the lost golden muse
the lost golden muse
wonwoo/seulgi
3776w
The first time he sees her, it's him catching and walking into the sight of her in pale blond hair falling down her neck, breathing in a cigarette stick down her lungs. She's smoking in a library he just found in one pallid and grey morning and it irks him because there is a possibility it can burn the whole building down. Where the hell is the librarian? he thinks.
Her breathing is sure and confident. She's clothed in mom jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt and she's barefooted. Leaning to one of the window panes, she casts her gaze slowly to him.
Then she's gone in a flash, pushing off the window behind her and jumps off. It takes his breath away for a minute and he scurries there, to see that she is safe and sound and running away from him, lily feets padding across the green, moist grass.
The second time he sees her is the very next week. Wonwoo always comes to the library in the early morning and he has forgotten the existence of that fleeting human-like creature. She is still breathing death around her but a book is flipped through the pages with her left hand effortlessly.
"Who allowed you to smoke here?"
He has snooped silently right in front of her and in a closer distance, he can see that the cigarette between her fingers is a menthol one, the one his lover in bed smokes all the time. And from a closer distance, her eyes don't seem human, feline-like and terribly black in void.
"The old man who sleeps at daylight and awake when souls are mourning," she mumbles warily, tipping the cinders to the table. He blinks his eyes and she is nowhere to be found again. He takes the book to see that it's turned to the dedication page, where a name is written.
"For Kang Seulgi, the girl who steals into the night and dreams, my one true love."
The third time is not the next week, but three days after the last time and it's in the evening. He thought that the library is closed down but he sees the librarian talking to the said blond girl. She is smoking another different cigarette, a clove cigarette, black and she doesn't cough into it after breathing it all in.
"He will never come back."
She's clothed in a summer dress, protruding collar bones and shoulder blades under floral patterns. Her hand is trembling and the librarian faces him but he doesn't pay attention to him, as if he wants Wonwoo to be a witness to a crumbling beauty.
"I know-"
"You can never be with him, even if he does-"
"I know," in a more restrained voice, she puts the cigarette back between her lips, and he can feel silent tremors inside of his body when she said it that way. "He still looks as beautiful as always," he can hear a smile and a sense of longing in her voice, and he wonders how can he imagine the image of her smiling when he only sees her for two times, none with her thin lips curved upward.
"He always thinks you're the one more beautiful out of the two," he gives a fatherly smile at her, hair grey and fading in thickness, eyes giving a sense of care and condolences.
"He thought that I am a thief who stole his heart, al-" suddenly, she is hit by a realisation that he is not with her anymore and she can't use 'always' anymore even though always has been their favourite word together; always love you, always be with you, always by your side, always sleeping with the thought of you.
"I should go," her voice is cracking and beating out of her body in memories. She doesn't head to the window this time, she heads to exit through the door like a normal person, right hand clutching her head that is dangling lowly to the ground and each step that she takes feels like the world beneath her is tumbling down to darkness and when her knees unbuckle themselves, he catches her. Him in his blue shirt and hair swept neatly across his forehead and a black sling bag hanging by his shoulder, his broad yet lean shoulders.
He catches her with him holding her arms from falling.
"Please don't run away anymore," tears are dribbling down her cheeks, and from a closer distance he can see that her eyes are not that dark and it is actually very brown and light with yellow circles in it and her eyes look like the eclipse, the sun bring swallow by the dark moon. There is a constellation of light freckles on her cheeks and he doesn't know anything about her at all but this profound sadness she seems to be coming back into makes his heart churn for her.
She trembles in a greater amount when he looks at her and she breaks away from him, running away from him like a normal person and not like a night creature.
The librarian silently looks at him, as if waiting to be asked.
He has so many questions in his mind, why does she smoke different kinds of cigarettes? Why does she love killing herself so much? Why does she smoke in this library of all places? How come he lets her do so? Why does she always run away from him but not from the librarian?
"Why? Why so much sadness in her?
"Seulgi is mourning. She is mourning for the living who won't return," his voice is calm but somber, his grey hair puts on this light of a wistful thought, his wistful thought. There is a sense of fondness he gives to him with the way he looks at him. "Such a sad, beautiful thing. He's the only one she will always love. So cruel, he was stolen away from her."
He has never talked to the librarian like this before, and he seems very thoughtful. Wonwoo makes a note that he should talk to him more often, because he sounds closer to him than a father he never has.
Δ
"I watched them grew up," it is a calm and soothimg morning in Saturday, the day he met her for the first time, the day where he doesn't have work on his hand and give some time of calmness in his heart. For a library this large, not a lot of people comes here and he finds that comforting. He needs his time away from the real world, too.
"I watched them grew up and fell in love with each other. She was a dreamer merely seeking for an escape and he was a boy overflowing with feelings. Watching them fell in love with each other is one of the most beautiful things in my life. I have never seen a love so innocent and selfless yet passionate before them. Never. It can never be compared to all the literatures here," the librarian explains all of this with a smile, waving his hand across the area as if to make a comparison to the separated lovers, eyes so nostalgic and he feels himself covered in a blanket of lukewarm heat he has never felt so long. So warm he wants to bury himself and die in it.
"Did he...pass away?"
At this, the librarian gives a steady and unreadable look. "I can't tell."
"What do you mean?"
"I just can't," he looks away, to the door then to the window, as if waiting for someone. "Her hair wasn't like that. Hers was as dark as her heart now, black and painted in darkness. Only that her hair used to be tangled between his fingers, where he often weaved and collected it up and tied it and he would place his lips on the nape of her neck. I caught them when they came on evenings and hid in corners, behind dusty shelves of books from the oldest time. Still wearing their uniforms for most of the time. They buried and kept their love for themselves between tales from the oldest era. She rarely smoked also, often she did it when she came here by herself and I could feel her worry that he'd leave her someday from my own space. He didn't know until the end that she did this. Then, she got worst."
"This is a secret between you and me, and it was the only time I caught them being intimate. I avoided it for a lot of times," but there is a knowing smile across the librarian's cracked lips, in which Wonwoo lets it brush away through his eyes.
"They must have found something so extraordinary between each other," Wonwoo replies, after a moment of having to ponder on his answer. He feels a surge of sadness lounging into his heart, gripping tightly into his chest.
The librarian smiles to him. "You seem like you'll be in the same age as them."
"How can you tell?"
He smiles again, enigma lined across his lips.
Then he sees him smiling, looking at someone behind Wonwoo. "You're here."
He turns and there she is, no longer barefooted and she is in another summer dress and gladiator sandals. There is another cigar stick between her fingers, another menthol like his past lover-in-bed which he has realised is not a necessity in his life now, and everything between them was superficial and now he has found something real and worth spending his time. Here, in this seemingly sacred place of old books with old feelings and young love.
"Somehow, I am," then she disappears through the bookshelves without noticing him, sad pale tresses falling down her shoulders.
Wonwoo disappears along with her into the bookshelves, and the librarian feels maybe being old makes him see the sentimental sides of people vividly, and he is grateful of that gift.
As if she recognizes the sound of his footsteps, she stops picking and placing books in her left hand.
"You're Seulgi right?" His deep voice echoes and he is merely wearing a long sleeved green T-shirt and a pair of black jeans. His eyes are peeking to her hidden eyes beneath her hair.
"Yes," she mumbles softly, hands starting to move again. He notices in a closer distance how her cig is unlit, pressed between her left fingers while carefully skimming through the books and how lithe and pretty her fingers are.
"I'm s-No, I'm Wonwoo," he watches her stop and her eyes peeking out from her pale golden tresses. He realises how she is not scented in cigarette smoke now but in daffodils. His favourite scent.
"I know," she smiles in a sad way, eyes drooping by half and his smile drops.
"How?"
"I just knew," she walks away from him, and he doesn't realise that he has randomly taken a book without looking and sits in front of her, the librarian is nowhere to be found and the library is still empty in a breezy morning at 5 AM.
"You're quite a reader," he comments again between his pages of a Romeo and Juliet book and he loathes it because how nonsensical the story is, the boy asking the girl in marriage after one meeting. What kind of nonsense, he thinks.
She places her cigarette by the side and opens the first book with a light nod to him. It's To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
"That's a good book, my favourite."
"I thought your favourite is Pride and Preju-" her voice has raised a bit too expectantly that he is intrigued and transfixes his attention to her. Then she stops, and he can almost feel her wanting to run again.
"It's okay, if I remind you of him. It's okay," this words coming out of him doesn't sound like himself, but he lets it out still.
It looks like she is going to burst into tears again. But then she smiles, and it's so beautiful in his eyes he can't turn away from her when she stops smiling. Even when his eyes rest on hers, feeling so much fondness and familiarity in it. Even when she looks down to read with rouge colouring her cheeks, small freckles in it.
Is this how Romeo felt when he saw Juliet? Hell no, Romeo didn't watch Juliet smoked proudly and sadly at the same time, he didn't catch her running away from him barefooted and Juliet's heart is not black like Seulgi's.
He wonders if her feet caught shards of broken glasses or tripped in her dash, if she had passed bad guys and made another run for it. And he finds himself worrying over her, and this is a new feeling of worry he never felt. He thinks he never felt, but perhaps there was a time he did, just that he can't pull any strand of it out of his mind.
Wonwoo hasn't felt so much at home for a long time. But now he does, with this broken girl reading in front of her and the librarian sipping into his green tea in the back perhaps. He somehow understands how broken and sad she is even though the way the librarian explained to him was very vague.
The seventh time they meet and it's Friday evening.
"Smoking menthol down your lungs will crystallize them," and this time she only shakes her head and continues smoking, but lightly. It's time to stop killing myself, I guess.
"Won't it be incredible? To have crystallized lungs? It must be so refreshing."
Wonwoo frowns. He is able to frown and not afraid he will offend her these days. "You won't be able to breathe."
"I'm familiar with that," he is reading while talking to her, leaning to that window she used to escape away from him. When he looks up, she is smiling at him and quickly turns her eyes away.
"You were smiling at me," he says, not making any attempt to hide the glint of content and tease in his voice.
"You're imagining things," a smirk wells up to her lips. He loves the way it curls up so dangerously without cigarette stick hanging out like a gun.
"And you're denying it-"
"Dream on."
He closes the book by now. "Perhaps, I'm dreaming now," this isn't him speaking and sounding more and more and more and dangerously and recklessly ready to let himself off to the pit. Drown himself in that eclipse of a pair of orbs she has.
And he is painstrickenly starstruck with that smile she gave to him when he was unaware of her and that devious smirk she has while denying it.
By the ninth time, he can't fall asleep without the thought of her. Her fleeting smiles he caught when she was looking at him, and that flutter of her eyelashes when he said that he likes her hair and that it's in the colour of starlight and whenever he saw that she read all of his favourite books. He decides that she is his ninth wonder of the world, even when the eight spot is still empty but nine is his favourite number and even though there is a possibility she won't move on sooner from that former lover of hers, she's already become his favourite person.
Even when she said that she hates the life outside of this library and this is her only escape whenever she has a free time, without having to be dolled up and caked in all the luxuries that is bestowed upon her.
By the ninth time, he sees her falling apart in front of the librarian.
"You're in love."
"I've always been," it's the black one, the clove cigarette between her lips and she's wearing another summer dress even though it's fall. He wants to cover her up from all the cold that is threatening her skin.
"But more, now. I saw how you laughed at him-"
"Like in the past," Wonwoo thinks that he misheard something. He feels a rush of panick that perhaps that lover of hers had came back and that she is becoming ten times brighter and more goddess-like because of her lover and that she feels guilty for spending her time with him instead of her lover. His heart falls to the ground already.
"He's still the same as ever," she chokes up not from smoke but from her tears. She scrunches it into an ashtray he hasn't paid attention to, made of glass and transparent and breakable, just like her. "He still starts conversations with me first and the way he writes is still the same, terribly small in size and very delicate. He still gives the same scent like he used to, like he just came back from the hospital even thought he rarely went to one, like disinfectant and sterile rooms-"
"But he said he likes my hair this way and his favourite is Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird-"
It's him.
"But he loves Wuthering Heights still, and I remember how he slipped it into my bag just so I would have to read it and he had borrowed it from you under my name and you agreed on him," she is still weeping and something begins to crack open inside of his mind.
Slowly, then all at once. Memories begin to spill and he has to hold on to the entrance as he hides away from them.
"This is the story I have won for a writing contest. It's published in paperback and here, it's for you."
"Is this the first copy?"
"The original one. I want you to have this."
The college student version of him stared and watched as she flipped open the book.
"You wrote this for me," she put her hand over her mouth, eyes looking at him. "Wonwoo, I don't deserve this. It's meant for you. You worked so hard for this. I can't accept it," they were hidden away in the farther corner of the library, of dusty encyclopedias no one ever touched.
"No, I want you to have this," he insists, pushing his book to her. "You're my muse in writing this. This story is about you."
She looks at him, then at the novel, tracing her fingers along with it. "I never have someone dedicate something to me."
"Now you have," he smiled warmly and running his fingers down her black waterfalls of a hair, then clasping his palm on the crook of her neck, slipping two of his fingers around the back of her neck past the collar of her shirt. She was sitting, reading it for a while until she lookrd up and literally jumped at him from the cold marble floor beside him, then crashed her lips to him, arms around his neck with so much love and gratitude that his feelings of iridescent butterflies and unworldly flowers exploded out of his ribcage.
He held, gripped and pressed his body to her and kissed her silently and hungrily to the cold marble floor, amongst murmurs of books being passed and pulled out of their homes , until the flowers and the daffodils inside of him regrow out of his ribcage and tangle their leaves around his bones and suffocate him and let her make them explode again; let the petals be blown by her touch. And he knew that another story of her was going to be written again.
"How could you stay silent all this time?" He chooses to walk in to the scene and she looks so painfully and heartbreakingly under pressure with his stare, she presses her palms to hide herself away from him.
"How could none of you say anything about this?" He croaks out, crestfallen, clutching his heart and he can tell that tears are welling on his eyes.
"Seulgi, how could you let me forget-"
"By the end of college, you found someone new. A new muse, you said," she scoffs, hearts being slammed to the wall. His, hers, and the librarian who is a witness how love is being misunderstood for its form. Wonwoo wonders how much morose is resting inside of her to shed so much endless droplets of tears.
"Then you got into an accident. You remember her, but you forgot me. You forgot me. You forgot everything that we have felt together and everything we went through together, you forgot how I used to make you feel," she gets up then walks to him, in each step Seulgi almost fell to the ground and Wonwoo almost scurries to hold her, he can't let her fall for the second time and bruised her knees again like those times in the past.
"You left me. You were the one who left me, Wonwoo. You were so cruel, so, so cruel," she is in front of him now, jabbing fingers to his shoulders to his chest and he doesn't feel like weeping anymore.
His former lover in bed must be this so-called muse. Yeah, she must be. She told him how he used to write but now he no longer wants to. She must not be his muse. This person in front of him, who had gone through puberty with him and everything, every falls and downs and hurricanes and meadows and sunshine, was his muse.
He doesn't remember the time he didn't love her in the past.
Perhaps, he can start writing again about her.
That must be why he is drawn to this library. That must be the reason, because even after all the things that happened, in some ways, he is just destined to meet her and fall in love with her again. That must be it, Wonwoo chooses to believe in that.
"Are you willing to accept me again?" He is looking down at her and when she nods, the back of her hand covering her eyes, he holds her in all his sadness and brightness and herself smelling like cloves and a new kind of happiness and even though it suffocates him, he realizes how long has he made her feel worst than this.
He will start writing about her again, and it is never a bad choice after all, to spend his weekdays here and stumbled upon an enigma that turns out to be the love of his life whom he had lost without his notice.
Not only did he find her, but he found his old and new source of happiness, his golden muse, and his passion he thought he never had.