Inked Promise | SANGI

01. INKED PROMISE

Some people are born with tragedy on their skin. Deep rooted sorrow and pain crawling out of the darkest depths, transcending time and space like it was a joke, carving the new flesh with a fateful future. For Mingi, his smooth tanned skin was adorned with acne.

His mother caressed his cheek, wet with tears and shamefully blemished with pimples. Her touch was soft, trying to persuade his pain to go away.

Though inside his room, the mood was gloomy, outside he knew there were kids bathing under the spring's sun. Maybe hanging out or sprawled at the park with his friends. Yet, Mingi was using his blueish walls to hide, trying to find comfort on the bed sheets behind him. Bare feet against the cooling floor, his mother crouched on the ground in front of him.

The kids outside were mean, going after him because he's a monster. Because he has grown and now there's dots painting his cheeks, shoulders and back, popping out to the eyes and blatant to finger's touch.

He knew it would be bad, but not so bad . For that, Mingi learned to hate his acne for everything it meant.

"It's not your fault, it's not like you chose it." She says when Mingi held tighter on the fabric he was grasping, her smile got a bit of pain. "Curses are stingy grudges from old lives. It's not your fault, Mingi."

Since ancient ages, destiny was a powerful weapon for the universe, guiding their lives through hardship and low days– like puppets being pushed by strings. There's not a single soul who shouldn't be grateful for it, the universe was kind, graced them with success, health, wisdom and true love.

True, sincere love was what most wanted. Success could be achieved by hard work, just like health was a product of their effort to not get sick, and wisdom could be mastered by many, through books and living. But true love was difficult to have, and it's even harder to keep it, to notice it, to have it reciprocated. Imagine being not able to know when you're in love, and when it's reciprocated? People were happy the universe decided to help.

That was the beginning, where it all started. It's the solemn cause of nowadays dynamics, much to Mingi's misfortune.

It lifts a weight out of your shoulder when there's reassurement, an obvious display to answer any doubts, like a neon sign shining in the dark night. And that's exactly what the soulmates marks meant. You could understand the basis of feeling love, of what it meant, since it would only be certain when the universe's mark would appear on your skin. Crushs, interests, friendly feelings, attraction– none of that would do the job, only true, sincere love. Because of that, people can have their fun when they're young and horny, people can have close friends without worrying about mixed feelings, because of that people don't waste their time and only marry when the two of them share a mark.

Which brings us to the nowadays society, where people had a rooted obsession with the perfect skin. There were tales of people with blemished skin, cursed to never have a mark, because the universe would be too disgusted to carve their skin. Then it went from spoken mists to written books, where the villains and hatred characters would have pimples and scars all over their body. And it wasn't any better than the movies, where the worst thing that could ever happen to the characters wasn't death, but having a tattoo drawn on their skin, be it a curse or torture by the villain's hands.

The sting on his head, where his classmates had aimed a rock, made Mingi wince and sob even more. His chest constricting as he remembers the stinging words, trying to block them out as his mother is gently shushing the voices away.