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Prompting is currently open. Prompting is open from 28 December 2024 to 19 January 2025.
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"the poem begins not where the knife enters, but where the blade twists"
"beauty is terror"
"you'll just have to taste me, when he's kissing you"
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy a hit tweet.
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do you love me like i love you?
(Anonymous) 2024-12-29 03:27 am (UTC)(link)Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: N/A
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
Past Lives (2023)
[FILL] in translation?
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: translation, implicit sex
Permission to remix: No
***
Minghao explained it over dinner to Wonwoo. One of those quiet nights they got to themselves, rare and getting rarer in the continual negotiation between hospital night shifts and nonprofit volunteering. He’d explained it the way he did everything, slowly and intensely, spoke of memory being like the moon, memory having its new, its full, and its wane. Metaphorized it, too: if a moth searched for a lamp, if a window separated the one from the other, and if the moth was in fact a person, then what was the light and what was the glass?
A wistfulness clung to his voice, and Wonwoo recognized it as a sign of something amiss. A melancholy so foreign he couldn't even dream of reaching it, and this added insult to the injury, because Minghao’s clean-lined Korean couldn’t convey the missing welling up inside him in a language Wonwoo only heard him speak on the phone with his parents.
He tucked Minghao’s fringe behind his ear only to watch it fall into place again, and Minghao’s face did the funny thing it did when he was annoyed but somehow worried. Eyes softening, mouth twisting. “I’ll be fine.”
“But you’re worried.”
Minghao thought for a moment. "I think lately I’m having difficulty expressing the finer shades of… meaning. And losing something over time without even noticing. That’s the worst part. It leaves me unnoticed."
Language attrition, he’d explained, was a scientific field that analyzed what happened when the knowledge of someone’s first language decreased, or in highly improvable cases, died completely. Like it had a life of its own and could wither, a plant neglected of water and sunlight.
It was not until they moved to the couch and Wonwoo was on top of Minghao, feeling feral and prophetic in the heat, that he blurted out, “I want to learn.”
The last rays of sunshine showed their parting tails only to be overshadowed by clouds. The sky slowly draining of color, a sign it would rain sometime soon, somewhere close. In the apartment below theirs, their neighbor must’ve been smoking silently on the balcony. They left the window open despite the smell and the doleful promise of summer rain in the air.
Voice equal parts curious and amused, Minghao asked him what the hell he was talking about.
“I want to speak your language. I want to learn.” He wanted to reach for the unreachable, to retrieve the irretrievable, to notice what went unnoticed. He wanted to learn everything Minghao knew about him, and he wanted to know everything Minghao knew about him too. To bridge the gap. Because their separation wasn’t a barrier to communication but the reason they strived for it.
No meaning was untranslatable. Not when Minghao didn't say anything to that, but his hands on Wonwoo’s hips tightened just so, and that alone gave Wonwoo an answer.
He kept the seesawing of his hips steady and bit his shoulder, hard, ground down, pressed on.
"Teach me."
Minghao taught him how to say I love you, first. First, with his body, wordless, because they had a double relationship: the real and the memorized. The real came with the flesh, the universal common sense of touch, a language so precise and secret, so incisive. How would they know each other if they weren’t allowed to feel the flow of heat from tongue to tongue, to map out the expanse of skin, to trace the scars and dips and divots and weird protruding bones? Touch always told the truth. The duplicity of their relationship emerged from the embodiment of the other within. Wonwoo didn’t need to be with Minghao to know how he talked, how he moved, or imagine what he would say. The memorized ghost of him within, an amalgamation of sight and speech.
It seemed fitting, then, that he taught Wonwoo how to vocalize the words as one, buried deep inside of him. Wonwoo repeated it until he could pronounce it as close to the sounds that rolled easily from Minghao’s mouth. The foreign syllables in his mouth would be meaningless to him if not for Minghao’s reaction:
He hid his face where Wonwoo’s neck and shoulder met, mouth wet and panting. A pained giggle there.
“Was it that bad?” Wonwoo laughed weakly.
Minghao bit him as if in retribution, and when Wonwoo’s nervous laugh grew, he snapped his hips upward. A sound between a whimper and a sob left Wonwoo's mouth.
And then there was no more need for talking.
After, it was just the murmur of rain filling up the gaps of silence. Minghao rested his forehead on Wonwoo's chest and said nothing. There was a stillness to him that meant he had retired to that room inside him that Wonwoo couldn’t decode his way into. He had learned not to dig searching for it because Minghao was so peculiar and possessive about what was his that all attempts at understanding him felt inherently futile. But he also had learned that sometimes he would come out and explain, or try to. And wasn’t love in the attempt? In translation?
"It’s too much for me to say—to hear. I barely heard it back home because we didn’t need to say it. Or think we didn’t need to say it. I didn’t say it much, either."
With a hand on his neck, Wonwoo pulled him back to look at him. His eyes were glassed over, but he wore his truths like he always did: like he’d hate to be helped out of them. If he shared anything, it was never because it was earned, but because he wanted to do it. Wonwoo still squirmed, sometimes, under that kind of defiant trust.
“Is it okay if I say it?” he asked because, selfishly, he wanted Minghao to say it, and he needed to hear it. Which wasn’t necessarily the same thing. He wanted Minghao’s warmth, and he needed to know: was he the moth, the lamp, or the glass?
There was not a smudge of hesitation in Minghao’s words. No question, no answer either. “Always if it’s you.”