Chapter Text
The sea gets into your head […]
once you let it in, it doesn’t leave you alone.
Hannah Kent, Burial Rites
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In October, Jeongguk’s inner compass for the different seasons of the year would go wild and fail to recognize the season happening around him.
It was something that had been happening for over a decade, yet Jeongguk was never prepared for it – for how this feeling would crawl its way from his ribcage to his throat and squeeze.
It was that time of the year – the passage, the time before the need to adjust would come and wash over anything known and certain, and therefore safe.
He was experiencing all four seasons during every autumn. Summer, when it was too hot outside to be anything else, when the leaves were still coloured in that specific shade of green possible only when a ray of sunshine was passing through that thin layer of life. Winter, when the mornings brought with themselves frost and the winds made everyone want to live somewhere else. And spring, of course, the season that hurt the most, when the sunlight hit his cheeks just right and it felt as if he was waking up from a sleep, as if he was coming out of a war alive.
All those feelings happened inside of him, rarely resurfacing, rarely becoming the object of asks from his friends who were used to his blues, to his silent battles with everything that used to be but no longer was.
All those seasons happened inside of him. Sometimes what was inside matched with what was outside, but Jeongguk seemed too preoccupied to notice the world that enveloped him.
This year looked no different than the rest of her sisters.
October marked the beginning of his winter holidays – a time when he was no longer needed as a lifeguard so he had to find something else to busy his mind and body with. He was still delaying the moment when he would visit his art studio for the first time since the summer season started. The key on the silver chain around his neck was not heavy enough to stop him from forgetting – something he was trying to do almost all his life.
Now he was pacing the rocks with his eyes never leaving the black hole that the water and the sky created together at night. The midnight ocean was something most people feared, but Jeongguk wasn’t the one to boast with much self-preservation. The darkness helped him breathe deeper, allowing his body to move freely, even though it was not in water. Usually such frivolity could be attained solely through swimming, or drowning; solely through water. The night as an event itself came close to the feeling Jeongguk’s mind was always chasing – it made him float, it made him lose himself.
He wasn’t the one to be afraid. Sometimes one had to survive a certain event or two during their early life that made them a bit reckless during the rest of it. It was no big deal. It never was.
Jeongguk descended the rocks, simultaneously undressing himself. The excitement licked his body like a flame impatient to be extinguished by the embrace of the water. Once inside of it, Jeongguk closed his eyes and let the air fill his lungs. The water was still warm, aggressive, but welcoming to those who proved worthy of existing alongside it and not simply as a container for it.
When Jeongguk was five, he almost drowned. It was no big deal, that was what his mother had said. All he could remember was his body becoming a prey for something he had found to be as infinite as the cosmos. He had been scared to his very bones. His body had become a glass quickly filling with water, then overflowing with it, and finally, identifying with it. Ever since that moment, he had been living his life aware of the biological fact that his body was at least sixty percent water. All these years he was unconsciously trying to transform the remaining forty percent into water as well. All these years he was trying to drown himself without actually dying.
Once the water got into him, it never left him.