there were no cameras, only memory and the way it betrayed itself over time.

heeseung used to think grief would stay sharp forever, like a blade you could never dull. but it wasn’t sharp. it was fog. slow, thick, swallowing edges.

you used to laugh in a way that made the air feel lighter, like even the sky leaned closer to listen. he remembers that. he thinks he does.

you died before anyone thought to steal moments with glass and flash. no photographs. no videos. just witnesses who eventually learned to speak in softer tones whenever your name came up, as if volume might disturb your absence.

heeseung kept you alive in fragments. the tilt of your head. the habits you had when you were nervous. the way you said his name like it had warmth inside it. but time is a thief that does not announce itself.

first he forgot the sound of your footsteps. then the exact shade of your voice when you were sleepy. then the shape of your handwriting. he started waking up unsure if he had dreamed you or lived you.

one evening, he sat by the window and tried to summon your face the way one calls a ghost. he closed his eyes hard enough to see stars behind them. nothing came clearly. only outlines. only the idea of you. and then the question arrived, quiet and cruel: what color were your eyes again?

he tried to answer. he really did. they were brown? or maybe something warmer, like melted amber. or were they darker, almost black when you were serious?

his mind refused to hold still. he pressed his fingers to his temples as if pressure could force memory back into shape. but memory does not obey. it drifts. it erases.

and still, there was that sentence, looping in the back of his skull like a prayer spoken wrong: "one day, you'll forget her." he hated whoever said it. he hated that it turned out to be true without needing permission.

years passed like pages torn out of a book. not fast. not slow. just gone. heeseung would sometimes stop mid-action, mid-thought, because something inside him would whisper that he had lost something important. but it never told him what.

he would stand in markets, in empty streets, in rooms that smelled like old wood and rain, and feel the absence like a second heartbeat. your name still existed. he had not lost that. but it had become a word without an image attached to it.

one night, rain falling like a memory trying to return, he whispered your name into the dark. it sounded unfamiliar.

there was a night when he almost remembered everything at once. it came like a storm pressing against glass, loud and bright behind his eyes. he saw a smile, maybe yours, maybe not. he saw hands reaching for his. he saw a field of pale light and someone calling him softly, urgently.

and then it slipped. just like that. as if the world had blinked and decided he did not deserve the full picture anymore.

heeseung stood in that rain and laughed once, but it broke halfway through. he realized then that forgetting is not a single moment. it is erosion. it is the soft undoing of love until only the shape of it remains.

he pressed his palm against his chest, as if he could feel you there, stored somewhere between ribs and breath. nothing. only silence answering back.

days later, he tried again. harder this time. desperate in a way that had no words left. he repeated your name until it lost meaning, until it became only sound. but even sound fades. your face did not come. instead, there was a blur. a kindness without edges. a warmth without definition.

and it terrified him more than pain ever could. because pain proves something existed. this did not. heeseung sat on the floor of a room he could no longer remember decorating and stared at his hands like they belonged to someone else.

if someone asked him to draw you, he could not even begin. he tried anyway. a line. erased. another line. nothing matched what lived inside the absence.

what color were your eyes again? he didn't know. and for the first time, the question did not feel like loss. it felt like empty sky after everything has flown away.