The Watercolor of Song

The Watercolor of Song





想寫一首歌給你　關於愛的秘密

愛來的時候　想你的時候　忍不住的喜悅在心頭
愛來的時候　想你的時候　閉上眼睛想想你就在身邊








Sometimes Zhou Mi thinks, as he splashes paint across the canvas and pokes at the blobs until they spread themselves in a semblance of equality, he should have been born a musician. It’s particularly bad on days like these where the pitter-patter of rain is wet against the backdrop of the overcast sky that he feels the melodies like an itch in his fingers, crawling slowly up his wrists like so much entwining ivy until he gives up trying to figure out differential equations and picks up a brush to vehemently cement those ivy vines down on paper. When sufficient green has bloomed across the paper, he sticks his brush in the water cup (though his mind is telling him to stop that, because it ruins the brushes and you wouldn’t want to waste those brushes) and folds up the delicate pages and watches as the un-dried paints seep through the folded side and stains his fingers a violent limegreen, forcing the itch to recede like the tide.

But it never completely goes away, like a hum in the back of the throat or limegreen paint on your finger tips. You can only wash so much, he muses as he lathers his hands with soap and runs it under the tap water, until wrinkled skin comes off in chunks. Kyuhyun has always been strongly opinionated when it came to this sort of thing, staring at his hands intently as he washes the latest smatterings of paint off of his hands and fingers and under his fingernails. Smirking as he pouts when his skin goes wrinkly under the spray and taking those hands into his with a look of amusement stretched across his face like a canvas. It sort of defeats the point of washing, you know, he says, bemused, if you wash off so much that there isn’t even anything left to wash any more.

And Zhou Mi agrees, when he looks into the sink and sees bits and splashes of run-off colors against the edges of the faucet and thinks that colors resemble skin, and if he washes off too much of it, maybe he would turn monochrome. When he voices his concern, however, Kyuhyun looks at him strangely. I don’t think it works like that. And even if it did, you’re not a painting, Zhou Mi.

I never said I was, Kui Xian.

I’m just reaffirming what you never said, Zhou Mi.

I don’t think it works like that, Kui Xian. He remembers saying it slowly, letting each word falling like droplets on his tongue. Words that came from Kyuhyun’s mouth, said with that off-handed drawl that would have seemed thoughtless from any other voice but Kyuhyun’s, because Kyuhyun is never thoughtless and never tries to be otherwise. He wonders at the subtleties of indirect kisses, stolen treasures from the rims of coffee mugs and the sealed envelopes of letters, and wonders if it’s the same if he tastes Kyuhyun’s words on the tip of his tongue like so much cinnamon. This, he doesn’t tell Kyuhyun, because he’s sure that Kyuhyun would consider it and smirk and say those words over and over again, and his clandestine fancying would cease. ‘I don’t think it works like that. It doesn’t work like that. You’re not a painting’.

He likes Kyuhyun’s voice. It’s the first thing he notices on the first day of school as children his age stand up to introduce themselves as 'strangers' and seat themselves as ‘classmates’. He has a serious look on his face, a look of abstract concentration, the sort you see on Greek statues and portraits of lost Gods. The sort of look that bypasses all else to stare straight into the eyes of the distant future. I’m Kyuhyun, Idokawa Middle School, and I like singing. One day, I dream to compose a song that everyone will hear on the radio.

He’s curious enough to approach him during break, and is surprised when the other nods as his approach and greets him as ‘that painter kid’, and tells him, conspiratorially, that it’s good to find a fellow artist in a world dominated by pre-laws and pre-meds and people who understand that fixing people’s plumbing gets you a higher paycheck at the end of the day and that artists are equivalents of hunger relief posters with style.

He doesn’t tell Kyuhyun that he is thinking about pre-med and that he hadn’t known that plumbers get better money and he’s never actually seen a hunger relief poster before. Instead, he talks about the teacher and lunch and about that song. You must really like music. What instrument do you play? What sort of song is it going to be?

He points at his throat. There is a hint of a grin tugging at the corner of Kyuhyun’s lips, he notes, like the stirrings of a groundhog. It’s going to be a love song.

He remembers being surprised, somewhat, though in hindsight, he really shouldn’t have been. For who?

And Kyuhyun simply shrugs. He laces his fingers and rests his chin on it, a faraway look on his face. I don’t know yet. But isn’t this how I’ll find out?

If he has to be anything, he thinks, then he wants to be a song -- the sort of song that comes into existence at the back of Kyuhyun’s throat and finds life in the thrumming of delicate guitar strings. The sort of song that will one day circulate the nation searching, searching, waiting for that person’s pair of ears to hear of it. Waiting for that person’s heart to beat to the rhythm of the song. He imagines that the girl just happens to have turned on the radio that day while seeking the weather report. He expects her to look surprised, perhaps even a little embarrassed, and to feel the thrum of guitar strings in her heart. To go to school that day, sit on the student council and for the first time since her entrance into high-school, daydream about the young man with the soulful voice who wrote it. He expects her to be ranked third in Kyushu, to be an actress and a singer and someone with an inscrutable smile. He expects her to be beautiful, delicate, frail but determined, contrary, witty but faithful. And one day, they will meet in the streets, Kyuhyun singing his song and the girl traveling abroad on her studies in Tokyo, and they will find an instant connection the thickness of a piano wire and seventeen times as strong.

He expects to paint a mural for their wedding. It’s as far as he’s thought about it. It’s probably why he slides up shyly to Kyuhyun in the arts room during second semester and pecks him on the cheek. Kyuhyun had looked at him with inscrutable eyes, before breaking into a wry smile. You even act like a schoolgirl. And then they had a good laugh over it, and when it was time to leave, he closed the door behind them.

It had been raining that day, pitter patter of droplets that brought floods and changes in air pressure but also life. Even now, he sings in the rain that song that had come to life that day. Listening to the pitter patter of rain, I’m in my room, thinking of a song for you, the falling rain’s secret.

He does so now, humming that song in the back of his throat as he mixes the watercolor paints on the palette. Their relationship, he thinks, is like green-blue, a color that’s not quite the sky and not quite the earth and doesn’t quite capture the way he moves his brush or the glint in Kyuhyun’s eyes, but it captures a little bit of everything and isn’t that what art does? He mixes the paints delicately, and presses the brush onto a new sheet of paper. The itch is like the crawling of fire ants upon his wrist, and he lets his brush sit there on the page, watercolor soaking into the paper as he breathes in the scent of art mingled with the sharp smell of coffee sitting on the table. Three sugars, two creams, a dash of cinnamon because cinnamon tastes like song. It goes well with the rain, which mutes everything into sprays of watercolor, giving off the illusion of the world under the water. The world after the flood has drowned everything and anything and there is nothing but the chorus of angels.

That day, when Kyuhyun takes him behind the school and kisses him, he thinks of drowning.

He likes the itch, because he knows it’s proof that the song is still there, strumming on his heartstrings and beating against the windowpane. It itches because it wants to dance in the rain, and he doesn’t let it, because the rain is not hard enough yet to drown it. Because it’s not yet time. The wedding has yet to take place, but he’s starting to think that it’s okay.

The knock on the door startles him out of his reverie. Grinning to himself, he lifts the brush from the paper and dips it into the jar to wash out the green-blue paints, and watches as the tendrils of color drift like an unnamed lifefrom at the bottom of the jar. He then leaves it, tosses his apron onto the back of the chair, and peeks out from the eyehole.

Kyuhyun is on the other side with his hand lifted in greeting and a guitar slung over his shoulders like the rakish eyepatch of a pirate. On the tip of his tongue, he can taste the sweetness of cinnamon. Somewhere, amidst the falling rain, he can hear the song echo.

He opens the door.