“That’s right. I lived here with my mother for two years, and because so many big changes happened all at once, I was a typically nasty adolescent who expressed his dissatisfaction and confusion with silence and defiance.”
He snickered at me as if he’d told a funny joke, but I couldn’t laugh. Seeing this, he changed his position, leaning his back against the windowsill and sweeping his bangs back.
“As you’ve seen, Ellen and Marcus are good people, and Jonas followed me around well, so it’s not like the memories are all gloomy, of course… but if we’re talking only about my internal problems, excluding relationships, you could say this was the period that laid the groundwork for my current, damnably twisted personality.”
With his right arm draped over the back of the chair, his left on the table, and the back of his head resting against the window, he turned to me and smiled again. And once again, he watched me quietly as I failed to smile, before turning his gaze toward the dark interior of the room.
“There are people who sometimes wish to be special. People who want to be distinguished from others by their extraordinary abilities or individuality… furthermore, people who want to be above them. That desire tends to be more pronounced during the period when the ego is just beginning to form. But when that specialness possesses a power that goes beyond superior ability or unique individuality… for some people, being special is just another word for loneliness. Like being pushed outside the lines, separated and cut off….”
I unknowingly released the pencil I had been gripping tightly and wiped the sweat that had pooled in my palm on my pants. This time, he picked up the pencil I had set down with his left hand and skillfully twirled it in his fingers.
“Just as it’s not a child’s fault for being born into a violent family, me being me isn’t anyone’s mistake or sin… but no matter how much I tried to think that way, everyone around me kept saying that from now on, I had to strictly control myself… so my thoughts inevitably turned negative. On top of that, my parents, who respected and loved each other perfectly well, even got divorced because of me. It’s no wonder a thirteen-year-old would come to hate himself.”
“Is it okay to ask… why your parents had to get a divorce?”
He pulled his head away from the window and stared at me for a little while.
“……Why.”
“I never thought the day would come when Seo Yeehyeon would ask me about this first. I’m glad you’ve become that curious about me….”
Glad, and on the other hand, what? He smiled ambiguously without finishing the thought and tapped the eraser on the end of the pencil against the tabletop.
“It was a sort of precaution against something that hadn’t happened.”
“……”
“My father’s maternal family is quite a prominent family in England. My father’s maternal grandfather held the title of Duke, one of only about thirty that remained in England at the time, and now my father’s maternal uncle, the eldest son of my maternal grandfather, has inherited the title as his successor. While modern aristocratic titles are mostly ceremonial, that’s not necessarily the case when you get to the level of a duke. In European society, including England, and in the upper echelons of high society worldwide, it still acts as a point of attraction, and in fact, my father’s maternal family was able to amass immense wealth and exert influence thanks to maintaining that title.”
He was now rubbing the pencil’s eraser on the tabletop, where there was nothing to erase. The story had taken a completely unexpected turn, and I could only stare at him, my lips parted, having forgotten even to blink.
“To put it briefly, you can say they divorced to protect my custody and parental rights from them. They were people who wanted to make the most perfect Alpha, a ‘special Alpha,’ the heir to their noble ducal house. And they were also ruthless enough to proceed with it regardless of the wishes of the person in question or his parents.”
To protect him completely until he came of age, his parents had decided to divorce, and his father’s infidelity had become the reason for the divorce so that his mother could be granted sole custody. Of course, his father had never been unfaithful; it was all a strategy his parents had agreed upon.
He had said he couldn’t help but feel guilty about his parents’ divorce. I couldn’t help but reflect on the story he had told me long ago. His words, about how he had to ask himself countless times if he was a person of such worth, were as vivid now as if I had heard them yesterday. If this was the reason behind it, then no one could have forced happiness upon him.
When he, who had seemed lost in his own thoughts for a while, spoke again, the detached tone he’d used, as if relaying someone else’s experience, was gone.
“Saying that showing myself, and knowing the other side of people’s public faces, was a bothersome and tiring thing, I chose to be alone for a long time, but in truth….”
Gripping the pencil so tightly that the veins on the back of his hand bulged more clearly, he lowered his voice.
“I must have been afraid.”
As if he couldn’t believe the words he himself had uttered, he let out a dry laugh and shook his head. Even so, he added with difficulty, in a parched voice that sounded as if it could give out at any moment.
“Because I thought that I, a being different from others, outside the lines, could never be accepted by anyone.”
Everyone admired Golden Alphas and Golden Omegas. Even Betas did. They were always portrayed as a charming, privileged class in movies and dramas. But as he said, for some people, being special could just be loneliness. Specialness was, after all, a relative value, and the feelings with which one received it were bound to be different for everyone.
I instinctively lowered my head at the thought that if I hadn’t heard Marcus’s story, I might not have understood even half of what he was saying now.
“You said it before, CEO… that I would find new stories I want to draw.”
His gaze, which had been fixed on his own hand holding the pencil, slowly moved to me.
“I was certainly young, and I’m still young… and the series of events was too heavy and overwhelming for me to handle… I just felt completely crushed, my throat choked up. I had resigned myself to the fact that my future life would be a bleak and inhuman daily existence of barely staying alive.”
I took a deep breath, my chest expanding. I clasped my hands tightly under the table. Not a single car had passed since I entered the room, let alone the sound of a dog barking, but now a couple was walking down the quiet alley, chatting affectionately. Their voices, which had approached from the east, faded to the west, behind where I sat. I spoke again when their footsteps had grown faint.
“But after meeting people at Phantom, hearing their stories, and learning about their diverse lives… strangely, just that alone made the weight pressing down on me feel lighter.”
Conveying my thoughts with words was, as always, not easy for me, and I worried I was rambling, but I didn’t stop. As far as I knew, he was a very patient person in conversation. At least, when it came to me.
“That cliché, that the best way to comfort someone else’s wound is to show your own… before, it just seemed to be about the selfish relief that I’m not the only one suffering, but now… I’ve come to think of it as being about empathy and encouragement.”
“Are you saying you want to deal with wounds? With your art.”
I let out a soft laugh, the tension leaving my shoulders at how he concisely got to the heart of the matter. Then I slouched a little more and rubbed the back of my neck.
“But… right now, I’m someone who can’t even properly face my own wounds. What I really need to draw is probably not Juhan hyung, nor the impressive landscapes I met on my travels…. And yet, right now, I don’t think I can draw anything more than that.”
He, who had been sitting sideways and listening with his head slightly tilted, stood up from his seat. He rummaged through the Boston bag where he’d packed his things, took out a cigarette and a lighter, and offered one to me as well. In the darkness, he seemed larger than usual as he stood before me. I looked up at him for a moment before taking a cigarette from the open pack and placing it between my lips.
After opening the window a little to let the smoke out, he sat down in his original spot in his original posture and, unlike me, skillfully lit his cigarette. I gazed at his side profile for a long time. I tried to imitate his breathing—a short, deep drag of smoke, then a thin stream exhaled through a tiny gap in his lips—but it wasn’t easy.
He took a drag, creating deep hollows in his cheeks that seemed sharper than when we first met, and spoke, holding the cigarette between his fingers.
“I don’t know how Seo Yeehyeon evaluates himself, but you’re someone who, however slowly, is sincerely trying to properly face yourself and your surroundings. So… don’t talk about your art as if it’s some task you have to break through.”
“……”
“It’s fine even if you haven’t overcome it. Just touch the wound. A wound is like a fingerprint, different for every person… so a drawing that touches it can’t overlap with anyone else’s. Not waiting for the wound to heal on its own, but constantly poking it, making it fester, transmuting it into another form that can be seen or heard, and making that public. That must be the role of art. No matter how much the times change, no matter if serious contemplation is no longer the sole meaning of art, in the end, what touches the deepest parts of people’s interiors, what lays bare and forces them to confront what they don’t want to see, aren’t things like the destruction of form or a mockery of the traditional meaning of art. That’s what I believe.”
When he tapped his ash onto the small decorative plate he had brought over with the cigarettes as an ashtray, a dimple-like hollow formed along the edge of his bare shoulder muscle.
He turned his body, which had been sitting sideways all this time, and leaned his elbows on the table, brushing his hand that held the cigarette over his eyebrow.
“The wounds and flaws we most want to hide and deny… maybe they are the very individuality and identity that make us a unique, independent entity, not identical to anyone else.”
“……”
In silence, slowly smoking, our eyes traced each other’s eyes and lips. He was the first to look away, dropping his head with a heavy laugh.
“I never imagined… that a day would come when I’d be having this kind of conversation with the person I love, in this room. The me from back then probably wouldn’t believe it even if you told him.”
The September night breeze of Boston blowing in through the open window was not entirely gentle. He stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, and leaned over, placing his hands on the back of my chair. Then he took the still-burning cigarette from my hand, extinguished the ember, and kissed me. His lips were parched, but his tongue, parting my mucous membranes and filling my mouth, was hot and wet.
Right here, in this very spot, I thought of the thirteen-year-old him who had been buried in the loneliness of being special, and cupped his cheek. Hoping that one day, I could give him a comfort deeper than ‘Isolation’. Hoping that he could achieve a maturity that would allow him to accept his wounds as his individuality. If not for me, then for his sake.
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