Death Switch | KTH ✓

Cinq.

When in the confines of my deserted house, lonely and unutterably bored by the voices inside my head that remained as my only friend, talking to me even at times I desired it to shut up and leave me alone, belonely with the hollowness, the emptiness that would suffice my restless heart who, even after the great joy of receiving a scholarship did not feel much better than before.

Perhaps, I had thought that my heart wasn't wounded, I had thought it didn't bleed, but it had scars, scars that were never going to heal for they remain with you as an awful memory.

So when this friend, cruel, terrible friend, living in the space inside my head, couldn't be reined over, I gave up, like I always did, and instead opted for several other methods to block it out, one of which turned out to be fruitful and that was, whiling away the hours in my backyard.

I remember the day when the sun rose above the horizon, bright and dazzling like a yellow yolk pouring on the large canopy of the endless sky, the freshness of the morning air, I had filled my lungs with, were seeming as if the break of dawn was greeting me.

The day seemed very queer, I had known it was going to be, and when Mr. Chaebin called me, a hesitation in his voice, a slight flicker as though not wanting to ask me something but then he spoke, "can you do the work for Jaemin today? He's on sick leave."

When my mind was contemplating, he added, "I will pay you extra for your work." Thus, I had agreed.

The ding-ding sound of my bicycle bell, pouring in the air of unrhythmic honking of vehicles, I had veered on the cemented pathways towards my destination, the area new to my knowledge. When I had been hastily climbing up the stairs of the two-story building where I was deemed to deliver the newspaper in one of the apartments, I saw myself.

Those couple of stairs had swept the ground beneath my foot, ingrained the memory of what I saw in my head with a driller, and pushed me to the doorsteps of my unfamiliar home.

It was her, for the first time I met Soa, before whom my footsteps had faltered, suddenly feeling as if heavy rocks had been stuffed inside my sneakers, making me unable to move from that place.

It wasn't the door I was supposed to deliver the paper to–that apartment had been above this one which meant I had to climb more sets of stairs but my feet had been unwilling to move, refusing to obey my command and so was my brain because what I had seen tugged the loose strings of my heart painfully.

Soa had been slouched against the closed door of her house, weeping with her legs pulled up to her chest, her dark hair open, cascading around her arms.

I remember asking her in my softest tone, "Are you alright?" because then it had twisted something inside her as her head had snapped up, red nose and bloodshot eyes looking at me in unimaginable horror before she dashed inside her apartment, slamming the door shut.

That was our first encounter but I'm certain Soa didn't remember, for her our first encounter was when I had saved her.