Ellio.

@seokscripted I love you.

Stalking you because you’re my favorite prey, my little prince. Also, you look so beautiful in an outfit that matches me.

It should be the other way round, my baby prince. I want to worship you and kiss every inch of your skin, and have you in my arms every minute and every second.

@seokscripted you’re the only person I’ve wanted even despite being tired

Happy 1 year and 1 month of us, @seokscripted 🤍 “All that you are is all that I’ll ever need” is a song lyric I think about a lot. It’s from the song “Tenerife Sea” by Ed Sheeran. It’s so nice to gaze out at the open sea and think about the love of your life, whose presence feels like the ocean embracing the shore. Even as I stood on a cliff somewhere near Antarctica, witnessing one of the most beautiful sights of my life, my first thought was still you. How much I wished you were there, and how badly I wanted to share that moment with you. A family of humpback whales came by to say hello beneath a clear blue sky, on a day the forecast had promised would be rainy. Somehow, even in a moment that felt almost impossibly beautiful on its own, I still found myself thinking that it would have been better with you beside me. I love waking up with the steady reassurance that you’ll be here for me, no matter where I wander. Even when I take off on one of my many adventures, you know how much of my heart is made of you. The kind of love that feels right to me has never been one that asks me to become smaller, or makes me feel like I can’t breathe. It gives me room to wander while still giving me somewhere I want to return to. And somehow, you’ve found the cure for a man who once thought he was too independent to ever be tied down, too sentimental to risk real commitment, and too protective of himself to believe that romantic love could exist without costing him some part of his selfhood. With you, I’ve learned that love doesn’t have to mean losing yourself. Sometimes, it means finding someone who gives you the freedom to remain entirely yourself, and still makes you want to come home. Thank you for waiting for me, and for allowing me to come home to you with my heart so full of summer adventures that I can’t wait to share with you. Yours for over 365 days now and counting into forever, Ashy

Summer is ending, but my feelings for you have only grown. They stretch beyond oceans now, made of cosmic eternities and ten thousand mountains rising into a single, endless peak. Happy twelve months of us, my dearest prince. I can’t stop smiling when I think about yesterday, or about every day since I met you. I never knew I was capable of loving someone for this long, or this deeply. Throughout all 365 days, you have been here for me. You have said good morning without fail. You have listened to me, held me, and cheered me on. You love me without ever shackling me, and I have never felt freer than I do in loving you. From today onward, through every day and every year still to come, I want it to be you. Always you. No one else could ever compare. Yours, with a pinky promise and now a ring on top, Ashy

Playing my favorite cosy game with the love of my life. Watching Toy Story 5 together and getting emotional over the ending. Listening to my favorite song, explaining every lyric, and telling him why it means so much to me. This is what my favorite weekends are made of.

Today you reminded me that I am loved, by myself first and foremost, before I am loved by everyone else. I’m so grateful for you everyday. The journal we’ve just started together? I can’t wait to fill it up with our wishes everyday.

I will wait for you if I have to for the rest of my life.

Just your 'typical' night out.

Do you ever look at your person and wonder: Out of all the electromagnetic noise this planet hums with, all the frequencies pulling bodies apart, scattering them across distance and time… What kind of miracle it took for your two souls to find the exact wavelength of each other?

He took out his phone and photographed it from above. The picture captured perfectly, the blush-pink petals massed against dark pavement. Even as the outline was imperfect, his sentiment was unmistakable. He opened his conversation with Ellio and attached the photo. His thumb hovered over the keyboard for a moment, and then he typed, beneath the image, a single line: which draws one voice out of two separate strings. He sent it before he could think better of it. Then he picked up his e-reader, settled back against the trunk of the tree, and let the petals keep falling around him while he waited, with more patience than he knew he possessed, to see if Ellio would understand. Ellio might not follow him into the Rilke. But a heart made of cherry blossoms? That, he would surely understand.

It was evening at the Yeouido Han River Park, and Ash sat beneath a cherry blossom tree that was shedding itself slowly, petal by petal, into the cooling air. Spring had arrived again. The blossoms hung heavy and pink above him, and the breeze carried their pollen like a whisper the season was trying to say before it lost its nerve. The sun had listened, too, as it was taking its time descending, gilding the river in long amber strokes, as if it understood that some evenings were worth prolonging. He had his e-reader in one hand and his reading glasses perched at the bridge of his nose. He had discovered Rilke only recently, and the discovery had fascinated him in the best possible way. He was on Rilke’s ‘Love Song’ now, reading it slowly, the way one eats something too good to finish quickly. How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? The line moved through him like a current. Ash was an avid reader, but more than that, he was a lover of love poems. Specifically the kind written by poets who understood that love was not softness alone, but weight, pull, the visualization of an emotion in motifs, and the terrifying gravity of another person becoming necessary to you. Rilke was that kind of poet. Every stanza written resonates with his intuition. He was a demon, after all. Emotions were recent acquisitions. They were tender things he was still learning to hold without escaping. Poetry had become something like a tutor for his inner life, each poem a lamp turned on in another dark corridor of himself, making him more sentient than he had ever thought to become. He both loved and hated how Rilke, in particular, had a way of making him feel startlingly, inconveniently human. He read the poem again. And then a third time. Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings. By the third reading, he his chest flooded with warm and fullness, the way a dark room would look when flooded with rich sunlight. He thought of Ellio. The way one thinks of something that has become the quiet background hum of every other thought, constant, low, luminous. He felt it plainly, and it was almost embarrassing how acutely he felt it: love. A great, patient, slightly overwhelming love for the man who was not here beside him but who was somehow everywhere anyway: in the slant of the evening light, in the poem’s reaching lines, in the way spring itself seemed to insist on beauty without apology. A pink petal drifted down and landed on the back of his hand. He looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at the ground around him. At the hundreds of fallen petals scattered across the pavement like nature’s own careless abundance. Something quiet and deliberate moved through him. He set his e-reader down. It took him several minutes, crouching against the pavement with the long shadows of evening stretching around him, gathering petals with the focused care of someone performing something sacred. He swept them together with his palms, coaxing them into a shape that was curved at the top, pointed at the base. When he was done, he straightened and looked at what he had made: a heart, dense and blush-pink, assembled from fallen cherry blossoms against the grey stone. Petals spilled loosely around its edges where the breeze had been less than cooperative. He liked the placement of it. They felt honest. Ellio would not see it in person. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Ash was thinking of him (had been thinking of him through every line of the poem, through every petal that landed in his palm). Some feelings, he had learned, needed to be made physical before they could be fully believed. Even if only the river and the fading light bore witness, the heart on the ground was true.

I gathered the fallen cherry blossom petals at the park into a heart. Because every pink piece of it was a thought of you.