Dark Matter | JJK

47. Unheard Apologies

It didn't take long before Jungkook found himself staying home for days at a stretch, wishing his duplex was haunted by her.

Wishing he could, in the midst of all the emptiness, feel a presence – but there was nothing there but nothing. He thought of the Corian-encrusted window Petra used to often stand by in their living room, of the time she told him that if she looked closely enough, she could almost see a young Isaac Newton sitting under the blooming apple tree outside, having absolutely no clue that centuries later people would make up the story of him being bonked on the head by a falling fruit – an under-the-sun aha moment that prompted him to suddenly come up with the law of gravity.

Jungkook stood at the exact spot by the window one day, straining, looking at what she saw, but he couldn't sense her. He tried leaning on the couch where he would sit nestled against her at any chance he got. She wasn't there either. When he could stand, he would do a phantom tour of the house in his mind. Here's where we slept in the middle of movie night and woke up with your leg halfway up my chest. Here's the cupboard you opened looking for baking soda and castor sugar. Here's where you let me make love to you for the first time, where I cried into your shoulder while we moved in tandem, trembling and breaking apart from just how in love with you I was. Remember how happy we were?

Could he feel her if he touched the things she had touched? If he smelled her clothes that still occupied half of the closet? If he read her YA novels that still sat beside his collection of vinyl records on the shelf?

Not even her ghost was here.

In their entire apartment, though he had walked round and round in circles through entire mornings and evenings, there was no Petra, nothing of hers, nothing at all. She was gone from his world as if she had never been there.

And as if his world was running short of cruelty, Petra had chosen to leave but had taken nearly none of her belongings with her. If he saw anything associated with her – black hair ties still curled with strands of brown hair on the dresser, or an empty vase that always had fresh flowers in it before, or a cupcake mould on the kitchen counter – a throbbing ache would settle in his chest then, like a thread of thorns had twined itself around his heart. With every breath he took, they pricked the organ beating in an erratic hum inside him until he was bleeding – bleeding disappointment, disbelief, and so much guilt.

His world kept getting smaller. Soon enough, it would disappear completely.

That morning, Jungkook begrudgingly pulled himself out of bed with the sole motivation that the house was in dire need of a clean-up. Or he was in dire need of a distraction. He started by scrubbing the tiles of the shower's floor, then emptied and restocked the fridge, removed the cobwebs from the corners of the kitchen's cupboards and made his bed with fabric-scented sheets fresh from the laundry. Throughout it all, he made it a point to ignore the wood-encrusted door the colour of black coffee opposite to his own room, a thin layer of dust coating its locked metal latch.

Nobody wants to face the danger until it is staring them in the face.

The door was staring him in the face.

Stepping into his parents' room made him feel like he had wandered into a forbidden corner of the decades' old house, like he had fallen upon a well-guarded secret. Only the secret was familiar, slightly larger than his own monochrome-tinted room, brighter and full of so much more life despite it being months since a soul had set foot within its precincts. Jungkook didn't know what was holding him back for so long. It wasn't as if he hadn't visited the room long after his father died, long after his mother willingly cut all the ties that connected her to it. He wondered where she got that kind of courage from, the courage to let go. Wondered if he had inherited even a silver of it for himself.