fic - "without warning we lose the vastness."
without warning we lose the vastness.
PG-13 · 4246 words · EXO
Kai, Baekhyun
It takes years to squash a bleeding heart. AU.
note: They say write what you know so I'm going to write about grim reapers. This is, once again, just like "you and i, learning to speak," for Tori (herocountry) because it's been a year since I've written anything and you told me to write, even if this is absolutely nothing you've asked for... oops.
Title from Calle Principe, 25 by Jose Tolentino Mendonca.
“Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear you apart.”
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I’m not so big on pizza. Something about how it was just a platter of dough with tomato sauce and cheese really pisses me off-maybe it was the simplicity of it all, or how insincere an inanimate object could taste, if that made sense-but Sehun used to claim that it was nearly impossible to ruin a pizza, which is why he’d drag me to the pizza parlor on Main and 3rd every other Wednesday just to spite me.
What I do like is closure, which is why I’ve found myself sitting across the usual booth from Baekhyun. I tell him that the pizza is gross and the fries were always soggy but he doesn’t listen to me and orders the fries anyway.
“How are they?” I ask him.
“Tastes like horseradish,” he replies, making a face, and nudges his plate towards me, “and the aftertaste is like the plague. Want some?”
“I’d rather not get food poisoning, thanks,” I say, and I wonder how inappropriate it would be if I rearranged the remaining fries into a portrait of Sehun’s moody, grumpy face before I remember that what little artistic ability I’ve ever had as a kid has diminished exponentially after years of disuse. Memories of the little things-like crass watercolor paintings of my house and my dogs-come back to me sometimes, randomly, in little increments like flashes of color in the corner of my eye.
I think it must have been the same for Baekhyun, but even after years and years of monotony the first thing I had noticed about him was that he was kind. I wasn’t sure what to make of him when we first met; he was all smiles and laughter and a sweetness that I didn’t know could belong in someone like us. He was like how Sehun described pizza; it was impossible not to like Baekhyun, whether romantically or platonically or out of sheer desperation, because he knew exactly how to make you smile and how to lighten the weather on a rainy day.
“Hey,” Baekhyun says suddenly, jolting me. “Jongin.”
When I look up, Baekhyun has a fistful of french fries gripped in his hand and a teasing grin on his face, his arm raised as if he was going to start an all-out food fight. But for a second he hesitates, his smile catches, and instead of throwing the fries at my face he scarfs them down without a second thought, food poisoning and all.
He looks like death. I wonder what I look like.
“Gross,” I tease, wrinkling my nose, but I don’t really mean it because Baekhyun’s idea of fixing me was to make me laugh. Baekhyun’s idea of fixing a terrible pop song on the radio was shouting the wrong lyrics and hoping he won. And he always did win.
-
I don’t know why I had been so fixated on Sehun and his life. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with Sehun like Baekhyun thinks I am, but if Baekhyun feeling sorry for me meant that he paid for horrific pizza and gave me tiny little smiles, then I kept leading Baekhyun on.
For the strangest reason I kept thinking that Sehun and I could have been best friends in another lifetime, even if we barely had anything in common other than our mutual passion for dancing. I liked to think that his grumpiness drew out the best in me and we commiserated together, even if I faked half of it. Most importantly, I liked to think that it was because Sehun had been almost the complete opposite of Baekhyun, and that was who I was really fixated on.
I had met Sehun on an abnormally warm day in the middle of March, two months before his untimely death. We had bumped into each other in a park a few blocks away from his neighborhood, and as I watched him dance we had talked about everything and nothing for hours.
He came off as eccentric and aloof; when he started to talk about what he wanted in the future, he sounded lonely. It was the kind of loneliness that didn’t manifest itself all at once, like when your dog dies or when your best friend moves across the country over the weekend, but more like the kind of loneliness that takes years to build up and even longer to break down. I knew what that was like-or, at least, I thought I knew-and maybe that was why I was drawn to him. It was like baking a pie for you and five of your best friends and nobody showing up to eat it.
It was only in April that Sehun had admitted to me at the very same park we met in, shyly and so very out of character for him, that dancing was the only thing he ever loved but he knew he couldn’t make a living off of it, and that what was the point of dancing, anyway, if he was just going to die?
I hesitated and wondered what Baekhyun would say. “Well, you’ve got years and years ahead of you to get better,” I said, trying hard not to sound unkind, even if I knew it wasn’t true. “You have years and years to change who you are.” The words were bitter in my throat.
Sehun had just toed the dirt underneath his expensive new brand name shoes he’d just gotten two weeks ago. Our conversation lulled not long after that, and I wish I had listened to Baekhyun when he warned me not to get involved in the lives of strangers because it never ended well. Just when I had steeled myself and was about to get off the park bench to leave, Sehun suddenly spoke up.
“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re gonna die young?”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even look at him. For a moment I wanted to save him, even when I knew I couldn’t. He glanced over at my passive face and continued.
“I guess I don’t mean that I think about dying all the time,” Sehun explained, sounding remarkably calm for an 18-year-old. “It’s not even a thought in the back of my head, and it’s not like I just watch a bunch of movies with people dying in them or anything.” I knew this, because his favorite movies were romcoms and comedies. “It’s just a fact that I knew about myself for as long as I can remember being alive. I’m gonna die young.” He furrowed his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “It’s the most annoying thing. I don’t know how I knew. I just knew.”
He looked up at me again, staring directly at me, like I held all the answers. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth (that I did) or even tell him a lie (that it was okay). We didn’t talk about death anymore after that.
We sort of became friends, even as I remembered Baekhyun’s warning every time Sehun and I talked. Sehun never asked about any details about me and I never offered him any. We would go to the gross, overrated pizza parlor on Main and 3rd even though we both hated it and it was a waste of money. We would track down every ice cream place in the city and try every flavor they offered. I would go to his dance studio with him and sit in the corner, watching him, and tried not to think about what little fragments I knew about my own life and how I used to dance, too.
In May he had once asked me if I needed him to walk me home one night and I smiled and said no, thank you. He asked me if it was easier for me to come home with him and to sleep over. I knew what he was doing; he had been lonely his whole life. He knew he was going to die. It could have been so innocent. I had just laughed.
-
I had been invited to Sehun’s funeral, and in turn, I had invited Baekhyun, too. I didn’t know how appropriate it was to have a plus one to a funeral, of all congregations, but it had been my first and I didn’t want to go alone, and Baekhyun was a comforting presence when he wanted to be. He’d held my hand tightly the entire time, his thumb soothingly running over the back of my hands like he was reading a poem written in braille on my skin.
We had stayed even longer than Sehun’s grieving parents. In the end, as they left, Baekhyun offered Sehun’s mother a tiny, sad smile like he was Sehun’s friend, not me; he’d gently patted Sehun’s father on the shoulders as if he was assuring him that time heals everything. It was a lie, but it was all we could give.
“First one,” he said conversationally as we made our way out of the cemetery, but I knew he was worried about me.
“Yup,” I replied. I didn’t know if a joke would be appropriate. When we passed through the white marble arches of the entrance I’d asked him, “How did you get so good at death?”
Baekhyun didn’t answer right away and I never knew he could even be so quiet for this long. He seemed to be turning the question on every possible side, flipping it over and over like a Rubik’s cube.
“You’ll never get used to it,” he admitted softly, rummaging his suit pocket for his keys, unlocking the gaudy red Jeep, and got in. “It takes years of practice to quash a bleeding heart,” he said lightly. “You should’ve seen me at my first funeral. I couldn’t stop crying for days afterward, and even Chanyeol felt a little sorry for me.” He looked over at me. “You wouldn’t know Chanyeol, he’s way before your time. He was the worst guide I’ve ever met,” he said jokingly.
We were quiet when Baekhyun drove for another few minutes and made a right turn at King and Mayfair. I was halfway home. “Jongin,” he said gently, “sometimes it’s good to let yourself feel. It makes you a little bit more human.”
The thing was that no matter how kind Baekhyun was or how much I remembered that I loved to dance, we weren’t actually human, even if we once were. We weren’t alive. It didn’t matter that I had eaten gross pizza with Sehun, or that he poured out all his deepest, darkest secrets to me, or even that Baekhyun was thoughtful and sweet and had beautiful hands. The throat is an open sepulchre, the mouth a faithless grave, and when we did our jobs we were liars at best.
But Baekhyun believed in kindness, and I believed in Baekhyun. When he finally pulled up to my flat I had thought about Sehun and his honest face and the crinkles near his eyes when he smiled. Before I thanked him for the ride and left, I had looked over at Baekhyun and wondered who he had been thinking about when he told me not to talk to Sehun. It had occurred to me that maybe I should have been a little jealous or a little angry-anything but a little sad and a little bit in love.
-
Sometimes when I felt like I was drowning in death or overwhelmed with taking people I would call a cab and take a ride around the suburbs and tried to piece together what I knew about myself. There isn’t much I remember; I knew my name (Jongin), how old I was (19), that I liked to dance, but that was really it. The cab drivers always gave me a pityingly look, like they thought I was a runaway or a lost little kid and would stop the meter when I asked to go home. I always pretended I didn’t notice.
I don’t know how Baekhyun does it. When we first met, he told me that guiding was a necessary evil-“Figuratively speaking,” he had added hastily-because one of the most important things I learned while on the job was that death was neither inherently evil nor inherently good, and everyone goes through death at some point in their lives, no matter how long they tried to prolong the process. But Baekhyun was personable and he always knew what to say, and while I fumbled for words most of the time he knew how to make people laugh, even if they were at their worst.
Before Sehun I used to try to convince myself that guiding would be easy. It was just another job, like maybe being a delivery boy or a mall greeter. You weren’t really there and you lied about half the things you told your assignment, but I never knew how hard it was not to get personally involved until your first one.
We had talked over coffee, I remember, in a café that was directly below Baekhyun’s flat. He smiled sunnily even though it was raining outside and introduced himself and we shook hands.
“There really isn’t much I can say to you about guiding,” he had said, sipping a latte. “But you’ll learn soon enough.”
“Oh,” I managed weakly. He looked at me then, as if he was seeing me for the first time.
To this day I’m still not sure what exactly he saw, but after a moment he gave me a tiny nod and invited me up into his apartment and turned on the TV to old reruns of Sex and the City (I had teased him mercilessly and he had just laughed). We watched Carrie get swept off her feet by Aleksandr and leave her entire life in New York behind to go to Paris with him. For a weird moment I felt like I was trapped in a pocket of time that no one else except Baekhyun and I inhabited; it was just us, two strangers drinking coffee and watching terrible soap operas as if we had known each other our whole lives. I tried not to think too much into it.
I really didn’t know much about Baekhyun. It’s just his personality, I guess; his cheer is infectious and he’s so loud he practically bullies you into liking him, making you instantly forget every personal question you might’ve had for him. It had been a few months since I’ve started to work with him and the only things I knew about him was that Chanyeol, his last partner, was just as loud as he was, and that he had trained under someone named Joonmyun, who Baekhyun describes as caring, patient, and just on this side of being too uptight.
“He was kind of like my dad,” Baekhyun once told me.
“Really?”
He stopped to think about it. “Nope,” he said. “I loved my dad and all but we never had gossip sessions about the other guides.”
I snorted. “Yeah, alright. Somehow I don’t see this Joonmyun as a gossiping type at all.”
Baekhyun just grinned and made a motion across his mouth, zipping his lips.
It wasn’t hard to miss the way that Baekhyun had talked about his family like he actually remembered them, and I believed that he did remember almost everything about his past life. I don’t know how off track I am but my theory about guiding is that the more people you guide, the more you remember about yourself. What comes after, I’m not sure. I didn’t really want to think about it.
So I don’t ask Baekhyun about his life, just like how I never asked Sehun about his. I liked to think of it as my way of protecting myself from the truth, just in case it was too hard and too painful to bear. It was the strangest feeling, like I thought I had lost Baekhyun before and if I asked too many questions I would lose him again, even if I probably never knew him when we were both alive, except maybe a few chance encounters on the street. But deep down inside I knew that, not counting his cozy flat and his blindingly red Jeep, the memories of his life and his life after death were all Baekhyun had to himself.
-
I meet Yixing completely on accident while he busks on the corner of State and 1st, because I haven’t forgotten the way I tracked Sehun and regretted it after. Yixing is nice enough, even if he does permanently reside in cloud cuckoo land, and I can never stop comparing him to Sehun. Even though Baekhyun’s warning is still ringing klaxons in my head, I introduce myself before I can shut up and walk away and pretend that nothing had happened until the actual day I was supposed to meet him.
He suggests a quiet bakery, completely tucked away and hidden unless you knew what you were looking for, and as we sample everything the bakery has to offer, he talks me through his life. He tells me about all the pieces of him, the parts of him that comprise Yixing, about his dad buying him a cake for his fifth birthday with fruit piled sky high on top, about his mom and her nightly face masks and cucumber slices for eyes.
Over time, after weeks and weeks of meeting in different bakeries all over the city, he sits down every time and tells me about the songs he’s written and loved and songs he’s written and loathed. He tells me about his first girlfriend (he was 6 and she was 7 and they had been engaged via daisy crowns and rings) and his last girlfriend (he was 20 and long distance relationships never ever work out).
He tells me about his hopes and dreams-and Yixing is a dreamer, his face dreamy and his voice dreamlike-and his greatest failures. He tells me about his first dance class and how he was terrible and he hated it, and I laughed because suddenly I remember that I was terrible, too; my plies were shallow and I used to sickle my feet when I pointed my toes and my shoulders were always too tight so my arms were never relaxed, and my teacher hated me at first but I never gave up.
I don’t tell Yixing any of this. I don’t tell Baekhyun I remember any more of my life.
“I don’t know,” Yixing says one day after recounting his days in middle school, “if there’s anything scarier than dying alone.”
There really isn’t, I want to tell him but the words are trapped in my mouth. What are you supposed to say to that? Baekhyun would give a perfectly politically correct answer, but I had never been in control of the things I say. Yixing gives me a sympathetic look, but really, I’m the one that wants to be sympathetic.
“I don’t want to sound morbid, and I don’t want to worry you, but I think some people just know when it’s time to go. I’m okay with it,” he says gently and I don’t know how anyone can have the gall to lie to me about death. He smiles and eats the rest of his cake and drops the bomb. “Jongin, I’m really glad I met you.”
-
Baekhyun thinks your emotions are what keep you human but more often than not I wonder if it’s your memories instead.
I bring Baekhyun to Yixing’s funeral, too, even though it probably strikes people as odd, and putter around uselessly in Baekhyun’s apartment after it’s over. Baekhyun makes soft, vaguely worried noises at me as he makes tea for me, and when he’s down he gives me a gentle push onto his shockingly orange couch, turns on the TV with his foot, and shoves a homemade ceramic mug that simply says Tao into my hands.
“It’s always hard the first few years,” Baekhyun says kindly during the commercial break. He pauses and looks at me, just like the first time in the café downstairs. He purses his lips together, and slowly, he says, “Jongin, I knew you before.”
I can’t say I’m too terribly surprised, even though I do choke on a stray tealeaf. Baekhyun looks mildly alarmed but I tell him that I’m fine.
“You were a snot-nosed kid,” he says lightly, trying not to laugh too hard. “I think you were in love with me and you always followed me around and tried to get my attention. I thought it was kind of funny.” I thought it was funny, too, but then again, if I remembered this happening I probably would have been mortified to hear that I was so obvious. “You were a sweet kid,” he continued, a little sadder this time. “When they first appointed you as my partner I just remember thinking that you were too soft-hearted for this.”
“I’m not too soft-hearted for guiding,” I protest.
“Well, you get too close,” he replies. “I used to get too close, too. Tao,” he says, nodding at my mug, “was my first assignment. He was going to die young and for the longest time I couldn’t accept it, even when I barely knew myself more than I knew him.” Baekhyun sighs. “So I decided to get to know him. You only spent a few months with Sehun but I spent an entire year with Tao. By the time I had to guide him I couldn’t do it because I started to think of myself as a real person and I had to get Chanyeol to go behind Joonmyun’s back and guide Tao for me.”
His fingers trace the slim handle of his mug as we both fall into silence.
I wanted to save them, I realized. I wanted to save every single person I got assigned because I couldn’t bear to take away the people who have bared their souls to me, and I fall in love, over and over again, and I couldn’t do a thing.
-
We end up back at the terrible pizza parlor on Main and 3rd a few months later and I can’t remember whose idea it was but Baekhyun offered to buy so why should I refuse? Baekhyun still gets the gross fries that taste like horseradish and I go against every grain of common sense I’ve ever had and order a pepperoni pizza big enough to feed four people. Baekhyun raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything else.
“How’s the pizza?” he asks.
“So gross,” I reply. “I’m pretty sure I’m getting food poisoning as we speak.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Jongin, you can’t even get food poisoning,” Baekhyun says, laughing as he breaks his french fries into halves, then fourths, then as small as he can get them. I watch him, trying not to feel creepy or obtrusive, and I think this is what Baekhyun meant by when he said I used to be in love with him. But I want to remember him before he fades away; there’s a freckle on his right temple and a tiny mole above his lip. His ears are weird looking at best and he’s pale and I’m sure if I leaned in close enough I’d see the imperfections on his cheeks and nose.
“Baekhyun?” I say suddenly and he looks up from demolishing his fries. “How long do you have before you need to go?”
He just smiles.
A pop song comes on the restaurant radio and he starts to sing mid-verse, terribly off-key as a joke, and it occurs to me that this is the Baekhyun that I would want to remember. I didn’t really care about his imperfections or everything he did perfectly; it would’ve been so textbook and very ordinary. When he starts to shout the wrong lyrics, the restaurant owner gives us dirty looks and we pay and bail out of the parlor as fast as we can, trying to stifle our laughter to a bare minimum.
We round the corner of 3rd onto State Street and Baekhyun’s summer skin is failing him as the bridge of his nose glows pink like Rudolph. When we reach the café on Union, I don’t offer to go up with him. The smile Baekhyun gives me should have been alarming, but it’s soft and sweet and utterly at peace.
“I can’t do this by myself,” I blurt out.
“You won’t be by yourself,” he says calmly, heading up the steps.
I try to tally everything I knew about him and to my dismay I really only knew his name (Baekhyun), his partners (Chanyeol and Joonmyun), his favorite TV show (Sex and the City), his biggest regret (Tao), and the fact that we knew each other in our past lives and he thought I was a brat. It was unfair, I thought, that he knew more about me than I even knew about myself. I still don’t remember a thing.
“Jongin?” he says, snapping me back to reality. “Goodbye. Thanks for the pizza.” He grins and gives me a thumbs up. He shuts the door and he’s gone, and for a very long moment the only thing I can remember to do is breathe.
PG-13 · 4246 words · EXO
Kai, Baekhyun
It takes years to squash a bleeding heart. AU.
note: They say write what you know so I'm going to write about grim reapers. This is, once again, just like "you and i, learning to speak," for Tori (herocountry) because it's been a year since I've written anything and you told me to write, even if this is absolutely nothing you've asked for... oops.
Title from Calle Principe, 25 by Jose Tolentino Mendonca.
“Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear you apart.”
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I’m not so big on pizza. Something about how it was just a platter of dough with tomato sauce and cheese really pisses me off-maybe it was the simplicity of it all, or how insincere an inanimate object could taste, if that made sense-but Sehun used to claim that it was nearly impossible to ruin a pizza, which is why he’d drag me to the pizza parlor on Main and 3rd every other Wednesday just to spite me.
What I do like is closure, which is why I’ve found myself sitting across the usual booth from Baekhyun. I tell him that the pizza is gross and the fries were always soggy but he doesn’t listen to me and orders the fries anyway.
“How are they?” I ask him.
“Tastes like horseradish,” he replies, making a face, and nudges his plate towards me, “and the aftertaste is like the plague. Want some?”
“I’d rather not get food poisoning, thanks,” I say, and I wonder how inappropriate it would be if I rearranged the remaining fries into a portrait of Sehun’s moody, grumpy face before I remember that what little artistic ability I’ve ever had as a kid has diminished exponentially after years of disuse. Memories of the little things-like crass watercolor paintings of my house and my dogs-come back to me sometimes, randomly, in little increments like flashes of color in the corner of my eye.
I think it must have been the same for Baekhyun, but even after years and years of monotony the first thing I had noticed about him was that he was kind. I wasn’t sure what to make of him when we first met; he was all smiles and laughter and a sweetness that I didn’t know could belong in someone like us. He was like how Sehun described pizza; it was impossible not to like Baekhyun, whether romantically or platonically or out of sheer desperation, because he knew exactly how to make you smile and how to lighten the weather on a rainy day.
“Hey,” Baekhyun says suddenly, jolting me. “Jongin.”
When I look up, Baekhyun has a fistful of french fries gripped in his hand and a teasing grin on his face, his arm raised as if he was going to start an all-out food fight. But for a second he hesitates, his smile catches, and instead of throwing the fries at my face he scarfs them down without a second thought, food poisoning and all.
He looks like death. I wonder what I look like.
“Gross,” I tease, wrinkling my nose, but I don’t really mean it because Baekhyun’s idea of fixing me was to make me laugh. Baekhyun’s idea of fixing a terrible pop song on the radio was shouting the wrong lyrics and hoping he won. And he always did win.
-
I don’t know why I had been so fixated on Sehun and his life. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with Sehun like Baekhyun thinks I am, but if Baekhyun feeling sorry for me meant that he paid for horrific pizza and gave me tiny little smiles, then I kept leading Baekhyun on.
For the strangest reason I kept thinking that Sehun and I could have been best friends in another lifetime, even if we barely had anything in common other than our mutual passion for dancing. I liked to think that his grumpiness drew out the best in me and we commiserated together, even if I faked half of it. Most importantly, I liked to think that it was because Sehun had been almost the complete opposite of Baekhyun, and that was who I was really fixated on.
I had met Sehun on an abnormally warm day in the middle of March, two months before his untimely death. We had bumped into each other in a park a few blocks away from his neighborhood, and as I watched him dance we had talked about everything and nothing for hours.
He came off as eccentric and aloof; when he started to talk about what he wanted in the future, he sounded lonely. It was the kind of loneliness that didn’t manifest itself all at once, like when your dog dies or when your best friend moves across the country over the weekend, but more like the kind of loneliness that takes years to build up and even longer to break down. I knew what that was like-or, at least, I thought I knew-and maybe that was why I was drawn to him. It was like baking a pie for you and five of your best friends and nobody showing up to eat it.
It was only in April that Sehun had admitted to me at the very same park we met in, shyly and so very out of character for him, that dancing was the only thing he ever loved but he knew he couldn’t make a living off of it, and that what was the point of dancing, anyway, if he was just going to die?
I hesitated and wondered what Baekhyun would say. “Well, you’ve got years and years ahead of you to get better,” I said, trying hard not to sound unkind, even if I knew it wasn’t true. “You have years and years to change who you are.” The words were bitter in my throat.
Sehun had just toed the dirt underneath his expensive new brand name shoes he’d just gotten two weeks ago. Our conversation lulled not long after that, and I wish I had listened to Baekhyun when he warned me not to get involved in the lives of strangers because it never ended well. Just when I had steeled myself and was about to get off the park bench to leave, Sehun suddenly spoke up.
“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re gonna die young?”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even look at him. For a moment I wanted to save him, even when I knew I couldn’t. He glanced over at my passive face and continued.
“I guess I don’t mean that I think about dying all the time,” Sehun explained, sounding remarkably calm for an 18-year-old. “It’s not even a thought in the back of my head, and it’s not like I just watch a bunch of movies with people dying in them or anything.” I knew this, because his favorite movies were romcoms and comedies. “It’s just a fact that I knew about myself for as long as I can remember being alive. I’m gonna die young.” He furrowed his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “It’s the most annoying thing. I don’t know how I knew. I just knew.”
He looked up at me again, staring directly at me, like I held all the answers. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth (that I did) or even tell him a lie (that it was okay). We didn’t talk about death anymore after that.
We sort of became friends, even as I remembered Baekhyun’s warning every time Sehun and I talked. Sehun never asked about any details about me and I never offered him any. We would go to the gross, overrated pizza parlor on Main and 3rd even though we both hated it and it was a waste of money. We would track down every ice cream place in the city and try every flavor they offered. I would go to his dance studio with him and sit in the corner, watching him, and tried not to think about what little fragments I knew about my own life and how I used to dance, too.
In May he had once asked me if I needed him to walk me home one night and I smiled and said no, thank you. He asked me if it was easier for me to come home with him and to sleep over. I knew what he was doing; he had been lonely his whole life. He knew he was going to die. It could have been so innocent. I had just laughed.
-
I had been invited to Sehun’s funeral, and in turn, I had invited Baekhyun, too. I didn’t know how appropriate it was to have a plus one to a funeral, of all congregations, but it had been my first and I didn’t want to go alone, and Baekhyun was a comforting presence when he wanted to be. He’d held my hand tightly the entire time, his thumb soothingly running over the back of my hands like he was reading a poem written in braille on my skin.
We had stayed even longer than Sehun’s grieving parents. In the end, as they left, Baekhyun offered Sehun’s mother a tiny, sad smile like he was Sehun’s friend, not me; he’d gently patted Sehun’s father on the shoulders as if he was assuring him that time heals everything. It was a lie, but it was all we could give.
“First one,” he said conversationally as we made our way out of the cemetery, but I knew he was worried about me.
“Yup,” I replied. I didn’t know if a joke would be appropriate. When we passed through the white marble arches of the entrance I’d asked him, “How did you get so good at death?”
Baekhyun didn’t answer right away and I never knew he could even be so quiet for this long. He seemed to be turning the question on every possible side, flipping it over and over like a Rubik’s cube.
“You’ll never get used to it,” he admitted softly, rummaging his suit pocket for his keys, unlocking the gaudy red Jeep, and got in. “It takes years of practice to quash a bleeding heart,” he said lightly. “You should’ve seen me at my first funeral. I couldn’t stop crying for days afterward, and even Chanyeol felt a little sorry for me.” He looked over at me. “You wouldn’t know Chanyeol, he’s way before your time. He was the worst guide I’ve ever met,” he said jokingly.
We were quiet when Baekhyun drove for another few minutes and made a right turn at King and Mayfair. I was halfway home. “Jongin,” he said gently, “sometimes it’s good to let yourself feel. It makes you a little bit more human.”
The thing was that no matter how kind Baekhyun was or how much I remembered that I loved to dance, we weren’t actually human, even if we once were. We weren’t alive. It didn’t matter that I had eaten gross pizza with Sehun, or that he poured out all his deepest, darkest secrets to me, or even that Baekhyun was thoughtful and sweet and had beautiful hands. The throat is an open sepulchre, the mouth a faithless grave, and when we did our jobs we were liars at best.
But Baekhyun believed in kindness, and I believed in Baekhyun. When he finally pulled up to my flat I had thought about Sehun and his honest face and the crinkles near his eyes when he smiled. Before I thanked him for the ride and left, I had looked over at Baekhyun and wondered who he had been thinking about when he told me not to talk to Sehun. It had occurred to me that maybe I should have been a little jealous or a little angry-anything but a little sad and a little bit in love.
-
Sometimes when I felt like I was drowning in death or overwhelmed with taking people I would call a cab and take a ride around the suburbs and tried to piece together what I knew about myself. There isn’t much I remember; I knew my name (Jongin), how old I was (19), that I liked to dance, but that was really it. The cab drivers always gave me a pityingly look, like they thought I was a runaway or a lost little kid and would stop the meter when I asked to go home. I always pretended I didn’t notice.
I don’t know how Baekhyun does it. When we first met, he told me that guiding was a necessary evil-“Figuratively speaking,” he had added hastily-because one of the most important things I learned while on the job was that death was neither inherently evil nor inherently good, and everyone goes through death at some point in their lives, no matter how long they tried to prolong the process. But Baekhyun was personable and he always knew what to say, and while I fumbled for words most of the time he knew how to make people laugh, even if they were at their worst.
Before Sehun I used to try to convince myself that guiding would be easy. It was just another job, like maybe being a delivery boy or a mall greeter. You weren’t really there and you lied about half the things you told your assignment, but I never knew how hard it was not to get personally involved until your first one.
We had talked over coffee, I remember, in a café that was directly below Baekhyun’s flat. He smiled sunnily even though it was raining outside and introduced himself and we shook hands.
“There really isn’t much I can say to you about guiding,” he had said, sipping a latte. “But you’ll learn soon enough.”
“Oh,” I managed weakly. He looked at me then, as if he was seeing me for the first time.
To this day I’m still not sure what exactly he saw, but after a moment he gave me a tiny nod and invited me up into his apartment and turned on the TV to old reruns of Sex and the City (I had teased him mercilessly and he had just laughed). We watched Carrie get swept off her feet by Aleksandr and leave her entire life in New York behind to go to Paris with him. For a weird moment I felt like I was trapped in a pocket of time that no one else except Baekhyun and I inhabited; it was just us, two strangers drinking coffee and watching terrible soap operas as if we had known each other our whole lives. I tried not to think too much into it.
I really didn’t know much about Baekhyun. It’s just his personality, I guess; his cheer is infectious and he’s so loud he practically bullies you into liking him, making you instantly forget every personal question you might’ve had for him. It had been a few months since I’ve started to work with him and the only things I knew about him was that Chanyeol, his last partner, was just as loud as he was, and that he had trained under someone named Joonmyun, who Baekhyun describes as caring, patient, and just on this side of being too uptight.
“He was kind of like my dad,” Baekhyun once told me.
“Really?”
He stopped to think about it. “Nope,” he said. “I loved my dad and all but we never had gossip sessions about the other guides.”
I snorted. “Yeah, alright. Somehow I don’t see this Joonmyun as a gossiping type at all.”
Baekhyun just grinned and made a motion across his mouth, zipping his lips.
It wasn’t hard to miss the way that Baekhyun had talked about his family like he actually remembered them, and I believed that he did remember almost everything about his past life. I don’t know how off track I am but my theory about guiding is that the more people you guide, the more you remember about yourself. What comes after, I’m not sure. I didn’t really want to think about it.
So I don’t ask Baekhyun about his life, just like how I never asked Sehun about his. I liked to think of it as my way of protecting myself from the truth, just in case it was too hard and too painful to bear. It was the strangest feeling, like I thought I had lost Baekhyun before and if I asked too many questions I would lose him again, even if I probably never knew him when we were both alive, except maybe a few chance encounters on the street. But deep down inside I knew that, not counting his cozy flat and his blindingly red Jeep, the memories of his life and his life after death were all Baekhyun had to himself.
-
I meet Yixing completely on accident while he busks on the corner of State and 1st, because I haven’t forgotten the way I tracked Sehun and regretted it after. Yixing is nice enough, even if he does permanently reside in cloud cuckoo land, and I can never stop comparing him to Sehun. Even though Baekhyun’s warning is still ringing klaxons in my head, I introduce myself before I can shut up and walk away and pretend that nothing had happened until the actual day I was supposed to meet him.
He suggests a quiet bakery, completely tucked away and hidden unless you knew what you were looking for, and as we sample everything the bakery has to offer, he talks me through his life. He tells me about all the pieces of him, the parts of him that comprise Yixing, about his dad buying him a cake for his fifth birthday with fruit piled sky high on top, about his mom and her nightly face masks and cucumber slices for eyes.
Over time, after weeks and weeks of meeting in different bakeries all over the city, he sits down every time and tells me about the songs he’s written and loved and songs he’s written and loathed. He tells me about his first girlfriend (he was 6 and she was 7 and they had been engaged via daisy crowns and rings) and his last girlfriend (he was 20 and long distance relationships never ever work out).
He tells me about his hopes and dreams-and Yixing is a dreamer, his face dreamy and his voice dreamlike-and his greatest failures. He tells me about his first dance class and how he was terrible and he hated it, and I laughed because suddenly I remember that I was terrible, too; my plies were shallow and I used to sickle my feet when I pointed my toes and my shoulders were always too tight so my arms were never relaxed, and my teacher hated me at first but I never gave up.
I don’t tell Yixing any of this. I don’t tell Baekhyun I remember any more of my life.
“I don’t know,” Yixing says one day after recounting his days in middle school, “if there’s anything scarier than dying alone.”
There really isn’t, I want to tell him but the words are trapped in my mouth. What are you supposed to say to that? Baekhyun would give a perfectly politically correct answer, but I had never been in control of the things I say. Yixing gives me a sympathetic look, but really, I’m the one that wants to be sympathetic.
“I don’t want to sound morbid, and I don’t want to worry you, but I think some people just know when it’s time to go. I’m okay with it,” he says gently and I don’t know how anyone can have the gall to lie to me about death. He smiles and eats the rest of his cake and drops the bomb. “Jongin, I’m really glad I met you.”
-
Baekhyun thinks your emotions are what keep you human but more often than not I wonder if it’s your memories instead.
I bring Baekhyun to Yixing’s funeral, too, even though it probably strikes people as odd, and putter around uselessly in Baekhyun’s apartment after it’s over. Baekhyun makes soft, vaguely worried noises at me as he makes tea for me, and when he’s down he gives me a gentle push onto his shockingly orange couch, turns on the TV with his foot, and shoves a homemade ceramic mug that simply says Tao into my hands.
“It’s always hard the first few years,” Baekhyun says kindly during the commercial break. He pauses and looks at me, just like the first time in the café downstairs. He purses his lips together, and slowly, he says, “Jongin, I knew you before.”
I can’t say I’m too terribly surprised, even though I do choke on a stray tealeaf. Baekhyun looks mildly alarmed but I tell him that I’m fine.
“You were a snot-nosed kid,” he says lightly, trying not to laugh too hard. “I think you were in love with me and you always followed me around and tried to get my attention. I thought it was kind of funny.” I thought it was funny, too, but then again, if I remembered this happening I probably would have been mortified to hear that I was so obvious. “You were a sweet kid,” he continued, a little sadder this time. “When they first appointed you as my partner I just remember thinking that you were too soft-hearted for this.”
“I’m not too soft-hearted for guiding,” I protest.
“Well, you get too close,” he replies. “I used to get too close, too. Tao,” he says, nodding at my mug, “was my first assignment. He was going to die young and for the longest time I couldn’t accept it, even when I barely knew myself more than I knew him.” Baekhyun sighs. “So I decided to get to know him. You only spent a few months with Sehun but I spent an entire year with Tao. By the time I had to guide him I couldn’t do it because I started to think of myself as a real person and I had to get Chanyeol to go behind Joonmyun’s back and guide Tao for me.”
His fingers trace the slim handle of his mug as we both fall into silence.
I wanted to save them, I realized. I wanted to save every single person I got assigned because I couldn’t bear to take away the people who have bared their souls to me, and I fall in love, over and over again, and I couldn’t do a thing.
-
We end up back at the terrible pizza parlor on Main and 3rd a few months later and I can’t remember whose idea it was but Baekhyun offered to buy so why should I refuse? Baekhyun still gets the gross fries that taste like horseradish and I go against every grain of common sense I’ve ever had and order a pepperoni pizza big enough to feed four people. Baekhyun raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything else.
“How’s the pizza?” he asks.
“So gross,” I reply. “I’m pretty sure I’m getting food poisoning as we speak.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Jongin, you can’t even get food poisoning,” Baekhyun says, laughing as he breaks his french fries into halves, then fourths, then as small as he can get them. I watch him, trying not to feel creepy or obtrusive, and I think this is what Baekhyun meant by when he said I used to be in love with him. But I want to remember him before he fades away; there’s a freckle on his right temple and a tiny mole above his lip. His ears are weird looking at best and he’s pale and I’m sure if I leaned in close enough I’d see the imperfections on his cheeks and nose.
“Baekhyun?” I say suddenly and he looks up from demolishing his fries. “How long do you have before you need to go?”
He just smiles.
A pop song comes on the restaurant radio and he starts to sing mid-verse, terribly off-key as a joke, and it occurs to me that this is the Baekhyun that I would want to remember. I didn’t really care about his imperfections or everything he did perfectly; it would’ve been so textbook and very ordinary. When he starts to shout the wrong lyrics, the restaurant owner gives us dirty looks and we pay and bail out of the parlor as fast as we can, trying to stifle our laughter to a bare minimum.
We round the corner of 3rd onto State Street and Baekhyun’s summer skin is failing him as the bridge of his nose glows pink like Rudolph. When we reach the café on Union, I don’t offer to go up with him. The smile Baekhyun gives me should have been alarming, but it’s soft and sweet and utterly at peace.
“I can’t do this by myself,” I blurt out.
“You won’t be by yourself,” he says calmly, heading up the steps.
I try to tally everything I knew about him and to my dismay I really only knew his name (Baekhyun), his partners (Chanyeol and Joonmyun), his favorite TV show (Sex and the City), his biggest regret (Tao), and the fact that we knew each other in our past lives and he thought I was a brat. It was unfair, I thought, that he knew more about me than I even knew about myself. I still don’t remember a thing.
“Jongin?” he says, snapping me back to reality. “Goodbye. Thanks for the pizza.” He grins and gives me a thumbs up. He shuts the door and he’s gone, and for a very long moment the only thing I can remember to do is breathe.