Ship/Member: Wonwoo Major Tags: Parent Death(s), Illness Additional Tags: Non-idol/Modern AU, Grieving, Second Person POV Permission to remix: Please ask
***
The last time you speak to your father is the first time you scream at him.
Courtesy, deference, innate understanding and the shaking, trembling, anxious fucking pounding of your chest broken away from just this once, to cradle the phone closer to your roaring lungs.
You’ve never screamed at your father before. He has never called you too late to tell you he’s dying before.
Unbidden you’re struck by the memory of a touch: your mother brushing ointment on the bruises on your knees as you sit cross-legged on the cold kitchen floor; your clumsy hands badly peeling a cucumber while she tosses chopped pieces into a large bowl.
Your dad loves this with a bowl of naengmyeon in the summers— what do you think, Wonwoo-yah? Like it?
No matter how hard you try, you can’t recall what it tasted like.
Quiet kids grow up to be quiet men. You know this, and you know that your family knows this, so you take it for granted. What is a phone call on which no one speaks but a building cavity of silences, a hollowness of your own making.
University flies by in a flash and train fares make the annual budget you draw up less and less.
Your aunt tells you you’re lucky when you make it back home at last, climbing out of the old town hospital elevator just in time to watch your mother die.
At least you got to see her one last time, say goodbye.
Nobody teaches you the art of bidding farewell to someone you love, not when they leave and especially not when they die.
Besides, is there a difference, you wish to ask, between seeing off the living who won’t speak and the dead who can’t.
There is, you learn the hard way.
Your train is on time and you’ll be home in three hours but you already know, in the way that dogs know of oncoming earthquakes, that your uncle lied to you on the phone, that your father is already dead.
There are no lies, no continued pretence on arrival. Just a corpse and its silence.
At your mother’s funeral, your father pats your shoulder and pours you the drink, twisting away to down his own before he walks off to greet new guests.
At your father’s, you pat your uncle’s shoulder and watch his son pour him a drink. Guests come, guests go. You pour and you pour, splashing liquid onto glasses. This is not a silence you are responsible for.
Or are you?
You almost miss the train back, locking up a house housing the remains of all your past lives, every slow step away from the front door heavier than the last. Your travelling bag is the same as it was when you arrived and you wonder what you could be carrying that is turning your footsteps to lead.
Time passes as it always has, the seasons change and the sun rises and falls. You are. You are.
The guksu place is on the street next to his apartment building is cheap—convenient.
The man at the counter recognises him now, putting down a bottle of soju and a glass before you can ask for it.
The naengmyeon is quickly placed before you, pre-made in the mornings. He offers to pickle you a fresh cucumber, to take off the heat.
You watch him peel the green skin and put the length of the cucumber down on the counter before he makes fast work of chopping it, the art of practised hands that do not need to wait for conscious thought to begin doing the needful.
It unravels slowly, the string holding your chest hostage in a bind. Fingers brushing through the fringes on your forehead, soft kisses on your nose, tinkling laughter at the dinner table, delighted ribbing in the living room, ambient, sunny music crackling from the beat-up speakers of an ancient sedan.
It was the silence, you realise. You have been lugging it all along, all this long and it’s a wonder you have been walking steady, instead of watching your feet sink into concrete as if wading quicksand. So achingly, terribly dense is the load now unfurling.
The man finishes prepping the cucumber and washes his hands before seasoning it in a bowl. He tosses in some oil, some gochujang, some sesame seeds. His hands are large and his knuckles coarse and torn but the movement of his fingers through the mixture is so, so gentle.
Everything pours out of you now like a monsoon thunderstorm.
I miss you. I’m sorry.
I love you. I’m sorry.
Nobody teaches you the art of saying goodbye to the dead.
There are some things about grief only you can teach yourself.
There are some things about grief you will find teaching yourself over and over again.
You’ll learn that these are just the kind of silences time cannot undo.
[FILL] love, persevering
Major Tags: Parent Death(s), Illness
Additional Tags: Non-idol/Modern AU, Grieving, Second Person POV
Permission to remix: Please ask
***
The last time you speak to your father is the first time you scream at him.
Courtesy, deference, innate understanding and the shaking, trembling, anxious fucking pounding of your chest broken away from just this once, to cradle the phone closer to your roaring lungs.
You’ve never screamed at your father before. He has never called you too late to tell you he’s dying before.
Unbidden you’re struck by the memory of a touch: your mother brushing ointment on the bruises on your knees as you sit cross-legged on the cold kitchen floor; your clumsy hands badly peeling a cucumber while she tosses chopped pieces into a large bowl.
Your dad loves this with a bowl of naengmyeon in the summers— what do you think, Wonwoo-yah? Like it?
No matter how hard you try, you can’t recall what it tasted like.
Quiet kids grow up to be quiet men. You know this, and you know that your family knows this, so you take it for granted. What is a phone call on which no one speaks but a building cavity of silences, a hollowness of your own making.
University flies by in a flash and train fares make the annual budget you draw up less and less.
Your aunt tells you you’re lucky when you make it back home at last, climbing out of the old town hospital elevator just in time to watch your mother die.
At least you got to see her one last time, say goodbye.
Nobody teaches you the art of bidding farewell to someone you love, not when they leave and especially not when they die.
Besides, is there a difference, you wish to ask, between seeing off the living who won’t speak and the dead who can’t.
There is, you learn the hard way.
Your train is on time and you’ll be home in three hours but you already know, in the way that dogs know of oncoming earthquakes, that your uncle lied to you on the phone, that your father is already dead.
There are no lies, no continued pretence on arrival. Just a corpse and its silence.
At your mother’s funeral, your father pats your shoulder and pours you the drink, twisting away to down his own before he walks off to greet new guests.
At your father’s, you pat your uncle’s shoulder and watch his son pour him a drink. Guests come, guests go. You pour and you pour, splashing liquid onto glasses. This is not a silence you are responsible for.
Or are you?
You almost miss the train back, locking up a house housing the remains of all your past lives, every slow step away from the front door heavier than the last. Your travelling bag is the same as it was when you arrived and you wonder what you could be carrying that is turning your footsteps to lead.
Time passes as it always has, the seasons change and the sun rises and falls. You are. You are.
The guksu place is on the street next to his apartment building is cheap—convenient.
The man at the counter recognises him now, putting down a bottle of soju and a glass before you can ask for it.
The naengmyeon is quickly placed before you, pre-made in the mornings. He offers to pickle you a fresh cucumber, to take off the heat.
You watch him peel the green skin and put the length of the cucumber down on the counter before he makes fast work of chopping it, the art of practised hands that do not need to wait for conscious thought to begin doing the needful.
It unravels slowly, the string holding your chest hostage in a bind. Fingers brushing through the fringes on your forehead, soft kisses on your nose, tinkling laughter at the dinner table, delighted ribbing in the living room, ambient, sunny music crackling from the beat-up speakers of an ancient sedan.
It was the silence, you realise. You have been lugging it all along, all this long and it’s a wonder you have been walking steady, instead of watching your feet sink into concrete as if wading quicksand. So achingly, terribly dense is the load now unfurling.
The man finishes prepping the cucumber and washes his hands before seasoning it in a bowl. He tosses in some oil, some gochujang, some sesame seeds. His hands are large and his knuckles coarse and torn but the movement of his fingers through the mixture is so, so gentle.
Everything pours out of you now like a monsoon thunderstorm.
I miss you. I’m sorry.
I love you. I’m sorry.
Nobody teaches you the art of saying goodbye to the dead.
There are some things about grief only you can teach yourself.
There are some things about grief you will find teaching yourself over and over again.
You’ll learn that these are just the kind of silences time cannot undo.