KUEBIKO: A STATE OF EXHAUSTION INSPIRED BY SENSELESS VIOLENCE

Wonho laid on the thin spread of ice in the dark, cold night. He laid motionless in all black, his hair sprawled, as pale and white as the moon in juxtaposition.

His eyes were stilled like stagnant water. They stared up at the dark veil of the night peering at him, and the cluster of the snow that fell on everywhere but his limp body.

Those eyes of his scared me the most.

There wasn't one bit of life left in them. They were void like the insides of two distant caves made out of hard rocks. He was not here anymore, but somewhere far away, where no one could ever reach him. His white hair mingled with the ice he was lying on. I wondered if he was a part of the frozen lake too.

"What are you thinking about?" Hyungwon's voice snapped me back to reality— back to my part-time, the age-old library with its distinct smell of ancient books, and comics, and coffee.

"What?" I asked him, fazed, still stuck in the imagery inside that head of mine. I blinked hard a few times and shut my eyes tightly for a few seconds and then I heard his quiet voice.

"You look like you're about to cry."

"I had a vivid dream last night," I said but the word 'dream' left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a nightmare, it definitely was. A dream so lucid yet so empty of any substance that it made me feel hollowed throughout the entire day.

Maybe because I thought of Wonho's death so much, and if it was to come, and I also thought about skating on the ice before— that it all mixed itself into one thought and crawled in the corner of my subconscious mind until it showed up in the form of a dream.

It was a dream no matter how hyper-realistic it seemed. In reality Wonho's hair was as dark as ink yet I saw it white as jasmine flowers, and snow.

"How do you get to know someone more without stepping inside their personal boundary?" I asked, almost without meaning the words. Before Hyungwon I could involuntarily say things without giving them any thought. In this world at least, there were only two of us sharing a big secret.

He sighed a little, looked up from the tattered Deadpool comic book on his hands, and mulled over it for a second. "I guess you can never know."

"And how do you save someone without even knowing them? Can you ever fully know someone? Is it in your hand to save that person?" I could hear the frustration in my voice. He could sense it too.

"You're talking about Wonho."

I averted my eyes from his and looked at the register before us, a wooden table beaten with time. "I don't see him a lot these days. He has his finals and graduation to worry about. I just... I'm lost."

"I think you have to save him not only for himself but because you, yourself may never recover from this, just like so many others may not."

I felt my eyebrows furrow. Was he foreshadowing? "I still don't know what I'm like in the future."

He immediately diverted his full attention back to the comic in his hand. His long bangs and side hair clouded his already impassive facial features.

"I think it's selfish. But letting him suffer alone feels selfish to me too," I said absentmindedly. He acted as if he had not paid any attention, but I knew he heard me full and clear.

He was reverting back to his own cage again, his same old clandestine nature. In a way, he was like Wonho. Only that Hyungwon was more aggressively silent and reticent.

"I think you should take this back." I took out the bracelet from my pockets when I remembered all of a sudden. It was the same bracelet Hyungwon had given me, a very mirror of the one I already had worn in my hand— the one I got from Wonho.

He stared at the little bracelet, the old little pearl-like beads glimmering under the lights. He then looked up at me with no change of expression whatsoever.

"This was initially with you, so it must've been there with you for some reason," I explained, even my own reason sounded vague to me.

I thought he would show a little protest but he took it back without a word and nonchalantly, yet very gently slipped it into his hoodie's front pocket.

"There's this thought I got the other day," I told him, "If there could be two bracelets there could be two of you here too, you know, since you traveled in time and space with it."

The idea sounded way grander inside my head than it did when coming from my mouth, yet I pursued that string of the notion. "But you could've been born after this too. You said you came from thirty years ago."

"I'm twenty-seven."

"I figured you could be Wonho's age. So you were born three years after, 2020." I couldn't help but beam at him as the pieces of the puzzle fit together. "You've come from 2047. In three years you'll be born!"

How much did the idea baffle me? There stood a man older than me at that space and time but he shouldn't even be existing there. He was supposed to be born later.

"In the future I can meet you again, right?" I asked with a chuckle. "The baby you, I mean. That version of you won't remember all this, will he?"

"I wouldn't be so convinced if I were you," he said and immediately he stood up. And he left the register with his comic book.

So much to get a word from him. But I was determined to get a word from someone else at least. Changkyun and Hanbyul wanted to go visit a street market and do some shopping the next day, and they had suggested that Wonho and I ought to join them too.

When I saw Wonho the next day on that bright afternoon at the flea market, I could barely recognize him.

Wonho had bleached and dyed his hair blond.

"Surprised? We were shocked too," Changkyun said with a laugh when he saw me gawking at the pale boy. Wonho's pale complexion was glowing under the warm blonde hair. Wonho only smiled at me, a bit shy of a smile.

"It looks good on you," I commented. Hanbyul nodded with a hand on the sunhat on top of her head which she had just bought at a very cheap rate, after taking some time to bargain over the price. She wouldn't shut up about the win for her. It was particularly windy day that day. 

"Just a spur of the moment. Something came over to me," Wonho said almost jokingly.

Later when he was walking by my side, our arms jostling against each other and the massive crowd of young couples gathering around for the evening and their waves of laughter and murmurs filled the dusky air, Wonho also said in a murmur that maybe he should've gone for blue hair instead.

He looked so much like a new person that every gesture of his felt different to me. Even though it was the same old him, with the same old way of speaking softly, and laughing like a whisper, and he smelled the same way too.

That smell like home, a faint scent of cologne, aftershave, soap, baby powder, and his very own distinct and bodily scent that differed from everyone else.

It was the fact which became real to me that I did not know him at all.

Here he was dying his hair blonde because of a spur of the moment, there the next day he could be gone for the very same reason.

"Wonho, I really want to see where you live," I said with my voice clear as I inched closer to him, our bodies brushing against each other. Hanbyul and Changkyun were way ahead of us and only the back of their heads could be seen from afar.

Wonho looked a bit stunned at the sudden proximity, so I moved a bit further away again and looked away. I was stepping into his personal boundary.

He closed the small gap between us and got closer to me. "Why?" he asked hesitantly.

"I want to know you better. I feel like I don't know anything about you." I couldn't look at him. My vision felt bleary and shadowed. I could only stare at the gravel below us as we walked side by side, extremely in close proximity.

"There really isn't much to know."

When he said that I could feel the sharp pang of pain blooming in my chest again. But then he said okay in a really small voice. He said okay.

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A/n: any theories about hyungwon?