dacryspeare • myg

4

when jiwoo saw her phone vibrate with the facetime call, she answered it, propping her phone against a nearby book. she kept her art work hidden from the camera as she held it on her lap. her screen was taken over by a guy around her age. both of their rooms were dark, single lights illuminating their faces, and in jiwoo’s case, her work.

“wow, jiwoo, you weren’t joking about homework. you have like 20 pencils.”

“yeah, no shit. anyway, park boy, how was your day? dry ass question, but i’ve never talked to you this way, so . . .”

“i fell asleep in majority of my classes. how about you?”

“i saw someone nearly get stabbed at school today.”

“what the shit.”

jiwoo answered with a breathy laugh, and a silence fell over them, yoongi listening to the sound of her pencils on paper. a question filled his mind, and he decided to voice it.

“why is a junior just now taking her art class?”

yoongi couldn’t help but get a warm feeling as a smile rested on her face at the thought of art class.

“i’ve been in art class since freshman year. i’m in art iii right now.”

“holy shit . . . you’re passionate about it.”

her smile grew as she blended out her picture and nodded.

“yeah, it’s the only thing that really let me escape. no matter what country we lived in, i could always count on art to drain out my mom and dad.”

“you’ve lived in multiple countries?”

jiwoo let out a sigh, and nodded, not as enthusiastically this time.

“let’s see, uh . . . i was born in busan and lived there for 3 years. then, we moved to seoul for 6 months. after that, we moved to hong kong for 5 years. then, back to seoul for another 6 months. by my 10th birthday, we moved to paris for my dad’s work and we stayed there a good 4 years. then, me, my mom, and my brother moved back to busan for another year. when i turned 16, which was last year, we moved here, and we make a year here on my birthday, which is in like 4 weeks or something.”

yoongi stared at her for a while, eyes wide.

“yeah, it got confusing in paris because i was horrible at french pronunciation and grammar for like 2 years, but i managed to somehow get the hang of it.”

“can you say something in french?”

yoongi smiled as he saw her throw her head back and laugh. she agreed.

“okay, um, let’s see . . . je fais les cours de l’anglish toute la journée aujourd'hui et je ne aime pas les carottes sur balançoires.”

his mouth dropped open at the words spilling from her mouth so simply.

“what did you say?”

“i take english classes all day today and i don’t like carrots in bakeries. well, i hope i said in bakeries. i either said in bakeries or on swing sets. french is really weird because instead of saying pay attention, you say make attention, and the amount of times i managed to get confused by that is more than i care to admit.”

“i literally can only speak korean, and just today i accidentally told someone to jump off the stage instead of saying walk off the stage.”

jiwoo laughed, filling yoongi with that warm feeling again. silence filled the two rooms once more.

“what’s your art homework prompt?”

“‘draw something you wish you could give to the world’.”

before yoongi could ask to see it, the brown headed girl held up a white piece of paper, with a completed dark, black pencil drawing of a slide morphing out of a tree trunk in a forest, with specks of sunlight hitting the ground.

“you wish you could give the world a slide?”

jiwoo rolled her eyes.

“it’s a metaphor for loss of innocence. the trees stand for a child, and the slide represents the decent into adulthood. in the trees, you can look at the sky and above the branches, but on the ground, you have to trust the light coming through, and hope that it’s not just someone shining a light through from above.”

“what about while you’re on the slide?”

“you can’t see anything, really. it all zooms by too fast, and you just had to prepare for the impact.”

yoongi nodded, impressed by what she had come up with, but he still didn’t quite understand.

“so you wish to give the world a loss of innocence?”

“i wish i could give the world perspective of the loss of innocence.”

the black haired boy nodded, and jiwoo placed her drawing aside, looking at her phone screen, watching yoongi.

“what about you?”

“hmm?”

“what are you passionate about?”

“rapping.”

“rapping? what kind?”

“underground — music with a meaning, that kind. not that manufactured bubblegum pop shit you hear on the radio that’s for sure going to be successful commercially. i want the real deal. i want people to feel emotion when they hear it; i want people to think, not mindlessly follow. i write about real problems in my life and other’s lives. i don’t want to be a pretty face, i want to be the voice of people all around the world.”

jiwoo nodded, understanding him completely. she wanted her art to speak the truth, like he wanted his lyrics.

“can you rap for me?”

yoongi nodded, and as he got his lyrics out, she got her art supplies out once more. she looked up and down between the screen and her notebook, memorizing his shining eyes and emotion-filled face as he rapped. her hands worked without her brain, tracing out shapes and words, filling in lines, blending and texturing the paper. he never stopped, and neither did she.

when she finally finished, she had a rough, yet fitting drawing of the boy on her phone screen with a speech bubble coming out his mouth. i’m the public enemy, the hyungs who benefited from slandering us. at the bottom corner, jiwoo signed her work and placed a small reminder of why she drew it. ‘what would you like to give to the world’?

-

even when yoongi saw her place her work away, he continued on, and jiwoo loved every song he spit out with emotion filling every word. she lay in her bed, listening through her ear buds to his tough voice, eventually lulling her to sleep.

yoongi smiled for the first time in a while as he saw she had fallen asleep, a smile on her face. then, he pressed the end call button, following her lead of sleeping with a smile.

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idk if this is any good bc im tired AF rn, so here u guys go