jaerim still remembers that midsummer night like it was only yesterday.
he was far too drunk to be remembering it as clear as day, but every detail was etched deep in memory. that was the night he had gotten dumped (this isn’t the groundbreaking part of the story), and the same night he picked up a paint brush again after years of shunning the canvas. the latter alone was something worth celebrating—he had missed painting, yearned for the feeling of wet paint gliding across a blank canvas, and wanted to feel like he was good at it again—but not when it's a product of the truth he tried so hard to suppress.
his girlfriend of five months had just broken up with him and the first person that came to mind was raon. he showed up at the bar she was working at and spent the night drowning his sorrows. the usual, it’s what he does every time he gets his heart broken. he claims it’s because no one makes a heartbreak remedy as good as hers, but he knows the cure isn’t in the drinks, but in the girl that makes them.
it was her presence he sought after whenever he needed help mending his broken heart. at first, it was because she didn’t know him as well as shiah did, and they didn’t have as much history as he did with seulki. it made it easier, confiding in a stranger about the things he wishes he forgot the next morning. and as much as seulki does a fine job in distracting him from the pain, he needed someone to pour his heart out to; someone to laugh at him and the tragedy that is his love life, to make him feel like things aren’t as bad as he thought they were. (and they really weren’t, as long as she was there with him.)
you would think someone who has been through this many breakups would get used to it, but seo jaerim is too much of a romantic to harden his heart and listen to his mind. it’s why he needs raon’s brutal honesty—at least, that’s what he tells himself every time he goes looking for her with pieces of his heart.
that night, after he had gotten home in the cab she sent him back in (he wanted to ask if she could stay with him for the night, but remembers their pact to stay friends and decided against it), he finally picked up the paint brush that was lying next to the empty canvas he had spent months staring at, willing himself to create something as effortlessly as he used to when he was a wide-eyed teenager riveted by the world he knew nothing of.
maybe it was the alcohol in his system, or the innate desire for a person so close yet so out of reach, his hands moved quicker than his mind, painting a picture of what he kept hidden in his heart. he says that heartbreak is the biggest stimulant of artistic muse and that the breakup inspired him to paint, but even he knows that would be a flat out lie. as his hands danced across the empty canvas, the person on his mind was not she who had broken his heart, but she who does not know has his heart.
she was the one person who felt further than the stars but had a warmth stronger than the sun. she was always around, dangling before him like a treat out of reach, and that only made him want her even more. (it doesn’t help that he’s once had a taste of the forbidden fruit, one he’s taken a bite out of knowing he shouldn’t have. could that be why it tasted sweeter than the fruits handed to him on a plate?)
when sunlight poured into his apartment the next morning, he swears, hungover with a pounding headache, that the painting would never see the light of day. even if he had been waiting for this day in years, for the day he would be able to pick up a paint brush and create something that did not reek of guilt and regret—the two things that clouded his mind every time he stood before a blank canvas. (he was afraid, to paint, for fear that the result would be one that reminded him of a mistake he’s yet to forgive himself for; a creation of his that never saw the world.)
the painting, along with all his age old art supplies that didn’t work as well as they used to, found its way into the back of his closet, to be hidden from the world, as his heart was from her. it’s okay, he tells himself, you’re better off deciding which artworks to display in a museum; it’s okay, he tells himself, you’re better off as friends.
but it’s not okay, he realises the night they crossed the line they had been dancing around all these years. he was drunk, again, but his mind was just as sharp as it was that midsummer night. he realised it when they locked lips again after all this time, that a mere friendship is not what he wants; that he no longer wants to hide his heart as he had hidden the painting that bears his heart.
the new gallery was still missing a center piece, one that would generate enough buzz to kick off its opening, a monumental event for his family. journalists have been asking, “why did you stop painting?”, and his grandpa wanted to see him paint again (he says jaerim was the best at it amongst his cousins and it was a pity he had stopped). most of all, he wanted to be honest, even if not to her, to himself.
“a little more to the left,” he says, taking a step back, watching as the movers hung up the final piece that would complete the gallery. “perfect.”
midsummer secret artist: seo jaerim