Chapter Text
It comes to me through an email. How fitting. In a sea of important messages, my eyes focus on it. It has his name. Bold and black. It gawks at me. I knew this day would come. But prior knowledge is no comfort. I stop. Park Jimin, it reads. I stop still to this day, and perhaps it will always have that claim over me.
Now there is another name attached to his. I curl my mouth around it. It tastes bitter. It is poison on my tongue. But I don't hate him for it. I hate neither of them. Nothing of his can be ugly or distasteful.
I hear gentle footsteps, padding on the cold wooden floor. Good morning, I hear his soft, sleep-heavy grumble as he kisses my cheek from behind, wrapping his arms around my neck. His hands are bed-warm still, tender. His chin a sharp pain on the crown of my head. A wedding invitation? It excites him. It's in his nature. Footsteps'. But he is my plus one, right? He ensures. That wavering uncertainty ever-present underneath his facetious overconfidence. If I accept, I remind him. Of course, of course, he is my plus one. I assure him. Who else would it be? He is self-conscious like that. Like the innocence of a toddler with a touch of the depth of darkness that peeks out only for me, the existence of which he is unaware of. Half the blame I bear for it. Or perhaps the whole of it. And then he smiles again. He always does. He bares his hesitancy for all. Always. He is comfortable in his afflictions. He allows everyone to see it. He is young.
I need to assure him of this too – and we’ve been through this before but he forgets, or he pretends to, because he needs constant reassurance: I am not in love with him. I might never was. I’m used to him. The other one. He whose name now links with another’s. But Jimin looks beautiful this morning as he sits before me cupping his coffee for warmth with his chubby hands. His hair is lighter now; the sunlight merrily bounces off of it. He looks happy. There is a certain spark to his eyes, his cheeks tinted, a natural glow coming from within that was absent for the longest time. An indulgent smile plastered on his plump lips. He looks content as he turns the golden band on his ring finger round and round. All these years of knowing him and I had forgotten what happiness looked like on him. Were they not lying then when they said we forget what treasure we hold until we lose it and see it drifting away, the waves of our reality carrying them far away, we see, we see what beauty it held but we fail to reach for it, least we drown. Drowning sounds enticing at the moment, I won’t lie, merely to add a bit of excitement in my life perhaps. But excitement stirs nothing in me, I tell myself, and I thought all proverbs were egoistic bullshit invented by lonely people.
"Does he not know?" I ask.
There is an instance of confusion on his face. I remember loving this. It doesn't feel so familiar now. He feels like someone else's. We're past this. He is past this. The question makes no sense to him. Then he figures and settles back on his chair. "Yeah," he says simply.
"And he doesn't mind you inviting me?"
"Of course not. He wants you there. He wants my friends there."
I look down and huff out a laugh. “He’s never even met me.” I take a sip of my decaf, I like it bitter. Caffeine is prohibited. "I just think it might get a bit awkward."
He doesn't answer. I look up. He has that expression of utter determinism on his face again. The I-must-have-my-way look. "I won't allow it. We're brothers first. Whatever happened, it's in the past. We were happy and we are happy. That’s all that matters. We're good now, right? You said we were good."
We're good, I want to say. We were. At least I was. I believe you to be good too. What random luck of the universe for two good people to find each other. I nod and ask instead, “are you in love?” because the idea seems bizarre to me.
“Of course,” he huffs out a sweet laugh and shakes his head as though he cannot believe his luck. “Terribly. He's fucking amazing.”
I smile to match his. I am good at that. “You look like you’re in love.”
He bows his head. Shy. “How's he?”
“V?”
“Yeah.”
“He's... He's... He stays.”
He stops, nods, takes a sip of his coffee. “Just that?”
“No. He’s good… knows how to love the right way.”
“The right way…” He swirls the phrase in his mouth, tests it. Sweet chuckles drip from his mouth. It always pleased him to mock me. “Has he met your parents yet?”
“Are you crazy?”
He smiles and shakes his head again. “Still the same.”
“What?”
“You are.”
I breathe. “It's... easy. With him. Candid. But he's from Daegu as well. My parents might not freak out as much this time around.”
“Daegu, huh. You can finally let out that accent.”
I eye him. “I don't have an accent.”
“Weird. Jungkook is from Busan.”
“What’s so weird about it?”
He shrugs at his failed attempt at drawing a bridge over this already imperishable floodgate.
“You know in some cultures they're only allowed to get married to people from their own village.” I try.
“Wouldn't that make them all relatives at some point in time?”
“Who says they're not allowed to marry their cousins?”
He laughs a hearty laugh. “Stop... Just stop with your fucking cultural studies horseshit. I’m past this.” He shakes his head. “Anyway, we're not from the same village.”
I look down and smile. “V speaks satoori.”
And he looks like a movie star dressed so smart. Navy suit over a turtleneck. His chocolate hair rests in a beautiful curve over his forehead. The lost look in his scintillating eyes, seemingly nonchalant, is a forage for familiarity. He thinks he will find it here because he sees my friends here, the people I am supposedly fond of. What he fails to register is that I am fond of hardly anything nowadays. But he mingles anyway. He is the shiny new toy among my friends and an overgrown playmate to their kids. And Jimin. He looks beautiful this morning in all white, more than I remember him ever being. He had a white nightshirt that came down to his thighs and caressed his porcelain legs as, rubbing his eyes, he stumped to the piano and stood behind me many a morning. Had my playing woken him up? Yes, it had. Did he want me to stop? No, he wanted to listen. Sit down then. And he would ignore my scooching over on the stool, lift my arms and sit on my lap, hugging me tight, his face tucked into my neck, and hum as an indication for me to continue. He lent me his honey-sweet voice and we sang of the pact of our youth together. So white.
White is his color, I decide. They both wear white as they take their vows. They cry and the whole church snivels.
A tap on my shoulder. A champagne glass is held before my eyes. A bit too close. But I am not allowed to drink. He winks at me. I won’t tell if you don’t, he says. V. He sleeps with his shirt off. His sharp bones exposed. He knows too. He knows my mind is wasted, my ancient indigo heart, midnight blue in places, clasped in barbed wire. And that it has a guard dog. And he stays. Still he stays. Shameless persistence. With hope perhaps. Wires rust, he must tell himself. Dogs get hungry and run in search of real food, instead of stale and brown blood. It's hopeless, I tell him the days I don’t sleep at night. Still he stays. Like a loyal pet. What irony. And he loves with his eyes, with the flip of his hair, with his patience hidden behind his impatient gesticulations, and his gaze on me to see what I see. He loves with the way he sits and listens to me pulling tunes from the air and letting it out through my fingers on the piano. He sits and listens until I ask him to leave. Okay, he says, and leaves. He isn’t sulky but he hesitates by the door and pokes at the doorframe. But you like me, right? Of course, of course, I do. I can’t think with someone else in the room sometimes. Just that. I like you. I’ll be in bed soon. Because I lend music from the night sky now.
And he loves with the soft caresses on his way to the sink to wash the dishes. He always does the dishes when he stays over. Perhaps because he knows that water and soap and dirty dishes disgust me, but he says he does this always anyway, it’s fine, it’s fine, I got this.
I smile. He thinks I don’t know, that I don’t see. And I don’t. Not always. But I know that he loves in the shared silence. He loves with the grumbled laughter he spares for me while watching a movie that he suppresses when he is alone. He loves with his palm placed on my thigh as a pillar to lean on, to ground me. He loves with the whole of him. Wide open and shameless. He loves with his stolen tears, his despair that he lets out in solitude. And his passion overwhelms me, it suffocates me. He pours it all on me. All at once and with fierce devotion. Through music, through art, through his attempts at conversation, through the open-mouthed kisses that he pours on and into me. I clutch the railing of the balcony some nights and pant, gulp for air like a fish out of water. I am full of his passion; there is no blankness, no void inside of me, not an inch empty.
“Let me share it,” he says, weaving his artful fingers through my hair.
“Share what?”
“Whatever it is that makes you come out here and sit by yourself half-naked in this chilly morning.”
I am silent. I want to tell him a lot of things, that it’s not him, that I am not still in love with the other one, that I see how miserable he is, that it’s not because he was too late, it’s not because he is not enough because he is, that I want to give him my whole self but I am dried out and I find meaning in nothing, not even in the past or in the prospect of the future. There is a storm inside of me, yet I stand still and calm as a lighthouse, seemingly apathetic. That it shakes me, demolishes my core, leaves me ravaged, and makes me want to vomit, but I gulp it down.
"What do you need?" he asks.
I shrug. "Time perhaps."
He mirrors me and attempts a shrug. "I have time." He takes a forced breath. "But you like me, right?"
I look at him.
We have no history, therefore infinite possibilities of realities. All equally bland. He is younger than I ever was. He carries me because I can't carry him. And I want to tell him that he is my favorite novel, my favorite turn of phrase, and my favorite metaphor. My favorite complexity, interior monologue, and my favorite changed hero at the end of his epic journey. That I see. I see the way he sleeps with his eyes slightly open when he's exhausted. The way he caresses my chubby belly where the previous abs are now absent. The way he makes me slow dance while I pull his leg and find a cover for my warmth in scorn. The way he takes me in his arms by instinct when he thinks I am tired. The way he presses his palms on my chest and huffs. The way he pulls my hand out of my pocket to hold it when we go to the farmer's market. The way he attempts piano and memorizes my music. That I see he doesn't fill the existing hole. He wraps the whole of him around it and nurtures it tenderly and then perhaps one day will gulp it whole as he devours onigiris like Cronus swallowed his children. I've yet to know his favorite place to sleep, the exact octave of my tone that hurts him, or if he prefers twilight to dawn for the approaching night because he is fond of all dark things. Or is it because of the moon? Or if he likes twilight at all because the mingling of yellow and blue makes the sky chameleon. My unknown lover. I am sorry.
But all can be forgiven because the morning sun is out with its open arms today and it lays soft caresses on his sleep-swollen face, dances among his mussed hair. His smile wavers. It makes me smile.
I cup his cheek. “You look beautiful this morning.”