𝓈𝒾𝓃𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 ─── ˢˡᵒʷ ᵘᵖᵈᵃᵗᵉˢ

⁰¹. ❞𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐭❞

''  "ᵒᵘʳ ˢᵖᵒᵗ" ''

✧─✧──✧─────────────────────────────✧──✧─✧

Sunoh kept to himself after his breakup with Jojo. Only three days had passed since that day, but it felt like an eternity to him. He was a completely different person now.

If his relationship with his mother was bad before, now it was as if they had no relationship at all. He avoided her like the plague, staying out until the ungodly hours of the morning and only coming back home to sleep for a couple of hours before dragging himself to school. 

Not only had his relationship with that woman worsened—his relationships with everyone had crumbled at alarming rates. He avoided his friends, ignoring their calls and blanking them during school hours when they tried to approach him until they gave up. He avoided Hye-yeon, his best friend of over ten years, too. He avoided everyone, shutting himself off and ignoring anyone that approached him.

People soon got the idea and began to avoid him in return. It proved to be easier than they had thought it would be considering his 180 degree turn in personality and appearance. The inner and outer charm that he had once possessed was gone, replaced with hollow emptiness that no one had the patience to deal with.

Sunoh looked terrible. There were bags under his bloodshot eyes, his cheeks were hollow from undereating and his body was closer to looking like a beanstalk than a human. He was just a shadow of the Sunoh that he had been before—an empty shell without a soul forced to roam around the cold earth without ever finding his essence again.

His attitude was just as bad as he looked. He always wore a cold, blank expression which only ever changed into a wistful look whenever Jojo appeared in his line of sight, or into a glare whenever anyone that wasn't her approached him. Whenever someone tried to talk to him, he either ignored them entirely or snapped at them so aggressively that he scared everyone in a 10M radius of himself away. 

It only took those three days for the amount of times that his Love Alarm rang to reduce tenfold. If before he used to gather hundreds of hearts per day, now he barely ever made it to 10. In fact, the number rarely climbed higher than a pathetic 4. Not like that was any surprise to him—who would love someone like him? He had been a fool—so entranced by the illusion of flying that he forgot all about gravity and now had to suffer the consequences. 

Sunoh knew that what he was doing to himself wasn't healthy, but he couldn't stop himself. He couldn't force himself to eat or sleep—couldn't force himself to be nice to people—couldn't force himself to move on. He was drowning in his despair the same way that his deteriorating body was drowning in his uniform which had once been a perfect fit for him. He was sinking, slowly and without any resistance.

As he sat on the top step of an outdoor staircase overlooking the courtyard and field below, he once again became lost in his thoughts. His mind kept repeating the same questions over and over again: Why did we break up? Does she really not love me anymore? Why? Did I do something wrong? Or am I just not good enough? Why? Why?

A movement nearby pulled him out of his thoughts and he glanced to the side to see a somewhat familiar-looking girl sitting on the other end of the same step as him, leaving about a metre of distance between them. He turned his gaze back to the courtyard below, not interested in the slightest about who the girl was and why she had decided to sit with him.