Until The End of Time | Wonho [√]

MONACHOPSIS: THE SUBTLE YET PERSISTING FEELING OF BEING OUT OF PLACE

I often wondered if one would someday look up at the night sky and think that it resembled a deep ocean with a bottomless abyss. Maybe the stars were the distant ships that were lost in the placid waves, maybe the sea above held air instead of water, but it was an ocean on its own.

And maybe because blue was so rooted to our lives since the birth of human kind, born under the blue sky, living beside the blue ocean that people held that colour so close to them.

Especially hospitals.

Blue was my favourite colour, gray and white often competed to take that spot yet I despised hospitals even when from outside to inside, the vicinity would always be adorned with those colours.

The pungent and nuseating smile of acid, floor cleaner, medicine, and more medicine, the beeping of machines, the cries of the achen souls, were a constant reminder for me that death was here. Uncertainty was here.

Even if this place was where people came to recover their health, I doubted if anyone paid a willful visit.

Ignoring the slight throbbing on the left side of my head, I signed the form of the patient who was to be discharged soon.

Chae Hyungwon, I glanced over his name, finally I had learned his name.

He was twenty six years old. Older than me. His pale and ashen face had often visited me in my train of recurrent thoughts, thoughts that didn't lead up to anywhere. They were just there, just like he was. Now that I was going to encounter him face to face while he was awakened my heart beated a bit loudly.

Here again it was, uncertainty. Which I had thoroughly despised all my life.

The nurse took me to the waiting room and left me there with patients and visitors wandering around the halls. The long haired boy sitting on a bench in the third row immediately caught my eyes, his shoulders huddled together, back slouching in front and tendrils of locks hooding his face.

Determined I took long strides, making up my mind to immediately ask him to pay back the hospital bill that Changkyun, Hanbyul and I together paid for.

There was a crippling thought that he might not, he could be a mentally ill person, more ill than what the doctors had described of him. And on that unlucky occasion I had a different choice ready to pick on.

As I stood right before him with my hands placed on my hips in a haughty manner, left foot tapping on the ground so he'd look up, and he did.

That moment it became sure to me that I would be choosing the other option.

Which was to getting a part time I'd seen on a leaflet, an evening job in a library to pay back Changkyun and Hanbyul.

No, the boy did not look anything alien, he was still pale, his full lips were white and a bit chapped on the corners, his dark brown eyes were gaping at me.