Stray Kids Drabbles

Fifty-fifty

You run into Lee Know (quite literally) and learn what friendship is about. 

꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎ ꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎ ꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎

You had spent your teenage years building up a fortress. Every single day after school, you went into your room and pulled out another brick. You made sure it was strong and sturdy. You took your time slathering those bricks with cement and placing them together. Day by day, brick by brick, you had created yourself a prison. You had trapped yourself inside without a door.

Isolating yourself from the world was reckless and you knew it. The first foundation of a solid relationship is communication and the second is trust, but you had trusted far too much. Too lenient, too forgiving, too many second chances which turned to thirds and fourths and suddenly there were eighths.

It was easier to make excuses and allow people to walk all over you. It's easy to fall into a pile of shattered glass, but it's harder to pull the pieces back out. The shards are too small. It stings. It aches. The glass scrapes along the bone. The tweezers hurt too much. Let the skin regrow over them no matter how much it'll internally hurt.

You had lived your childhood with your head in the clouds. Believing that people wouldn't take advantage of your kindness because wasn't that how everyone was? Wasn't everyone sweet? Didn't everyone have empathy?

You had been told you were gullible, but you never understood it until you got older. Gullible. Naive. Ignorant. An idiotic impressionable fool who held too much empathy inside them. The world was never meant for so much altruism.

You had given and given and given. No matter how tired you were, you offered your advice. You offered compassion. You spent so many nights staying up late reassuring your friends that their problems would be okay. Everything would be fine.

With your parents dumping their problems onto you, it only added to the weight on your shoulders. Parents. Friends. School. While searching for the answers for everyone else, you never had time for yourself. You pushed your own problems off to the side.

You couldn't bring them up now. No way. Not when everyone else was already dealing with other issues. What kind of asshole adds to other people's problems? You couldn't do that to them. You wouldn't.

That's how it went until you crumbled. Your glass shoulders had shattered. Your legs collapsed. Exhaustion hung over you like a storm cloud. You can give and give and give, but it will eventually catch up to you. The human body was only made for so much.

Something inside of you had broken along the way. You created your walls and that was your home. You pushed people away. You stopped coming out of your room. As much as you had once loved people, it was so much easier to be alone.

It felt better to drown in your problems by yourself. At least, you weren't hurting anyone this way. You could suffer alone and nobody else would be hurt besides yourself. It didn't feel right going to people and taking up so much space. Being vulnerable with people was something you could never seem to grasp.

You turned inward on yourself. Even after you finished school, you spent your days pacing around in that brick wall that you built. Studying every brick and trying to figure out how to get out. How could you face the world when you had been closed off for so long?

You had met Lee Know by accident. He had quite literally bumped into you and knocked you to the ground while in a rush to get to the JYP building. He had apologized non-stop and offered to disinfect and bandage your scraped palms.

You were about to turn down his offer until you had a change of heart. It had been years since you had distanced yourself from past friendships and let them die. You had never known how to befriend someone, but now was your chance.