LOSE MY BREATH

LMB 38

38: Tacenda.

A year in one place didn’t necessarily make it your home, but Jisung couldn’t help feeling that way as his gaze got stuck on things a little bit longer as the day for leaving got closer.

The way up the mountain was rocky and made entirely of places where Jisung had at one point stumbled and gotten caught by Minho’s watchful hands. The tree he had crashed into while flying the first time was visible from the path.

He would never get to fly again, he realised. He would never get to use his golden core.

The wall of discipline still held only three thousand rules, although Old Man Jinyoung had tried to put more on it. Jisung thought about adding his own rules. In any case-- Minho had in no uncertain terms made it clear-- he would personally go hack the new rules off of the rock if they appeared there, so they hadn’t.

The wall where they first met with Minho was only a wall in the daylight, but Jisung’s breath caught staring at it. Chan had talked about assigning meaning to things that the first time the ‘fated meeting’ had been explained to him, and now he could not help looking at the wall and wishing meaning on it.

That’s where I met him, he thought desperately.  That place is forever the place where I met him.

But it was only a wall, built in the style of a dynasty Jisung didn’t know the name of, and he’d leave the Geumgangsan soon.

He looked for a sign that he should stay in the cold spring and the main hall and the cat meadow, eyes scanning for a message that wasn’t just his own selfish wishes about it. He wanted the universe to jump in again, and make the decision for him.

Minho’s house had been the worst offender at first, but after a year it was undeniably a home for them both. Minho’s white robes only took half of the space in the closet. Jisung’s notes on his side of the table were disorganised, spilling to Minho’s side. There were two kinds of tea in the cabinet, one strong and the other mild.

That was the corner where Minho had meditated obsessively when Jisung first came here and got badly on his nerves by sitting on his lap or talking endlessly. There, by the porch, was the cut on the floorboard that Jisung made when attempting to demonstrate his juggling skills with chopsticks and then accidentally used spiritual powers with it.

He looked at the doorway opening to the yard, the lush greenery all around. Nothing was cramped. Nothing felt like the ‘too much’ of his apartment in Seoul.

They’d played music on that porch so many times. The song that Minho had made. The one that was about yearning.

And Minho –

Jisung could not look at him. Could not look at him when every passing day those eyes turned a little more expressionless, the man closing off before his eyes. It was like neither of them could spend these last days apart, yet when they were together it felt excruciating.

It was strange to imagine what his life had been before Minho. Before there had been someone always there, giving him looks of exasperation and indulging him in the silliest of things.

He thought about the day just before he’d come here, how he’d been up for more than eighteen hours, going out to pick up more energy drinks to somehow manage to finish his degree. How that didn’t feel like a real thing anymore.

A business degree. The world he was returning to cared about business degrees.

He’d been relieved, he recalled. Just a little bit. For not having to go back to that, just for a while.

Here, there has been breathing space. And Minho.

Now the man was sitting there with him on the porch again, listening to the rain clinking against the roof. It was very green here. Much greener than anywhere he’d ever been before.