PAPER HEARTS

38

Everything is moving too fast, the lights, the cameras, the eyes. My limbs are limp, my body is fighting to stay awake and it feels as if my life is being wrenched away from me as the ride jounces my thoughts all over. It feels as though I'm caught in a tornado of events I can't hold on to, and though my eyes are shut, I can feel the scrutiny of this world on me.

I can't cry.

If I do now, I know I won't stop.

This isn't the ending, just yet. In my end is my beginning, is a phrase everyone's fond of quoting, but where do I start? I'm spinning round and round, and it feels as though I've been stuck in this cage since forever, waiting to find my way out, screaming for an escape. It's so empty. Everything is so empty, and my feelings - they are sucked out to the brink of my devastation and I'm crumbling under the weigh to not knowing. 

This world is so rotten.

I look at the taxi driver through the rear-view mirror again. He is an old man, maybe in his fifties, driving to earn the last piece of bread for his family of four, maybe five - humble, too humble to have taken up this job. What is going on in his mind? Is he worried too? Like me, is he working relentlessly to earn the money for an ailing family? I look away, closing my eyes again, forcing my thoughts away from how I'd dropped my phone right there, not even allowing Jimin to finish, and just running to the road to find a cab and get myself to Taehyung, to hold him in my arms again, to wake all of us up from this cruel simulation. 

I look outside the window, dirty white clumps now sticks to the pavement. People are busy in their own bubble, people are sad, happy, stoic, confused. These are just the emotions that meet my eye - what are they, really? How are they like, beneath this facade?

And then, my mind wanders back to all the times Taehyung has dragged me back up, refusing my acceptance with falling. To all the times he's saved me from the monsters in myself, and to keep himself from being devoured by his own; all this while, we were only each other's distraction from the truth.

Love, hate, desire - these are human, in their own respective, but it's scary when you're drunk in these emotions. 

This is not the end.

The buildings slow down, the wheels screech to a stop and the man wishes me a good day as I step out with the change burning into my skin. I stuff it into my pocket absently, quickening my footsteps as I move closer to the white building, and almost immediately, I'm rebuked by the putrid smell of medicines.

I keep my eyes on my shoelace, my canvas is tattered and their once spotless fabric is now covered in spots of brown and soot. I count my footsteps, starting from one and tallying up to a three hundred and something and I step over the staircase, making space for a few nurses as they bustle with surgical instruments hugged to their chests.

Sickness is prevalent on everyone's faces, be it a common cold or cancer, I see the agony written on people - it's only the beginning of their pain.

And I see news walls on the television, Minjun's face, everywhere, his name being whispered by younger girls and I grow frustrated the more I hear it. I take a minute to wait my turn at the counter, a pretty looking girl sits with the telephone dispatcher headset over her head and her lips are a blatant shade of red as she guides her people with a permanent smile on her face. I force my feet into a quick job, the air renders me breathless and I place my hands flat over the counter as I gulp for more.

"Taehyung," I breathe. "K-Kim Taehyung."

"Second floor ICU, patient 9 -"

I don't let her finish, my feet shuffling towards the endless corridor with my head muddled with so many voices. I'm running so fast, I'm afraid I'm going to fall. I hear whispers from behind me, all of them directed to Minjun and they're lethal as they fill me with rage. I push myself to run faster, harder, my feet slapping against the marbles, and my hands clenched to fists as I run. I can't stop now, not now.