(no subject)
Mistaken Identity || jiyong/taeyang ||
Dong Youngbae (Taeyang) was brilliant. And maybe Jiyong could appreciate that, if from afar.
You’re beautiful because you’re classically trained.
Jiyong swirls the alcohol of his life in time with the soft tink, tink, tink of the piano trickling down from the upstairs-apartment. He mutes the television and rolls his head back against the cushion of his lounge. The music washes over him in perfect, lilting notes and he wishes he could sing along.
The tune is soft and beautiful and choppy, broken, unfinished.
Jiyong imagines the boy upstairs, sitting at his piano; his fingers muddied with ink as he adds a note here and changes a note there. Try again, better.
The piece rises to its crescendo, halts, falls back down to the deep, thundering of a bass. Rises again, halts, rises again, wrong.
Jiyong takes another sip, the alcohol turning to poison as it burns down his throat. The music starts again, a faster tune, happier. Jiyong’s reminded of the sun and the sky and the birds in the fucking trees.
The boy upstairs; Dong Youngbae is the name his bills are addressed to (their house-numbers are often confused, Kwon Jiyong and Dong Youngbae mixed together in a collection of overdue electricity bills and pamphlets advertising a new gym,) but his friends call him Taeyang (one Thursday evening a boy had knocked on his door to ask Jiyong if he had any soya Taeyang (Youngbae) could borrow for his stir-fry? Jiyong didn’t, but he remembered the skinny waist and cute-eyes of the boy and the name on his lips.)
Youngbae (Taeyang) was brilliant. And maybe Jiyong could appreciate that, if from afar.
They lived in the same apartment block but their lives were a galaxy apart. Taeyang (Youngbae) worked part-time at an organic milkshake bar and was doing an Arts degree at university, majoring in history; he wanted to become a teacher.
Jiyong worked three hours a week packing boxes at the docking yards two hours out-of-town because he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew the bosses daughter. Jiyong drinks alcohol in excess and smokes cigarettes ‘cause they keep his fingers busy.
Taeyang grows his own vegetables and goes for morning jogs.
Jiyong hates the sun.
The music picks up again and Jiyong switches the television off. The wooden twing, twang of an acoustic guitar twirls its way through the melody of the piano keys and Jiyong’s glass is empty. The younger boy had arrived; that explained the pause.
The younger boy is small and cute and waves at Jiyong whenever he sees him. He wears glasses and gives Youngbae kisses on the cheek in greeting.
Jiyong’s heart tells him boyfriend, his head reasons brother. They look nothing alike and yet, they seem to make up the pair and Jiyong tells himself he hasn’t a fucking chance, alright?
Their music is nothing and everything all at once; notes and chords stringed together with laughs and years of friendship. Jiyong imagines them; smiling at one another, eating the dinner Taeyang prepared for them, being in love and all that.
They were content with their life and their music showed that.
Jiyong was content with day-time soap-operas and last-nights take-away sometimes. Mostly he wasn’t and this almost made him sick.
The music stops at a quarter to eleven that night and Jiyong wonders if the younger boy has an as early start as Youngbae. He wonders if he’ll sleep over, if they’ll share the same bed, if they’ll curl around each other and exchange whispers through kisses. He wonders if he’ll be able to hear them fuck. He wonders what the boy will look like spread out under Taeyang’s strong arms.
He closes his eyes and pretends to himself that he’s fallen asleep. He pretends to himself and the world that he’s not trying to listen.
He sleeps and he dreams.
(Dong (Taeyang) Youngbae) and the (other).
He doesn’t know whether the throb of his headache the following morning is due to the alcohol, the dream, the fuck-up his life has become, or a mix of all three.
He smokes a cigarette out his bathroom window and flicks his butt down into the street, watching as it falls with the wind and with the gravity.
-------
You’re beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not a marketing campaign.
“Good morning.”
Jiyong raises his gaze from the cracks in the footpath beneath his feet. Taeyang is waving at him, his bag swung over his shoulder and text-book held under his arm.
“Nice day, isn’t it?”
Jiyong doesn’t think it’s a nice day, he thinks it’s a rainy, grey winter’s day. He thinks the puddles have seeped through the holes of his shoes and soaked his socks. He thinks he’d rather be in bed. “Sure.”
Taeyang smiles in return and nods his head in farewell as he heads down the road. Jiyong imagines the clouds breaking and the sun peering through, he imagines a rainbow. He imagines seeing the world the way Taeyang saw the world.
A crack of thunder rolls through the sky and he curses under his breath as he hurries up the stairs to his apartment. His socks cling between his toes and he thinks maybe he should have said bye.
The first time Jiyong saw Taeyang he didn’t really see him. He saw a guy fumbling with keys as he struggled to keep his shopping in his arms. He saw a guy hop on one leg as he tried to shove a resisting key into a resisting lock. He saw a guy that looked at Jiyong over his shoulders and rolled his eyes and laughed.
It didn’t take Jiyong very long to become interested (infatuated). Taeyang was everything everyone wanted to be. He was kind where he didn’t need to be kind, he was thoughtful where most couldn’t care less.
He gave his sugar and his salt and his soya to all his neighbours that asked, whenever they asked, and Jiyong wondered if they ever gave back.
Jiyong wasn’t nice. Jiyong grew up with a missing-dad and an all but missing-mum. Jiyong cared about himself because that’s how he learnt to survive. He didn’t help people pick up their dropped belongings, he didn’t hesitate to shove his way onto trains, and he didn’t tip waiters with what little cash he had.
They were opposites and this made Jiyong feels so alone.
It was three days later and Jiyong was late for work, he tripped his way down the stairs as he tugged the sleeves of his jumpers up his arms.
“Shit.”
The younger boy had tripped over a step, his bag falling to his side as his arms moved to break his fall.
Jiyong was so, so late. Fuck.
“Are you alright?”
He crouches by the boy, placing a hand on his shoulder. The other looks up with a start, his eyes wide. Jiyong sees recognition and he doesn’t know what that means.
“Oh,” the boy replies. “You scared me.”
He was really all kinds of gorgeous and Jiyong doesn’t move his hand.
“You fell.”
“Yes, stupid feet,” the other laughs. “Thanks for helping me.”
Jiyong stands, offering his hand to the boy.
“You’re Taeyang’s neighbour, right? I’m Seungri.”
Seungri. “Seungri? As in victory.”
Seungri laughs. “As in victory. My real name’s Seunghyun, Lee Seunghyun. Everyone calls me Seungri.”
“Jiyong.”
“Nice to meet you, Jiyong. I’ve been meaning to introduce myself to you for a while now, you’re a hard man to corner though, you know that?”
“Sorry.”
Seungri (Seunghyun) bites his lip with a smile. “You don’t have to apologise.”
The boy glances down to his feet with a quick nod of his head and Jiyong thinks that if they’re boyfriends at least Taeyang (Youngbae) made a good choice; Seungri (Seunghyun) was perfect. “Are you alright now?”
“I am, thank you.”
Jiyong smiles; Jiyong attempts to smile. Seungri (Lee Seunghyun) laughs. “You should come over sometime, we’ll cook you dinner; you’re entirely too thin.”
Seungri continues his way upstairs and Jiyong wonders if he has his own key and if Taeyang had given it to him on their one year anniversary together and if Seungri cried in happiness. He’s so, so late. Fuck.
Jiyong doesn’t go to work, he doesn’t answer the buzz of his phone with his bosses name flashing and he drinks black coffee until the sun sets instead; watching the teenagers and their colourful clothes and careless lives. He forgets that he’s only twenty-one himself. He forgets that it’s raining and that he’s left his umbrella at home again. He forgets that he doesn’t own an umbrella.
He doesn’t forget Seungri’s laugh and he doesn’t forget Seungri making his way up the stairs to Taeyang’s apartment.
------
You’re beautiful because you prefer home-made soup to the packet stuff.
The electricity cuts out half way through a thunderstorm and at a quarter to seven on a Tuesday evening. Jiyong curses and curses and can’t order take-out and has one rotten mandarin in his fridge and is starving. Jiyong curses, he curses.
There’s a knock at his door and he considers jumping out his second-floor window.
He unlocks the front-door and peers out into the darkness. Seungri is smiling at him in the shine of a flash-light. Jiyong thinks that perhaps he’s had too much to drink and this is all some kind of messed-up dream.
“Hi, Jiyong. We were wondering if you’d like to come to dinner. I’m scared of the dark and Taeyang’s trying to find candles; do you want to come and keep me company?”
Jiyong really doesn’t.
“Sure.”
Jiyong follows Seungri up the stairs and isn’t mesmerised by the sway of his hips and the skip of his walk as he takes steps one, two, three at a time. He isn’t, he isn’t. He wonders when he started lying to himself and why.
Taeyang’s house is a home. Taeyang’s house has plush lounges and burgundy curtains and soft carpet. Taeyang’s home is warm where Jiyong’s house is dead.
“Tae’s this way, we should probably say hello before we drink all his wine.”
Jiyong thinks that maybe he’ll be able to say hello after he’s drunken all the wine.
Taeyang is in the kitchen, haloed in the fire of candles that light the room. Jiyong thinks that maybe he should jump out of Taeyang’s third-floor window and save himself the pain.
Taeyang smiles. “Evening, Jiyong.”
He briefly wonders why he bothered waking up at all. “Hi.”
“What’s for dinner?” Seungri smiles as he pulls himself onto the kitchen bench, his legs swinging as his fingers fiddle with a thin, purple candle. “I’m so hungry.”
Taeyang brushes past the boy; a hand against his knee. “You’re always hungry,” he laughs. “Growing boys, right?”
Jiyong doesn’t answer and he thinks maybe Taeyang should find him ugly. I’m ugly because.
Jiyong’s lived off pre-packaged food substitute for near twenty-years of his life and Taeyang cooks something with herbs and spices and Jiyong thinks he may very well die a happy man at this moment. I’m ugly because you’re beautiful and I can’t be.
“So, Ji,” Seungri says around a mouthful, slipping so easily into nicknames and friendship. “What do you do with yourself every day?”
Ji (Jiyong) answers. “Not much, you know. Bit of this, bit of that.”
Seungri pouts. “That’s not an answer.”
Jiyong maybe smiles. “Sometimes I spit at school-kids ‘cause they don’t do anything back. Sometimes I catch trains to places I don’t know to be able to get lost and sleep in internet-cafes. Sometimes I swim in rivers until old-ladies throw stuff at me to get out. You know, stuff.”
Jiyong meets Seungri’s gaze; can feel Taeyang’s eyes on him. The pause breaks through their slow conversation and Jiyong hates that he’s screwed things up again.
“You better not have ever spat at me, you bum,” Seungri mock-frowns before giggling, his hand wrapping around his glass as he pokes Jiyong in the shoulder repeatedly; breaking through the silence and the awkwardness with a one simple smile. “I’d totally beat your ass for that.”
“Sure you would, baby,” Jiyong responds, thinking this nice and lovely and very, very fragile.
“I would! I’m very strong.”
Taeyang laughs. “You’re afraid of the dark. And spiders.”
“Why are you all picking on me? Aren’t you supposed to be nice to your maknae?”
Taeyang laughs harder and Jiyong hesitates a moment before joining him. Seungri smiles around his pursed lips; hiding his laughter behind his pretends.
It’s strange.
It’s strange in that way that makes Jiyong’s heart thunder and his cheeks flush. It’s strange in that way that alcohol tastes better drunk with friends. It’s strange in that way that Jiyong maybe never wanted to go home and this is what he was most scared about.
It’s strange the way Seungri kneels on both knees and curves his back to wrap his arms around Taeyang’s neck to kiss him goodnight.
It’s strange the way Seungri crawls over to Jiyong, all drunken lines and swinging hips, and kisses him on the other cheek.
It not strange the way he grins, or the way he makes his way into Taeyang’s room already stripping the clothes from his body.
It’s not strange the way both Jiyong and Taeyang watch him leave with hooded-eyes.
“Lee Seunghyun. Bloody hell,” Taeyang says with a laugh.
“He’s really something different?”
“When I met him he was spread across the bonnet of his principal’s car, watching the clouds. I asked him what he was doing, he said he was educating.”
“You went to the same school?”
Taeyang smiles. “No, I was taking an apprenticeship-type thing. For my course. I visited his school.”
“And you kinda hit it off?”
“It’s pretty impossible not to hit it off with him.”
Jiyong nods. “I figured that out for myself.”
“So what about yourself, Jiyong? Is that your real name?”
“Kwon Jiyong, yeah.”
“What do you really do all day?”
“What I told Seungri, I don’t do anything. I’m boring, I’m bored.”
“Why?”
“Because I failed-out of school, because I smoked a lot of drugs when I was younger, because I’m waiting to die? I don’t know why.” Jiyong hates having to explain his life, he hates having to explain the empty fridge and the overdue rent-notices and the deep, deep bags under his eyes. He hates having to explain his addiction to getting drunk and watching the sun rise from the roof of his apartment block. He hates having to explain his disgusting, pathetic, ugly lifestyle to those with more than everything.
“If you’re so bored why don’t you do something?”
“I like excuses.”
“Excuses waste away your life.”
Jiyong hated Taeyang’s sunny, peachy-fine attitude. “Maybe that’s the idea.” Why was he being an asshole. “Not everyone has their five-year plan down.”
“Everyone has dreams.”
“I had a dream of you and Seungri fucking last night. Does that count?”
Jiyong blamed the alcohol.
“Seungri’s been sweet on a boy in his maths class for over a year now and I see him as nothing more than a best-friend. We met, we had the same passions, but it would never have worked because we were too the same and we wanted too different.”
“I’m sorry I said that, it was rude.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
They were awkward again and Jiyong blamed Kwon Jiyong and his messed-up little view of the messed-up little world. “Maybe I should go.”
Jiyong was ugly and he didn’t pretend to think he wasn’t. Ugly.
--------
You’re beautiful because you don’t see love as a competition and you know how to lose.
Jiyong spends the next week in a daze of herbal-tea and lemon-sorbet. He spends the days laughing at his face in the mirror and the nights awake, awake, awake and he thinks his life is so nothing that it’s everything. I am Jiyong, he tells himself, I am Kwon Jiyong and if I die, no-one would notice.
He doesn’t know what to do with this fact.
It’s early on a Tuesday morning and how Jiyong comes to meet Choi Seunghyun and Kang Daesung begins with an envelope pushed under his door.
JI-HYUNG!
We’re having a party on Saturday and we want you to come. Remember, I know where you live. Okay? Okay.
Love you, Tae and Ri xx
He folds the letter, places it back in the envelope and runs his thumb along the crease before pulling it out to read again. His eyes tracing the letters of what he imagines to be Seungri’s tidy handwriting. He want to go, he wants to go. But Taeyang will be there with his perfect teeth and his perfect eyes and his perfect judgement.
Taeyang will be there and this makes Jiyong see stars.
Jiyong sleeps on the idea with his eyes open and at three in the morning stumbles his path through the dark to the twenty-four hour grocery store on the corner. He picks up this and he picks up that and he tries to remember his way back to third-grade cooking class.
He remembers flour and yeast and sugar and his pretty teacher and icing sugar and that boy with the crazy eyebrows and he remembers rainbow sprinkles.
It’s Saturday and Jiyong is staring at his wonky cup-cakes through a blur. His kitchen has turned to shit and his oven is still smoking and the colour of the icing isn’t right. The cupcakes are horrendously wrong and Jiyong thinks this says everything about everything about his life.
“I made cup-cakes. I didn’t know what we were celebrating. They’re not organic or shit.”
Seungri laughs and laughs and laughs and the tears in his eyes aren’t from his giggles. “Jiyong, I love you so much.”
Choi Seunghyun (t.o.p) insults Jiyong’s cup-cakes within an inch of their lives and then eats five. He pats Jiyong on the shoulder, calls his hair stupid and compliments him on his taste in music. His eyes light up when he mentions this rap and that mix and he claps his hands when Jiyong doesn’t ask who? He bitches on his girlfriend but then excuses himself a moment later when his phone rings her tune. He steals Jiyong’s belt and scrawls his phone number on Jiyong’s front door in chalk. Jiyong doesn’t believe in angels, but he comes close.
Kang Daesung (Daesung) smiles so wide Jiyong’s heart breaks and he doesn’t know how to explain this. Daesung drinks himself into intoxication and tells the street below that he hates this fucking city. He curls himself against Seunghyun’s side and moans about a broken hearts and a mending minds and Jiyong finds himself moaning alongside him. They don’t know each other but Daesung says they should.
Jiyong’s pouring himself a drink when Seungri corners him in the kitchen with a smile that breaks skin and Jiyong doesn’t know what he’s done. “Did you and Taeyang fight?”
“What?”
“You haven’t looked at him all evening and he can’t stop watching you. What happened?”
“Seungri, leave it alone.”
“He’s my best friend, Jiyong, and I want to know what went wrong. He really likes you.”
“I went wrong. I fucked-up like I always do. Is that what you want to hear?”
“If it’s true.”
“Stop being a bitch.”
Seungri grins and it’s disgusting. “If I can’t be a bitch what else do I have left, Ji? Do you know me? Do you know the first thing about me? Do you know that I fell in love with Taeyang the first time he smiled at me but that he already had his eyes on someone else? Do you know that I sucked his cock in the back-seat of his car ‘cause I thought that would make him like me back? Do you know that he wiped my lips and told me sorry, Ri, but I really, really like him? Do you know that? Do you know how filthy that made me feel?”
“I thought-”
“You thought there was a boy in my math class?” Seungri laughs and the world freezes. “I’m a brilliant liar, Jiyong. He could have had me any way he wanted. I would have done anything for him. But he wouldn’t use me, I wanted him to, but he wouldn’t. Because he was so in love with his god-damned, fucking neighbour to ever want me.”
Jiyong’s life explodes in a flash of green and yellow and Seungri’s eyelashes flutter with tears.
“He loves you so don’t tell me I’m a bitch for trying to help him with that.”
“Seungri-”
“You’re sorry, I’m pathetic. Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that if something’s fucked-up then I have to fix it because if I can’t make it better for him what use am I?”
Jiyong’s never been able to handle his own tears; he hasn’t a clue what to do with someone else’s.
“I have to make him happy,” Seungri’s voice cracks and Jiyong stands eight steps away, a mile away. The silence is like thunder in the dark and Jiyong can’t see. Taeyang shadows the doorway and Jiyong can’t move.
“What happened?”
Taeyang has an arm around Seungri’s shoulder and Jiyong is standing a mile away in another galaxy, another fucking time-zone. “Lee Seunghyun happened,” Seungri smiles through his heartbreak and Jiyong can’t breathe past the scars of his throat.
“What happened, Jiyong?”
Taeyang is staring at him and Jiyong can’t breathe.
--------
You’re beautiful because of a single buttercup in the top buttonhole of your cardigan.
“Hi, Jiyong,” Seungri smiles a soft smile of broken dreams and shattered bones. “I’m sorry about last night. You could have stayed. I’m expert at hiding my feelings; I would’ve been fine in a minute.”
“You shouldn’t have to be fine, Seungri.”
Seungri laughs gently. “Of course I do, Ji. What’s the point in mourning him?” He pauses a second, his fingers fiddling with the fabric of his pockets. “I’m used to it now. It’s easy.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
The pain on Seungri’s face tears at Jiyong’s veins.
“How would I do that? I can’t breathe when I’m not with him, Jiyong. He’s- he’s been the only consistently good thing in my life; how could I leave that? I love him so ridiculously much but him happy is the only thing I want.”
“At your own pain?”
“His happiness muffles my pain,” Seungri smiles again. “You should have seen him talking about you. It was always you this, you that. When he finally learnt your name he shone so bright. Like the sun and the moon and the stars. You make him brilliant, Jiyong, and I want that for him.”
“Seungri, I can’t-”
“I know you like him. I know.”
“That doesn’t matter, you’re my friend.”
The word is square on Jiyong’s tongue and his heart races against the cage of his chest.
“And I’ll love you whether or not you love Taeyang.”
“Seungri.”
“He’s impossible to hate, he’s impossible not to love.”
Jiyong’s breath whispers past his lips. “I know.”
Seungri’s smile is bright, the tears in his eyes are brighter and Jiyong feels dirty with the mud Seungri tries to paint over his breaking heart; his mended, broken heart.
“I-I’ve got to go, Jiyong-hyung. I’ll see you around, and you should talk to Youngbae, you-you really should.”
Jiyong watches as Seungri continues along the sidewalk, his head bent as he steps over cracks and splits and lines in the concrete. He watches as Seungri leaves and he has never felt more dead.
He sits on the front step of his apartment block and he wonders what he’s waiting for. The sun is fire against his neck and he wonders why nothing is ever as simple as he wants it to be. He wonders why he had to rent this apartment on this road in this city and meet Dong Youngbae (Taeyang) and Lee Seunghyun (Seungri) and everything that came with their rollercoaster lives of ups and downs and upside-downs.
He wonders where he’d be if he had more money or a prettier face or a better voice. He wonders where Taeyang and Seungri would be if he’d never destroyed their five-year plans.
“What are you doing out here all alone?”
Taeyang sits beside him, his eyes focused on the glare of the street-lamp across the road. He has bags of shopping in his hands and Jiyong doesn’t breathe.
“Thinking.”
Taeyang laughs softly. “Am I allowed to ask about what?”
“About Seungri and about you and about how everything’s all messed-up.”
“Seungri wouldn’t tell me what happened last night,” Taeyang whispers. “He always tells me what’s wrong; I don’t- I don’t know what I did.”
“It’s less what you did and more who I am.”
Taeyang’s head turns and Jiyong can feel the burn of his gaze, he lowers his head to the darkened footpath.
“What does that mean?”
Jiyong pauses and his eyes catch on the sunlight yellow of a bouquet of flowers Taeyang has tucked into one of his paper bags. “It means I really like you and Seungri had to tell me that for me to accept it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m slow? Because I’m scared?”
Because you’re so, so perfect and I’m not?
“Did Seungri tell you how I feel?” Taeyang whispers and his words lose themselves in the light chill of a night-time breeze.
“I’d like to hear it from your lips.” Your lips, Jiyong thinks through a haze of what ifs and why nots.
“The first time I saw you, you were eating sweets out of your window and you kept throwing the yellow ones onto the road and I thought I could love you ‘cause I hate those yellow ones as well. The second time I saw you, you were wearing mismatched shoes and I thought I could love you ‘cause sometimes I can’t choose which pair I want to wear in the morning and sometimes I think about wearing one of each as well. The third time I saw you, you were reciting poetry to the moon and the stars, you weren’t drunk and I thought that I could love you ‘cause I can never write the words I want to say the music I write but I think you could.”
Jiyong is silent and all he can hear is silence. Taeyang laughs.
“You’re supposed to say something now.”
Taeyang’s blush is golden and Jiyong has never felt more alive.
“The first time I saw you, you were perfect and I was so, so ugly.”
-------
I’m ugly.
“You can’t wear that,” Seungri laughs and Jiyong doesn’t know what’s happening.
“Why not?”
“It’s your first date, you can’t show up in a pair of dirty jeans. God help me.”
“Taeyang’s not going to dress up.”
“Taeyang always dresses up.”
Jiyong pauses. “What’s wrong with my jeans?”
“They’re fucking ugly.”
Jiyong stares at himself in the mirror, he stares at his messy haircut and odd ear-rings and crisp, new shirt and dirty jeans. He stares at himself and he stares at Seungri laughing over his shoulder. He stares and he stares and he thinks that maybe he doesn’t want to hit himself anymore.
He’s ugly, he’s ugly but Dong Youngbae (Taeyang) is so beautiful that he doesn’t mind.
And Kwon Jiyong (Ji-hyung) thinks that’s mostly alright.
for bluemonkiesx
poem by Simon Armitage