one step, two steps.
{ and,
some memories never leave. }
*
*
*
The ride back was quiet.
Mingzhou could tell that Minseok was collecting his thoughts. His face was pensive and his eyes were glazed over. He wasn't faring much better himself, constantly replaying Junfei's words in his head.
It sparked some kind of sadistic pleasure in him to think that Junfei felt guilty for not having communicated with him all that much, but he also felt an equal amount of pain to think that he hadn't done much better with maintaining contact.
"Mingzhou," Minseok shook his arm, "we're here."
They walked silently until Minseok spoke up, "why didn't you talk to him?"
"What?"
"Junfei," he clarified. "Why has it been so long since you talked?"
Mingzhou bit his lip, he felt so silly all of a sudden. It would make no sense to the social butterfly that Minseok was if he tried to explain how invisible he felt in his senior year of high school and freshman year of college - that was brought upon himself really; he didn't even try, preferring to admire people from afar. He didn't want anyone to know how lost he felt without Junfei there beside him to drag him along to participate in his shenanigans.
"Were you lonely? Is that why you didn't make any friends last year?"
He felt as devastatingly transparent as the smudgy vase his roommate had filled with lego flowers. But Mingzhou wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. To hell with it, he wasn't even going to reply to that.
He turned his face slightly to face Minseok, who was looking ahead resolutely. "How did you know I don't have any friends." His voice sounded bitter and depreciative to his own ears.
Minseok shrugged, not offering a response to that question, instead choosing to, stupidly in Mingzhou's kind opinion, bulldoze into very dangerous territory. "So you pushed him away and you didn't make any friends? You really are something else Xie Mingzhou."
"Shut up, you don't know anything," he spat.
Minseok heaved a sigh, "would it hurt if I said I would like to? I would like to know, please."
His voice was gentle, kind.
It reminded him of the day he met Junfei.
*
*
*
Mingzhou had gotten to the high school dormitories without much trouble. The flight was short, so he wasn't tired either and he had called his mother earlier in the taxi so that was one less thing to worry about.
What was plaguing his mind though was his dorm situation. He could only hope that his roommate would be okay with the constant clicking of his camera, lighting fussiness and 3 a.m inspirations that would jerk him into half-lidded consciousness and fling him into the trajectory of creativity.
Room 406.
He made his way into the tiny dormitory that had a bunk bed, a small kitchen and two desks against the considerably average-sized window. The lighting would be a pain to manoeuvre around though, he thought, with them getting ample view of the tall school building, blocking the light of the west-facing room.
Mingzhou dropped his bags on the floor, trying to figure out where his roommate could be in the dead of the night. God, what if he was an illegal drug-dealer, or a party monster, or some kind of -
He heard humming from the bathroom and felt his body stiffen. His roommate was already here then. He had learned from his student guide that he was rooming with an upperclassman and had tuned her out after hearing "he can be a handful", needless to say, it made him anxious.
The whistling ceased and the door opened. In a set of animal printed nightwear and a face of pinkish cream covering his cheekbones was his roommate. He had really high cheekbones.
"Hey, Mingyue!" the boy bounded up to him in childlike excitement. He was really tall. And broad. "Long time no see, huh?"
Mingzhou couldn't even interrupt the boy to tell him that he wasn't Mingyue. He couldn't even understand the upperclassman properly.
"– were applying here, why didn't you tell me, dude?" he punched his arm playfully.
Mingzhou felt a little distressed at the sudden familiarity and cleared his throat awkwardly. "Hi, my name is Xie Mingzhou, I'm from China," he bowed politely, a full 90-degree bend, to hide his darkening blush at his broken Korean. It wasn't all that fluent, he could only just carry a simple conversation that consisted of introductions and a formal goodbye.
The older boy, though, looked more embarrassed than Minzhou did, not even bothering to sneer at his stilted attempt at an introduction as most of the people he met had.
"Shit, you're not... oh my god, I'm so sorry. I must've read your name wrong! I think it wasn't printed right or something. Sorry, I –"
"It's okay," Mingzhou felt a little at ease knowing that his roommate wasn't a stuck-up brat.
"Oh shit!" he cursed again, under his breath. The consonants that tumbled out of his mouth were all too familiar. Mingzhou felt like crying listening to that little slip of Mandarin and it solidified when the boy introduced himself.
"I'm Wei Junfei by the way."
Mingzhou's heart rate tripled at the usage of mandarin, now enunciated clearly. He was right.
A person from home.
Junfei shared the sentiment, his grin widening, "let's be good friends."
*
*
*
Mingzhou walked around the area by his bed. The light slanted into his dorm in all its golden glory creating a confluence where the beams melted into his laundry. In a less picturesque sense, his mess was being highlighted by the 4 p.m sun.
He pinched the bridge of his nose in disdain. "Why don't we sit in the dining room?"
Well, calling it a dining room was a generous description of the small square table that was saturated with stains of scalding coffee burnt into the light perishable wood.
Minseok sat down on the rickety wooden chair. Mingzhou had half a mind to tell him that he'd only just fixed the leg of that chair last week, but his friend beat him to it.
"So? Do you want to explain?"
Mingzhou tilted his head towards the small casement that characterised the room every day, presenting a hazy look onto the courtyard of the campus. He inhaled slowly, spotting the dried branches of the cherry blossom tree that was accompanied by a very realistic hallucination of Junfei reading beneath it.
He blinked. Junfei was gone.
*
Mingzhou was an obedient child, but he likened himself to a fresh canvas, a camera without film, a brush waiting to be dipped into paint, a roll of monochromatic film waiting to be swamped in colour. Junfei was that splash of excitement, of trouble, of fun and experience.
("Like spices to a bland dish!" Minseok had put in eagerly, trying to relate to Mingzhou with his own analogies. Mingzhou wasn't sure if it was a good thing he was compared to a bland meal, but whatever.)
"– didn't realise how I'd solely depended on him for anything. How he was my alarm, my cook, my nurse, my tutor, but most of all he was my best friend –"
"Sorry for interrupting, but he's still your best friend. If today was anything to go by, he cares about you just the same. Mingzhou, you were grieving the loss of your best friend by pretending he didn't exist and forcing yourself to believe that, but you weren't able to wipe the memories of him."
"Kind of. Not quite." Mingzhou pulled at his dark hair.
As a non-native, he often found himself unable to fill the blank spaces in between his feelings in a language that wasn't his mother-tongue. Not able to condense his thoughts into a single line before it could follow its tangent from the continuous cyclic motion all his thoughts went through in his head so they continued to accelerate. The same speed at all times, different velocities at all points.
He was incapable of letting go at the right times, where his thoughts would align with his mouth, always a little too late, so if they did follow the tangent, finally escaping from the circular path in his head, they would only end up shooting straight down his throat. He was swallowing his words again. Mingzhou traced the stains of the coffee mugs on the dining table.
There was a reason why he'd given up writing all those years ago.
His thoughts were always a burden. If he was an instant pot (yes, he was using Minseok's eccentric culinary analogies) and he let the soup spill, let the pot overflow, would that liquid keep him in a chokehold? Would it brim his lungs like the time the thick red paste had gone down his trachea when he croaked a laugh at Junfei's joke about love at first sight; it burned his throat when he tried to cough it out. He couldn't remember what other inane things they had talked about that night.
The box in which he had kept Junfei's old instant pot was catching dust in the deepest drawer of the kitchen. Why meaninglessly unearth something you meant to bury. But the shift of the dust pattern on the mouldy cardboard box said otherwise.
"Ugh, I'm so silly. Does anybody even do this with best friends? God, this is so stupid that it's not even real enough to appear on tv shows or in books. That's how ridiculous this is!"
Minseok looked thoughtful, "I don't know about that. Stories are different for everybody, novels stem from life, not the other way 'round. It isn't meant to invalidate your experience, because it's different for everyone. You are, your feelings are. Don't think so hard about it."
He remained silent, trying to coerce that wise outlook into retention. His experience doesn't have to be pre-documented for it to be real.
The temperature was high, the day was warm. He'd overslept, forgetting to turn off the induction. The liquid bubbled over the top of the stainless steel vessel.
Minseok was patient.
He let the dam break. His words were distorted by the liquid, his memories, floating in the froth of the water.
He spoke.
About school, how he'd felt after his first year of college, not keeping up with Junfei as often as he'd have liked. He let it all out.
After the wave had ebbed back into his body, the silence that filled the space between them wasn't prickly anymore. The absence of words, of noise, of pity and sympathy, was so much more meaningful than empty shells of empathetic backrubs and gazes.
The silence had stretched to no more than 10 minutes before an alarm trilled.
Minseok glanced at his phone and let out a yelp, "shit, gotta scram. My shift is in like 5 minutes. I loved lunch today and your friend and his friends are awesome. But you're the awesome-est." Cue the bone-crushing hug Minseok enveloped him in.
Mingzhou tried to hide the twist of his lips, but given Minseok's zealous grin he knew he'd failed.
He folded his coat on his arm and moved to turn the cold doorknob; the metal was always cool to touch, like water from a stream, despite being under the direct stream of sunlight all day.
"There's a reason why not everybody writes their stories. Would there be authors if each of us tried writing our experience? Don't write your story based on someone else's book, or worse, don't write something before it happens."
The handle twisted under his palm.
A smile and a wave later, he was gone.
Mingzhou tightened his hand on the doorknob. It was the most curious thing; the metal was warm. As if Minseok had extended a little bit of his embrace to everything he meets.
Maybe that was all it took, to share your warmth with someone until they're at equilibrium with you.
*
When the orange of the sky dissolved into blue, Mingzhou decided. He was at the bridge, and he wanted to cross it. One step at a time.
KAOKAOTOK
Wei Junfei:
hi
will you be free in december?
we should meet up sometime during winter break
i have a lot of work to finish before xmas break so we could meet around that time
send me your schedule, i'll try to match up with it
[sent]
He switched his phone off, before settling into his chair and opening his laptop to do homework and clear off all his backlog.
December would roll around soon enough.
*
*
*
{Apricity (noun):
the warmth of the sun in winter.
origin- Latin}