ssaecularis

[ssaecularis]

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[ssaecularis]

dark sky, critters in the night / with @ech0h

let the record show that if only jungil had noticed the faint smell of ozone and dew before he began his morning routine outside of his house, he wouldn’t have taken a single step beyond the threshold of the front door. as it stands, he disdains being on the wrong side of the theory, and he downright hates being caught unawares even worse than that. so, for the effect of the second part of this record—even if the sky had so blatantly announced in its special-onyang-manner that the day would not be right for any outdoor activities—by sheer force of unwavering will and the slightest inkling of hope, jungil had known that he was going to inevitably be caught under the monsoon.

wretchedly—or intimately, almost, with the way jungil was now soaked down to the bone in the half-minute it took for him to make a decision—now he can say that knows more of that special-onyang-…state of existence… better than yesterday. and that, at least, soothes some of the better parts of him: the one that enjoys having significantly less heat on his skin after so many days of persistent and cloying humidity; the one that can appreciate the steady collision of raindrops on all solid surfaces under the clouds, announcing the end of their free-fall; the one that can’t really help but think if i stuck a sample of this water under a high objective lens, will i see anything different?

different than the usual? jungil helplessly sticks a hand out beyond the café’s portico and catches a bit more of that special water in his palm, and he brings up the smallest puddle of it up to his eyes for a moment of perusal. even from here, within the noise of heavy precipitation, he can clearly discern the roar of the river sloughing a bit too much weight through its channel, bowling over in a downwards spiral.

if higher existence did exist, in this plane or another or in all of them, wouldn’t it have tainted the water in the same impossible and disgusting color that the sky had taken on in those spare moments before it had wrenched itself open? and what would be the color of the eyes that kept tearing at the back of his head everywhere he went? right. the special-onyang-way-of-things that might make you go just this side of insane. something in his chest resounds a brash typical, and jungil is not willing to question it today.

jungil pivots on his heel to look at the opposite side of his shelter and to his great delight (read as: terror) ilwoo is there—and by luck, again, jungil settles his eyes on him just as the thunderclap descends on them after illuminating the sky. his arteries squeeze until they’re close to collapsing— fuck.

 “christ, ilwoo. of all the times you can’t seem to do anything without making noise, why did you have to be so quiet now?” but since it’s just ilwoo, the wreckage in jungil’s chest only marginally deems itself less of a drumline and more of, there, there, it’s not a demon with a thousand eyes.

wait. quiet? “…actually, why are you quiet? are you scared of a little thunder?”

[ssaecularis]

synonym for space / with @fatedandbound

kindness has an odd name to it sometimes. today, it could be a hot breakfast already waiting for him when he wakes up at first light in the morning. tomorrow, it could be his favorite graduate students asking for that extra project to bump up their overall scores well before the finals rolled in, and he isn’t too swamped with their clamors and questions to cast them that very wanted lifeline. but some other days, kindness is more like a shade of tolerance, and it could be a baek jinri not fixing a significant stare on him once again when the clock strikes closing time while he’s still embroiled up to the top of his head with a particularly heinous submission that had been hurled at him at three in the morning.

 “i swear i’m almost finished, i truly am,” he says to her—to jinri, not the clock or his computer—quickly in apology, or permission, or both, after he’s near done spouting vituperations at digital paper and. well. he should just leave it at that. he messages the student instead: let’s discuss your submission tomorrow at five pm, and promptly closes the entire program to let them stew in that. on the tabletop, right underneath his right hand and the pen that it holds, with the corner pinned under an empty blue-rimmed cup on a matching saucer, is an open notebook; and on the very top of the lined but blank paper is a neat scrawl that reads, the top five reasons to quit my job. today gave him number two.

that’s dramatic. in the paper preceding that page is another list that begins with a premise: is onyang really that bad?, and he had written in red ink, not really, it’s very quiet and i like that because i can work in peace. there is quite a lot of omission to it.

it really is a terrible time to not remember most of what he was up to way back when, that many years ago. onyang and most of its concomitant particulars still seem rather immaterial—unsubstantiated in both essence and form—even if he had spent a good portion of his first month walking around circumference of the town in order to recall what it was about this place that slammed down the proverbial shutters in his mind. it hadn’t been a serious effort, though, and a non-answer isn’t always the end to a query. maybe if he just looked at it from another angle— and he did, somewhat, and it had resulted in him finding jinri again working at the only café in this tiny town.

at the very least, the café up until now has been a rather fruitful endeavor. at the very best, he could have at least remembered her name that first time he asked for some black coffee, instead of just batting an eye at that awareness of her having left, just like he had, at some point. he has yet to see her with a smile that reaches the eyes.

bit of a recurring matter, that one, to know of and not really know.

he tries not to look at her as though she’s an interstice to an onyang that’s lost in the forest. instead, she’s lovely brown hair with a face fit for magazines, and an uncanny awareness that hadn’t been all that lost on him. oh—

he should have been working. “my bad, jinri,” he apologizes again and he means it, closing his notebook, so near to giving up for the day. “i thought the downloads would be quick, but it seems that there’s too much traffic, and the files are too large. i sort of need them to be able to work somewhere else. i’ll get out of your hair once that’s done."

[ssaecularis]

so they meet and re-meet / with @sacrosaenct

“it’s always a mystery to me how you keep working here, kang yunseol.” jungil calls her by her full name so that there’s no distinction or mistake; and it frankly tumbles out of his mouth like an afterthought when he sees her after all these years—all woman and very, very different from the afterimage of a young girl with troubled eyes—working behind the counter of the little shop of oddities. “but i guess i’m thankful for it.” he pitches his voice firmly within the vicinity of low but loud enough to speak over the music wafting from the ether – or from wherever the speakers were located among the overflow of knickknacks.

he can’t really tell. the sound bounces off everywhere, and it more than sort of reminds him of when his father decides to waste his day away tuning into his personal collection of vintage records. it’s his right – he is retired, after all. and it’s not an all-around awful event. he and his mother like to dance together unusually often (or very usually, as is the usual state of the seong household; as in the music rarely stops when you’re perpetually having fun, despite such a thing as circumstances; as was the case when he left the house about an hour ago), though that charming little tidbit does not exist in a universe without some consequences.

jungil genuinely hadn’t expected to be reminded of that, of all the things that he could be thinking on, when he set out for lee’s underneath murky light of the strange sky with the intention of bringing yunseol a rather large assortment of banchan for her to take home. it’s the least he could do – and the most that he can offer, while sparing a sliver of his own ego - so that he wouldn’t have to ever revisit that one time his parents nearly pushed him into a fit of neurosis when they did not pick up his call (so busy with the dancing. oh lord.)

he rang them so many times that day, too, and maybe his father shouldn’t have ended their last call in a fit of coughs and dismaying sounds, and the abject fucking misery that had roiled in jungil’s stomach had been so devastating that he had no choice but to dial the first number in onyang that came to mind: lee’s store, as it turned out. yunseol had picked up then and the rest is…a foregone conclusion.

as is his luck though, conclusions often possess a postface.

so jungil had carried his charge and now settles a nondescript plastic bag filled with a variety of containers on the first empty space he could find on the counter in front of her, trying not to convince himself to make it as brief as possible. he had set aside the time to talk to her specifically, to the actual person in the flesh and not a handheld contraption, and it had been a couple of months already. he’s been raised better than this, and he should show it, now that he’s back for…at least for the foreseeable future.

jungil fixes on what he hopes is a kind smile and gestures vaguely to the bag, “i’m aware that this might be a little forward, but please just take it and spare me the embarrassment. how have you been, yunseol?”

[ssaecularis]

YOU REMEMBER — @theantlergod

playing with your friends, the rabbits, near the edge of the woods as a child. you remember them shrieking and laughing and daring each other toward the edge. you remember staring at a wall of trees and listening to the wind howl through the thicket. you remember the feeling of dread in your gut. you remember not following them in. you remember the way that they frowned at you. you remember the way they all climbed out of the woods later, their faces smeared berry red, their legs mud-streaked. you don’t know why you’re remembering it, just that you are. that it seems important. that you want to know. there has been an unspoken divide ever since, a distinct separation of them and you- can you trace it back to that day? you continue to harp on this when one day you spot a rabbit heading back into the forest. your curiosity stretches like a shadow looking to attach to their back, you wonder what they’re doing.

sometimes in his dreams that precise moment bleaches the skin of his knuckles ghost-white. it is a vague knowing that becomes a fact the moment jungil reopens his eyes to the breaking of dawn spilling in through his window, and finds that the joints in his fingers are locked in tight around themselves to the point of aching. nothing has ever happened in those—well, not anything that’s noticeably different—but the memory has proclaimed itself ouroboros, and some days repetition is more synonymous to nails scraping down a chalkboard than a sweet little tromp through a valley of flowers, or a sprint through a cursed forest... through a cursed forest that could probably plant a range of invasive ideas instead of tree seeds, if it really wanted to.

so jungil, over a steaming cup of anything that’s warm and bitter, can at times fancy himself a mental horticulturist, and with a mental steel shovel and imagined limbs, he could dig up the right impetus to tell the flowerbed of unwanted ideas in its face that the soil here is dank and virulent and death-dealing.

but he doesn’t.

on the third day, after he had startled himself away from his notes to the aimless sound of feet the size of fists running on damp dirt, jungil thinks that if fear hadn’t been so pervasive in him, if the wind had imitated a valley’s vale rather than a rumble of the indistinct, back when the world was smaller and more simple, he maybe would have followed them all the way through right across the precipice. he had trusted them enough. he had, once, wanted them enough to risk everything even if there was no bridge in sight.

some days. sometimes. on a time, two days afterwards—this day, today in particular, the repetitive scene distillates into remission, even if his feet hadn’t gotten the memo in time to stop him from walking a circuit towards the forest. huh. fancy that. on the topic of closed curves, do you ever loop around a train of thought so quickly and so constantly that it might become a thing imitating a rollercoaster instead? or something like a yo-yo? does rotational inertia still count as losing something, even if it remains ever so tethered to its axis?

no, no, actually, that doesn’t count. when you swallow the tail, you lose it in only one perceivable sense, perhaps just by sight. but you still feel it, and smell it, and even taste it. that's change, not loss.

jungil feels like he hadn’t lost the rabbits, not like in the interpretation of schism. the connection simply… stretched, in a straight line right across the precipice, and there’s no bridge in sight, and he doesn’t want to jump.

he hopes with all hope that he hadn’t been seen, and when this rabbit vanishes into the ticket of greens and browns, jungil turns back and retraces his steps, and thinks, as loudly as a thought can be, that this is a conversation they should have at a much later time, away from the forest.

[ssaecularis]