Here’s to the terrain of stardusted remnants: he remembers mother, wiping at his muddied clothes told him that they were made of fractured stars, blistering cosmos and decomposed memories. But what if, really, there was more to it than particles of dust and subhuman concepts?

His mother’s voice would always be lilted with an accent his young ears couldn’t place, somewhere halfway between happiness and regret. Her sayings would hang in the air over a room like rain clouds and father would shake his head dismissively.

Picture this: Hongbin, born September 29th, to a man with strong fundamental beliefs of the religion he was a part of; yet also know no kindness for others like his son. ing his deep pocketed, obtrusive selves into his quiet abode, he knew nothing of kindness.

In comparison, Hongbin can be called nice. (They are uncannily like each other, father and son, Hongbin looks like the devil and it rises monstrosities from his gut every time he is faced with such a revelation. Hongbin sneers in the idea of being a replica, but bitterly tastes the gratefulness of such creation.)

He looks at his mother, and she mothering wears her face with the heartbreak she’s pathetically carried for the past years of her dingy life. That beautiful woman, that vile , there crying like she does, every single ing time. How ing heartbreaking. Why couldn’t she leave him? All she does is tear at his heart in pity. Beautiful women shan’t willingly fall into the hands of those who are putrid, always too soft and yet too cruel and the same time in order to capable to stand up to her abusive husband.

Every time he looks at his father with a look like that (the look that blazes bloodshot, teeth grit, a hand that begins to crack his ribs, to crack his elbow to the young heart) every time he sees his father with his eyes alight like that—

—an irrevocable in his chest drives his mind to the very moment the devil had struck the palpitations of his son’s heart dulls and dies with ache.

It begins and ends when he was a child: there’s a memory wrapped in carmine and the stream of light from which he saw in his window. His mother with the kitchen knife leaning over the counter, the scarlet liquid dripping onto the floor, splattered into her hands and arms, visible through the pale cotton sweater she loved to wear. He remembers well how his mother looked at that moment. The ichor which have been spilled from between her ribs could fill rivers—robust and mighty, overflowing so that they havoc villages and flood homes, rivers of raging crimson.

He was seven then, a small little thing with big eyes, and she had turned, looking at him with a mournful expression that seemed to pour straight out of her soul.

Confounded and consternation filled his vision with naught other than confusion and enigma before the world turns to abysmal black.

For someone whose only memory of mother and father had been blurry images of his past, who now remained phantoms to the young boy, Hongbin developed an odd independence for a child of the street.

Drenched in the downpour of the ruthless city, he got by doing odd jobs to support himself. He was the poster child for his rundown impoverished neighborhood. But it was not his destiny. Sure, there were still constant reminders of terror that reaches into his mind, visuals of death that seeps into his vision.

He’s facing fears, chin up and his eyes bore into what’s considered intimidating. But years went by and his youth made his fractured pieces glue themselves back together for a time. The luridness, the trepidation, all which have been trapped in his psyche in the ebony chasm now surge forth of the nucleus of the his mind.

Cooped up with the rest of the rats in the dingy flickering city lights of seoul, Lee Hongbin exists. it’s some complex owned by a grandmother he once knew (probably dead and her will this was it).

He’s up on some seventh floor glory, towering over the citizens of Jangseung whom pass by his building like a petty, human-sized power, mocking and sizing with classics in his hand. He can feel the universe tilting, teetering the precipice of everything he knows, and he’s a perfect reflection of those very strained seams, it just so happens as to why he applies for a scholarship, lets himself be comfortable for a degree in criminal justice.

Still he feels like he’s a voyeur to this never-ending complexity.