cigarettes after sex

i'm a firefighter

Jaehyun's first word was no. He said it to his sister as she had asked him, jokingly, if he'd have a piece of cake their mother would sometimes bring home. Jaehyun was five years old and he was yet not speaking. His sister wasn't allowed to make fun of it, it was explicitly communicated between her and her parents in a long discussion they had on the subject. Such was never considered an abnormality to be treated since Jaehyun's mother knew children who started talking by the age of three and was convinced Jaehyun could but just didn't want to talk and that the time would come when he'd be compelled to utter something, be it in defense, question or exhilaration. Well, the time has come as Jaehyun was five. He had said it quietly, distinctly and with that very precision one says something which has been on one's mind for some time already. Then he stood up and left.
The next day he had entered kindergarten for the first time.
He didn't talk much after that too, especially not to his family. On some days he didn't talk to them at all. When aged 16 he was asked why he was rather quiet, he told Taeyong he just had nothing to say. That's it. He talked very little and as irony would have it, didn't have much to say on the matter either.
A teacher once called him a minimalist and Jaehyun didn't correct him. He had to join some classmates for a presentation but was left having nothing to say as those very classmates were sprouting words that were meant for him. He was also never angry at anyone. Taeyong had pointed it out as he tried to illustrate why it was important that he didn't take the teacher seriously. Jaehyun agreed, he was not familiar with the concept of anger but he couldn't deny he wasn't sometimes verbally minimalistic.
Subsequently, Jaehyun didn't have many friends, throughout his whole life he got close only to very few people although he knew and was loved by many. His parents were not one of these people. He knew that he had certain obligations and responsibilities, that these people were kind of important, but couldn't bond with them really. He knew it was not normal but he didn't care much. The closest he ever got to either of them was when one day, he was still living with them and his sister, he decided to bring home a flower. He passed the florist on his way home and only rarely stopping by, studied the flowers, never buying one as one day some old woman saw him lingering, leaned towards the man by the checkout and said,"If I had a face like that young man's I'd not hesitate to grab one of these for myself. Such beauty has to be celebrated"
Jaehyun can't remember what exactly it was that went through his head when he heard those words, but he remembers his hand extending towards a flower, one out of many, his fingers closing around its stem, his grip tightening while pulling it out. It was a lovely white rose.
He continued to drop in once a week and always had a fresh, preferably white flower stretching high towards the ceiling. He did not let them wilt, once the flower started to droop, he would remove it, chop off its head and press it flat as he hid it between the pages of old textbooks.
His mother, sure of having discovered something fundamental about her child, had asked him if he meant to become a florist one day, to which Jaehyun had shrugged and suppressed a chuckle. "No, I just like them"
After that, he started to bring her a flower too, would sneak in and carry a vase he'd put among books on the top shelf, then take a step back, look for it, find it and watch it. The next day, the flower would invariably disappear and he would never learn where she'd put it.

In a way this was more words and smalltalk than they had in months, was better, more private and confidential than any words they exchanged and was more intimate, personal and genuine than any smalltalk kids usually have with their parents. It showed that, firstly, they were not that awkward around each other that they'd have to resort to the perfectly calculated, diligently structured lines of smalltak, and, secondly, there had to be a connection because otherwise, rituals such as these would not be possible.
It made Jaehyun feel his mother did know him all along. He was part of the family, not some stray dog deciding to stay. It made him feel like he really belonged.
On Christmas Eve months later, he had received his mother's favorite book for a present, it had four hundred pages and Jaehyun savoured every single one with almost animal desire. It was the last bit of proof that he was at the right place. He absolutely and completely loved it. He would reread it and say "Me and mother, we totally get each other". And he would sound so proud, so certain and confident that Taeyong would have to avoid his sparkling eyes and wonder, did he even get his mother as Jaehyun claimed to get her? Did he know his mother as Jaehyun claimed to know his? Did they have this connection?
When she died Jaehyun was 15 and not really distraught. He acted as though nothing fundamental had changed. He didn't mourn. The ritual was shifted to her grave and the flower still managed to disappear. He often imagined his mother's hand descending from the clouds, picking up the flower and it was often why he came home from the graveyard he looked so inexplicably happy. He liked to come there so much because after so much years of silent discourse he finally started talking to her, to what remained of her buried underground. He knew that she couldn't hear him but as she herself often emphasized,"Sometimes we speak only to hear ourselves speak and find solutions by listening, not only hearing,  but truly listening to our own thoughts", which was what he did. Grief had absolutely no place in his daily life. From the book he had learned that life was a collection of random, inexplicable mysteries. One had to endlessly grope forwards through the blinding fog but one could not grasp what lay beyond. It was what he convinced him had happened as his father left this world too. That it was another puzzling mystery and he would never fathom it. The flowers he brought to his mother's grave stopped disappearing.
He was shamelessly smiling as he strolled through the halls of the school when the news had reached him. It could be because he never really liked his father. He was what urban dictionaries refer to when describing the word "asshole", meaning a middle aged man with an exasperating kind of a superiority complex. It could be because on that one particular day the weather was exceptionally fine, because the sun had left its hideout and wanted to play, because the wind was, for whatever reason, holding back. It could be nearly everything. He was smiling and he was almost bouncing around, there was energy suffusing the veins on his hands, there was adrenaline flowing along with his blood.
On his way back home as he was mulling over the facts of total independence, of possible financial instability and the prospect of getting a job, he was detained by a woman, who holding a cross and muttering biblical references, was trying to persuade him to join her religion, because Jesus could not only solve all of his problems but also offer him more than he could ever imagine, that Jesus could save him.
It was a year after his mother's suicide, approximately a day since his father's death and all he could think of was "save from what?".

The only thing that he felt was missing, as weird and surprising it may sound, was romance. He heard its echo in the chirping of the birds, he was certain to see it behind every part of human's day-to-day life, he could discern it in the eyes of the teacher referring to his favorite author, in the flowers inclining towards the sun, up in the sky and the cotton of the clouds. Love was everywhere but not where he wanted it to be, it was not in his grip, in his hands, in his grasp. He longed for love as one longs for air after diving into water, he sought it everywhere, in his fleeting affairs, in friendships, in glances he intercepted and glances he shot but he just couldn't get his hands on it, it kept escaping him, slipping from his grip as he reached out to grab it. For all his life, Jung Jaehyin never wanted something as strongly as he wanted to love and be loved.
But how could he ask Jesus of that?
When Taeyong heard about Jaehyun's father's accident that had happened at work, in a quarry, he, having notified Doyoung and convinced him of the moral obligations they had towards Jaehyun, and having Jaehyun seated in front of him, didn't know how to approach him. Taeyong was squirming in his seat and couldn't come up with a suitable preface to start the conversation, so Doyoung decided to intervene. "We're sorry about what happened", was what he said.
"Oh no, it's okay, the day would've come anyway. Sooner or later", was what Jaehyun replied with.
Also, he shrugged. It meant that he didn't know but also didn't care to know. It was a shrug that indicated how irrelevant a detail that was to make him be anything other than okay. Yet for an instant, as he had gulped and his head inclined, his face seemed stifling an emotion, and some of it, slipping his notice manifested right there on his face. It was neither sorrow nor sadness, rather a benumbing jolt of melancholy, a jolt that was also a wave and had lasted less than a second. It was the moment his mind came to realize that what had happened to his father and what everybody seemed to expect him to break down upon was none other but one of these very mysteries that were happening whilst he groped his way through the fog. One of many that happened either all at once or not at all and that it had to be recognized and accepted yet could not be understood.
"Why, I surely can't do anything now so I might as well be okay with it. What else can I do?"
Taeyong was terrified, he could not begin to understand him, and he didn't know if it was madness or wisdom. But he was sure of one thing, that was not how a sixteen-year-old was to act after losing his parents.

Months later, upon discussing Romeo and Juliet's tragic deaths in class, Jaehyun had said this most wonderful thing:
"Death is just one stage of many. There's birth, there's life, then there's death and rebirth. Just like there's Morning, Day, Evening, Night and Morning all over again."
So why mourn one of the stages over?, ty had added as he thought about his words. That too rather terrified him.
Jaehyun was either abnormally wise or simply mad. He had either reached wisdom people reach by the end of their lives or was simply not in his right mind about the whole thing.
It reminded him of something he came upon while reading Albert Camus : "Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter." But the thing was, he was certain that Jaehyun never read Albert Camus, never read Nietzsche or Dante, or even Kant, in fact, he never really read anything. When asked, he'd say he didn't have time and gumption. 
"I don't get him", he would say to Doyoung. "You never will. It takes a Jaehyun to understand him"