A Belief in Vision and Other Parts [✳️]

A Sign of Weakness

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."

― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

· · · ·

(( "Soojung would have liked her. They would have been partners-in-crime."

"Like us?" Taemin tosses a can of root beer his way and he smiles, grateful as he moves to lay back on the grass.

His fingers brush the granite of the tombstone over head and finally, he feels peace.

"Yeah." ))

· · · ·

Kai thinks that he never meant for things to change. He'd been content to try to move on; to be happy about who he is and what he has left. He had given his heart to Soojung and he wasn't looking to get it back because Kai knows that Soojung is gone (dead in the ground with poppies littering her tombstone) and he loves her, loves her, loved her.

But Jinri is different (so much it is painfully beautiful). She is there when she needed and when she is not, caring when he thinks it's all just in his head.

As the alcohol burns its way down his throat Kai begins to understand why Taemin's heart had to change.

He only wishes his didn't have to change too.

· · · ·

"Thanks." He stands and the moment ends with him giving her a melancholic smile. He doesn't want to think much more of it but he knows when gratitude is due. And so he tells her, in the best way he can.

"Thanks for pulling me out while I still could."

· · · ·

It scares him when he thinks he hears Soojung right next to him, speaking in that exuberant way he both detests and misses. Kai finds himself turning towards the absent sound more often than he likes, aching for something that wasn't—will never—be there again. He knows it's crazy to think that she would haunt him. They were friends but they weren't really friends. Not in the way Taemin liked to assume they all were, from way before everything happened. Before the accident.

They couldn't be friends. Not with the way he felt about her.

Feels. He corrects immediately (because it is natural of him to do so), present tense.

He couldn't be truly friends with Soojung when she had been alive. Not with the way he felt about her then, when she was laughing and breathing the same air as he. Soojung had a way of creating noise wherever she went. Letting you know exactly where she was and what she was doing just by the distinct trill of her voice. Kai could categorize her mood by the lilt of her tone. A skill he had used time and time again for Taemin's sake because God knows how dense his best friend was to the needs of his (deceased) ex-girlfriend.