These Lonely Nights (Hwang Hyunjin)

VIII. But something about him ... well, I'm sure you know.

I am avoiding everyone who cares about me.

I don't have the energy to lie to myself and say I'm just tired or processing, because I'm not. There is nothing left to process; I am instead avoiding my friends because they will know instantly something is different and attempt to help me through it.

The last thing I want is help.

I push my body through normal, mechanical functions. My head is killing me; I take an aspirin. My body is dirty; I strip off my clothes from the night before and shower, moving through the motions—shampoo, condition, rinse—without thinking about them. My room is a mess; I grab some Clorox and start with the beer stain on the carpet, then the rest of the space.

Not once do I let my mind in. Not once, in the entire two hours it takes before my room is unrecognizable, do I let my thoughts inhabit my physical tasks. If I do, I will see him. In the aspirin that I had only bought for him, in the memory of his hands tracing up and down my skin, in the alcohol that started this entire goddamn fiasco.

I cannot let him in.

I have already allowed too much.

Jisung and Seungmin call me for the fourth time as I am starting to clean out my kitchen, so I silence my phone and leave it in the bathroom. It's best that they do not come close to me, now. Not here or ever.

I am a terrible friend, I think, for letting them in this much. For pretending that they could ever rely on someone like me, crashing through life pretending to be whole.

This is what's best for all of us.

I know that my avoidance, my withdrawal, is only feeding into my self-loathing, but I cannot help it. If I was a better person, I would never have left that room with some shabby explanation of regretting what had happened. If I was a better person, I would have stayed. Talked to the other person in the bed and explained to them why we had been foolish. Why I had been foolish.

I didn't know that wanting someone could be ugly, and selfish, and sick.

If I was a better person, I would have gone to see my friends immediately afterwards. Told them all about it like friends are supposed to do, let them support me and tell me it's okay, we're here for you.

But I learned that words could lie the first time someone told me everything would be okay, and now I think I have grown deaf to that specific piece of comfort. I am not a better person; I'm not even a good person. I am cracked and bleeding and broken inside, and Hyunjin—

Hyunjin put his fingers on either side of my chest and wrenched it open with his bare hands.

And now I am kneeling on the kitchen floor, my elbows deep under the cabinet under the sink, blaming him for my own selfishness and attempting to sew myself up with thread as thin as a sparrow's wings.

I do not think I could hate myself more.

-

After a couple hours, it begins to fade.

Not completely, but in the wake of everything that happened last night—the quiet of my room, the solitude ... it slows things down. Forces the roiling mess of my mind that I am holding at arm's length to calm with every passing minute, if only a tiny amount.

By afternoon, I have become a dull, easy numbness. My loathing, my guilt, my selfishness, have dimmed, and I am immensely thankful for it.

And then the knock comes at my door.

My mind implodes. In an instant, my body has filled itself with voices screaming, surging, shouting it's him, it's happening again, he's here and you will have to face everything that you've done—