♡ A story about learning to love, learning to hurt, learning to 𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘥 ― and most importantly, learning to be human. ♡
𝐅𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄𝐃 4x
Marino Hills, California in the mid-2000s is hypersensitive to the idea of change. It clings desperately t...
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THE SUMMER OF 2007 Opening Up
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It's late at night.
Jisung is in his room, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. The fan is spinning lazily, the blades making soft whirring noises as they cut into the air. There's a faint ticking of a clock coming from downstairs. It creates a steady beat.
It's lonely. It's suffocating: a compression sleeve pumping around his throat.
Alone, alone, alone.
Jisung misses the summer nights where he'd lie in bed, camera phone pressed to his ear, giggling as Minho would ramble utter nonsense into the phone line. His heart reaches out for the moments of sweet silence between them, or minimal noise from Minho's soft hums to busy himself. Perhaps, even his soul is reaching out for those moments where their phone call would flatline with Minho snoring softly on the other end.
Those were the nights where Jisung felt complete, or whole. Those were the nights where the final puzzle piece to his heart found its rightful place in the world.
Jisung misses that sweltering summer of 2006 where his heart danced into the hands of someone who was never meant to break him this way.
Jisung misses the summer he fell in love. But, it's been a year since then. The summer has long since passed.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The boy Jisung fell in love with passed away alongside that summer. Perhaps it's time to arrange a lantern ceremony for all that's died in Jisung's heart.
Minho Lee is alive and breathing, but the boy with the warm smile, 'honey-hair,' and galactic eyes is not the same. Not really. He might as well be dead.
The summer is dead, too. It was murdered by a bitter winter and a tear-stained ticket to Gwangju, South Korea. Its accomplice? A stiff polo shirt with the Saint Augustine's insignia stitched into pale fabric.
All that's left of the summer is a hollow corpse and the ghosts that follow. Those ghosts haunt Jisung's nightmares of fire, brimstone, and bloodied flesh embedded in between the Devil's teeth.
There's a pause in Jisung's mourning ceremony due to faint rapping at his window.
Jisung freezes. He's a human icicle for a moment.
A few seconds later, the rapping comes again. Quicker intervals. Desperate. Like a pitter-patter of pebbles for droplets of rain.
What the fuck?
Jisung sits up in his bed, the thin sheet pooling at his hips.
He cranes his head toward the window.
The glass panes are pitch black—like the night sky is a thick blanket draped over the fiberglass—hiding the view of the other side. Jisung can, however, see the pitiful reflection of himself: dark circles underneath his eyes, a sliver of moonlight shining on the bridge of his nose.
