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It’s the season of the bird migration. The wind is strong, enough to stop them mid-air, enough. They float against it, all the black birds with their wings spread wide and all the dots behind, too. Heading to somewhere hot, somewhere nicer, or trying to, at least.
The sun is low over the horizon, casting orange colours over the sky, a painting. Idyllic, almost, even with the stains of Hanbin’s presence, his salty tears being swept up by the salty sea, the waves hitting his feet.
The wind beats against his face, cold and hard. The bacterial taste from the night, overshadowed by toothpaste, overshadowed by black coffee in the morning, bitterness lingering in the back of his throat until sundown.
He rubs his hands together, a ghost of something warm. The birds swim over him like fish, and the things he is composed of seem to have tripled in size.
There’s his nails that are too long, simply because he can’t be bothered to cut them. His hair, also too long, even when he feels like he cut it yesterday, maybe, or maybe the day before, hits his eyes and mouth violently, and he holds it with his hands until they grow tired. His limbs, lanky and shaky and always all over the place. He can’t ever seem to get them to move exactly how he wants it.
The sand is rough beneath his bare feet. He digs his heels into it, watches it bubble up around them.
Everything inside of him– the good, the bad, the rest he can’t name– reminds him of at least something. There’s always something. The small scar on his left hand from the time he fell off his bike and scraped off his skin. He remembers it being bloody, scary, like a child would. Because he was one.
The slight tint of blue in his hair from when he dyed it that still hasn’t completely washed out yet. There’s always a blue hair phase. There’s always something.
Hao gets rid of the residual. Chews right down to the bone, stark white and smoldering. Greyish. He dusts it away, and there’s a hole in his head, the flesh and the skin and the bone too wide for his own good, anyways. The blood– red and runny, watery almost. Flows and flows like it has places to be. Anywhere but trapped in Hanbin’s body.
The gym door is heavy as he struggles to push it open. He still feels the cold linger on his body like an outer shell, a new skin. The wet sand still stuck on his feet, soiling his shoes. He dumps down his bag and sits at the bench. The wall is yellowy, residue from smoking. Dirty. It makes his skin crawl. Like there are spiders all over and in his mouth and in the back of his throat that he swallows down on reflex. He shakes his head.
The bite, the crunch. Hao’s teeth. An indent. The feeling of something missing, a phantom pain of sorts. Hanbin wants to itch the place where there’s nothing, and he wants it to bleed until he’s dry of it.
There is a meaninglessness in the way that he moves. Something that screams I shouldn’t be here, I should’ve disappeared a long time ago. He lifts up the weights, small and heavy in his hands, one at a time, senseless. What’s a few kilos going to do when there could be so many more? What’s so little going to do when there are such bigger things in the world, bigger things than Hanbin? Why does Hao ever stay?
And Hao could chew Hanbin’s nails off, too much anyways. If Hanbin squints, he can sometimes imagine the dead skin trapped under them still, even when he’s scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. The blood from scratching his own skin too much. Digging his nails into his palms until he can taste his own blood when he bites them out of nervousness. When he smiles and says yes even when he means no. When he couldn’t stop biting them while waiting for his turn to present his project at school. The feeling of his heart beating. All so real.
It’s hard to imagine a time without something. Before everything. He feels the sweat blooming on his forehead slowly, running down the side of his head. He bites his lip. Without the bedframe that he’d accidentally hit his head against too many times to count. The coffee table he’d stub his toe against every time he walked past. The assortment of pens he had that never seemed to work properly. Just small and faint streaks of blue. There’s always something.
There’s nobody here at this time of day, just before dawn. Night, maybe. Everything seems to have turned on its head. Red-faced. Black spots. On the verge of fainting.
Squishy eyes and seeing eyes. Doing what they’re supposed to. Functioning like they should. Watching and looking and seeing everything that should be seen and everything that shouldn’t; noticing the flinches and eyes evading, noticing everything.
Hao can take those, too. Gouge them out, suck them right out of their socket.
His skin. The bruise on his shoulder from when he bumped into the wall while laughing too hard. Hao’s smile burning, a bittersweet taste in his mouth, bile. Hanbin presses on the place it used to be and imagines the pain blooming from it, imagines the colours, thinks about painting it on again, because. The purple makeup lies at the bottom of his bag. He could start wearing sleeveless shirts, show it off. Something to show when someone asks are you real?
Running and falling face-first into mud, laughing like it meant nothing at all. Hao asking if he’s okay, then bursting out laughing to tears, falling to his knees on the ground beside him. Hanbin’s hands were covered in sticky mud, dirt under his nails, in his hair, his eyes. Rubbing it off his eyelids with his fingertips, the stains left. Tooth-gapped smile, the times before braces and procedures and training regimes.
He doesn’t think he ever quite got the dirt scrubbed off fully.
Hao can take his hair, too. Maybe save it for last. Rip it right out of his head, a few chunks at a time. He can’t ever seem to wash out the- this from it, even with Hao’s shampoo. Citrus somehow makes it worse. Makes it all feel more real.
His palms are bloody, scraped. The weights lie on the ground. His chest rises and falls with his breaths. Feels too real to be real.
Hanbin just wants Hao to eat all of it. Every single piece. Just wants Hao to eat everything of him until he’s disappeared with the wind, flown away with the birds. To far away countries, the hotter ones as winter starts to settle in the air. Hanbin thinks it settled in years ago. The ones without the swingset that he walks by every morning, the one he used to swing on with his friends. The ones without the homeless lady begging for money, the one he would always give all his change when he had some. The ones without the wishes for a white Christmas that were never answered, dirty and wet winter boots playing in the thin layer of snow that was. The ones without the rust swimming in the air, the smell of pollution like a perfume, so homely he’d miss it when he’d travel out of the city. The ones without all the stuff that he is composed of, the stuff that molded him into who he is, the stuff that makes him him.
He wants to feel the breeze in his hair, flushing his cheeks red, even when he’s not moving against the harsh winds. Wants to wash the leftover dirt off his body, wants to be real enough to feel it. Wants to fly alongside the bird migration, be one of them, fly to a warmer place, somewhere more comfortable. He just wants to try.
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