begonia & adonis.
begonia and adonis ― deformed and a painful recollection
de·formed (diˈfôrmd) adjective (of a person or part of the body) not having the normal or natural shape or form; misshapen.
Deformed was never a word Jongdae would use to describe himself, not as a child, and not now. But, children are cruel. Sometimes unknowingly so and sometimes with the utmost clarity it’s almost frightening. Of all the words Jongdae has considered himself, deformed had never been within that vocabulary until it had been unwillingly introduced to him as a child.
He remembers the small classroom, the spines of books arranged by greys as they sat on their class bookshelf, messy desks aligned in messy rows in the centre of the room. The blinds had been down that day, lights dimmed as the teacher read to them and they pretended to follow along in their own copies, thin pages worn with use. Thinking that the light wouldn’t be enough to bother his eyes too much, the sunglasses (smaller with a marginally better prescription) had come off and he had squinted down at the book in front of him. The text was large enough that the achromat could read it without the help of the sunglasses for the most part, and the light dim enough that it didn’t bother his eyes.
A loud ring of the teacher’s phone interrupts her midsentence and she halts her reading to answer the electronic, the children momentarily left to their own devices. A boy walks up, plucking Jongdae’s sunglasses off his desk and leaning in close to the frames, scrutinizing them.
“Why do you wear these?” The boy slips his sunglasses on, taking an exaggerated step backwards and holding out his hand in front of him, looking down at the body part through Jongdae’s sunglasses. “Whoa you have really bad eyesight. Is that why you twitch all the time?” The child pauses, pulling the glasses off and setting them back on the desk, “I read about people like you. You’re deformed right?”
In retrospect, the only reason the other child had used the word was most likely because of their vocabulary packet for that week, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less when he said it.
