and i don't know when i'm coming home [ fic ]

[lovelyable]

c i t i e s
gd/top | r, 4565 words, ar
gone soul-searching.


a window opens up and some one calls your name
but i can tell you don't know how to play this game
i know this isn't it; you'll hit your target someday
COME BACK HOME/TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB

His heart is a chain-link fence of keys. They're attached by pieces of string, or barbed hooks, some gold and others silver, all of them glinting in the sun.

Jiyong leans against it, back pressed against the climbing ivy on days when he doesn't really know what else to do, watching keys drop off like old leaves on last year's tree.

This is the end, he thinks. He plucks a plain silver key with a pedometer keychain dangling from the end. A road not traveled. The numbers on the pedometer spin forward into zeros; the key swings down from it, a pendulum.

It unlocks a rusted car the shade of puke. The driver's door creaks; the air vents are duct-taped shut.

Jiyong waits until the sun goes down, and then sneaks past his umma dozing on the porch, dragging a knapsack full of shoes and ghosts he doesn't remember.

The ignition barely makes a sound when he turns it on. He keeps his hand on the tuner and his eye on Polaris.

And watching the city disappear behind him in the rearview mirror is a satisfying feeling, very toes dipped in spring lake water as the rest of you sweats, very glow flies in a jar before they die of suffocation, very Seunghyun before Jiyong and a car crash that sends him spinning.

m o n d a y
He can't breathe for a moment - then the glass crumbs flying toward him become the dust fragments, glittering in the air; squealing of car tires turn into a whining in his head, the puke-colored driver's door impounding into his body is his heartbeat.

His hands pressed over his eyes are pointless - when he takes them away, all he sees is a gray sky, small town underneath with washed-out signs and green awnings flapping in the wind, trees bone-bare and a few stray leaves skittering down the quiet sidewalk.

Hotel, the sign right above him reads in faded white letters framed by light bulbs. It's as good as any - at least until his nerves calm down. Jiyong shakily reaches into the backseat for his duffel.

The door of the hotel has a silver bell on a piece of twine, clattering delicately against the glass when Jiyong pushes it open. He walks up the black-and-white tiled floor to the reception desk and asks for a single.

"They're all booked," the receptionist tells him, even though the place is deserted. "But you can have a double, free of extra charge."

Sure. More room for him. He's never been that good by himself - but sure, here's to self-discovery. Jiyong smacks some wadded up bills on the desk and then presses the up button on the elevator. Inside, it's five for the fifth floor, and then he turns and catches sight of himself in the mirror.

He has brown hair again. It's tousled, longer than he remembers, curled slightly at the edges and just enough to brush into his raised eyebrows,; he tears a slight gold headband out of his hair and stares at it. That's new, he thinks. He hurries out of the metal box, figuring (praying) it's just a trick of the light.

Five-oh-seven, he reads on the door placards. The one to his room is slightly ajar. Jiyong frowns and slowly pushes it open, treading eggshells on thin carpet. "Hello?"

The beds are unmade, imprints of past bodies pressed into the mattresses. Cigarette butts litter the nightstand and table. A breeze pushes his hair out of his face. Jiyong rounds a corner to see the bay window flung wide open, letting in the cold air - and a boy is sitting - almost perching - on the ledge like a gargoyle, facing outwards towards the town below and puffing on a cigarette.

"Hey," Jiyong says. "I just - I booked this room. Sorry."

"Ji," the boy suddenly calls, and Jiyong almost jumps out of his skin. "I think I found it."

Jiyong takes tentative steps forward, the quiet city framed in the window opening up to reveal a dark gray lake in the distance. "It?"

"The stupid café you made me drive all the way out here for. It's there, behind the church. See it?" The boy points at a small blue building in the distance, a great big tacky cutout of a coffee cup attached to the roof.

"I," Jiyong says unsuccessfully, and then runs out of words.

The boy's eyebrows knot as he glances up at Jiyong, dark eyes and spiked hair and smoke unfurling from his fingertips and mouth. "If this isn't it again I give the fuck up," he says, through a corner of a smile.

Jiyong feels like he's just walked into the middle of a conversation with strangers. "I think you have the wrong person," he says.

But the stranger interrupts him, or he doesn't hear him, or he just ignores him altogether because maybe here Jiyong is just irrelevant. "Hey, where are those cigs?"

"Cigs?" Jiyong blinks. What the fuck is going on? "I don't smoke."

"Really. Today you don't smoke." The boy seems to mull this over for a minute, eyes narrowing as he brings his fingers up to his lips again to take another drag of the cigarette he's holding. The intensity of his gaze makes Jiyong uncomfortable. He feels like he's taking his X-ray, that his eyes can see through walls and he knows just what to say to screw Jiyong up in the head. The second-hand smoke clings to his body.

"It's - I - I think I have the wrong room," Jiyong decides, and then is speed-walking (bolting) out the room and down the hallway, his canvas bag dragging on the floor and praying to god as he stares at his fucking brown hair in the elevator that by the time he gets down to the lobby the twilight zone will have ended.

"Excuse - me," Jiyong says as he runs to the front desk, and slows to a halt as he realizes nobody is there.

A fine layer of dust coats the imitation marble; the receptionists' chair is full of mothballs and swings gently around and around with the breeze. A few scattered tiles are missing from the checkered floor.

"You don't get it," the voice of the boy says from behind him. Jiyong whirls around in time to see him step off the bottom crumbling stair, cigarette gone and hands tucked in his pants pockets. "Do you?"

He steps towards Jiyong, and the things between them are the door and the light.

Understand what, Jiyong wants to ask - but here, he doesn't really understand anything, really. He shakes his head.

The stranger looks a little put out, but the fire burning behind his eyes isn't dimmed by much.

He helps Jiyong pack his bag back into the car, and he slams the trunk closed. Jiyong waves, but the stranger pushes past it to tousle his long hair, easy since he's almost half a head taller. It feels strangely familiar.

Jiyong smells like smoke for the next five hours. The city becomes just a gray blip on his rearview mirror in two seconds. After a while, the coffee cup billboard is the only thing he can see.

t u e s d a y
It's snowing in the next town. Jiyong doesn't actually want to stop, having just fueled the car a couple hours ago, but the sun disappears, and his wheels start getting stuck in the ice, and after skidding around and almost killing himself he puts it in park and turns off the engine.

The whole neighborhood is covered in a thick layer of white, like a blanket. A clock tower chimes the hour nearby, and Jiyong hears faint echoes of children shouting and laughing a little far away for him to see.

Twenty minutes spent trying to push the car out of what turns out to be a snow bank, another twenty trying to flag down cars, and Jiyong gives up, flopping down on the fresh powder beside a towering oak tree to stare up at the still-spilling sky. Maybe he hates being alone right now.

He watches a snowflake drift onto the tip of his nose and melt in place.

Jiyong's eyes fall closed, wondering if he can drift off to sleep here. He's exhausted - and it's not actually that cold. Maybe he'll build an igloo.

"What the hell, Ji?" Jiyong's eyes fly open. The boy with the cigarette is standing over him, wrapped in a black-and-white windbreaker and holding a fur hat in his hand. His hair is different: shorter, cropped closer to his head, and the tips of his ears are pink from the wind. He grabs Jiyong's hand and yanks him upright, beating snow off his back and hair.

Jiyong gapes at him.

"Wha - how did - " he stutters, but the stranger cuts him off.

"You want to get even sicker, you idiot?" He snarls, and tugs the cap on over Jiyong's ears, zipping Jiyong's puffy white coat - that he is apparently wearing - all the way up to his chin. Jiyong realizes he is sniffling; he tries to talk and a cough chokes its way from his throat instead.

The boy sighs. "See?" Everything in his tone is like a song Jiyong's forgot the lyrics to. He lets the boy take his gloved hand, and Jiyong tries to figure out why he looks familiar outside of the framework of the last city, a character from his dreamscape of which the edges he just can't grasp.

"Come on, let's go back inside," the boy says. "And next time your mom suggests a vacation, we're going to Hawaii. Fuck the snow."

They trudge toward a small apartment complex he feels he should know but doesn't - only certain things, like the color of the forest green paint and the sound of the wind chime on the third floor balcony standing out to him - dislocated memories in a sea of ice. There are two sets of footprints from the front step leading out to where they are. One of them is the stranger's.

The other ends right where Jiyong had been lying.

His breath catches in his throat, and he quickly pulls his hand out of the other boy's, breathing hard, the snowflakes around his mouth swirling into themselves, miniature blizzards in the air.

"Where am I?" He says. "Why am I here?"

The boy pauses. His eyes fall to the ground. "You don't know."

He helps Jiyong push the rusty yellow car out of the snow bank. Jiyong gives him the fur hat back, and the boy hangs on a bit too long to Jiyong's fingers.

The snow melts away into slush as Jiyong drives out of town.

w e d n e s d a y
They are selling rainbows on the side of the road.

Jiyong stops for a closer look at the vendors before he realizes the rainbows are organic, red peppers and bananas, mangos and heads of lettuce.

It's hard to see with the people around him pushing and shoving and shouting orders at the sellers in aprons behind the tables. He manages to get his hands on a fruit and thrust some money into an outstretched hand before he realizes he has an eggplant in his hands.

The setting sun beats down on his back, and for a second, he feels like he has a place to go. He squints down the narrow street: somebody is sitting at a low brick wall.

As he gets closer he can make out the slanted eyebrows, the messy black hair (though today it sweeps into his eyes, several inches longer), the cigarette between his ink-smudged fingers.

Jiyong hops up on the ledge to sit beside the boy the world is set upon him meeting, placing the eggplant on the wall by a pair of clunky black glasses and a mug of what looks like tea. The boy grins at him, showing deep-cut dimples, but it fades some when Jiyong opens his mouth.

"Look, I'm not who you think I am," he says. Strangely, he feels bad for him, for the hurt in his eyes behind his sharp features. "I'm not who you're looking for."

It takes a while for the smile to reappear on the stranger's face. "Okay," he concedes. He doesn't sound convinced.

"No, see, I'm... I'm Jiyong," Jiyong continues, a little lamely. "Kwon Jiyong." And he thinks about things he could tell him, about where he went to college, who his first boyfriend was, his favorite color and his mother's telephone number, how this boy can and thinks he should fit into all of it too but he doesn't and it's like trying to push a circle through a square.

"Whatcha doing here, Kwon Jiyong?" The boy asks.

He has no idea. He sucks at lying. "I don't know," he says. "I'm still figuring it out."

But for now, he has nowhere to go, so he spends the next few hours on that wall beside the boy, watching the hustle and bustle of the people on the street: businessmen buzzing by in mopeds, lovers flirting with their fingers and children with brightly colored rubber balls and puppy dogs weaving in between shops. The sun blazes a trail down the edges of the sky against the red roof tiles and burnt orange stucco.

"So what's he like, then?" Jiyong asks sometime between when the sky is there and when it's gone. "The guy who's - who you're looking for."

The stranger gives him a sidelong glance before answering, sucking his cheeks between his teeth for a moment to think. "He's," he starts, hesitantly. His eyes fall on the purple vegetable on the wall, and then he lights up. "He was the type of person who would hate eggplant, but would buy it anyway. Because he liked the color, you know? And then I'd have to eat it." This last statement turns into laughter and a stolen glance; Jiyong smiles back.

"I don't like eggplant either," Jiyong offers. After a minute, he adds, "Good luck."

The crowd thins as the sun disappears, and Jiyong hears the crickets in the grasses start to chirp. He likes it here too much to stay. Maybe when he's more straightened out.

They walk to his car together. Jiyong gives him the eggplant, and he waves through the glass, looking strangely small inside his car window.

"What's your name?" Jiyong calls, forgetting to roll down his window.

"Seunghyun," the boy answers. His voice is muffled.
The sky is pink and silver, and then no color at all.

t h u r s d a y
"So wait," Jiyong shifts until the windshield wipers aren't digging into his back anymore, and glances at Seunghyun out of the corner of his eye. "This is real life. Right? Like, I'm not just in a really weird dream or something."

"Got me," Seunghyun replies. He goes back to staring at the stars, knuckles tapping at the tarnished paint of Jiyong's car. "Any beer in this tin can?"

"No," Jiyong says, rolling his eyes. He isn't even sure he's allowed to park off road on the fields of undisturbed grass, but he figures the land here is so flat he should be able to see any cop cars before they see him.

"I just. I feel like I'm missing the point."

"They're just stars, Jiyong. There's no point."

"Oh, thanks. I mean this," Jiyong interrupts, waving his hands around. "My life. This. Everything. Like, where am I? Why are you everywhere?" He digs the heels of his hands in his eyes and then rubs at his uneven Mohawk. "And why does my hair suddenly do whatever the fuck it wants?"

Seunghyun is silent - and it is full of total, utter silence, because here is a place where there is no moon amongst the stars, where there is grass but no flowers and where even the crickets don't go.

"Is that a question for me?" Seunghyun says. There is something so snarky and so comfortable in his voice that Jiyong once again feels like he's seeing a tiny corner of one of his dreams that Seunghyun was the centerpiece of and he's this close to remembering who Seunghyun is and why the way he smiles feels like something he's seen every day of his life but has blocked out and if he could just take that corner and pull it down -

"I just don't get it," Jiyong says. "All I ever do is, like, drive around. And waste money on gas."

"And meet me."

"And meet you." He frowns.

Seunghyun crosses his arms. "I thought you were looking for something."

"Well, obviously I'm doing it wrong since the only thing I've found is you," Jiyong says. He glances at the cigarette smoke unfurling from the corner of Seunghyun's mouth and sits up on his elbows. "Give me one."

Seunghyun looks surprised for the first time. "You don't smoke," he says, but hands the pack of Marlboros over anyway.

The lighter uncaps almost as if by itself and then Jiyong is breathing in the acridity with ease, holding it a few seconds in his throat before releasing the smoke in a steady gray stream into the sky. It fills him to the tips of his fingers, an old friend come home again.

The edges of his vision clear, just a little more. Jiyong blinks - stares down at the cigarette laying between his index and middle finger. Seunghyun is on pause beside him, holding his breath.

He flops back down on his back on the hood of the car. "Whatever. This sucks. Tell me more about your Jiyong."

"Man, I don't even know what to say," Seunghyun answers with a short laugh. "He's... I don't know. He sleeps in late. Smokes too much. He spent his entire paycheck once on a bracelet he doesn't even wear. I dunno." Seunghyun sighs and cards a hand through his hair, today styled like a fauxhawk. "I don't know what to tell you."

Or maybe Seunghyun does, and he's right on the money - and maybe it's scaring Jiyong. He shakes his head, brushing ash off his white t-shirt. "So why aren't you looking for him?"

"Because," Seunghyun replies, sounding a little guilty. "He kind of has to find me."

"He's taking his damn time."

Seunghyun shrugs and leans back on his elbows, nudging Jiyong with his foot. "Oh well. I can keep you company in the meantime."

It's quiet again for a while, the world on mute and them not speaking.

After a long time - when Jiyong seems to drift off to sleep, then wake up again, he lets Seunghyun take his hand, loosely intertwining their fingers between the grit and the rust and the feeble light of the stars - maybe thinking that he can make up for things. His fingers tighten around the other boy's, and the field of grass crackles and compounds inwards, crumbling and breaking and fading to nothing but a small pile of soot at their feet.

f r i d a y
Seunghyun isn't in the next city.

The buildings are white and piled chaotically on top of each other, glutinous wedding cakes caught mid-motion in a tumble-and-crash, and Seunghyun isn't there.

It's unexpected peace and quiet and maybe he could have gotten something done here, but Jiyong spends the whole time on edge at the foot of his white motel bed, biting his nails and wondering where Seunghyun should be and when he'll come in with his smoky haze and his mean eyes and call him the Jiyong he's not and ruin (or make?) his day.

Jiyong does it all by himself. He can't sleep, tossing and turning for three hours on the small pallet that feels like water and the air that feels like jelly.

He ends up slinging his knapsack over his shoulder and running as soon as it's light enough outside to call it a new day. The crashing waves and crying seagulls bid him farewell.

s a t u r d a y
Skyscrapers.

Jiyong can't even see the tips of them when he cranes his neck from his car window. They block out the sky, cold and unfeeling, until everything else is gone. It might be night, it might be day. There may be birds flying in the sky. Down here, Jiyong can't tell a thing. The lights are artificial street lamps and the only thing left of the birds is the chirping noises at crosswalks.

He drives around for a while looking for a spot to stop, and finally parallel parks in the only empty space in a row of identical black luxury cars. He opens the car door and almost runs into a crowd of people on their cell phones, forbidding behind their opaque sunglasses and carrying cappuccinos. They flock by like a formation of crows, and then are gone.

Jiyong wonders where to go. There are combination locks on all the doors, window displays backlighting mannequins in vogue poses, and he's in a huge t-shirt and too many accessories.

Taking rings off his fingers one by one and dropping them with a clink on the street, he walks against the flow of the crowds and spies a glass door through which the light shining onto the street is different, almost rosy; Jiyong hurries towards it and easily pushes it open.

And Seunghyun is there.

He's sitting in the middle of a polished dance floor, a room of mirrors and shining mahogany floors. A boom box plays a tune that, from where Jiyong is standing, sounds like fuzzy noise.

Seunghyun looks like one of them, hair slicked back into a pompadour and in a black woolen trench coat - but his face is friendly, and there is no cappuccino in his hand.

"Jesus, do you always have to stand out so much?" Seunghyun says, the grin on his face suggesting he doesn't mind as he looks Jiyong's outfit up and down.

"You weren't there," Jiyong says.

Seunghyun gives him a blank look. "Where?"

"Yesterday," Jiyong says. "You weren't there. I waited."

And Seunghyun does a 180.

His hair falls around his face, unstyled and glossy and doing a poor job of hiding his eyes. "Hey - are you - did you come to find me?"

"Obviously, idiot," Jiyong says. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"No," Seunghyun says, and steps forward to grab Jiyong's shoulders. "Are you finding me? Is this you finding me, Ji?"

"I already - wait." Jiyong steps back. The rest of the rings on his fingers fall on the floor and echo around the room, too big for him to wear. "No," he says, irritated, "I'm not him. Remember?"

"So who are you, then?" Seunghyun says. He closes the space between them, and the trench coat around his shoulders disappears.

"I'm," Jiyong says, and like before, runs out of words, but not for lack of trying.

The mirrors in the room shine on him, reflect from a sun too high up to see, and Jiyong has to close his eyes against the brilliance.

There are words painted on them. You sleep in. You smoke too much.

I don't smoke, Jiyong thinks, and clings onto a history of his own that he never had, full of empty holes and filled in with keys to things he never went to, never attended because he slept in late. Because he sleeps in and smokes too much.

You spend paychecks on a bracelet that you never wear. Seunghyun's voice is echoing, making waves in the room that buzz around him like flies before painting themselves on the mirrors, around and around.

Jiyong remembers a horrendously ugly bracelet stashed away in the box it came in underneath his bed at home.

Eggplant is your favorite color but not your favorite vegetable and you make Seunghyun eat them because you buy one every week and you would be an Eskimo if you could and that goddamn stupid coffee cup on top of that blue building where you wanted to have tea.

"I don't know," Jiyong says, and Seunghyun takes his face in his hands, close. The boom box is playing only one-word songs now full of Jiyong, Jiyong, Jiyong echoing around the room, and the mirrors racing tighter and tighter, higher and faster -

"Hey," Seunghyun whispers, so full of home, so simple.

For a minute, everything is still. Jiyong recognizes the warm chocolate brown of Seunghyun's eyes, the way they crinkle at the ends and the dark brows above them.

"Hey," Jiyong says back, smile on his face, dream dragged into focus, and he picks up one of many pieces that begin to tell him who he is.

And then the mirrors, they shatter into a million pieces, shimmering in the sunlight and racing towards him, taking his breath away. The door flies open and the people in black number in thousands outside, screaming and squalling as they climb over each other and grow wings and turn into crows, all of them spiraling towards him, and the door is a rusted shade of puke that hits him square in the stomach and then it is a car crash that sends him spinning, exploding.

He comes to in a city of flashing blue and red, crystal crumbs on his face. Noises sound in the distance; a heart beats in his ear. Everything is muffled, swimming in fog, and he can't fully open his eyes.

Somebody says something above him. There are arms circling his chest, exhales of breath tickling the tops of his blond hair. Jiyong sees the rearview mirror lying on the side of the road, cracked perfectly down the middle.

A hand on his hand, and then a kiss to his temple, Jiyong's ear pressed to their chest; and somebody is making him promises he can't distinguish through the slur of his ears, but he pushes through the padding and listens to things about Spain, about Greece, about stargazing in Mongolia and building igloos in Alaska and dancing in New York. And whatever the fuck else he wants to do, as long as he stays.

Whatever he wants to do. Just stay.

By the time they come for him, he has decided that what he really has to do is leave. His shoes crunch against the glass on the road as he walks away, and watches the red and blue lights, vans pulling away with a boy with dark eyes and a beautiful face smudged with red carrying in his arms the body of another who looks strangely like him.

It is all shaken off like yesterday's skin.

The sun is here and it is bright upon his skin as he walks to the chain-link fence, the metallic noises of keys guiding his way.

And he unhooks a silver one with a pedometer that reads thousands of numbers, thousands of millions of decisions already made and memories held yesterday for a split second before they flash back to one.

His umma is asleep on the porch, the shoes are in his trunk, the car waits patiently by the road.

Eye on Polaris and singing along to any old song he finds on the radio, Jiyong leaves the city behind.

edited: 02.20.2012