fic: this is how frantic I hollowed out
I don't even know, man. Title from One Love Story, Eight Takes by Brenda Shaughnessy. I feel there should be notes for the references. Only one canned coffee was harmed in the making of this fic, but a fuck-load of tea was brutally murdered. Please forgive my ignorance, point out the inevitable typos, etc.
this is how frantic I hollowed out
bigbang; M; gtop.
4500~; Once, you could have opened your mouth over that spot, caught it, claimed it, breathed music against it. Now, the hinges of your jaw would probably creak with the effort. post-breakup future!fic. Jiyong and Seunghyun meet years later, dragging with them the memories of their live's knotted trajectories. Also, jokes.
And I've made my bed, I'll lie in it
And pillow talk you into it
I've made my bed, I'll lie in it
Entice you with this leopard print
And matching velvet duvet
{first love, the maccabees}
It is night.
Outside the city has donned a halo of light pollution. You are on the fortieth floor, or the forty-first, you forget which. Someone else pressed the button in the lift. Standing on the streets, the hotel had loomed over; the surface mirroring the city in fragments, and hiding beneath, its own rhythmic machinations. Every day humans come and go, rumple identical sheets, give the same staff the same smiles, thumb their passage on worn room keys, feel loved and lost, like everyone does.
It is a party, or at least, there is alcohol and there are people and if they are depressed they are pretending not to be, so it is a party. The windows are ceiling-to-floor and through them Seoul is lit up below. In them, the party stretches out over the city, reflected in the glass so that the guest’s ghostly doppelgangers wander over buildings, sipping their drinks as they drift through skyscrapers, peer at vols-au-vent resting on distant mountains. Everyone is shot through with bullet-holes of light.
This is how you first see him after all these years, a phantom in the glass, a wrong-way-round Seunghyun who is perched at the bar, and as he raises his drink his watch catches the light.
You’ve had dreams like this before.
-
You are fourteen years old. The sky stretches grey above, eaten up at the edges by the city. Through the chain-link fence, the basketball court echoes with the strike of the dribbling ball and the slaps of the sneaker-shod feet of kids leaden with the promise of their own future, which is probably just an excess of unfinished side-dishes. The air feels heavy with the thought of rain, but maybe that’s only the weight of generations-worth of basketball games pressing down on the court, hammering it into the ground until we are all swallowed up by the earth again.
It will be years before you realise that this sound was music. But still, you listen closely to their playing as though you could suck it all into you, absorb all their laughs and childhood memories and at the other end, spit out a song with words that hummed like that-like they had crawled out of something bigger than your own mind.
There is a boy sitting beside you on the park bench and he thinks you have forgotten him, even though he is older and bigger than you in both directions and forgetting him would be like forgetting the presence of a grey seal wearing a neon hoodie. This isn’t a very flattering way to put it, but you are fourteen-that is to say, even though you’re a middle-class Korean kid you’re convinced that The Notorious B.I.G. speaks deep to your soul, and secretly, you still think Baby Dinosaur Dooly is funny.
He is borrowing your walkman and rapping to himself about umbrellas, the lyrics getting sillier and sillier. Just ‘cause I ain’t got no four foot parasol, don’t mean I gonna end up soaked like a water vole, he mutters, bobbing his head seriously, Yeah I gotta compact, automatic solid black, Eight spokes, the real shit, So fly I need a permit. He thinks you have forgotten him. You are watching the game and smiling behind your hands.
-
Seunghyun is wearing his glasses again, the tortoiseshell, German-professor-of-history ones. His hair is swept up and smoothed down, long enough at the back to gently lick the nape of his neck. Once, you could have opened your mouth over that spot, caught it, claimed it, breathed music against it. Now, the hinges of your jaw would probably creak with the effort.
You could say this, and some of the other things you’ve catalogued and filed away over the years, if you were more partial to humiliation. Instead you fold yourself onto the stool beside him, and the two of you regard each other silently. This is the point to say, Hello, or maybe that was earlier, maybe it’s already too late. The words curling up inside you. Your heart tangled like telephone wires.
‘Hello,’ he says.
‘You look good,’ you blurt. ‘I mean, yeah. Hi. How are you. Long time no…yeah.’
Seunghyun laughs and you hide your face behind your hands. This is good. Relax. It can be easy like this, you know. ‘Have I seen you somewhere before?’ you ask, going for coy. ‘You look familiar. Are you on the television, or something?’
‘Mmm, I think you may have seen me, I present the weather sometimes. It’s probably hard to recognise me without the push-up bra.’
He still has his dimples. Of course he still has dimples. Stupid. Don’t feel so happy about it.
‘Ahh, that’s it. I’m Kwon Jiyong. I’m a big fan of your work.’ You stick your hand out for a western-style shake, but he bows in his seat instead.
‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Choi Seunghyun, thank-you for your support.’
-
You had thought you were in love. This was because your heart, your fingertips, the sense of something having crawled into your chest to roost slowly choking the breath out of you, matched well with the generic sentiments you were used to hearing auto-tuned over an electronic pulse, or laid earnest against the chords of an anonymous guitar.
It wasn’t the useful sort of inspiration you had been led to believe. Your thoughts became stupider. His hair was ridiculous. You wanted to bury yourself in it, live there forever, pretend you were underwater. There were long moments when you just stared at the shadow his collar made against his neck. Nobody even noticed.
Sometimes when he smiled, it was just for you.
-
At reunions, there are the same old stories. In the same way people say, Once upon a time, there is, Jiyong sleeps like the dead.
Once, many years ago, you had roused blearily to find the rest of Bigbang crowded into your room, halfway through a gusty rendition of Insomnia. Daesung had been rapping and occasionally kicking your bed with over-enthusiastic dancing. Seungri, beat-boxing, had struck a dramatic pose on your desk and was squashing your favourite headphones. Youngbae and Seunghyun were belting their way through the chorus in a manner that to describe as off-key would be to over-associate it’s proximity to any key whatsoever. It didn’t sound like a cat being murdered. It sounded like the whole fucking menagerie being shoved through a meat-grinder.
This is still the alarm on your phone.
-
Of course, you are not strangers meeting for the first time in a bar, hovering at the edge of surmountable distances, smiling with the possibility of Something Beautiful, or even Everything Being Okay. There is still that body of history drifting purposelessly beneath the façade. He is still angry with you, the kind of anger that dries up and no longer has anything to do but remember what it once animated, the grains it leaves behind settling into the rough edges of the soul. You are still unwilling to acknowledge to the point of being forgiven.
‘Sorry,’ you say, pushing your empty champagne glass around on the bar, giving honesty a shot, ‘I’m a bit nervous.’
‘You? Really?’ Seunghyun affects surprise. ‘Maybe you need to be drunker.’
‘That’s an idea. Nothing good ever comes from being sober.’ You signal the bartender for something stronger. ‘I should be drunk. You should pay for it.’
Seunghyun pats his suit pockets theatrically. ‘But I’m just a struggling actor. You’re the hot-shot music producer, buy your own drinks.’
‘He says, fondling his Dior,’ you quip, accepting your vodka tonic. ‘I thought you were a weathergirl?’
‘He retorts, preening in his Rodarte,’ Seunghyun dimples, ‘I’m sleeping my way up-oops, I mean, “working.”’
You were planning on pretending that this was a coincidence, but he doesn’t even ask. You don’t know if this means he doesn’t care, that he already knows, or if it hasn’t even occurred to him to wonder. You don’t even know which you want to be true.
‘I feel old,’ you say by the fifth drink. You solemnly press the cold glass against each of your burning cheeks.
‘If it helps, you still look like a teenager.’
‘Ahhh, ajusshi is just envious because he’s lost his girlish figure.’
-
The longest time you ever went without changing your hairstyle was the army.
That’s a given.
You learn things like: how the weight of a gun feels on your shoulder, somehow dangerous and insubstantial at once, how being really flexible! no really! isn't that helpful, the language of sounds that means trouble or friends or what-the-fuck-was-that-even, the proper way to fold a flag, the truest sense of anonymity you’ve ever felt, the taste of mud. On the weekends you get drunk like everyone and sing loudly in the backs of cars, like everyone.
You wake up when they tell you to.
You miss a lot of things. There is no point in missing any one thing in particular.
When you first see CL after all this, she hugs you and says, ‘How nostalgic!’, and then later, ‘No one calls me that anymore, GD.’
The shoes they gave you had pinched your toes. But you don’t talk about this anymore.
-
Seunghyun never really lost that awkwardness to be able to really give himself over to a rôle, but his face was still like that and his voice still sounded like it did so for a while there he never lacked for work.
‘He’s gotten better at acting,’ Youngbae was telling you once. There was beer. You think you were eating soft tofu. Earlier, there had been pictures of small children on his phone, their hair creeping over their ears, soft baby-dresses giving way to tight school-collars; a vacation, somewhere there was sun.
‘He’d have to,’ you had said. There wasn’t any particular bitterness to this, but Youngbae had sighed anyway.
‘I’ve been thinking about your problem, Jiyong,’ he had said, ‘It’s a lack of honest communication.’
‘I think it’s an excess of that,’ you had replied, probably less pithily, ‘and that we’re still smarting from it. But there isn’t really a problem.’
What had prompted this? You can’t remember. It might have been some birthday party: you’d been out of the country, Seunghyun had attended, or vice versa. And this was likely even before you’d started making a conscientious effort to avoid each other, so that’s something.
‘It’s awkward for the rest of us, too,’ Youngbae persisted, ‘He misses you, I can tell.’
‘Did he say that? No-? No,’ you had demanded, as Youngbae shook his head exasperatedly. ‘And it’s a mutual lack of, of missing.’
‘Look,’ you had continued, getting angrier, stabbing at your meal. Come to think of it, it must have been dakkangjung. ‘Look, I’m sick of being made out to be the bad guy, I don’t need that, that betrayed-puppy-dog crap. It was inevitable, time for it, and fucking years ago besides.’
‘Jiyong, I’m on your side, but you did make the decision unilaterally, and we were all kinda pissed at the time-’
‘But you got over it, because unlike some supposed-hyungs, you’re actually capable of being adults.’
There had been a bruised silence. ‘That isn’t fair, Jiyong.’
‘Life isn’t fair,’ you had said. ‘And I’m fucking tired of-I’m just so fucking tired.’
-
You had a plan. In it you were suave and witty and profound, in it the two of you had split your souls clean open and disembowelled everything, along with the dirt of years of resentment, to spill onto the floor between you.
But there is too much gentleness here. The elephant in the room is a skeleton already half on it’s way to becoming someone’s piano. You are unable to say any of the things you’ve been thinking all these years.
This is how his hands finds your wrists when you nearly drop your drink, how you were too drunk to pretend to be too drunk to be affected. You realise don't you Jiyong, it’s not that words became inefficient; it’s that they no longer matched the music they were written to attend.
-
Seunghyun comes back late to the dorms. This is a mistake, because you have been waiting. No, that’s not the mistake, the mistake is-
‘What’s all this,’ he says, surveying the collection of cans on the tabletop.
‘I thought it was a tragedy that Maxim brought out a coffee called T.O.P and didn’t ask you to advertise. That doesn’t even make sense, it’s your name, and that makes it practically your baby. So I thought you could pose with them, and we could take pictures and things, but you were late.’
‘Slow down,’ he says absently, picking up a can. He frowns, forehead creasing. ‘What the hell? It’s empty.’
‘You were late, hyung,’ you explain patiently.
‘There’s about ten cans here.’
‘You were really late.’
He stares at you is disbelief. You wonder if he can see you vibrating slightly. He looks tired. You should have left him some coffee. It didn’t even taste that nice. He looks tired. Sometimes when you look at proper-hardworking Seunghyun it is hard to see the goofy kid underneath. Then, you miss it. He looks tired.
‘You look tired,’ you say.
‘I wish I could say the same about you. You’re all trembly like a lit firework. I’d probably be less worried if you were smoking weed again. You know the schedule starts at five, right?’
You nod. Sleep seems unlikely. ‘Feels like insomnia-ah-ahh-ahh~,’ you sing sotto voice, swaying from side to side.
Seunghyun rubs his hand over his face, smudging his eyeliner. ‘I’m going to pin you to your bed. You sleep like the dead normally, so something will happen. If it’s not sleep, then at least you won’t go, I don’t know, shooting through the ceiling. Like a firework.’ He makes a gesture with his fingers. ‘Or…something like that.’
The hum of the fluorescent light overtakes the conversation. You are struggling to work out if he was trying to make a joke.
‘You’re really tired,’ you observe.
‘Yeah, and you’re really wired. Come on, let’s go to bed. We’ll even out somehow.’
-
These are some things you know:
Pre-packaged meat from Family Mart really is as disgusting as it looks.
The speed at which hair grows is inversely proportional to how much you hate your haircut.
You look better in pictures than real life, but in real life you still look pretty fantastic.
You have more than once admired yourself in one-way glass and other people’s hubcaps.
Old text-messages are an excellent source of blackmail.
‘Choom TOP’ will never not be funny.
If you say ‘red sun’ enough, you can hypnotise someone into punching you in the face.
One of life’s greatest pleasures is smoking at dawn, when the air is cleanest everywhere but your lungs.
The true meaning of ‘sacred’ is your dot dae.
The best way to write music is to plagiarise from so many people it’s impossible to tell.
It is possible to remember the feeling of someone’s fingertips on your wrists for years.
Regret is for those who’ve yet to discover the magic of chronic alcoholism.
Sometimes you are afraid of sleeping alone.
-
Consider the solitary salaryman as he stands in the convenience store eating kimbap and drinking beer, his tie loosened and his collar undone. He is framed in the illuminated window like a painting called If this is loneliness then we’re all here together. Or maybe, Sometimes the knowledge of the moon keeps me awake at night, which is also the name given to the flowers tied around the telegraph pole at the T-intersection and the lingering smell of incense, now that you’re trying to quit smoking.
In the winter you will go to Haeundae, Busan, to sit wrapped in a coat made of how no-one understands you and watch the waves pushing back-and-forth on the rocks like an indecisive lover. This is the way the tide pulls at us, matches us as we breathe, leaves with the expectation of return, gives us scum-marks to remember it by. So you will go to Haeundae, Busan, just to tell the carparks about borrowed umbrellas, about how guilt doesn’t taste bitter, but of your mother’s cooking instead, about how everything was passive-aggressive unless it wasn’t, about the weight of your forehead against his. You will tell it to the carpark because the sea has already heard this story so many times before-because the sea, like the moon, is billions of years old, and it already knows how it ends.
-
Seunghyun decides you are too far gone for the taxi, and takes you to his hotel room. Neither of you had come for the party, you couldn’t even remember what the fuck it was supposed to be about. There is giggling, and when you walk you bump into each other, and he feels solid and warm and there, just like a real boy.
Every other sentence begins with, Hey, remember when-?, and then, Jiyong, Jiyong, Ji and you are saying, You’re whispering too loudly, you twat, and someone says, I think I’m going to piss my brains out, but when it comes to it his hand is steady on the room key as you stumble in, so what even, the sober prick.
You rest your head on his collarbone, trying to fit against his neck, and his hands are on your belt-buckle, and now they are shaking a little and he huffs I’ve no idea what I’m doing against your hair.
You want to say, I’ve missed this, but that would be wrong. You could say, I need you, but all you wanted was for him to look you in the eyes.
-
‘I can’t believe you’re eating galbi without me,’ Seunghyun says indignantly. Through the noise of the restaurant you have pressed the phone closely to your ear. If you smile, there’s a real chance your cheek will cut off the call.
‘Hyung, you never come out with us to eat. You see what happens?’
‘Tell him I’m eating his share.’
‘Seungri says he’s eating your share,’ you oblige. The meat hisses gently as Youngbae turns it. ‘But Daesung’s having extra too, what’s that about.’
‘Hyung~ you traitor! Sorry Seunghyun-hyung! But you’d rather I have it then Seungri, right?’
‘Where are you?’ you ask casually, biting your chopsticks. At the same time a voice on the other end says, ‘What’s happening, Seunghyun-oppa?’
‘I’m-I’m with Jaejoong,’ Seunghyun says, then somewhat distantly, ‘My dongsaengs are mutinying.’
‘Had a sex-change, has he?’ You pinch the mobile between your ear and shoulder as you tear up the lettuce.
‘Jaejoong, and friends,’ he explains. Jaejoong’s voice comes through tinnily, ‘Ah, it’s the jealous wife.’
You ignore this. ‘When you finish shooting, you should come to the studio, it’s been too long. And your mother-in-law misses you.’
‘Who?’ laughs Seunghyun, proof that dimples really can be transmitted over phones.
‘Oi, that better not mean me,’ Youngbae warns, prompting Daesung to faux-whisper loudly: ‘He admits it!’
There’s a rustling at the other end of the line, a car horn-then his voice, clearer.
‘So lonely without me?’ he asks.
-
You were the first to leave the band.
The truth is it was always more important for Seunghyun than any of the others. You knew this, everybody did. But there was the palpable sense of everyone splintering away, as the force of the band’s success pulsed and pushed everyone out further into their own solo destinations. This is the meaning of the big bang, after all, and how everything is born dying.
But here is the importance of ambition. It’s one thing to like to perform, it's one thing to be satisfied with this or the other; it’s another to have music multiplying like cancer beneath your skin. It’s another thing entirely to be constantly scratching at the walls to get to the stars painted on the ceiling.
-
This was earlier, at about drink number nine, which had tasted of apples and hand-sanitiser. He had said, ‘Do you remember when we’d sneak up onto the roof to smoke in the mornings?’
(cigarette butts hidden under flowerpots, drawing smoke deep into lungs, waiting for the leaden feel of nicotine to settle in your veins, a shared fag and the dampness of the filter against your mouth)
‘Back then you were awake before anyone,’ he had said, but you weren’t listening. You had been caught instead, in the space between his neck and collar, the subtle seduction of the single undone button.
He had said, ‘Back then, I really-’
-
First, you just lost contact for longer periods. When you met in groups you chatted as much as ever but nothing was ever really said. Eventually, the nicknames and in-jokes died away, and you stopped being able to tell what he was thinking just by looking at his eyebrows.
And then, at some point, you no longer even touched.
-
A different argument today. About what isn’t important-no. It’s important but we’re not ready to talk about it. We’re back to a time when his hair is black and short at the sides, but it falls into his eyes at the front. When Seunghyun is upset, he doesn’t even have the decency to put a proper face on it, just looks so tragic and vulnerable as if he’s the first person to be hurt ever. He’s just too damn sensitive. It’s one more dinner of watching him pout moodily into his rice, and you’ve had about enough.
‘I can’t believe you’re still acting like this. I’ve been in the studio all week, and you’re still- jesus. It’s not cute.’
‘Sorry, I forgot what a tragedy your life was. They should make an episode of Human Theatre about it- “how my life of talent and privilege undermines my credibility as a hip-hop artist but I still manage to make millions.” A real tear-jerker.’
‘Oh, fuck you,’ you snap, ‘I’m not apologising for trying to actually develop as an artist. What even is the difference between “T.O.P” and “Tempo,” apart from the size of your fucking waistband?’
There’s an audible gasp from the other members, who had been pretending not to hear. You can’t, you just can’t-right now, like this, you hate every last one of them.
‘That,’ Seunghyun hisses, ‘that’s fucking low.’
The best use of anger is to block out guilt. ‘Yeah?’ you say. ‘Well at least now, you’ve an actual reason to be upset. Hey, you only started a week early.’
-
Understand. This is not an apology. This is not the way forgiveness slips though our lives. Instead, your fingers trying to twist through his shirt, fumbling for skin; his mouth, biting into yours. Instead, the shift of muscles, the hardness of bone, his teeth scraping down your chest like he could bite through to your soul. As the walls slur into the carpet and into the bed, you search his body for something familiar, but Jiyong, there is nothing for you to recognise.
You see, sometimes we fall back into the ghosts we leave behind in the grooves of other people’s lives. In this way, you and he are only here because you are walking in the footsteps of your past selves, slipping into their feelings, drawing them around you like they’ll protect you from what you’ve each become. In this way, the shadows of his eyelashes, the small little broken noises he makes, the strange, heart-breaking softness of the skin under his jaw, are just echoes bleeding through the cracks of your memories.
You should have done this before, back when it could have meant something. Years later it is only this: the two of you moving against each other, scrabbling for purpose on each other’s skin, pressing against each other, pushing into each other, trying to love each other, until you are both exhausted with it.
-
Once more: he is raising his arm and bringing the whisky to his mouth, putting his lips to the rim and letting it all burn through him. You are halfway across the room, watching his reflection in the glass and you are exhaling.
He is raising his arm, the ice cubes moving silently against each other then to fall to touch his upper lip. The reflection is blurred, you cannot see closely enough to make out the shape of each familiar finger curled around his drink, to see which ring you might not have met before. An old breath is leaving your lungs.
He is raising his arm and you are faced away and watching him in the glass and you cannot see clearly the dial of his watch as it ticks time going backwards.
He is raising his arm. You are not breathing.
-
Later you will sit down in front of your laptop and you will write a song, and when you are finished, the sun will be leaking through the window and everything will be over. Then you will go to sleep.
But this is much, much later.
-
Sunlight on dust motes, long shadows of window mullions wobbling across the bones on his feet. Hotel sheets stained from a night of sentimentality on the rocks, please, and make it a double. Try scraping some of your memories up. They always seem to settle like dregs in the back of your skull.
You’ve got to do something, otherwise he’s going to turn to you and say something like Jiyong, it’s like going to Disneyland when you’re forty-six. Everywhere, lovers are breaking up, but you don’t even have the courtesy of the title. Okay, so fucking doesn’t solve everything like it does in the movies. You do not have a magical, past-erasing, problem-solving penis.
Einstein says time is relative, but who could run away fast enough to make a moment last? As a bullet burrows into the brain of a condemned man, neurons firing in his dying brain spin out the memories of an entire life like water rushing down a drain. When Seunghyun turns to you and begins, Jiyong, try it -
Close your eyes. Something is dying here too, after all. You can take that moment: the shape of his bare feet against the carpet, the smell of his shower cutting through the sweat of an unopened room, his voice saying, Jiyong. Jiyong, like it was something he owned. Jiyong, like there is a universe somewhere in which he has not just scrubbed all traces of you from his body, where the collar of his shirt does not conceal the lingering evidence of your desperation.
There must be a universe somewhere that Seunghyun does not put on his shoes and leave.
Otherwise, the tangled fragments in your chest, the brittle residue of ghosts searching for their imagined histories. Otherwise, your heart, swallowed-and you, waiting for him to spit it up.
this is how frantic I hollowed out
bigbang; M; gtop.
4500~; Once, you could have opened your mouth over that spot, caught it, claimed it, breathed music against it. Now, the hinges of your jaw would probably creak with the effort. post-breakup future!fic. Jiyong and Seunghyun meet years later, dragging with them the memories of their live's knotted trajectories. Also, jokes.
And I've made my bed, I'll lie in it
And pillow talk you into it
I've made my bed, I'll lie in it
Entice you with this leopard print
And matching velvet duvet
{first love, the maccabees}
It is night.
Outside the city has donned a halo of light pollution. You are on the fortieth floor, or the forty-first, you forget which. Someone else pressed the button in the lift. Standing on the streets, the hotel had loomed over; the surface mirroring the city in fragments, and hiding beneath, its own rhythmic machinations. Every day humans come and go, rumple identical sheets, give the same staff the same smiles, thumb their passage on worn room keys, feel loved and lost, like everyone does.
It is a party, or at least, there is alcohol and there are people and if they are depressed they are pretending not to be, so it is a party. The windows are ceiling-to-floor and through them Seoul is lit up below. In them, the party stretches out over the city, reflected in the glass so that the guest’s ghostly doppelgangers wander over buildings, sipping their drinks as they drift through skyscrapers, peer at vols-au-vent resting on distant mountains. Everyone is shot through with bullet-holes of light.
This is how you first see him after all these years, a phantom in the glass, a wrong-way-round Seunghyun who is perched at the bar, and as he raises his drink his watch catches the light.
You’ve had dreams like this before.
-
You are fourteen years old. The sky stretches grey above, eaten up at the edges by the city. Through the chain-link fence, the basketball court echoes with the strike of the dribbling ball and the slaps of the sneaker-shod feet of kids leaden with the promise of their own future, which is probably just an excess of unfinished side-dishes. The air feels heavy with the thought of rain, but maybe that’s only the weight of generations-worth of basketball games pressing down on the court, hammering it into the ground until we are all swallowed up by the earth again.
It will be years before you realise that this sound was music. But still, you listen closely to their playing as though you could suck it all into you, absorb all their laughs and childhood memories and at the other end, spit out a song with words that hummed like that-like they had crawled out of something bigger than your own mind.
There is a boy sitting beside you on the park bench and he thinks you have forgotten him, even though he is older and bigger than you in both directions and forgetting him would be like forgetting the presence of a grey seal wearing a neon hoodie. This isn’t a very flattering way to put it, but you are fourteen-that is to say, even though you’re a middle-class Korean kid you’re convinced that The Notorious B.I.G. speaks deep to your soul, and secretly, you still think Baby Dinosaur Dooly is funny.
He is borrowing your walkman and rapping to himself about umbrellas, the lyrics getting sillier and sillier. Just ‘cause I ain’t got no four foot parasol, don’t mean I gonna end up soaked like a water vole, he mutters, bobbing his head seriously, Yeah I gotta compact, automatic solid black, Eight spokes, the real shit, So fly I need a permit. He thinks you have forgotten him. You are watching the game and smiling behind your hands.
-
Seunghyun is wearing his glasses again, the tortoiseshell, German-professor-of-history ones. His hair is swept up and smoothed down, long enough at the back to gently lick the nape of his neck. Once, you could have opened your mouth over that spot, caught it, claimed it, breathed music against it. Now, the hinges of your jaw would probably creak with the effort.
You could say this, and some of the other things you’ve catalogued and filed away over the years, if you were more partial to humiliation. Instead you fold yourself onto the stool beside him, and the two of you regard each other silently. This is the point to say, Hello, or maybe that was earlier, maybe it’s already too late. The words curling up inside you. Your heart tangled like telephone wires.
‘Hello,’ he says.
‘You look good,’ you blurt. ‘I mean, yeah. Hi. How are you. Long time no…yeah.’
Seunghyun laughs and you hide your face behind your hands. This is good. Relax. It can be easy like this, you know. ‘Have I seen you somewhere before?’ you ask, going for coy. ‘You look familiar. Are you on the television, or something?’
‘Mmm, I think you may have seen me, I present the weather sometimes. It’s probably hard to recognise me without the push-up bra.’
He still has his dimples. Of course he still has dimples. Stupid. Don’t feel so happy about it.
‘Ahh, that’s it. I’m Kwon Jiyong. I’m a big fan of your work.’ You stick your hand out for a western-style shake, but he bows in his seat instead.
‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Choi Seunghyun, thank-you for your support.’
-
You had thought you were in love. This was because your heart, your fingertips, the sense of something having crawled into your chest to roost slowly choking the breath out of you, matched well with the generic sentiments you were used to hearing auto-tuned over an electronic pulse, or laid earnest against the chords of an anonymous guitar.
It wasn’t the useful sort of inspiration you had been led to believe. Your thoughts became stupider. His hair was ridiculous. You wanted to bury yourself in it, live there forever, pretend you were underwater. There were long moments when you just stared at the shadow his collar made against his neck. Nobody even noticed.
Sometimes when he smiled, it was just for you.
-
At reunions, there are the same old stories. In the same way people say, Once upon a time, there is, Jiyong sleeps like the dead.
Once, many years ago, you had roused blearily to find the rest of Bigbang crowded into your room, halfway through a gusty rendition of Insomnia. Daesung had been rapping and occasionally kicking your bed with over-enthusiastic dancing. Seungri, beat-boxing, had struck a dramatic pose on your desk and was squashing your favourite headphones. Youngbae and Seunghyun were belting their way through the chorus in a manner that to describe as off-key would be to over-associate it’s proximity to any key whatsoever. It didn’t sound like a cat being murdered. It sounded like the whole fucking menagerie being shoved through a meat-grinder.
This is still the alarm on your phone.
-
Of course, you are not strangers meeting for the first time in a bar, hovering at the edge of surmountable distances, smiling with the possibility of Something Beautiful, or even Everything Being Okay. There is still that body of history drifting purposelessly beneath the façade. He is still angry with you, the kind of anger that dries up and no longer has anything to do but remember what it once animated, the grains it leaves behind settling into the rough edges of the soul. You are still unwilling to acknowledge to the point of being forgiven.
‘Sorry,’ you say, pushing your empty champagne glass around on the bar, giving honesty a shot, ‘I’m a bit nervous.’
‘You? Really?’ Seunghyun affects surprise. ‘Maybe you need to be drunker.’
‘That’s an idea. Nothing good ever comes from being sober.’ You signal the bartender for something stronger. ‘I should be drunk. You should pay for it.’
Seunghyun pats his suit pockets theatrically. ‘But I’m just a struggling actor. You’re the hot-shot music producer, buy your own drinks.’
‘He says, fondling his Dior,’ you quip, accepting your vodka tonic. ‘I thought you were a weathergirl?’
‘He retorts, preening in his Rodarte,’ Seunghyun dimples, ‘I’m sleeping my way up-oops, I mean, “working.”’
You were planning on pretending that this was a coincidence, but he doesn’t even ask. You don’t know if this means he doesn’t care, that he already knows, or if it hasn’t even occurred to him to wonder. You don’t even know which you want to be true.
‘I feel old,’ you say by the fifth drink. You solemnly press the cold glass against each of your burning cheeks.
‘If it helps, you still look like a teenager.’
‘Ahhh, ajusshi is just envious because he’s lost his girlish figure.’
-
The longest time you ever went without changing your hairstyle was the army.
That’s a given.
You learn things like: how the weight of a gun feels on your shoulder, somehow dangerous and insubstantial at once, how being really flexible! no really! isn't that helpful, the language of sounds that means trouble or friends or what-the-fuck-was-that-even, the proper way to fold a flag, the truest sense of anonymity you’ve ever felt, the taste of mud. On the weekends you get drunk like everyone and sing loudly in the backs of cars, like everyone.
You wake up when they tell you to.
You miss a lot of things. There is no point in missing any one thing in particular.
When you first see CL after all this, she hugs you and says, ‘How nostalgic!’, and then later, ‘No one calls me that anymore, GD.’
The shoes they gave you had pinched your toes. But you don’t talk about this anymore.
-
Seunghyun never really lost that awkwardness to be able to really give himself over to a rôle, but his face was still like that and his voice still sounded like it did so for a while there he never lacked for work.
‘He’s gotten better at acting,’ Youngbae was telling you once. There was beer. You think you were eating soft tofu. Earlier, there had been pictures of small children on his phone, their hair creeping over their ears, soft baby-dresses giving way to tight school-collars; a vacation, somewhere there was sun.
‘He’d have to,’ you had said. There wasn’t any particular bitterness to this, but Youngbae had sighed anyway.
‘I’ve been thinking about your problem, Jiyong,’ he had said, ‘It’s a lack of honest communication.’
‘I think it’s an excess of that,’ you had replied, probably less pithily, ‘and that we’re still smarting from it. But there isn’t really a problem.’
What had prompted this? You can’t remember. It might have been some birthday party: you’d been out of the country, Seunghyun had attended, or vice versa. And this was likely even before you’d started making a conscientious effort to avoid each other, so that’s something.
‘It’s awkward for the rest of us, too,’ Youngbae persisted, ‘He misses you, I can tell.’
‘Did he say that? No-? No,’ you had demanded, as Youngbae shook his head exasperatedly. ‘And it’s a mutual lack of, of missing.’
‘Look,’ you had continued, getting angrier, stabbing at your meal. Come to think of it, it must have been dakkangjung. ‘Look, I’m sick of being made out to be the bad guy, I don’t need that, that betrayed-puppy-dog crap. It was inevitable, time for it, and fucking years ago besides.’
‘Jiyong, I’m on your side, but you did make the decision unilaterally, and we were all kinda pissed at the time-’
‘But you got over it, because unlike some supposed-hyungs, you’re actually capable of being adults.’
There had been a bruised silence. ‘That isn’t fair, Jiyong.’
‘Life isn’t fair,’ you had said. ‘And I’m fucking tired of-I’m just so fucking tired.’
-
You had a plan. In it you were suave and witty and profound, in it the two of you had split your souls clean open and disembowelled everything, along with the dirt of years of resentment, to spill onto the floor between you.
But there is too much gentleness here. The elephant in the room is a skeleton already half on it’s way to becoming someone’s piano. You are unable to say any of the things you’ve been thinking all these years.
This is how his hands finds your wrists when you nearly drop your drink, how you were too drunk to pretend to be too drunk to be affected. You realise don't you Jiyong, it’s not that words became inefficient; it’s that they no longer matched the music they were written to attend.
-
Seunghyun comes back late to the dorms. This is a mistake, because you have been waiting. No, that’s not the mistake, the mistake is-
‘What’s all this,’ he says, surveying the collection of cans on the tabletop.
‘I thought it was a tragedy that Maxim brought out a coffee called T.O.P and didn’t ask you to advertise. That doesn’t even make sense, it’s your name, and that makes it practically your baby. So I thought you could pose with them, and we could take pictures and things, but you were late.’
‘Slow down,’ he says absently, picking up a can. He frowns, forehead creasing. ‘What the hell? It’s empty.’
‘You were late, hyung,’ you explain patiently.
‘There’s about ten cans here.’
‘You were really late.’
He stares at you is disbelief. You wonder if he can see you vibrating slightly. He looks tired. You should have left him some coffee. It didn’t even taste that nice. He looks tired. Sometimes when you look at proper-hardworking Seunghyun it is hard to see the goofy kid underneath. Then, you miss it. He looks tired.
‘You look tired,’ you say.
‘I wish I could say the same about you. You’re all trembly like a lit firework. I’d probably be less worried if you were smoking weed again. You know the schedule starts at five, right?’
You nod. Sleep seems unlikely. ‘Feels like insomnia-ah-ahh-ahh~,’ you sing sotto voice, swaying from side to side.
Seunghyun rubs his hand over his face, smudging his eyeliner. ‘I’m going to pin you to your bed. You sleep like the dead normally, so something will happen. If it’s not sleep, then at least you won’t go, I don’t know, shooting through the ceiling. Like a firework.’ He makes a gesture with his fingers. ‘Or…something like that.’
The hum of the fluorescent light overtakes the conversation. You are struggling to work out if he was trying to make a joke.
‘You’re really tired,’ you observe.
‘Yeah, and you’re really wired. Come on, let’s go to bed. We’ll even out somehow.’
-
These are some things you know:
Pre-packaged meat from Family Mart really is as disgusting as it looks.
The speed at which hair grows is inversely proportional to how much you hate your haircut.
You look better in pictures than real life, but in real life you still look pretty fantastic.
You have more than once admired yourself in one-way glass and other people’s hubcaps.
Old text-messages are an excellent source of blackmail.
‘Choom TOP’ will never not be funny.
If you say ‘red sun’ enough, you can hypnotise someone into punching you in the face.
One of life’s greatest pleasures is smoking at dawn, when the air is cleanest everywhere but your lungs.
The true meaning of ‘sacred’ is your dot dae.
The best way to write music is to plagiarise from so many people it’s impossible to tell.
It is possible to remember the feeling of someone’s fingertips on your wrists for years.
Regret is for those who’ve yet to discover the magic of chronic alcoholism.
Sometimes you are afraid of sleeping alone.
-
Consider the solitary salaryman as he stands in the convenience store eating kimbap and drinking beer, his tie loosened and his collar undone. He is framed in the illuminated window like a painting called If this is loneliness then we’re all here together. Or maybe, Sometimes the knowledge of the moon keeps me awake at night, which is also the name given to the flowers tied around the telegraph pole at the T-intersection and the lingering smell of incense, now that you’re trying to quit smoking.
In the winter you will go to Haeundae, Busan, to sit wrapped in a coat made of how no-one understands you and watch the waves pushing back-and-forth on the rocks like an indecisive lover. This is the way the tide pulls at us, matches us as we breathe, leaves with the expectation of return, gives us scum-marks to remember it by. So you will go to Haeundae, Busan, just to tell the carparks about borrowed umbrellas, about how guilt doesn’t taste bitter, but of your mother’s cooking instead, about how everything was passive-aggressive unless it wasn’t, about the weight of your forehead against his. You will tell it to the carpark because the sea has already heard this story so many times before-because the sea, like the moon, is billions of years old, and it already knows how it ends.
-
Seunghyun decides you are too far gone for the taxi, and takes you to his hotel room. Neither of you had come for the party, you couldn’t even remember what the fuck it was supposed to be about. There is giggling, and when you walk you bump into each other, and he feels solid and warm and there, just like a real boy.
Every other sentence begins with, Hey, remember when-?, and then, Jiyong, Jiyong, Ji and you are saying, You’re whispering too loudly, you twat, and someone says, I think I’m going to piss my brains out, but when it comes to it his hand is steady on the room key as you stumble in, so what even, the sober prick.
You rest your head on his collarbone, trying to fit against his neck, and his hands are on your belt-buckle, and now they are shaking a little and he huffs I’ve no idea what I’m doing against your hair.
You want to say, I’ve missed this, but that would be wrong. You could say, I need you, but all you wanted was for him to look you in the eyes.
-
‘I can’t believe you’re eating galbi without me,’ Seunghyun says indignantly. Through the noise of the restaurant you have pressed the phone closely to your ear. If you smile, there’s a real chance your cheek will cut off the call.
‘Hyung, you never come out with us to eat. You see what happens?’
‘Tell him I’m eating his share.’
‘Seungri says he’s eating your share,’ you oblige. The meat hisses gently as Youngbae turns it. ‘But Daesung’s having extra too, what’s that about.’
‘Hyung~ you traitor! Sorry Seunghyun-hyung! But you’d rather I have it then Seungri, right?’
‘Where are you?’ you ask casually, biting your chopsticks. At the same time a voice on the other end says, ‘What’s happening, Seunghyun-oppa?’
‘I’m-I’m with Jaejoong,’ Seunghyun says, then somewhat distantly, ‘My dongsaengs are mutinying.’
‘Had a sex-change, has he?’ You pinch the mobile between your ear and shoulder as you tear up the lettuce.
‘Jaejoong, and friends,’ he explains. Jaejoong’s voice comes through tinnily, ‘Ah, it’s the jealous wife.’
You ignore this. ‘When you finish shooting, you should come to the studio, it’s been too long. And your mother-in-law misses you.’
‘Who?’ laughs Seunghyun, proof that dimples really can be transmitted over phones.
‘Oi, that better not mean me,’ Youngbae warns, prompting Daesung to faux-whisper loudly: ‘He admits it!’
There’s a rustling at the other end of the line, a car horn-then his voice, clearer.
‘So lonely without me?’ he asks.
-
You were the first to leave the band.
The truth is it was always more important for Seunghyun than any of the others. You knew this, everybody did. But there was the palpable sense of everyone splintering away, as the force of the band’s success pulsed and pushed everyone out further into their own solo destinations. This is the meaning of the big bang, after all, and how everything is born dying.
But here is the importance of ambition. It’s one thing to like to perform, it's one thing to be satisfied with this or the other; it’s another to have music multiplying like cancer beneath your skin. It’s another thing entirely to be constantly scratching at the walls to get to the stars painted on the ceiling.
-
This was earlier, at about drink number nine, which had tasted of apples and hand-sanitiser. He had said, ‘Do you remember when we’d sneak up onto the roof to smoke in the mornings?’
(cigarette butts hidden under flowerpots, drawing smoke deep into lungs, waiting for the leaden feel of nicotine to settle in your veins, a shared fag and the dampness of the filter against your mouth)
‘Back then you were awake before anyone,’ he had said, but you weren’t listening. You had been caught instead, in the space between his neck and collar, the subtle seduction of the single undone button.
He had said, ‘Back then, I really-’
-
First, you just lost contact for longer periods. When you met in groups you chatted as much as ever but nothing was ever really said. Eventually, the nicknames and in-jokes died away, and you stopped being able to tell what he was thinking just by looking at his eyebrows.
And then, at some point, you no longer even touched.
-
A different argument today. About what isn’t important-no. It’s important but we’re not ready to talk about it. We’re back to a time when his hair is black and short at the sides, but it falls into his eyes at the front. When Seunghyun is upset, he doesn’t even have the decency to put a proper face on it, just looks so tragic and vulnerable as if he’s the first person to be hurt ever. He’s just too damn sensitive. It’s one more dinner of watching him pout moodily into his rice, and you’ve had about enough.
‘I can’t believe you’re still acting like this. I’ve been in the studio all week, and you’re still- jesus. It’s not cute.’
‘Sorry, I forgot what a tragedy your life was. They should make an episode of Human Theatre about it- “how my life of talent and privilege undermines my credibility as a hip-hop artist but I still manage to make millions.” A real tear-jerker.’
‘Oh, fuck you,’ you snap, ‘I’m not apologising for trying to actually develop as an artist. What even is the difference between “T.O.P” and “Tempo,” apart from the size of your fucking waistband?’
There’s an audible gasp from the other members, who had been pretending not to hear. You can’t, you just can’t-right now, like this, you hate every last one of them.
‘That,’ Seunghyun hisses, ‘that’s fucking low.’
The best use of anger is to block out guilt. ‘Yeah?’ you say. ‘Well at least now, you’ve an actual reason to be upset. Hey, you only started a week early.’
-
Understand. This is not an apology. This is not the way forgiveness slips though our lives. Instead, your fingers trying to twist through his shirt, fumbling for skin; his mouth, biting into yours. Instead, the shift of muscles, the hardness of bone, his teeth scraping down your chest like he could bite through to your soul. As the walls slur into the carpet and into the bed, you search his body for something familiar, but Jiyong, there is nothing for you to recognise.
You see, sometimes we fall back into the ghosts we leave behind in the grooves of other people’s lives. In this way, you and he are only here because you are walking in the footsteps of your past selves, slipping into their feelings, drawing them around you like they’ll protect you from what you’ve each become. In this way, the shadows of his eyelashes, the small little broken noises he makes, the strange, heart-breaking softness of the skin under his jaw, are just echoes bleeding through the cracks of your memories.
You should have done this before, back when it could have meant something. Years later it is only this: the two of you moving against each other, scrabbling for purpose on each other’s skin, pressing against each other, pushing into each other, trying to love each other, until you are both exhausted with it.
-
Once more: he is raising his arm and bringing the whisky to his mouth, putting his lips to the rim and letting it all burn through him. You are halfway across the room, watching his reflection in the glass and you are exhaling.
He is raising his arm, the ice cubes moving silently against each other then to fall to touch his upper lip. The reflection is blurred, you cannot see closely enough to make out the shape of each familiar finger curled around his drink, to see which ring you might not have met before. An old breath is leaving your lungs.
He is raising his arm and you are faced away and watching him in the glass and you cannot see clearly the dial of his watch as it ticks time going backwards.
He is raising his arm. You are not breathing.
-
Later you will sit down in front of your laptop and you will write a song, and when you are finished, the sun will be leaking through the window and everything will be over. Then you will go to sleep.
But this is much, much later.
-
Sunlight on dust motes, long shadows of window mullions wobbling across the bones on his feet. Hotel sheets stained from a night of sentimentality on the rocks, please, and make it a double. Try scraping some of your memories up. They always seem to settle like dregs in the back of your skull.
You’ve got to do something, otherwise he’s going to turn to you and say something like Jiyong, it’s like going to Disneyland when you’re forty-six. Everywhere, lovers are breaking up, but you don’t even have the courtesy of the title. Okay, so fucking doesn’t solve everything like it does in the movies. You do not have a magical, past-erasing, problem-solving penis.
Einstein says time is relative, but who could run away fast enough to make a moment last? As a bullet burrows into the brain of a condemned man, neurons firing in his dying brain spin out the memories of an entire life like water rushing down a drain. When Seunghyun turns to you and begins, Jiyong, try it -
Close your eyes. Something is dying here too, after all. You can take that moment: the shape of his bare feet against the carpet, the smell of his shower cutting through the sweat of an unopened room, his voice saying, Jiyong. Jiyong, like it was something he owned. Jiyong, like there is a universe somewhere in which he has not just scrubbed all traces of you from his body, where the collar of his shirt does not conceal the lingering evidence of your desperation.
There must be a universe somewhere that Seunghyun does not put on his shoes and leave.
Otherwise, the tangled fragments in your chest, the brittle residue of ghosts searching for their imagined histories. Otherwise, your heart, swallowed-and you, waiting for him to spit it up.