Mission Wall-E || Jakehoon

One: Earth Boy

Being alone and surrounded by others. Being alone and still pushing away friendships. Being alone and being okay with it. Park Sunghoon.

Sunghoon never fit in. Sure he did on a surface level, but he always had the sinking feeling that he was different and would never quite be normal.

In eighth grade, he got his first friend group. They were fun, of course, always walking to the library a mile away after school together and drinking heavily caffeinated drinks that shouldn't have had access to. But Sunghoon always felt his feet get pushed onto the grass by the sidewalk and always had to find ways to bring himself back into their conversations since it didn't cone naturally. And they all stopped talking to him when he moved a few hours away. It was then when he decided that he wasn't really ever friends with them, more just someone that they liked to drag along to their social events.

His second friend group was his freshman year. At his new school. They only ever talked during classes and never hung out outside of school. Sunghoon really didn't consider them friends either, and he felt very alone those days. Always staring in awe at the large laughter coming from groups of people his age laughing in the mall food court, and always wishing it could be him.

However, over the break between freshman and sophomore year, he met Sunoo. He was nice and bubbly, and Sunghoon finally felt like he had an actual friend. But that changed a few years later. He started to feel off senior year. His only friend, the only person he talked to, was Sunoo. And Sunoo was extremely attached to him.

Sometimes he felt like Sunoo was everywhere, always holding so tight of a grip on him that he had a hard time breathing. He'd facetime him several times a day, and come over to his house whenever physically possible, and being highly introverted, it would leave Sunghoon so tired and drained that he'd fall asleep at the lunch table during school or so early that he couldn't finish his homework, And the feeling of safety that he gave his best friend was often not returned back to him either. Sunghoon had a had time opening up, and he was sensitive. Sunoo played too many jokes and he often took them too seriously, and he felt like Sunoo wouldn't care about the problems he had if he worked up the courage to tell him, or that he would be comforting at the moment, but crack a joke about the problem, later on, making him feel embarrassed and stupid for bringing it up in the first place.

He couldn't tell anyone about this either. His parents knew them to be the best of friends. Connected by the hip. And he didn't actually have anyone else he could tell. So often he was left alone with his thoughts of needing to break free from his own best friend. But he quickly learned that loneliness was beautiful, and it took meeting Sunoo to realize it.

He wished he could go back to the days when he didn't have someone calling him all the time, and he didn't have anyone asking to come over and have another sleepover. He had more time to himself then. He felt more independent and free. More himself.

That's why he slowly started to pick up Sunoo's calls less and less.

He felt free. But not as free as he could. He still wanted to break off from society and never talk to anyone ever again, and never have to deal with knowing that he'll probably die an old man who worked a nine-to-five job that he didn't like his entire life. But he was stuck. Completely stuck.

Thats why he was getting rid of things he didn't need. He didn't need ten shirts, he didn't need eight hoodies. He didn't need hundreds of books he didn't ever read. Because he didn't see the point in owning so many things when all it did was make him realize none of it was making him happy. None of it. He thought completing his collection of albums by his favorite band would somehow make the feeling of needing to break free from whatever life he was confined by. But it didn't. It actually made it worse. The more things he had, the more that he felt he was being tied down to a life he didn't want. But he should it want it, right? He's living well, his parents pay for all his needs, he has his own car, he owns all the maze runner books, he just graduated high school. He should feel like everything was going well, right? But no, the more "successful" he got, the more he felt like he just following the stream of people, sticking to the status quo. He wanted to leave everything behind and just live. Live without worries and live without confinement, somehow. But he felt it was impossible.