_{^{jihyun's childhood had been drawn by modern-day romantics and future philosophers, skies colored in with sepia crayons until they burst under the weight of his ocean-blue adolescence, sea-salty and wrought with a heartache that buried his lungs in an aching need for purpose; to perhaps be more than the pages of his father's philosophy textbooks or a mere pomegranate stain upon the earth's pure-white fabric of time. see, jihyun knows what it is to grieve every fraying stitch of a man falling apart at the seams. knows what it is to curse nostalgia — the silver-tongued liar that it is — and live in a home with seven other people, rooms cramped and floorboards rotting before the pads of their feet. knows that he had lost the glittery, mortal gems of boyhood as soon as his mother told him he would be a great older brother. his aching hope, then, to find answers that lay not in the sun-bleached words of historians or stuffy classrooms, would drown under hazelnut skies and a responsibility that crushes him with its familiar melancholy.
        sepia crayons, worn down to their very ends. jihyun's maritime hues may as well have been crushed to dust by the time he hit fifteen. realization bruises his ambition with a kindness only his family can afford him: he must search for truth in the confines of mediocrity. nietzsche and paul-satre and kim jaegwon would never see bae jihyun leave the city that pollutes his blood and begs him to settle.
        he has sacrificed everything to this place. to the boy he met in eighth grade, with lighter fluid running through his veins and fruit-punch stained knuckles. jung daeseong had been freedom personified and held his hands with a conviction that only poets knew. the outspoken sort, whose flaws had grown out of his pores like poisonous fungi. the type of man who likes to devour others whole, and jihyun had been willing to serve his heart upon copper platters.
        like most poisons, jihyun did not feel his heart collapse until it is too late and his arteries coil around themselves twice over. the agony is a prison: one that threads the seam of his mouth shut and tears his voice to shreds.
        daeseong is gone; a phantom from the past that will not leave. he will not remember jihyun, but jihyun will carry around the ghost of his fingerprints on his body. memories of him are like teeth sinking into his organs: painful, violent, knee-jerking, sickening.
        he tries to wash the hurt away, tonight, when the trauma is all that surfaces when he searches for truth and tries to forget, forget, forget. the sky is gunmetal black and jihyun's hands search desperately for a bullet beneath his skin. scrubs harder, harder, harder, until his blood boils and his bones ache.
        he did not want to sacrifice that one shred of childhood warmth. did not want those prying hands to take.
        this is grief. this is mourning a self he can never take back.
        this is his fifth shower of the day and yet he feels the filth of the past cling onto him, rusting him from the inside out.
        the past is a silver-tongued liar, and it grows teeth to chew on jihyun's soul. 
        he is fighting to forget.
        he is fighting to erase.
        he is fighting today, today, today, and knows that tomorrow has to be better.}}