Hung Up On The Stars • ChenJi

fifteen

Jisung wakes up confused with the fiction of life that has been depleted in the hole dug by himself. He doesn't have a bad dream that night or any recollection of having it. He looked at the palms, pale and perhaps swollen, except feeling the joy of having something in life. The empty feeling of not feeling anything somehow induced the feeling of not being wanted by anyone or himself.

He looks at the water that leaks through the gashes between his fingers akin to the people he lost in the discourse due to the loopholes in his personality and absence of hope for success in the story of life.

The figure of Hina crying, Jaemin abandoning him, his mentally absent father, and his mother in front of him revives with a new ferocity affecting his peace of mind. The virtue of fortune is lost with the uncertainty and unfortunate events which vanished the possibility of prosperity.

He looks at himself in the mirror with a sore expression and the meaningless, dense idea of getting through the day that sinks into his compartments of the brain which was like a hollow hole that can't even be looked deeply into. He tries to focus his orifices into the hole with a lack of hope only to get satisfied with the testimony of not finding anything but a vacuum to look into, nothing beyond or below that.

Just empty. Nothing more. Nothing less.

He bathed with the coldest water compelling his body to react towards the pain. And he does. He cries, he cries for what he thinks is less than an hour trying to make his skin feel more fleshy and alive.

He doesn't understand why he feels so restless and wanting to fight somebody or the inner feelings. He doesn't understand why he likes to wound himself so much, doesn't understand why he is both the culprit and victim of his own suffering.

All he knows is that life is very difficult.

He doesn't want to complain yet in the hope of things getting worse, in the meaningless positivity that tells him that, "at least he is happier than what he can be later on."

He isn't sure of tomorrow because of the fear of today.

The food in his container doesn't taste good anymore, the steak reminding of how much of a loser he is and the things he has lost that probably weren't even his own.

But he needs somebody, somebody that can save him from himself.

As he sits on the dining table watching his father working, sitting on the couch, typing the necessities on his laptop and talking something about the NYC project that Jisung would not be bothered about.

He realizes that he isn't bothered about his dad as much as his dad isn't, about him.

Yet, he is angry.

He finds his mother chopping the chilies looking directly at his blank expression and Jisung doesn't even register her voice when she calls him.

"Jisung."

He feels her presence later beside him as she nudges her shoulder beside him.

"What?" He asks.

"Did you eat?"

"Yes I ate."

And then Jisung doesn't remember what he ate.

Instead, he remembers the times when he ignored his friends' texts and the times when he really wanted to try the tobacco cigarette in the shop he went to, the day before. He remembers the kids smiling and laughing excitedly when the stuffed the white powder inside their nerves bubbling up their happiness, which he knows is too temporary and last only till the bubble attains the maximum diameter of the strata they can explore. And then it explodes.