STRAWBERRY FIELDS|| BTS

two

Today's silence was different.

Conceivably it could have been the change of season that was slowly crawling round the corner of this town. But it seemed different, not in the way the wind gradually stopped its whistling and the way the waves began to look softer and warmer, but in the underlying tones of the ocean's silent monologue.

He sat in the sand, his cardigan-like coat besides him, his shoes neatly underneath them, socks tucked into them.
He dug his fingers into the earth, feeling the sand underneath his nails, but he didn't care.

The ocean did not lull him into a daze today, the silence was loud and angry.
Was it angry? Jimin thought, was it angry at him, for never accepting its invitations? He wrapped his arms around his knees, face resting on them as he watched the waves.
The sunset seemed to never come today.

He watched the waves, the foam as it crashed into the cold, wet sand. Maybe he watched for too long, the way it was a sort of dance– the waves– maybe he began to imagine things.

But nothing would change the fact that he saw something resting on the sand, water soaking it wet, but never taking it back.
He frowned.

As if someone was gradually increasing the volume, all sound came to him.
The screams of the seagulls above him, the soft hums of the ocean's waves, the distant traffic, the tourist's chatter, the local's shouts.

The silence was different today.

Sighing he pulled on his socks, followed by his shoes, and rose to his feet.
He left his cardigan-like coat behind, the sleeves of his shirt longer than his hands.

He never showed his hands.

All his sleeves were longer than necessary.

With short steps he made his way to the shore line.
With every step his heartbeat increased.
The closer he got, the clearer it became that, whatever the water was licking at, was not a pigment of his own imagination.

He stood above the pair.
Water licking at the sole of the shoes.
Crouching down he picked them up, flinching when the water got on the rims of his sleeves.

He stared at the shoes in his hands.
White.
Frayed laces.
Owner less.

At home he dried them off, and left them besides his own pair.
The shoes carried their own type of silence.
The type of silence without history.
It served him as another reminder that there was something he forgot about.

He sat on the window sill, cat resting in his hands, moon shining through the curtains draping the room in blue.
The shoes, he thought.
Who did they belong to? And why did the ocean offer them to him.
The cat purred under his soft touch, breaking the heavy, thick atmosphere of the living room.
Somewhere in the kitchen the fridge was buzzing, the washing machine roaring.
But in the living room– silence sipped through the walls and from under the floor boards, it floated from the shoes and into his mind.

The shoes felt so...familiar in his hands, as if he's held them before, held them as if it was the most important thing in the world.
The shoes felt right in his hands, as if he always knew their shape and form.

But why didn't he remember them?
If they were so, so familiar, how come there wasn't even a grain of memories containing them.

There was a sense of nauseousness rising in the pits of his stomach.
He stroked the cats pelt, the same motion over and over again, something he couldn't just forget to do in the moment.

He gasped.

The cat jerked under his hand.

He shook his head, because there was just no way...but if he dared question then...

He pushed the cat off, hurriedly getting off the window sill and taking long, fast strides into the corridor between the entrance and the living room.
On the blue tinted walls hang the cork board and the 54 polaroids of the sunset, all alike like two drops of rain, but all different like two rocks carved by the ocean itself.
It could not be.

He couldn't have forgotten to take a picture today.

It was a motion repeated again and again, that could not be forgotten in the moment.

Yet as he counted, eyes wide as he got closer and closer to the number, he proved himself wrong.
There was nothing after 54.
An empty space and a pin ready to have been used today.

He looked at the shoes by the door.
They carried a history-less silence, imbedded in their soles.
But he wanted to know where they came from and who they belonged to.

The water plummeted into the bath.
It was hot, steam raising and fogging the white tiles of the bathroom. There was no mirror, either he never got time to get one or he was afraid of what he would see in it.
Soon, the tub was filled to the rim, and as he slipped inside it splashed over onto the floor. But it didn't matter, the whole bathroom was tile.
There was a little inbuilt shelf in the wall adjacent to the bathtub, it had two things.
A lighter and a box.
The box was about the size of a Polaroid, and it had exactly that inside of it. Jimin didn't remember when he found the box, and he couldn't recall exactly where–under the bed or in the laundry pile, maybe somewhere in the depths of his closet, but he knew one thing, if it was in his house it must have certainly belonged to him.
Everything in the house belonged to him.
Though he could say against that now, with the shoes aligned to his by the door.

Another thing he did not know was when the pictures were taken, or who took them. Or who they captured frozen in the moment.
Most of them were empty horizons, dull marshes or the backs of people he did not know. Of people he didn't recognise.

So he burned them.

Leaning over the edge of the tub, his fingers holding the corner of the Polaroid, his other hand nearing the small streak of fire towards it, he burned them.
One by one, until the smoke stung his eyes and his finger tips were burned by the sodium hydroxide goo inside the films.

But he never stopped burning them, there were too many, and they never seemed to stop.

He never stopped burning them, so he got longer sleeved shirts instead.

He moved on to the next photo, but something told him to pause.

A pair of shoes saddled upon someone's feet raised in the air and leaning against a wall covered with papers.
Posters, post-it notes, vouchers and brochures collected from the street. Recites and outdated bank notes.
But most importantly the white shoes and the frayed laces, and the fading away logo of all star converse that decorated the inner side.

A pair off shoes exactly like the ones by the door. White. Frayed laces.

And the photo itself, marked with a date.

A date that Jimin had clearly no memories of.

In black marker, scribbled on the white rim was 30.12.19.

The photo was nearly 8 years old.