maybe it isn't god, in the capital sense, in the abrahamic sense, but surely it is some kind of god, some entity beyond human understanding. it's been inside her, festering for years - she doesn't have the luxury of nonbelief. her fingers close around the vine ilwoo presses into her palm, fingers deft and sure, peeling back the layers as if the act itself could peel away the years of silence and waiting. the sap clings, sticky and stubborn, much like the voice that coils in her brain. something deep in the pit of her screams that this is wrongwrongwrong but the murmur in her ears makes it terribly easy to drown that out. yunseol isn't used to listening to herself, after all. ilwoo works on cutting and yunseol patiently unfurls, unknots, until they're staring at the bared coffin, and trepidation snakes its way up her spine. "protect us from ..." she trails off - has it ever said? the promise of protection sits in between them and she shrugs. "dunno, actually, but - i mean - a mysterious entity offers you protection, probably means you'll need it, right?" her face is still a twist of consternation as she reaches down to help haul him out of the hole, a strange quiet between her ears - an implication that their work is, for the moment at least, finished.

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LIMINAL

@saintsons

this time, yunseol's own feet bring her to the edge of the forest. it's quiet enough between her ears, for once, a distant murmur that she can tune out. not the roar of the night He'd called her back to the woods, not the rumbling of his instructions as she had followed his directions to the top of the mountain where - she's trying not to think about it. or, maybe she is trying to think about it. maybe she's desperate to think about it, to go back up there, to examine with fresh eyes what she - they - had done. a coffin on the mountain, too large for a human, cut free from the bondage of strange flowers. she can see it so clearly now, every time she closes her eyes. so she's been mostly keeping them open, mostly avoiding sleep, and she's doing this today with a mix of red bull and vodka that is utterly vile on the tongue, a true criminal offense to the palate. her gaze cuts to the side, examining the boy who stands beside where she has perched on the top railing of an old fence. one foot dangles free, the other propped against the bottom rung, and she smacks her lips with a grimace. "tastes fuckin' vile, honestly," she admits, shaking her head. "but i feel like if i've spent the money...." her expression sours before she takes it to her lips again. "tell me something. something distracting," the words fall like a child's plaintive plea for a bed time story.

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SPLINTER // @willowhour she doesn’t expect yunseol to look up from her tinkering. only grabs two bottles, the cool glass easing her sweaty palms. she slides one over to the other girl. “the walls are vibrating, by the way,” she mutters, voice flat as she takes a swig. her eyes fall onto yunseol. or at least, what she can make out from her posture and busy hands. “are you trying to summon mr. lee out of his grave?”

in another lifetime, yunseol probably could have made something of herself. 

in a lifetime where she hadn’t gone missing, hadn’t lived in onyang, hadn’t grown up with the throb of god inside her skull, she might have done so much more. she’d have gone to college, for starters. she’d always been smart, but that had fallen by the wayside in the wake of Him. she’d have moved to the city, probably, as so many did - at least, so many statistically speaking. onyang was a place where people stayed. maybe she would have dated more seriously or loved more earnestly, if she’d had space and time in her life for something other than the voice of god, hammering at her skull, digging tunnels between her ears, creeping in her gray matter. 

but she had gone missing, and she had grown up this way, and so she had done mostly nothing. and most of the nothing she had done took place at mr. lee’s.  there were few places in the world that yunseol truly felt at peace, safe. not the forest, not the church, not the chapel, not even her home. perhaps, in the end, only here. it was a mish-mash of places, a venue without identity beyond chaos, and in this sense it suits yunseol just fine (yunseol, who often thinks of herself as a fraying, patchwork quilt of a girl). 

lee’s is a comfort, a distraction - always something new to fuss over or fix, something new to paint or poke at, and no one has ever had the guts to properly complain about how loud she keeps the store music. her gaze flicks up, quick, at yurim - perhaps an exception. “yes, i thought he’d roll back up and give me a raise so that i could afford better liquor,” she returns on a drawl, twisting the cap off the bottle offered to her. “don’t have anything better to do tonight?” her brow quirks upwards in question, not a condemnation, but a curiosity. yurim isn’t like her - yurim has potential still. yurim could do better, be more. if yunseol was a better friend, she’d try to prop her up, encourage her. but yunseol isn’t- she’s selfish and she’s lonely, so instead she lifts the bottle to clink against the other girl’s with a faint grin.

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HALLOWED GROUND // @lostw0n "if i'd known having soju was part of the ritual, i would have believed sooner," he nods at the half-empty bottle in her hand, eyes sweeping across the shattered glass piled up in the corner like a visible confession. a brow rises as he fixes his gaze back on her. "been praying a lot, huh?" the words come out wry, in lieu of a how have you been.

yunseol can count on her hands the number of meaningful relationships she’s had in her life, the number of people that have really dug their way under her skin. and in most cases, there is always a caveat. won had represented himself as something different- something hers. 

at least, until he wasn’t. 

she’d be lying, too, if she said that goddamn podcast hadn’t found its way to her ears, reopening a wound barely scabbed over.  it’s somewhat chilling (or just infuriating) to have a recount of your childhood trauma out  there on the internet, much less out of the mouth of someone who had up and run from you, as if bored after having sucked out the details of the story like some kind of literary vampire. 

god says to forgive but yunseol just can’t. forgiveness is such a heavy task when she is already saddled with the weight of the thing that whispers in her head, the understanding that there is, perhaps, the weight of a test on her shoulders and she is failing it. step by step, day by day, she walks closer to the edge of the darkness and yearns to jump. so, if she supplements her prayers with soju, so be it. 

her eyes narrow, accusatory when she speaks. “i have long since learned my lessons about believing  things you say,” she informs him, the words all but dripping with poorly suppressed hurt, wrapped in the guise of sardonic disgust. her grip tightens around the cold neck of the bottle, smoothing her thumb against the curve of the glass as if to ground herself, one hand reaching up to tug at her earlobe, a longstanding nervous habit that she likes to believe helps to chase off the whispers. “but it’s as good a time as any for you to go seeking absolution.” 

dark eyes level the other with a flat stare, cutting away as she begins to ruminate a little too closely on the way the candlelight illuminates the planes of his face. ignoring the bag on the pew behind her, she purses her lips. “i don’t have enough to share, so don’t get any ideas.” it’s patently untrue, a lie on once-hallowed ground. once-hallowed ground to suit a once-hallowed girl, how apt. 

“rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all things,” she recites idly in reply, clicks her tongue. “one out of three, at least.” 

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INTO THE / @ech0h “what the fuck is that?” ilwoo asks out loud, and this time it’s entirely himself. he drops his hold on yunseol’s hand and inches in a little closer. “is that a fucking coffin?” he asks, twists his head back to look from her to the hole and back again.

years ago, they’d stood at the edge of the woods just like this. she’d been a little bit taller than him, then, having hit what would sadly be her final growth spurt a bit faster. they’d both been long limbed, knobby kneed, and their knuckles had been bone white they clutched each other’s hands so tightly. 

she can’t remember how they separated in the woods, that time, she just remembers the trees; limbs extending as if to beckon her, branches grabbing at her hair and clothes, the sound of her heart pounding in her ears until it shaped itself into a voice that never left. she remembers the feeling of drowning, the mud sucking her into the bog, the bone-cold chill, and the sound of voices, radios, a helicopter when they finally dragged her out. she should be afraid. 

by all rights, everything in her life had changed forever, something irrevocably mutated in the three days she spent in that forest. “i think - “ she pauses, she listens, she thinks, “i think everything is about to change.” she knows this to be true as soon as she says it, something echoing in the space between her ears, beside her brain, where the voice lives. the humidity is a living and breathing entity that chokes her and their joined palms grow clammy, sticky, and part of her wants to let go - the rest of her clutches at him like a life-line. 

it must have been hours. 

she can feel the sunburn on her cheeks, throbbing in time to her heartbeat, as they crest the summit. her mouth tastes like copper, the inside of her cheek chewed raw, her heart is racing. she presses her fingertips to her sternum as if she will be able to physically still the stutter and skip of it, grinding her teeth together. every step closer to the box and He grows louder, until she’s almost wincing at the intrusion on her senses, struggles to focus on ilwoo over the sound of Him. “it’s -" the box is too big for a human. 

the coffin is too big for a human. 

she shudders, instinctive, fingers fluttering in a familiar pattern - forehead, chest, shoulder, shoulder, lips - “it’s His. we have to - the knife. we have to use the knife.” one eye winces against the insistence of the instruction, a sense of foreboding in her gut even as there is a feeling of such earnest rightness as soon as she speaks. “He wants to protect us. If we cut the vines off, He can.” 

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A MATCH INTO WATER / @4ntemortem It continues to rain. Jiyeon tries not to think about Yunseol and her worsening ... illness. At what point will Jiyeon's placating not be enough? Will these violent outbursts one day become a permanent part of her? "You can stay as long as you need." Jiyeon leads them upstairs quietly, starts going through the motions of putting her to sleep and passes her a clean set of clothes. "Here, change into these."

yunseol can see in jiyeon’s eyes the exhaustion, the reservation, the shuttering of those emotions as quickly as they come. the other girl has been a pillar for yunseol for so long and there is an excruciating awareness of that between them, an unspoken guilt that weighs heavy on yunseol’s shoulders, the knowledge of the inevitable. like so many others, at some point, knowing yunseol will be too much to bear. trying to help yunseol shoulder this burden will become exhausting, a tipping point will be met, the straw will break the camel’s back and jiyeon will learn to put herself first. to take care of herself, as she takes care of others. 

yunseol knows this. she doesn’t want this. rationally, yunseol should be brave enough, be a good enough friend, to stop asking - demanding - so much of someone. but yunseol also knows that she is fundamentally selfish, scared to her core, and she is not strong enough to be the good person, to be the good friend that jiyeon needs. that she deserves. 

so, as yunseol always does, she shows up at jiyeon’s doorstep in all her selfishness and all her weakness, and takes from her. demands of her. trembles in her living room and asks questions they already know the answer to, begs for the reassurance of jiyeon’s warm words and soft hands and kind expression and does not think about the forest and does not listen to the whispering in her ears. 

“i - no - i don’t need a bath, i just - i can - if i can just change or - i just can’t be at home right now.” it echoes its emptiness back at her, brutal and cold, every memory and cruelty hanging in the dimness. jiyeon’s hands are placating, warm against her own, and she curls frigid, pink-jointed fingers around them, clinging to her with the desperation that drives the spiking adrenaline in her, the rampant rush of cortisol that animates her exhausted frame. “thanks,” she breathes, a weak gratitude, not enough to express her appreciation, not enough to offset the burden she places on the other girl, but all she has the strength to offer. 

mechanically, without much thought, yunseol peels soaked cotton from her skin, dragging on the borrowed clothing, ignoring bramble-scratched legs and bruised shins - evidence of a haphazard crash through the underbrush of the forest. she pushes her hand back through her hair, uses her own shirt to squeeze out excess water until it is passably damp, rubbing her knuckles against her sternum - the dull ache of it grounding her. “you were busy?” she questions, the edge of guilt showing, biting at the inside of her cheek. “tell me something. what- what are you up to, these days?” she’s floundering for the liferaft of small talk, something to think about anything beyond her own guilt or the rumbling in her ears.

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HALLOWED GROUND / @lostw0n

if one was to take the time to examine the fact that there is a tiny, decrepit little chapel on the outskirts of town, long abandoned, it might be somewhat bemusing. after all, while catholicism has it's hold in the country, it hardly has the same european saturation, particularly in regard to religious structures. nevertheless, there it is. maybe someone, at some time in onyang's infamous history, had sensed the presence of whatever it was that lived in the forest (whatever it was that lived in her head) and had made an attempt to counteract it - one which perhaps went as well as the largely ignored temple further up the mountain. regardless, the hollow structure carried with it just enough promise of a familiar sanctity that yunseol had taken to spending time there, lighting candles to ward off the dark, falling back into old habits (as evidenced both by the rosary twisted around her wrist and the shattered bottles in the back of the room, a dichotomous as she herself). the flicker and glow of the candles, set up akin to those meant for offerings, is the sole light in the room. there's a camping lantern somewhere, but it's dark enough to dig it out yet. she sort of wishes she had it in hand to bludgeon with, however, when the sound of footsteps approaches, the drag of a door against the ground heralding an intruder on her brief moment of quiet. dark eyes narrow with something between suspicion and skepticism as her gaze falls upon a once familiar visage, her lips pressing together thin before she decides that isn't enough, takes a swig from the bottle in her hand instead. "it's rude to interrupt someone's prayers," she informs him, tone tilting frostily between them even as the soju warms her inside-out, brows lifting slightly. "so you'd better have a compelling reason to be here.

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A MATCH INTO WATER To ask if the girl was okay would be redundant; instead Jiyeon approaches her slowly, much like one would a scared animal. "Yunseol? Do you want some tea? Why don't we get you dried off, yeah?" It's not an usual scene for them, Yunseol flying off the rails and Jiyeon trying to put her all back together in the aftermath. She assumed Yunseol would have grown out of it with time, though, become a relatively productive member of their deteriorating society. Maybe Yunseol just likes being taken care of, Jiyeon finds that most don't really grow out of that. Jiyeon manages to force her to sit at the kitchen table, combing through her wet hair with her hands. "Do you want to talk about it?"

of course i don’t.

but yunseol doesn’t say that.

instead, she laughs—sharp and breathless, not because anything is funny, but because something in her is rattling loose and it needs to get out somehow. she’s still dripping on the floor, her sleeves soaked to the elbow, hair plastered to her neck like a second spine. her eyes are glassy, fever-bright, too wide.

“tea?” she echoes, grinning like it’s a joke she doesn’t quite get. “sure, yeah, that sounds fucking great. maybe throw in a communion wafer while you’re at it, jiyeon, maybe we can pray real hard and make it all go away.”

she’s pacing before jiyeon can answer, fast, restless movements like something cornered and wired. her boots leave muddy prints on the linoleum, trailing the forest right into the kitchen like she dragged the whole damned woods in with her. “i'm sorry, that wasn't fair, it's not you ji, it's just - fucking - it's fucking everything else,” she mutters, more to herself than to jiyeon. “i just can't get - a minute alone in my head you know?" she claps her hands over her ears for a moment, then pushes them back through the dampened strands of her hair as if she'd meant to do that all along.

she stops suddenly, turns her head to fix jiyeon with a glare.

“do you think i’m crazy?” she's asked jiyeon this question a million times before. the answer is (usually) the same. yunseol isn't sure if she would believe it either way- a yes is too simple and a no is too foolish. "i feel --" she takes a breath, lets it out. "I feel like i left part of me somewhere." the heels of her hands press into her eyes, rubbing at it as if exhausted (she is exhausted, she's been exhausted, when was the last time she wasn't exhausted?) "i just need to get out of my head. can i stay? for a bit. just a bit, i swear," she promises, finally fixing her fluttering gaze on the other, chewing at the corner of her lip.

“you have always lived in the mountains, sheltered by the forest. and to the forest, you shall return.” curious, you follow the order. it hasn’t asked you to enter to forest for so many years. you do it yourself, sometimes. it’s a comforting place. but this is different, it feels charged, meaningful.  at the mouth of the forest you see magpie. it feels like an echo of the past. like before, you link hands and out of habit, you find yourself retracing the path you took so long ago as a child. the memory stops repeating when they hit the crossroads where the split from each other so long ago. in your head, you hear it’s voice “follow a new path, higher instead of deeper.” and next to bat, magpie speaks in a voice that isn’t quite theirs, “this way, up higher.” you walk high up into the mountain and stand before a hole in the earth. standing upright in the middle is a coffin, once buried vertically. wrapped in long lengths around the coffin are vines, sprouting thick bushels of purple flowers that you’ve never seen before. the voice picks up in your ear once again, “free me from my bindings, i will protect you.”   

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close enough to the edge of the trees and the mosquitos sit as dense as fog. behind them, like an apparition, is yunseol. he cracks a grin between his “you need to go into the forest” that catches on his teeth, a clipped grind of an incisor. yunseol, just like before. it’s deja vu, or some iteration of it that tastes like nausea, salt-sticky spit underneath his tongue. he reaches a hand out to her, like a reassurance that everything is real. just like before. a small pile of mosquitos gnaws at the bone-jut of his wrist as he moves through them. he’s too caught up in his speaking, in telling yunseol now, “you need to go to the forest” to brush them away, to notice them at all. 

he tugs, and she follows. they fall in step. just like before.

kang yunseol wakes to the sound of the garbage truck, the smell of rain and pine, and a whisper in her ear. this is not new. there has not always been a whisper, but there's been one now, longer than there ever wasn't. she scratches lightly at her temple, as if that will turn the dial on the sound, loud enough to hear the words or quiet enough to ignore. it doesn't work. the voice hovers, generally speaking, at exactly the most annoying level of sound - just enough to be frustrated by the fact you can't quite make it out, like you're always grasping after meaning and coming up empty. kang yunseol is always grasping at something. a creature built of longing, she rubs a loosely closed fist against her eye, examines herself in the mirror. exhaustion bruises purple around her eyes, a sullen look on tired features, a tousle of wavy black hair that falls in disarray around her shoulders. someone calls her name. she doesn't turn - this is normal. she waves a hand beside her ear as if to scare away a fly, and readies for the day. it's later that she hears it, really hears it, commanding. firm. unquestionable. and like yunseol always does when He speaks, she listens. her brows furrow and a curious need to follow, follow, follow blooms in her, and for a girl who has spent quite a long time trying not to follow directions, it is all too easy for her to fall into step. standing at the edge of the forest, she hears Him twice and she knows what that means, turns to find the source of His voice behind her, hand stretched out, and she places hers in his, nodding when he speaks again, the His voice out of ilwoo's mouth. her heart hammers in her chest but there's no reason, surely, to be worried - they've done this once before, after all. still, her hand tightens to the point of pain around his, even as she guides him in, the murmur in her ear, at her side, prompting them both further up and further in.

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omg here we go yall its time! im blu (she/her) and im really excited to write with everyone sooo allow me to get to the important part. this is the bat, the slightly-more-lost of the two lost children once upon a time, kang yunseol. i am queueing this bc i took a huge licensing exam today and i am beat but i will be back on tonight/this afternoon to get back to everyone and you can find all my important info in this pinned post or under the cut in a little ramble! also as a note, heavy tw religious trauma, mental illness i am working thru some good ol' fashioned catholic trauma w this one.

kang yunseol is a thirty year old fuck up, to say the least. born into an excruciatingly religious, hypocritical, single mother household, she was raised blisteringly catholic, with a vehemence that would astound, frankly, and really did a number on her. she has, as you imagine, internalized a lot of Things as a result of that. everything was fairly normal within that context until she was 12 years old. yani was missing in the woods for three days, having nearly drowned herself in a bog, apparently, chasing down this voice in her head. she was at the time convinced this was the voice of the biblical abrahamic god. obviously, this went over well as one might expect, which is to say, not at all. she was rushed to the hospital, put on fluids, psychologically evaluated, ran the whole gamut of "missing child" protocol, as you can imagine. everyone told her mother that yunseol was probably just traumatized, having a stress reaction, whatever, and that it would stop with time and the magic of prayer, obviously. it did not. yunseol hears the voice intermittently at first, but with increasing frequency over the years. at times it is just a rumble, sometimes it is insistent. sometimes it is pertinent information, sometimes it's not. sometimes it's sacrilege (the antler god does not enjoy abrahamic religion or yunseol's attempts at piety, which has...caused her great concern, to say the least) and sometimes its secrets. the secrets are what got her into trouble. yunseol finally snaps, at about seventeen, and spills the priest's indiscretions (and oh, there were many) in front of the congregation, with an amount of proof that simply was not possible for her to have known in any capacity. and yet. it drives the priest - and her mother - away from her, out of town, and she's left largely to her own devices in their family home. this begins the great unravelling of yunseol. she tries to silence the voice with drinking, with pills, with sex, with prayer, with exercise, with anything she thinks might put it on the back burner for awhile. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. she's a rotating door of attempts to seek out any sensation, any distraction she can get her hands on. she's fairly certain it's not the voice of god (due to the sacrilege and all) but she knows it must be something. at the behest of a family member, she went to visit a prominent shaman in the region who took one look at her and informed her if she wasn't there to pay for an exorcism she needed to get the fuck out, because that was certainly no deity that the mudang had ever heard of. obviously, this was alarming. whatever the case, yunseol is stuck with this voice in her head. she is, on the whole, very conflicted about it. there have been times it has helped her implicitly and there is also plenty of evidence that it is a harmful entity overall. if these motifs appeal to you, yunseol is open to plot any kind of messed up miserable nonsense you like. i didn't expect to make this so long. she was pretty solitary and weird (i.e. hyperreligious awkward kid) until she was 12 and she had some casual viability as a friend between 12 -17. after 17 all hell broke loose, so connections from that time onward would need to be rather fraught or conflicted, i imagine. like this post and i will track you down in messages and perhaps we can exchange discords and all that good stuff, idk, this is already too long i'm just really excited!

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hi_sseulgi

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