By Zephyria 
Leaning deeply into the backrest, Eun-ha crossed his arms. He had managed to smoothly mend his relationship with Park Hyun-ji, who had been quite sulky about him disappearing without a word on the party night, in the near future. Of course, it was a superficial reconciliation as always. He would act appropriately flustered and offer roundabout apologies, and she would grudgingly accept them with a scolding, then playfully berate him, and then they would promise to meet again. As if burying their true feelings was the only way to maintain their current, thin-as-ice relationship.
Lee Eun-ha.
Just before hanging up, Park Hyun-ji called out to Eun-ha in a stiff voice. As if he had something left to say. But in the end, he didn’t bring up any main point and only filled the silence.
…Take care. You jerk. Call me if anything happens.
After a long pause, all that came was useless rambling. Eun-ha clenched the phone in his hand.
‘…Yeah, you too.’
He thinks about the relationship that will drift apart as soon as one of them lets go. About the people who hold onto that line until the very end, about those excessive feelings whose depth cannot be fathomed.
Trash……. He was aware of it, but he couldn’t find the resolve. That was always the problem.
A trip. It was the moment he was pondering when his last trip was. Among the unread messages, a certain name caught his eye. Eun-ha stared at it silently.
Jeong Tae-geon
Let’s meet up when you have time
It was an unexpected message. He paused for a moment, as he was the most recent partner he had met, but soon the excitement faded. What was he going to do by seeing him? Eun-ha expressed his intention by reading and ignoring it. What else could it be… it was obvious that it would be a boringly predictable matter.
Eun-ha, who had dropped his hands holding the phone between his legs, tilted his head back. He saw a peaceful sky. It was the same old daily life. Friends like rocks weighing on his heart. Useless contacts from someone left like the dregs of life he had carelessly let slip by. An emotional state that was more than just boredom, it was lethargy.
And the summer that cycles back again. A hot and humid season. Or a season where your shoulders would shrink from the cold air conditioning.
“……”
When that tiresome part of the year returns, Eun-ha is lost in similar thoughts. In fact, he still wonders if he is just slowly walking down a path to death.
At that moment, a vibration went off in his hand. Eun-ha checked his phone listlessly, unable to shake off his lethargy.
Baek Yeon-jun
Hyung
(Photo)
(Photo)
Several photos of flowers taken from various angles were sent as a bundle. It was Yeon-jun, who had diligently visited the cafe early this morning. His lips twisted in bewilderment because the content that arrived after only a few hours was somewhat out of the blue. What was this all of a sudden? Eun-ha admired the rather atmospheric photos for a while before sending a reply.
lol what’s this all of a sudden?
Baek Yeon-jun
I remembered that Hyung likes flowers
It was common for the unread mark not to appear at all when he sent a message to Yeon-jun. Eun-ha looked at the photos again. They seemed to have been taken somewhere on campus. Unnamed yellow wildflowers and purple wildflowers, and white flower buds beautifully hanging on tree branches.
Perhaps it was because he saw him every day. It was not difficult to imagine Yeon-jun taking these photos while squatting or holding up his phone. It was very out of place for him to be doing that with his large frame, and even if it suited him, it seemed childish, and so it was funny.
Eun-ha scrolled back through his past conversations. Most of them were questions about whether he had eaten. Since the day he collapsed at the movie theater, he had been asking him every day without fail if he had eaten. If he said yes, he would ask what he had eaten. When he arrived at the cafe and showed his face, he would ask if he had slept well.
They were all just commonplace greetings, but he didn’t know why they kept feeling so difficult. It felt like he shouldn’t be dealing with them carelessly.
Putting sleep aside, he didn’t want to lie about the specific menu of his meals every time, so he made sure to eat at least something, and as a result, he ended up having a proper meal once a day. As a result, it seemed like his stomach had grown a little.
I remembered that Hyung likes flowers
Eun-ha, who had read the message again, wrote a reply. Pretty. After sending it, he closed his eyes. The thought that had filled his head the moment he read it remained only under his tongue.
I don’t like flowers. I just hate that they wither. No matter how much effort I put in and how much I tend to them, I get angry at the infuriating conclusion that they die off, so I just keep repeating the process of blooming, blooming, and blooming. But that doesn’t mean they can live forever.
The last weekend of May, just before summer. Eun-ha had another date. They had a proper meal for lunch, sat leisurely in a park somewhere and had trivial conversations, stopped by a bookstore for a while, and then had a simple meal again around sunset and went for a drive to a lake near Seoul.
The last one was Eun-ha’s suggestion. Lately, he had been feeling suffocated and often went for drives. If he concentrated on the wind that slapped his cheeks fiercely, he could at least breathe.
Eun-ha drove, and the car was his too. To be exact, it was under Mom’s name, but it didn’t matter. Yeon-jun said that he hadn’t gotten his driver’s license yet because he didn’t feel the need for it. Throughout the drive, he could clearly feel Yeon-jun sitting in the passenger seat, looking around with clear eyes filled with a strange light, which he was now used to. When he asked why he was staring so intently, he gave another foolish answer, “Just because I like it….” If he glanced sideways, he could find Yeon-jun looking at him subtly with blurred eyes.
It was absurd, and so he laughed.
An evening heading somewhere with a twenty-year-old boy who didn’t have a driver’s license in the passenger seat was not a bad feeling. It seemed like he wanted to enjoy that feeling in the first place. Whenever Eun-ha realized that Yeon-jun was young, whenever he acted immature, Eun-ha steadily felt pleasure. It was a shallow display of power and affectation.
While slowly walking along the Luminarie-lit promenade of the lake, they had another trivial conversation. How could they have so much to say without stopping? Eun-ha was quiet, and Yeon-jun was not the talkative type either, but strangely, the conversation never stopped when they were together.
Perhaps it was because they knew so much less about each other than they knew. So many topics came up and disappeared every day. Contents that he couldn’t remember when he tried to recall them a day later. Times when he would laugh in vain, wondering what he had talked about so much yesterday. Light and unnutritious small talk, impressive anecdotes he had experienced sometime, things like that.
“Have you ever been here with anyone?”
It was close to night. The wide promenade bridge that crossed the lake was safely lit, but it was quite late and the point they had reached was also deep, so there were no people nearby. The night lake, surrounded by gentle mountains, looked somewhat eerie, but it was also charming in its own way.
Eun-ha answered with a silent look.
“You seem familiar with it.”
He had moved his steps according to the course he remembered, and it seemed that he had read that.
Not much different from what he expected. It was a place that was not unfamiliar. The first person he came with was Kim Ji-woon, and since then he had come with his partners a few times. You might wonder why he would go to a place famous as a date course with a sex partner.
Just because sex was the main purpose didn’t mean they only had sex like a job. Sometimes they ate out, and sometimes they went for a light drive. They had also strolled aimlessly in the park. He had never asked to spend such time first, but if the other party asked, he would respond without hesitation. It was always, except for the exclusion of emotions, not much different from a relationship.
So, just like today. The only difference between those times and now was that sex was missing. Because the final destination with those people was always a hotel or an Officetel.
It is a sudden insight. In a ‘relationship that is no different from a relationship if emotions are excluded’, what is a relationship that has even lost its Sexual relationship?
So… what am I doing right now… a dazed realization. A vague suspicion.