They both sat quietly, letting the darkness soak into them. Finally Nayeon went back into the building: Jungkook went unwillingly back to his apartment, casting back the doubtful glimmer of his face upon her moving image.
The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the buildings of Seoul. There was a smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding symphony of the million-noted little night things, rising and falling in constant ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious certitude. The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay silence on the earth, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.
He remembered them sitting with joined hands in the slowly creaking swing. Her touch shot through him like a train of fire: as he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her over to him, his fingers touched the live firm cup of her breast. He jerked his hand away, as if he had been stung, muttering an apology. Whenever she touched him, his flesh got numb and weak. She was a virgin, crisp like a celery-- his heart shrank away from the pollution of his touch upon her. It seemed to him that he was the older one. He felt the age of his loneliness and his dark perception. He felt the gray wisdom of sin-- a waste desert, but seen and known. When he held her hand, she lifted her lovely face to him; it was inhabited by a true and steadfast decency. All the young beauty in the world dwelt for him in that face that had kept his wonder, that had kept innocency, that had lived in such immortal blindness to the terror and foulness of the world. He came to her, like a creature who had travelled its life through dark space, for a moment of peace and conviction on some lonely planet, where now he stood, in the vast enchanted plain of moonlight, with moonlight falling on the moonflower of her face.
The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the buildings of Seoul. There was a smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding symphony of the million-noted little night things, rising and falling in constant ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious certitude. The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay silence on the earth, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.
He remembered them sitting with joined hands in the slowly creaking swing. Her touch shot through him like a train of fire: as he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her over to him, his fingers touched the live firm cup of her breast. He jerked his hand away, as if he had been stung, muttering an apology. Whenever she touched him, his flesh got numb and weak. She was a virgin, crisp like a celery-- his heart shrank away from the pollution of his touch upon her. It seemed to him that he was the older one. He felt the age of his loneliness and his dark perception. He felt the gray wisdom of sin-- a waste desert, but seen and known. When he held her hand, she lifted her lovely face to him; it was inhabited by a true and steadfast decency. All the young beauty in the world dwelt for him in that face that had kept his wonder, that had kept innocency, that had lived in such immortal blindness to the terror and foulness of the world. He came to her, like a creature who had travelled its life through dark space, for a moment of peace and conviction on some lonely planet, where now he stood, in the vast enchanted plain of moonlight, with moonlight falling on the moonflower of her face.
