your love died on a telephone connection
title: your love died on a telephone connection
pairing: gia/yifan, gia/tao
rating: g
notes: unfinished
i.
gia often falls in love with artists. maybe because she's one herself, maybe because they're full of pain manipulated into beauty and they understand. whichever maybe it is, it doesn't matter; she falls in love with artists and they give her love, love turns to beauty, then pain. pain becomes her most famous story. pain becomes her most sung song.
she's twenty years old when pain first becomes something beautiful. something that satisfies her when it's there, and when it's not it gets replaced with ease, and ironically enough this is what hurts her more. so she lives a life full of pain. what does it matter? she's in love.
she's been in love many times before, but - as we always say for our biggest loves - this is different. he's an actor. he's twenty-six years old and cigarettes kiss his lips more than she does. his fingers are torture when they aren't touching her, even more torturous when they are, but mixed with pleasure. from then on, pain earns a new meaning. pain becomes wu yifan.
he kisses with desperation on his lips like saliva, spreading them onto gia's lips that until then had only known kisses like rain or morning dew. his tongue is even worse, tasting like nicotine and smoke, feeling like what every dreamer has always thought love would be. with the flick of his finger like a wand, gia falls to her knees and into love.
yifan is late-night texts, phone calls in her bedroom that turn into panting and tears, he is green tea frappes and failed homemade dinners, chinese takeout for lunch and the taste between her legs for afternoon snacks. he's steady hands and her legs wrapped around his waist, their giddy smiles, his raspy morning voice, his bad jokes and beautiful laughter.
but he is pain. and pain always stems from something deep within.
what yifan really is is fucked up. he pushes and he pulls and when the rope threatens to break he's at his happiest. there's something sweet under all his layers but life has not been nice and it turned him into his own worst nightmare.
at the age of twenty wu yifan started breaking. like a vase dropped, his being shattered to pieces was inevitable. it took twenty-one years but it happened. the vase finally hit the ground and broke. yifan was three months into the legal drinking age when the floor his feet touched became shards of glass. five years later, he is in what he once might have called love. this, of course, means a reason to run away.
so on gia's twenty-first birthday, instead of a day together what yifan gives is a disappearing act. and in a perfect world, he is forgotten.
ii.
perfect worlds do not exist. gia becomes crippled with sadness and pain. there it is again. pain. with what seems like the permanent absence of yifan comes the lack of ease that had been present before. with yifan, there is pain. and now, without him, there are excruciating prickles on gia's skin, like a fire has been started inside her. it does not get easier.
what it becomes is an excuse to find herself again. feeling that yifan had stolen her essence while he was buried in her and ran away with it, she goes out often, to places she's not familiar with. she thinks getting lost will bring what she lost back to her. all she finds is bodies with a complete lack of soul.
she drinks and she drinks and she parties in the way she never did when she was younger, she wakes up with hangovers almost bad enough to fill the hole yifan had left in her. she starts smoking because it's the only way she can taste yifan again, but she soon learns that while it tastes like a part of him it's not her favourite part. she loses all hope.
but she keeps going; what else can she do. there are a lot of possibilities in broken things and she decides to turn hers into something more beautiful than everything she's ever made. her hands find brushes that find paint that in turn find canvas to make something breathtaking out of what feels like an allergic reaction to liquid painkillers in her veins. she draws pain himself, his long fingers in her mouth, his oversized hands shackling her down. and when her water has turned into something flammable her heart no longer feels like it's on fire.
still in the same state three months later, she knows that she is broken.
and then he calls.
his voice is as low and soothing as it had been before he decided she no longer deserved to hear it every morning, pushing her back into the pit of love she thought she had almost escaped from.
"how are you?" he asks as if he had not broken something beautiful.
'you have no right to ask me,' gia wants to say. 'you have no right to call me back after all this time.'
"i miss you," he whispers into her ears. there are thorns wrapped around her throat, a sob waiting to pour out of her mouth, her body shaking, and her lungs forgetting how to breathe. "gia?"
"i-" she imagines his lips wrapped around her name, his tongue rolling its letters off his mouth like the whispers of lust he used to leave in her ears. her mouth moves of its own will and it's too late to do anything. "me too."
"i keep thinking about you."
"i-"
"has there been anyone else? after me?"
"no, no, no, yifan, i love you, it will always be you. you know that, right, fan?"
silence.
"fan?"
the line is dead.
iii.
tabula rasa. a scraped tablet. a clean slate. that's what gia wants most of all. to forget. she's done with yifan. she swears. she swears it with the scrape of her tongue on the roof of her mouth as she bites her lips, trying to make a choice. she stares at the black paint on her fingertips, to the black and white canvases in front of her, seeing red and wishing she could pour blood on every negative space, saying, here is all the love my foolish heart poured out for you, here are all my mistakes in liquid form.
she becomes her paintings and her paintings become the feelings she knows she can never convey to yifan. as everyone who has ever fallen out of love knows, moving on is not easy and never lacking drama. moving on becomes the life of one who has fallen out of love because the person they're trying to move on from is no longer their life.
gia tries to forget yifan but he's etched into the back of her eyelids like a permanent reminder that she has loved him, she still loves him, she will always love him. she invites her friends over for parties and the first few times they ask her about the paintings of long hands and compliment them. as time passes they ignore the ever growing collection of the same person at different times of his life, because they’re artists; they know what this means, they've all been here before.
"i feel like i'm in an art gallery," one of them jokes.
with a drink in her hand, gia laughs. "you can look as much as you want, but you can't touch him no matter how hard you try."
two weeks later she's in a restaurant meeting a friend. the television set is speaking words she doesn't want to understand. the channel changes and suddenly her chest aches. everything hurts.
with gia staring at the screen as if it had wronged her, yet feeling like it deserves a second chance, her friend teases, "you look at him like he's the greatest love of your life."
gia blinks. she watches as yifan kisses another girl on the tv, then looks at her friend. "he is. he was. well- he is."
"maybe we can change that."
gia forgets her friend's uttered words. she forgets a lot of things in bottles and glasses and canvases and paint. she's less sad, now, or better at handling her feelings. yifan has called twice since the last time and both times he just wanted to hear her say she was still his. being who she is, she submitted. it's still the truth, anyway.
but three days pass and her friend comes knocking on her door.
"gia, hurry up. i want you to meet someone."
they go to the coffee shop a few blocks down. there's a tall man with a red scarf around his neck and covering his mouth standing by the sidewalk. his hair is a dirty blond and he has his hands in the pockets of his overcoat.
"gia, this is zitao."
iv.
huang zitao tastes like cigarettes but only faintly. his mouth tastes like overly sweetened coffee and feels like what everyone knows love really is. he's a model and he has a certain confidence in his poses that can only be described as beauty embodied. his eyes are taunting up until his smile that radiates light lets itself appear. he is everything wu yifan is not. so of course, gia wants to sleep with him.
whatever she has with zitao is not a sudden thing. unlike yifan, he does not approach her, a drink in hand, and asks if he can accompany her the rest of the night. zitao takes her out for coffee, burns his tongue when he drinks, and makes her laugh. he shares his happiness, shines his light on gia who has been trapped in a world of darkness far too long.
zitao is a romantic. he is full of emotion not in the way gia is - which is suppressed with sudden short bursts often unsaid but instead made into art. zitao is in love with the world, curious about it like a child in his formative years. he knows how the world is, how cruel it can be, and yet he judges it by its potential. he believes in the world almost as much as gia has given up on it.
but the way he loves the world, the way he believes in it, is pale in comparison to how he's in love with gia. if his love for the world is a muted watercolour painting, his feelings for gia are a collection of bright, colourful acrylic paintings that together form a story.
it doesn't take too long for him to wake up by her side. she isn't opposed to a possible physical aspect to their relationship, but it still comes gradually, caused by zitao's careful steps. when it happens, it's after a night of dancing together in his apartment, her voice filling the room as tao looks at her full of love, willing and wanting right then to pluck the stars from the night sky to gift to her eyes. they fall together onto his mattress, messy white sheets pressed against the corner of the room, the window close by. as her lips part, as his are pressed tight, as their backs arch apart with their hips together, the night sings the tune of life. when zitao's back hits the bed, gia following soon after, he looks up at the sky and sees the moon staring at him, shining on them with its light.
when the morning comes, the sun bleeding pink and yellow into the blue sky, gia has long been awake, staring out of the window awaiting the sunrise. tao groggily sits up, fingers searching for gia's skin, clutching to her waist when he finds it. with his hair still messy, his eyes barely open, his lips leave a trail of kisses up her back to her neck and ending on her cheek as a good morning. he feels the smile forming on her face, doesn't see it, but knows it's more beautiful than the rising sun.
they have coffee and cereal for breakfast, and when gia has to leave tao accompanies her all the way outside the apartment building, kissing her before bidding her goodbye and be safe. walking backwards, gia smiles at him and waves, and when she turns her back tao watches as she disappears from his sight.
with her feet hitting the pavement, her hands stuffed in her spring coat, gia makes her way back to her apartment, thoughts forming in her head and leaving zitao forgotten.
huang zitao loves gia more than his heart is capable of doing, causing a constant clenching pain in his chest. he loves her with all the art and scenarios forming in his head that he's incapable of actualising. he loves her more than life itself, but to gia, he is nothing more than practise on canvas.
pairing: gia/yifan, gia/tao
rating: g
notes: unfinished
i.
gia often falls in love with artists. maybe because she's one herself, maybe because they're full of pain manipulated into beauty and they understand. whichever maybe it is, it doesn't matter; she falls in love with artists and they give her love, love turns to beauty, then pain. pain becomes her most famous story. pain becomes her most sung song.
she's twenty years old when pain first becomes something beautiful. something that satisfies her when it's there, and when it's not it gets replaced with ease, and ironically enough this is what hurts her more. so she lives a life full of pain. what does it matter? she's in love.
she's been in love many times before, but - as we always say for our biggest loves - this is different. he's an actor. he's twenty-six years old and cigarettes kiss his lips more than she does. his fingers are torture when they aren't touching her, even more torturous when they are, but mixed with pleasure. from then on, pain earns a new meaning. pain becomes wu yifan.
he kisses with desperation on his lips like saliva, spreading them onto gia's lips that until then had only known kisses like rain or morning dew. his tongue is even worse, tasting like nicotine and smoke, feeling like what every dreamer has always thought love would be. with the flick of his finger like a wand, gia falls to her knees and into love.
yifan is late-night texts, phone calls in her bedroom that turn into panting and tears, he is green tea frappes and failed homemade dinners, chinese takeout for lunch and the taste between her legs for afternoon snacks. he's steady hands and her legs wrapped around his waist, their giddy smiles, his raspy morning voice, his bad jokes and beautiful laughter.
but he is pain. and pain always stems from something deep within.
what yifan really is is fucked up. he pushes and he pulls and when the rope threatens to break he's at his happiest. there's something sweet under all his layers but life has not been nice and it turned him into his own worst nightmare.
at the age of twenty wu yifan started breaking. like a vase dropped, his being shattered to pieces was inevitable. it took twenty-one years but it happened. the vase finally hit the ground and broke. yifan was three months into the legal drinking age when the floor his feet touched became shards of glass. five years later, he is in what he once might have called love. this, of course, means a reason to run away.
so on gia's twenty-first birthday, instead of a day together what yifan gives is a disappearing act. and in a perfect world, he is forgotten.
ii.
perfect worlds do not exist. gia becomes crippled with sadness and pain. there it is again. pain. with what seems like the permanent absence of yifan comes the lack of ease that had been present before. with yifan, there is pain. and now, without him, there are excruciating prickles on gia's skin, like a fire has been started inside her. it does not get easier.
what it becomes is an excuse to find herself again. feeling that yifan had stolen her essence while he was buried in her and ran away with it, she goes out often, to places she's not familiar with. she thinks getting lost will bring what she lost back to her. all she finds is bodies with a complete lack of soul.
she drinks and she drinks and she parties in the way she never did when she was younger, she wakes up with hangovers almost bad enough to fill the hole yifan had left in her. she starts smoking because it's the only way she can taste yifan again, but she soon learns that while it tastes like a part of him it's not her favourite part. she loses all hope.
but she keeps going; what else can she do. there are a lot of possibilities in broken things and she decides to turn hers into something more beautiful than everything she's ever made. her hands find brushes that find paint that in turn find canvas to make something breathtaking out of what feels like an allergic reaction to liquid painkillers in her veins. she draws pain himself, his long fingers in her mouth, his oversized hands shackling her down. and when her water has turned into something flammable her heart no longer feels like it's on fire.
still in the same state three months later, she knows that she is broken.
and then he calls.
his voice is as low and soothing as it had been before he decided she no longer deserved to hear it every morning, pushing her back into the pit of love she thought she had almost escaped from.
"how are you?" he asks as if he had not broken something beautiful.
'you have no right to ask me,' gia wants to say. 'you have no right to call me back after all this time.'
"i miss you," he whispers into her ears. there are thorns wrapped around her throat, a sob waiting to pour out of her mouth, her body shaking, and her lungs forgetting how to breathe. "gia?"
"i-" she imagines his lips wrapped around her name, his tongue rolling its letters off his mouth like the whispers of lust he used to leave in her ears. her mouth moves of its own will and it's too late to do anything. "me too."
"i keep thinking about you."
"i-"
"has there been anyone else? after me?"
"no, no, no, yifan, i love you, it will always be you. you know that, right, fan?"
silence.
"fan?"
the line is dead.
iii.
tabula rasa. a scraped tablet. a clean slate. that's what gia wants most of all. to forget. she's done with yifan. she swears. she swears it with the scrape of her tongue on the roof of her mouth as she bites her lips, trying to make a choice. she stares at the black paint on her fingertips, to the black and white canvases in front of her, seeing red and wishing she could pour blood on every negative space, saying, here is all the love my foolish heart poured out for you, here are all my mistakes in liquid form.
she becomes her paintings and her paintings become the feelings she knows she can never convey to yifan. as everyone who has ever fallen out of love knows, moving on is not easy and never lacking drama. moving on becomes the life of one who has fallen out of love because the person they're trying to move on from is no longer their life.
gia tries to forget yifan but he's etched into the back of her eyelids like a permanent reminder that she has loved him, she still loves him, she will always love him. she invites her friends over for parties and the first few times they ask her about the paintings of long hands and compliment them. as time passes they ignore the ever growing collection of the same person at different times of his life, because they’re artists; they know what this means, they've all been here before.
"i feel like i'm in an art gallery," one of them jokes.
with a drink in her hand, gia laughs. "you can look as much as you want, but you can't touch him no matter how hard you try."
two weeks later she's in a restaurant meeting a friend. the television set is speaking words she doesn't want to understand. the channel changes and suddenly her chest aches. everything hurts.
with gia staring at the screen as if it had wronged her, yet feeling like it deserves a second chance, her friend teases, "you look at him like he's the greatest love of your life."
gia blinks. she watches as yifan kisses another girl on the tv, then looks at her friend. "he is. he was. well- he is."
"maybe we can change that."
gia forgets her friend's uttered words. she forgets a lot of things in bottles and glasses and canvases and paint. she's less sad, now, or better at handling her feelings. yifan has called twice since the last time and both times he just wanted to hear her say she was still his. being who she is, she submitted. it's still the truth, anyway.
but three days pass and her friend comes knocking on her door.
"gia, hurry up. i want you to meet someone."
they go to the coffee shop a few blocks down. there's a tall man with a red scarf around his neck and covering his mouth standing by the sidewalk. his hair is a dirty blond and he has his hands in the pockets of his overcoat.
"gia, this is zitao."
iv.
huang zitao tastes like cigarettes but only faintly. his mouth tastes like overly sweetened coffee and feels like what everyone knows love really is. he's a model and he has a certain confidence in his poses that can only be described as beauty embodied. his eyes are taunting up until his smile that radiates light lets itself appear. he is everything wu yifan is not. so of course, gia wants to sleep with him.
whatever she has with zitao is not a sudden thing. unlike yifan, he does not approach her, a drink in hand, and asks if he can accompany her the rest of the night. zitao takes her out for coffee, burns his tongue when he drinks, and makes her laugh. he shares his happiness, shines his light on gia who has been trapped in a world of darkness far too long.
zitao is a romantic. he is full of emotion not in the way gia is - which is suppressed with sudden short bursts often unsaid but instead made into art. zitao is in love with the world, curious about it like a child in his formative years. he knows how the world is, how cruel it can be, and yet he judges it by its potential. he believes in the world almost as much as gia has given up on it.
but the way he loves the world, the way he believes in it, is pale in comparison to how he's in love with gia. if his love for the world is a muted watercolour painting, his feelings for gia are a collection of bright, colourful acrylic paintings that together form a story.
it doesn't take too long for him to wake up by her side. she isn't opposed to a possible physical aspect to their relationship, but it still comes gradually, caused by zitao's careful steps. when it happens, it's after a night of dancing together in his apartment, her voice filling the room as tao looks at her full of love, willing and wanting right then to pluck the stars from the night sky to gift to her eyes. they fall together onto his mattress, messy white sheets pressed against the corner of the room, the window close by. as her lips part, as his are pressed tight, as their backs arch apart with their hips together, the night sings the tune of life. when zitao's back hits the bed, gia following soon after, he looks up at the sky and sees the moon staring at him, shining on them with its light.
when the morning comes, the sun bleeding pink and yellow into the blue sky, gia has long been awake, staring out of the window awaiting the sunrise. tao groggily sits up, fingers searching for gia's skin, clutching to her waist when he finds it. with his hair still messy, his eyes barely open, his lips leave a trail of kisses up her back to her neck and ending on her cheek as a good morning. he feels the smile forming on her face, doesn't see it, but knows it's more beautiful than the rising sun.
they have coffee and cereal for breakfast, and when gia has to leave tao accompanies her all the way outside the apartment building, kissing her before bidding her goodbye and be safe. walking backwards, gia smiles at him and waves, and when she turns her back tao watches as she disappears from his sight.
with her feet hitting the pavement, her hands stuffed in her spring coat, gia makes her way back to her apartment, thoughts forming in her head and leaving zitao forgotten.
huang zitao loves gia more than his heart is capable of doing, causing a constant clenching pain in his chest. he loves her with all the art and scenarios forming in his head that he's incapable of actualising. he loves her more than life itself, but to gia, he is nothing more than practise on canvas.