Mission Wall-E || Jakehoon

Twenty-two: Astronomy

Possibilities. There are so many of them. He sees hundreds of them but can't seem to stick to one. To some, this would be frustrating, but to him he finds it brings the sounds of an entire orchestra into his head. It's not that he's constantly thinking or overthinking all the different situations or patterns his eyes pick up on so easily. It's just that he finds them to give him a sort of high. Finding new possibilities was like waking up on his birthday. Just the fact that he can explore a thought that runs into his head at random, just because, is what gets him.

He remembers in eighth grade when he sat at the front of his science class, rows of desks away from his friends, staring up at the whiteboard with little diagrams, pictures, and words scribbled on it with blue dry erase marker. That's when a thought came stumbling in. The small drawing of the structure of an atom in front of a him exploded into thousands of different sounds and other senses he couldn't name. Something about the atom being one of the smallest things in the universe blew his mind. People can't even see them, yet we somehow know they exist because a few smart people from years ago said so. It was crazy.

It got him thinking. This is the part where he overthinks. Not like the boy he recently met though. He doesn't think like him. He doesn't think so hard that he feels like his brain had turned to mush looking at every last tiny detail, just to make sure he 'figure it out' or 'understood it perfectly'. No, rather he thinks of those tiny details that Sunghoon would, and somehow jumbles them all together into a decent-looking, somewhat big detail (which sometimes would lead to left behind details, but they don't really matter if they fell did they?). If he were someone who spent his entire childhood learning to figure skate and memorizing lines word for word from the books that could be found colour coded on his shelves, then he would have taken one glance at the lines that made up the picture of that atom in eight grade, and he would have picked it apart. He would have figured out exactly how and why it was 'an atom', inside and out. He would have spent the next three weeks sitting wrapped in a warm blanket in the darkness of his room at night figuring out how atoms would place themselves together to form different materials. He would have somehow come up with ideas, that he desperately wished he could prove or disprove, about what really was the atom. Maybe it was a spec of magic, fallen from the heavens. Or maybe it wasn't the atom, but we were. But Jay is not Sunghoon.

Jay sat, legs bouncing up and down on the white and brown tiles of his middle school and saw violins. He saw that atoms made up them. Atoms made up sound. Not because they were sound themselves, but because they could create sound. And anything you create is a part of you. Just like how if you have children, they'll have your genetics. But he didn't stop there. He stared at the picture some more, his eyes glazed over and the words falling out of his teacher's mouth didn't seem to make sense or matter. If atoms somehow were everything. Everything was atoms. By that logic, atoms were emotions, atoms were the connections and feelings between people, aroms were music, atoms were colour. Atoms were the soul.

From then on he decided that the human consciousness must be one singular atom. And whatever neutron or proton (or whatever things his teacher said made up the atom on the whiteboard were called) were the basic parts of the soul. He thought this because you can't see the soul with the naked eye or in any medical or scientific examination. Just like how you can't see an atom. You just know it's there because some smart old person told you so a few years back.

It wasn't until he remembered his world war lessons, and the fact that an atom could be split was a thing. He then got the idea that the atomic bomb was so dangerous and tragic because you shouldn't split a soul. You break someone's soul and the things that make it up, and you create an explosion. One so big that it will cause whole cities to fall. One person's ultimate suffering, will caused by thousands of others.

The soul being an atom wasn't something he thought about too often. He never perfected it. If he did (like Sunghoon would have) he would have found small flawed details about the whole thing that fell through the sound waves that entered his ears and onto the ground, and ultimately would have given the idea up. Cause Sunghoon thinks of the details too much. He loves and hates them. He gets so lost in them that he feels stuck. But he likes that stuck feeling on some days, it keeps him thinking. Jay just straight up hates them. Details get you too caught up in things. Details squeeze the life out of any marvellous thought or idea you've come up with. Details make the sounds of orchestras sound like nothing but strict notes that musicians must play.