spring feels like waking up from an overdue afternoon nap. the city stretches her limbs to rouse sore muscle and exhales deeply with warm breezes to bid the chill of winter farewell. she greets the sun with a lazy smile and newborn blooms, freckles of pale pink decorating spindly branches. seoul becomes a little brighter, a little warmer, and revels in the promise of clear mornings and cosy afternoons. her citizens respond in kind, inhaling the crisp air just a fraction longer, before exhaling with a sigh steeped in relief. january always starts with explosions of colour and a whirlwind confidence, but such spectacles can’t compare to the long-awaited, soft-spoken arrival of spring.
at least, that’s how kyungsoo sees it. spring is for getting tangled in curtains of sunshine and thanking this tiny earth for all its hard work, because he can finally stop worrying about finding places to sleep that aren’t flooded with snow. as the planet continues to turn, rosy cheeks and sunburnt shoulders replace trembling fingers and silvery exhales. gone are the nights of using toilet paper for makeshift jacket padding, along with the feeling of his lungs catching fire, stricken with panic to pair every stuttered influx of icy air. today, he doesn’t have to keep one eye on the sidewalk for patches of ice and the other on the sky, scanning for any sign of impending snowfall. instead he’s breathing freely for what feels like the first time in forever, his strides a little longer and smiles a little wider.
eventually, his feet grow tired from crossing close to half of every street in seoul, and they soon lead him into the nearest shelter from the concrete jungle. almost immediately, he’s greeted with the familiar scent of millions of pages living together, thousands alone to a shelf and yet more surely hiding elsewhere. out of habit he skims a fingertip along the spines, and his gaze does the very same, scanning the tiny characters etched into each one. it’s not until he stumbles across a familiar collection of fairy tales does he pause, hesitating for but one more second before gingerly wedging the book free.
it’s memory that brought him here, but a wish upon a star is what takes him to a corner of the store, made all the more mystical from the light slanting in from a nearby window. there’s a phantom familiarity that sits heavy in his lungs when he thumbs through the first few pages. he feels eight years old again, sat upside down on a secondhand sofa and debating on the advantages of magic frogs between fits of giggles. but this time, he doesn’t have any hands to hold or smiles to meet. here, he only has clumsy lips and faraway memories, the two of them only barely cooperating to help him through each passage. it feels like ages before he can turn to the next page, struggling with the strings of characters, but the colourful image of tiny mice in equally tiny suits offers enough encouragement to continue. difficult, but not impossible, his mother would say, and he feels this in every brush of the page corners against his fingertips.
