━━ THERE WAS A shell within zhao daiyu's chest. it was a hollowed out shell, once filled to the brim with a distant dream called happiness. that shell was what became of her heart.
there are times when loss is too difficult to stomach. times when daiyu feels her stomach churn and her chest ache at the now distant scent of pine, or becomes aware of the dangling silver against her thinning wrists.
instances where daiyu awakes in a coat of sweat, the last fading image of a body on a stretcher or the white and blue backdrop of the operating room—chest tight and lungs gasping for breath. grief continues to piece apart her life as if it were a young child disassembling a complete puzzle to shove and break the dainty pieces into fitting within the box.
the chinese-korean girl is stuck. she no longer knows what to do. even though it leaves a sour taste in her mouth, she slowly grows distant from the people around her.
there is a pit in her stomach whenever she turns away ms. rén (the acknowledgment that she could've been mrs. zhao was shattering) and her son jianyu from the door, telling them that she can manage.
she can't. they know that. they all know that. yet they allow daiyu to hole herself up and dry herself of her tears; no matter how long the pain seemed to last within her worn body.
the only times her shell of a heart feels is when it is splitting apart at the seams, spilling out acrid poison into her veins, harming her, feasting on her, killing her by filling her head with sounds she doesn't want to hear—cries and pleas, whispers and ghosts of smiles belonging to people she could no longer love the same as she once had.
that shell that dug its hollow claws down her eyes, leaving behind a plethora of bloody purple and blue scars to sit below her once playful and fierce gaze. raking its hot breath down her body, scarring it, burning it, destroying what she once loved about herself into a pile of sickening ash.
there were ghosts clutching onto that shell, squeezing it and leaving her in agony, all alone in a country that no longer felt like it once did, no longer a home but a prison.
even after months, zhao daiyu couldn't forget. she could not forget such bright stars nor their extinguished warmth.
she could never forget, but she could heal.
someday, someway, she would be able to look back and smile at their memory. but that time would not come for a while, and it wouldn't come on its own.
daiyu still needed closure.
━━ DAIYU HAD COME to associate plane rides with bad memories. every aerial trip she took always led to pain.
her departure from china and the reason for her mother's abandonment, daiyu's last day with him, and now her return to korea.
it was a difficult decision, choosing to return to the place where she had lost what she had only recently found. unfortunately, there were no easy decisions anymore, especially between a home that only ate away at her guilt or a country that reminded her of someone she had been incapable of saving.
however, something within daiyu chose the latter option. maybe it had something to do with the fact that there were a significantly lesser amount of memories tied to places in a foreign country, or because daiyu could just avoid everything without feeling like she was wrong.
the teenage girl—now turned adult, she supposed, 18 had never been a more bitter and daunting age—found herself once more overlooking the passengers on the plane and the view from the small window provided.
