she should’ve been somewhere else now. far away from the bustling university campus and korean peninsula. she should’ve been on the coasts of the mediterranean sea, with books and bags as her only companions in a beautiful french city. that was once promised to her and yet the older she gets, the more she’s aware of her own foolishness. she’ll leave one day. she’s sure of it, but she doesn’t want that day to come when she’s all old and gray. instead, she wishes to waste her youth in the beautiful city of nice, with a foreign tongue and red wine on her lips.
it’s insane to think that happiness awaits her on cote d'azur, but still, those are the exact thoughts that haunt her mind. she could leave her sadness in seongnam. nothing good will ever come to her here. instead she could become someone better, someone new, someone who actually knows how to live and smile. it’s a shame that no one’s ever warned yuna that no matter where a person goes they always take a part of themselves along. but at least she could pretend that she’s there. at least she can imagine. if only the shy sun could help her with the little fantasy. that’s why she sits calmly, with her legs crossed and eyes closed, imaging and daydreaming of a better life. in her thoughts, she’s somewhere on the beautiful promenade des anglais, in nothing but a sweet summer dress and with a smile on her lips. in spite of that, it doesn’t take her long to sense another figure and out of a force of habit, she mutters a quick greeting, something that wouldn’t prompt the other to keep a conversation going.
but as soon as she opens her eyes, she’s faced with a brute dose of reality. it’s geon. no. it couldn’t be him. not him. why him? why couldn’t it be anyone else but him? suddenly a thunderclap begins to echo in the barren wasteland of her mind, rendering her speechless in a matter of only a few seconds. she stiffens, and a stillness falls over her that seems almost unnatural, but she supposes that he’s just another ghost. there’s no need to be afraid of something that’s not real. “geon,” she murmurs and and it takes more effort than she’d like to admit not to smile, not to show her surprise. it’s clear that the warmth she once felt inside of her heart thanks to him never fully turned into ice, it simply went into a state of remission, like some awful disease. “yes, it’s been so long.” she feels close to silly for repeating almost the same thing, but what else could she say to him? why would she want to rub salt into her old wounds? “how how you been?” she inquires, voice laced with faux disinterest. she wants to know. she deserves to know. she just doesn’t want him to see just how much she cares to hear him speak.
the way she speaks to him feels almost foreign, like a language he can’t understand. it’s so different from the way she used to speak to him, with understanding and patience, a voice of reason and stability among all the changes that were happening to him in freshman year, all the adjustments he had to make, the new things he had to just get used to. it feels so long ago, a distant memory, only a few years passed but feeling like a lost era, fossilized underneath the sands of time. he can’t say he doesn’t deserve the indifference, though, not when he’s had so many opportunities to rebuild that broken bridge, not when he’d been the one to set it afire in the first place.
so he smiles through it, small, the feigned joy not quite reaching his lips, a sheer veil to fruitlessly hide the pain underneath. it’s almost hard to believe that once upon a time, he’d thought she could be someone he could spend time with in a much more intimate manner than most anyone else in his life, but then he thinks about all the ways she’d helped him, the way she used to smile at him, the almost coy manner in which she’d given him the pen he still uses to this day, even the way she’d scold him when he’d bring her treats from the bakery. it all adds up to make sense, and as someone who refuses to live with regrets, the one big one he still holds on to hangs over him now, a dark cloud shrouding the both of them, unspoken, but felt to his very core.
“i’ve been....” he pauses, thinking of just how much time has passed, how little has changes since they’d spoken last. school, work, avoidance, acceptance, stillness. it’s all the same save for her presence, and the realization of just how much he’d missed it. “working. studying. the same old, you know how it goes.”
he chuckles dryly, pressing his back against the bench, throwing his head back as he runs his fingers through long locks, brushing them away from his eyes only for them to fall right back into place. he knows he doesn’t have any right to ask now after all these years but he has to know, too. “how about you? how have you been?”
discoholicmusic
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
izzy806
2087
areudirty