laike—

even as i sit in my room, i am consumed by the silence you’ve delivered me.

even as i sit in my room, i am enveloped by your memory.

if i close my eyes, the day breaks through, but

i can remember with resounding clarity what it was like

to breathe in the void of you

and feel you around me like a fog—

the weight of your spectacular dissipation;

disintegration in fabric and fingers,

hollows and heartbeats

mouth and melody…

to be next to you in blackness

in a world devoid of nightjars

the silence of your voice like inksway atrocity

in the open chasm of my welcoming heart.

i will think about you until you come again to set my confusion right,

dawn to dusk like time is a kindness

through the silver night as though starshine is some comfort for absence.

i hope that i haven’t caused you trouble.

you’ve helped me a great deal and i am so grateful.

i look forward to seeing you again.

your friend,

yu

xxx

Laike hangs on every word; he

lives in every stroke of every character,

traces Yuhui’s calligraphy in the candlelight.

He shapes a new reality where he hears Yuhui’s mouth

read Yuhui’s words aloud. He imagines him speaking it calm.

He imagines him speaking it through a smile like sunshine on his face.

He imagines him whispering his name under duress.

He imagines him breathless.

Laike’s sigh trembles when he turns over in his bed and reaches for inkpot and brush, paper and slate.

When Yuhui wakes, there is a letter next to his hand on the edge of his bed. It is tied shut with a blacked out snippet of jasmine vine, flowers and stem both transparent black in shade as though they’d been plucked from the cast shadow ground of a garden bathed in noonday sun.

xxx

我的彩霞:

that you would bless my mouth to open so i may speak, so i may breathe, so i may taste is a kindness i can never repay.

my mountain view is embroidered. it no longer feels real when i look out the window. my world has been replaced by a master’s illusory screen. it is still beautiful here; it will always be beautiful. i am, however, no longer held rapt by the grey mist mornings i’ve long considered my favorite time of day, my reward for waking early and training through sunrise before breakfast’s scent wafts through the halls. i used to watch the sky descend upon the grounds with my morning tea and i would meditate; I would calm my moments, calm my soul, but now i just anxiously wait for night to descend. it seems i may prefer the twilight hours; i have been swayed by dusk; i’ve discovered the striated color of daylight’s afterglow.

i am thankful my prince has undone my world;

i will think of him till next i compose words for him,

till next i have the honor to write upon his skin,

& i pray, when next we meet,

he will find me worth

undoing again.

來剋

xxx

Yuhui wakes to the perfume of hand-picked shade. For a moment, his fingers dance along the lines of freeform darkness, then he carefully pries the letter from its shadow sleeve as though it were more delicate than copper wire and gold-veined filigree.

The prince takes the paper into his small courtyard sparkling beneath an abundance of morning dew and reads it over and over, a blush in the newness of day. When he sits with his family for breakfast, his thoughts are elsewhere: he watches shadows spill from every object in the room, wondering if, at any moment, they will bring him that face he longs to see more than any other. Like in clouds, he imagines shapes out of each dark-mark casting. There is a curtain across the room that draws curved lines on the floor and he contemplates if that is what it looks like when Laike’s hair pools behind his head, round and inviting.

By evening, Yuhui is deep in his return composition; he makes a square pouch of the delicate paper he’s inscribed and tucks inside a single piece of candy, gummy and fruity and sprinkled with sugar in its colorful plastic wrapper. He leaves the note in the same spot on the bed.

xxx

laike—

come together and i will take you apart.

come undone and i will frolic in your sprawling pieces.

tell me: of all the colors in your newfound twilight, which do you like most?

vibrant red or flushing pink? transitory lavender or a calmer blue?

of all the sounds in the evening sky, which are the most pleasing to your ears?

greedy swallows chittering in their feast of mayflies?

a symphony of cicadas screaming breathless in a distant treeline?

when you’re coming how do you know you’re here? are there pathways in the underside or did you chart a course directly to me? i hope that someday you will stay, that your mountain will allow you the freedom to linger for a moment alongside me, a moment not meant for work.

i want to know everything about you.

tell me—

yu

xxx

It is very late when Laike dares to check if Yuhui left a letter in the shadows. He is neither here nor there; he is present but he is elsewhere; the world he walks is an opposite realm of silhouettes wavering in ocean tides. He sits at Yuhui’s bedside and watches him but he can just barely parse the logic of his outline. He listens closely, consumed by Yuhui’s soft, steady breathing when he reads his friend’s letter in his friend’s voice—once, twice, three times in the dim cast of moonlight;

his lips part when Yuhui threatens to take him apart,

he swallows hard at the promise of his scattering.

He is dashed and dotted,

blushing in the dark, a

victim of Yuhui’s

pretty hedonist

architecture.

He has to respond before he leaves. His mind wells. He finds inspiration in the night next to Yuhui’s unconscious form. He composes his words on the spot with Yuhui’s paper, Yuhui’s brush, Yuhui’s favourite shade of blue-black ink.

He pops the Prince’s candy into his mouth and writes.

xxx

我的如火晚霞:

a person can only be learned over the course of a lifetime:

if you succeed in learning everything about me then i will cease to be.

you’ll know my ending and i will be happy you saw me through to my death as we promised each other,

but there is a better way.

i’d rather be charted in small moments; i’d rather be observed for evidence, for answers; i’d rather you know me by my presence rather than the poor representation my words can provide. then, when a lifetime passes, you will know me in full without asking me to tell you a word and i will be happy to be known, truly known, in the night of your eyes. i will give my core to yunji without regret because yuhui knew me whole, knew me in pieces, knew me scattered, knew me mended, knew me scarred.

my new favourite colour is the vermillion cast of the sky fading into twilight’s black. it is the colour of the ink I warded you with: my red immixed with your blue-black. my new favourite sound is my beggar memory’s ghost of your voice wrapped ‘round your letters’ lyrics.

i want to hear your voice laid over the mountain’s cicada song; i want to hear you speak over the mumbling of yunji’s waterfalls as they cascade down to the river that flows to fanxing; most of all, i want to hear you again in the absolute quiet of my shadowsong night.

someday i’ll show you the path from me to you;

i’ll teach you to navigate the winding roads

of the dark; i’ll walk it with you till

you memorize each step; till

you can find me without

need of your eyes.

soon, xia.

來剋

xxx

Yuhui holds Laike’s letter over his head as he rests flat in his bed, lithe arms poking out from beneath a confusion of bedlinens and assorted silks, head barely noticeable from the pile except for the mess of his hair so disturbed by sleep. He sighs and holds the letter to his chest, breath and pulse quick in a rush of ardor.

He rises and pens his response early. His morning is full of obligation; his afternoon is spent in the front courtyard with an open satchel crossed over his chest and a small set of shears clutched in his hand.

Yuhui is sleeping soundly by the time the moon rises over the wall of his family’s palace and hits the vase he moved before a long window. Its porcelain glaze gleams like an uneven mirror of an impossible world and it throws the wavy lines of its distended form like a dark doorway left open upon the floor next to his bed. The prince’s return letter is left for the taking in his upturned palm, surrounded by the geometrical perfection of meticulously cultivated camellias. A bouquet of golden ratio spirals unfurl from an abundance of peculiar petal arrangements, all around which his narrow fingers gently curl. They are bright and white, even in the hungry dark.

xxx

laike—

bring me your presence so that i may know you. bring me the shape of your form so that my palms can trace it in the dark, make an outline of your divots and angles. bring yourself to me so that i may learn all the things that make a you: the weight of your hand in mine, your skin warmed by the sun of my garden. make me shiver in the chill of your shadow; let me observe you from every angle until i can assemble a clearer recollection of you, sure in every little detail, every little darkness.

if you want to hear my voice, then it is waiting for you. i would have you take it from my throat, i would will you pluck the strings of my vocal cords until i sing whatever song you want to hear, speak whatever word is most harmonious to your ear.

you can have it, you can have it all when you’re ready. you can

pull it from my open mouth

find it on my tongue

take it completely

take it away

until i am

silent

a breath

barely

bare

blustered and

broken,

yours

truly

xxx

When Laike returns in the night, he spends an hour at Yuhui’s bedside, too nervous to pick the letter from the sleeping Prince’s palm. He marvels at the intricate lay of camellia petals on their ocean of muted greens and nighttime blues; he marvels at the spirograph distraction Yuhui has laid around his trap of a hand. Eventually, he plucks his prize from the improbable boy’s palm and he flips his friend’s trap—now Yuhui’s hand is surrounded by a spiral of perfectly cultivated camellias in translucent black that cast solid white shadows on his seaside brocade.

The shadowstalker has flipped their perceptions; he has left himself a splash of floral white in the underworld he walks alone.

He finds the scent of camellias comforting in the dark.

Laike leaves his letter where he found his own: left protected by Yuhui’s fingers like a cage.

xxx

我的煙霞:

if you lay traps that don’t snare, your prey may become skittish and avoid the field until daylight illuminates his hunter’s position more clearly.

yours truly

when you can

catch me,

dear xia.

來剋

xxx

laike—

oh, you beautiful thing

that wasn’t a trap, it was a gift.

don’t let your fear make you blind to reality.

here, i’ll help you this one time:

this is the trap.

xxx

The next night, there is no paper letter. There are no flowers nor candy, no gifts of any other sort left out for the taking. There is only Yuhui, comfortably asleep, hand outstretched, again, in the neutral ground where their exchanges take place.

This time, it is the boy himself that is the paper. His hand is marked with silver ink calligraphic all over his skin. The strokes on each of his digits are precise—the syllables of his words lead toward his palm, the writing on his palm is a gateway for more text over his wrist. It winds and makes a trail down his arm, into the darkness of his robe’s wide sleeve.

xxx

how much do you treasure these letters? how eager are you to read what i have to say?

i wonder, if i ramble along the ley lines of my skin, would you be willing to follow anywhere i decide to take you? will you walk across my arm with me, will you traipse across my neck, around my shoulder? will you duck into the shadow down my back to see all these thoughts i’ve tucked away for you?

xxx

That boy shimmers in the grin of the crescent moon hanging sly, perched halfway up the dome of the thick, indigo night. His persistent words meander across the pale bend of his neck, follow up his cheek and back down again, disappear beneath his covers, into the fold of his robe partially split over his silver-stroke chest. Yuhui is a puzzle of correspondence, he is a self-redacted missive left to be discovered.

xxx

what will you do?

are you more capricious or brave?

if you won’t tell me, then you have left me to my own devices.

xxx

When Laike arrives, he is perplexed.

Initially he sees nothing because Yuhui is his shadow; he is naught but his shape. When he steps from one world to another to investigate, he begins to understand:

trap or no trap, if he wants words

(and he so badly does)

he will have to

risk discovery

tread closer

touch

feel.

He reads Yuhui’s hand with his elbows resting at the bedside. When he loses a line, he moves to wrist, up his arm, but he is obstructed.

Laike is careless; he is reckless when he wants, stern when he needs. He shifts forward to move the Prince’s sleeve but he does not manage his balance well when he is frustrated, when the chaos eats holes in his ward.

The shadowstalker falls forward into Yuhui’s orbit and lands with his full weight on his sleeping sunset’s bed.