MONACHOPSIS: THE SUBTLE YET PERSISTING FEELING OF BEING OUT OF PLACE

I often wondered if one would someday look up at the night sky and think that it resembled a deep ocean with a bottomless abyss. Maybe the stars were the distant ships that were lost in the placid waves, maybe the sea above held air instead of water, but it was an ocean on its own.

And maybe because blue was so rooted to our lives since the birth of human kind, born under the blue sky, living beside the blue ocean that people held that colour so close to them.

Especially hospitals.

Blue was my favourite colour, gray and white often competed to take that spot yet I despised hospitals even when from outside to inside, the vicinity would always be adorned with those colours.

The pungent and nuseating smile of acid, floor cleaner, medicine, and more medicine, the beeping of machines, the cries of the achen souls, were a constant reminder for me that death was here. Uncertainty was here.

Even if this place was where people came to recover their health, I doubted if anyone paid a willful visit.

Ignoring the slight throbbing on the left side of my head, I signed the form of the patient who was to be discharged soon.

Chae Hyungwon, I glanced over his name, finally I had learned his name.

He was twenty six years old. Older than me. His pale and ashen face had often visited me in my train of recurrent thoughts, thoughts that didn't lead up to anywhere. They were just there, just like he was. Now that I was going to encounter him face to face while he was awakened my heart beated a bit loudly.

Here again it was, uncertainty. Which I had thoroughly despised all my life.

The nurse took me to the waiting room and left me there with patients and visitors wandering around the halls. The long haired boy sitting on a bench in the third row immediately caught my eyes, his shoulders huddled together, back slouching in front and tendrils of locks hooding his face.

Determined I took long strides, making up my mind to immediately ask him to pay back the hospital bill that Changkyun, Hanbyul and I together paid for.

There was a crippling thought that he might not, he could be a mentally ill person, more ill than what the doctors had described of him. And on that unlucky occasion I had a different choice ready to pick on.

As I stood right before him with my hands placed on my hips in a haughty manner, left foot tapping on the ground so he'd look up, and he did.

That moment it became sure to me that I would be choosing the other option.

Which was to getting a part time I'd seen on a leaflet, an evening job in a library to pay back Changkyun and Hanbyul.

No, the boy did not look anything alien, he was still pale, his full lips were white and a bit chapped on the corners, his dark brown eyes were gaping at me.

It was his eyes, swallowing me in whole. Lids that never closed, watching me quizzically then his eyes turned wider, a look of realization, and then, panic.

I couldn't look away either. I saw how his lips started to tremble, eyelids suddenly quivering. He stared at me, as if he knew me.

As if he had known me for a very long time, for ages.

That alone made me halt my breath for a a few seconds, and only exhale when he finally looked away. Maybe he really was sick, he really needed help.

"I..." I started, not knowing where to go. Then with a sudden realization I unclasped my bag from my shoulder, opened the zip and pulled out a small and white package.

"The medicine they prescribed for you." I held it out and he glanced at it. After a second of pause his bony hand hiding behind his flimsy, green jacket reached out.

His skeletal fingers were trembling when he took that.

I knew what the packet contained, some multivitamins, nutritional pills, and, antidepressants.

The doctors found an empty bottle of prozac in his pockets, they ran a test and found out he was taking pills for depression. I wasn't a philanthropist but when I came to know of such a knowledge I bought those medicines for him.

Now I was going to let him go unscratched, without paying his own medical bills. I was concerned too if he actually had a home to go. He did not look like a homeless person, but no one should be judging someone by their appearance, looks could never tell and I knew better.

Again, I wasn't a philanthropist.

There was something about him that made me do all those, even now that I had taken a seat next to him on the bench he looked like a relic to me.

A delicate relic of the ancient past. His disposition looked aged with time, yet when he first looked at me his face was filled with boyish youth under the pallid complexion.

It was hard to fathom he was twenty six. He felt way older, and way younger than that, at the same time.

"Hyungwon," I spoke formally. "Since you're older than me by three years I'm going to address you respectfully."

The boy was shrinking in his position but as soon as I called out his name he straightened up, his colossal height becoming visible. He could be taller than anyone in the room.

"Do you have a place where you could go to?" With a little bit of hesitancy, I asked, seeing now that he was sitting so upright.

He didn't turn to me, nor did he answer.

"I mean, I'm no one to pry, of course." I saw his hand grabbing on the edge of the bench tightly and I gulped. "Since I saved you the other day, I was a little concerned."

More like he didn't leave my mind. And his watch didn't, on that hand grabbing on the bench I saw a figment of the wristwatch and its brown leather belt partially hidden inside the sleeves.

Since all of my focus was on his wrist I was startled to hear his raspy and low voice, a voice that sounded like it hadn't been used in ages.

"I...," He said quietly," I'm new. New here."

"Oh, you're new in Seoul? Looking for a place?" I finally looked up, now his eyes were facing me.

Again, I wondered how blue was such a fascinating colour, enamored by all, affecting us all since the first embryo was brought to earth.

Yet blue spoke voices, blue often spoke sadness and grief. People would say, 'I am feeling blue', because they're sad and they don't know why.

Hyungwon's eyes weren't blue, they were dark like chocolate, like mahogany wood, coffee beans, wet earth after a long rain shower.

It suddenly came to me that his eyes were like oceans, drowning me in whole, drowning him too in his own sadness.

They were filled to the brim with tears, threatening to fall.

"A-are you alright?" I stuttered out. He turned away and slowly shook his head in the affirmative.

His hands were now folded together on his lap, the watch fully cloaked under his viridescent jacket. There was nothing much to say, his shoulder was sinking again, chin facing downward.

"I am Sunnny." Before standing up to leave I introduced myself, even though there wasn't a reason too.

He immediately glanced up with another puzzled look.

My eyebrows furrowed together, his face screamed a question, what- I did not know. Nonetheless, I put my black umbrella beside him where I was seated before.

"The forecast said it's going to rain later in the night. You don't have to give me back my umbrella." Not that he could too.

When I left assured myself for the umpteenth time that I wasn't a do-gooder.

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A/n: WONHO'S DEBUT MV LOSING YOU IS HERE WRITTEN AND ARRANGED BY HIM AND IT'S FULLY ENGLISH PLEASE STREAM

https://youtu.be/9Xfy6EwfrpQ

LIKE I LEGIT STAYED UP ALL NIGHT FOR THIS

YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND I CRIED SO MUCH

THE SONG SUITS THE THEME OF THIS STORY SO MUCH BRO I-