BRIDGES. － a.yt + j.ws

11: ghost's shadow

It had been a little over a month, night walks sporadically adorned with crumpled letters, and Wooseok still knew nothing of who he had been speaking to. Something was alluring and pleading about the tight, small handwriting the writer masked themselves behind, and though his mind was reeling with countless scenarios in which the story ended horribly, he bitterly found himself far too knotted in the stitched thread around his every limb and thought.

His parka was zipped to his chin, his hood over the black beanie on his head that tucked away his hair of the same colour, and his jeans were nestled into the tight embrace of his biker boots that crunched the uneven ground beneath them. The world was dark, silent, not a soul that breathed or a shadow that twitched, but the snow that fell steadily from the clouded sky, twirled around him almost jovially, dotted his shoulders and adorned the rims of his shoes.

Wooseok blinked against the ice, tired eyes squinted as he neared the river that had partially frozen over in the low temperature － and there there was a figure that loomed eerily just over the water's edge, squatting perilously near to the end of solid land, close to the same tree he had been walking towards.

The silhouette was balled and blurred, Wooseok could hardly decipher anything that wasn't directly struck by the moon's glow, nonetheless something reared its head within him and he was jogging towards the person sitting so still, metres away.

The sound of his heavy footfall and deep breaths did not urge, the one he came to understand was male, to look up at him, and he set his head askew, slightly miffed. He came to realise with shock that said man wore hardly enough clothing to contrast the freezing wind that surely nipped at his exposed flesh and burned his purple-tinted veins.

That which covered his skeletal frame was nothing more than of a sole, monochromatic palette of no colour, a simple hoodie and jeans, badly tied sneakers that were cracked at the rubber borders on his feet. His hair was long enough to be put into a ponytail and to be whisked by the air's invisible force, likewise being with the two locks of hair that dangled from the sides of his face.

Wooseok didn't know how to attract his attention. Abruptly, words were failing him and the atmosphere was tense and shrivelled by something ineffable. He shifted on his feet and then joined the other at his side, squatting down to too look into the lifeless water. He took a furtive peek at the other's profile: straight-bridged nose, full bottom lip, eyelashes long as the irises behind them were shut off from the world.

He gulped, dry throat beginning to ache.

"Y?"

The man exhaled, blinked his eyes open and then directed them onto Wooseok, causing the latter to almost startle.

"My name's Yuto."

His voice was astoundingly deep, Korean accented by a foreign language, and his gaze was as vividly dead as that of the tree he'd left his letters on.

"I'm Wooseok," His hand twitched within his pocket to reach out and shake that of Yuto, but he felt it to be out of place for them somehow and refrained, choosing to offer a polite smile instead. "It's nice to meet you."

"I doubt it," Came Yuto's instantaneous response, a wry smile of his own forming upon his dim-coloured lips, "It's not the best weather to meet up in."

"And you're hardly dressed appropriately for it at all," Wooseok said just as quickly, a tint of worry to his words that made Yuto sigh.

"It doesn't matter."

They then fell into silence, the wind rustling dead branches and pushing at their crouched forms, as if urging them into the gelid water.

"The moon is my friend, a companion who stays by my side even when the sun's light threatens to hide it," Yuto's melliflous voice cut through the wails and shouts of the nature around them, and Wooseok's ears honed in solely on its sound, "The moon listens and the moon cries with me, it's a jewel in an infinite ocean of darkness, a breath of oxygen in a life of suffocation."

Again, a prolonged pause, one during which Wooseok did his best to comprehend what he'd been so suddenly told.

"I was answering your question," Yuto spoke up, halting his train of thought, "You asked me what the moon is to me and I told you I would say so when we met. We've met."

Wooseok hurriedly nodded.

"We － We have."

》》》

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