We are like books. Most people only see our cover; the minority read only the introduction; few will know our content. If you focus on building your garden, the butterflies will come. And even if they don't, you'll still have your beautiful garden. If you love the flower so much, autumn will hurt you.
When you stop fearing the storm and stop worshipping the sun, you become the endless sky. We romanticize the stars but forget the dark is what made them visible. Their beauty is a function of their distance.
The note lay on the gravestone, a single sheet of paper saturated by the storm. Ink bled into the cold granite like tiny, desperate veins trying to live again. Aiko's fingers trembled as the downpour stitched cold fire across her exposed skin. Her fingertip traced the carved, rain-slicked name on the granite—her own, or his, she no longer cared—before retreating. She felt anchored only by the paper crane in her pocket, its stiff, brittle rice paper a memory of a wobbling café table and promises made in careless daylight.
"Love me or hate me, both are in my favor; if you love me, I'll always be in your heart; if you hate me, I'll always be in your mind."
The phrase echoed in the vault of her skull, a desperate, childish dare transformed into a shared, lifelong sentence. Even the brightest star will eventually burn out, his voice once whispered, a cruel statement of entropy they had failed to heed.
Laughter, spilt coffee, and memory flared inside her, molten and uncontainable, a furnace fed by blood. His exit wasn't malice; it was the calculation in his eyes, a misplaced kindness that killed her faster than any hatred. The silence that followed had the texture of wet velvet pressed against her face, thick and suffocating. The grave murmured beneath their boots as she walked. The wet earth dragged at her ankles. The air smelled sharply of rain, raw iron, and an unnameable scent that belonged only to her and the promises they had shredded.
Min-Jun emerged from the curtain of mist, materializing like a figure pulled from a wet dream. His coat was soaked, his eyes burning with that quiet fever of people who'd waited far too long for a moment of reckoning. A silver locket swung from his neck, reflecting the scattered moonlight like a confession he couldn't speak. The iron key in his hand throbbed with a slow, synchronous pulse. His entire orchard, the soil, the trees, the endless rain, felt built on unsaid goodbyes. When it exhaled, it released the sound of infinite receding footsteps. The moonlight pressed like cold mercury on their shoulders, unyielding and heavy.
"I wish to be by your side forever." He rasped the words, his voice cracking under the weight of the promise. "But forever is a dangerous word. Mortals cannot promise eternity. Devotion is a trap. When something is cared for too much, a soul comes to inhabit it, trapped by excessive devotion."
Aiko's chest tightened, branded by his memory. She looked up through the rain. "I smell formaldehyde in this storm, Min-Jun. That's what memory is: a thing preserved and ruined at the same time." Her voice was tight. "Everything we hear is an opinion, not fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not truth. And yet I… I still want you here." The shiver that ran down her spine wasn't from the cold, but from the unbearable truth of her own words.
The path beneath their feet trembled, an involuntary spasm of the earth. Lightning split the sky into jagged shards of glass, hurling her backward through time: the coffee cups, the laughter, the quiet hours in the Orchard where his laugh unraveled into the buzz of summer bees. Each moment struck like thunder through her ribs.
The Orchard thickened around them, a machine of mourning, its geometry warped by grief. Moonlight exhaled the scent of violets and rot, and the faint sweetness of old books. Beneath their boots, the soil hummed with gears grinding through a thousand years of accumulated regret, every faded photograph an operand in the computation of despair.
Min-Jun led her deeper, to an open patch where the ground was freshly turned. The grave waited, a patient, hollow witness beneath the storm's curtain. The cold air felt like a ledger stretched taut between two centuries of grief. Rain carved tracks down his face, masking tears she knew he wasn't crying.
"What happens when we stop caring?" she asked, voice brittle. It was the only question she had left to fear.
"Nothingness, despair, hatred," he whispered, the words tumbling out like stones. "It already has. I am the leftover of the man who longed in utter hopelessness. I… I just missed you."
Stunned by the simple, raw confession, Aiko forced herself to look away, the raw sound of his admission warring with the calculated pain of his memory. She finally whispered, "I still feel the mark of your effort." The glitter of his past actions burned like acid. "Someone's effort is the reflection of their interest, and it cost us everything."
Mud gripped her boots. They stopped walking. She couldn't move. He couldn't either. "Then we are leftovers together," she said, looking straight into his feverish eyes. "Condemned, but still breathing in each other's lungs. I hope you find people who act with love, not for love."
The soil trembled violently. The Orchard wailed, a desolate, high-pitched keen. Their hands met; a blinding shock of blue light flared where their skin touched, and a dry, immediate thunder cracked directly overhead.
"You must choose," he said, his voice now steel. "Be hopelessly romantic or just hopeless."
The leaves yawned above the grave. Cold rain pressed against her ribs; a strange, furious heat pulsed from within her core. She followed him into the deep dark. The taste of air shifted: sharp, clean, with the fleeting scent of burnt rubber, a ghost smell gone before it could be answered.
Stillness fell, total and unnerving, as if the Orchard were checking its own work. Min-Jun drew a shuddering breath. Above the grave was a ring of hollow earth, a circle of pure absence.
A note lay half-buried, soaked: "You must become the endless sky." The ink flustered into the rain, its commandment irrevocable.
"We're still us, after all?" she whispered, the question laced with terror and relief. "Min-Jun, please never let the ugly in others kill the beauty within your heart."
He looked down at the empty grave, the final resting place of their bodies. "We fixed the flaw in the machine, but we became the fault line."
"For now," she said, the key heavy in her pocket. "Every tally of this orchard haunts me."
She felt the entire destructive program running through her: the storm, the locket, the regret, the repetition. It ran like molten roots through her veins. Horror, love, grief: the machine of them, the theorem of their bodies. Condemned, yet impossibly alive. A dry, flower-choked cough tore through her, ragged and painful. She touched her throat, finding only the brittle, paper-dry sensation of petals pressing outward. The flowers weren't sustenance; they were magnificent parasites, blooming only from the soil of her deepest sorrow.
He met her eyes again, his own filled with desperate, familiar admiration. "Aiko, don't compare yourself to sunshine and roses when you're clearly orchids and moonlight. You were built for shadows."
His hands shook around hers one last time. "May you find the courage to disappoint people who expect you to stay small. The ones who need you to be small are the ones who cannot love the sky."
She laid her palm on him; her voice was a brittle light, a breaking point.
"It's like you made flowers grow in my lungs, and though they're beautiful, I can't breathe anymore."
"Still," he murmured, his voice accepting the inevitable, "I will always cherish this chaos, until it consumes me and blooms."
She lowered her hand. The storm softened; clouds split into shards of hard blue, revealing brief, cold constellations. Across the earth beneath them, two heartbeats synced in unison, unending. They were condemned, and they were blessed.