(Jungkook POV)
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"Wash up before you sleep, okay?"
I smiled at my mother, nodding as I watched her tread up the stairs in her work clothing, black hair dishevelled and eye bags stark against her dulling skin.
The house droned a quiet song of loneliness and disappointment as it watched me pack up the food that I barley ate, again. My bare feet on the cold hardwood announced its converting to Autumn and condolences to Summer as I snapped the lid shut and placed the plastic bowl in the fridge.
My hair stuck up in all directions, defying the weight of the universe's gravity and its pull upon me. I had been trying to finish my school work for the past three hours, but every minute, I'd keep getting distracted. Perhaps it was because on the way home I'd seen that girl, the one with the long, tanned legs and the beautiful skinny arms that I had tugged on my long sleeves and hid myself. Or maybe it was even the way the pencil moved in my hand, my thick and stubby fingers clutching so furiously that my knuckles were white.
I eyed the bag of groceries my mother had picked up on the way home and I started to unpack and store away the food.
- 115 calories per serving
- 280 calories per serving
- Total fat 15g
-Total fat 23g
- Total carbohyda-
It was a ritual, I couldn't escape it. It was one of the reasons why I hated going to restaurants and fast food places because not only I wasn't able to speak up and ask the waitress, "how much calories is in this?", I couldn't meet the eyes of my mother when she'd purse her lips and watch me dice my food into little pieces.
I couldn't let her know what I'd been doing to myself in bathrooms so I'd smile and occasionally cook her a meal, sometimes Italian cuisine and other times, Chinese. And so, I'd wrap my apron tight around me and scan each and every ingredient in her cookbooks, eyes watering as the smell of food would hit me, pausing to ask her how does it taste? and not test it myself.
Because when she'd be out of sight, I'd throw the food down the garbage and take it out right away, hoping she wouldn't suspect why I was taking the trash out at 12 AM and not sleeping.
'Body fat percent 19% - Body fat percent 18% - Body fat percent 17%' the BMI calculator displayed the results over months and months, still all too much.
I felt my arms shiver against the refrigerator's cold and I closed it with sweaty fingers because my arms looked so meaty. My eyes teared up at the hideous sight and I felt the tension bubbling up my throat as my heart sped faster and faster.
Please not now, please not now.
I couldn't be like this now, not when my mother was home, not when my homework still needed to be complete, not when the sun was going down because the house was getting dark and so were my thoughts, and especially not when at the time I needed to be doing homework because if I don't then the teacher and all the students and everyone, oh then everyone single person will think I'm a delinquent and ugly.
Dizzy.
So dizzy. . .
I limped up the spiralling stairs, begging to God and all the stars and the universe's infinity that she did not hear me. I felt like my lungs were trying to suck up the thin oxygen on the top of Mount Everest and the cold water rushing to my burning lungs at the bottom of the Pacific ocean - both at the same time. My focus kept deterring from the focal point and my clammy palms pushed open my bedroom door, closing it softly with my remaining strength.
Pain and fear were all I knew as my back shuddered against my wool rug, fingers flying to my chest and toes curling in and forehead sweating because I couldn't breathe. I shivered violently as my face became wet with salty tears and my head dug into the warm rug, thinking is this what a heart attack feels like?
Oh God, please make this stop because it feels like someone's foot is pressed down on my chest and I coughed loudly, hand flying to my mouth to prevent any sound leaking from my mouth. I couldn't let my mother know - couldn't worry her, couldn't have her take me to the doctor's or even worse, a psychiatrist because I wasn't crazy, oh God, I couldn't be crazy.
I shut my eyes - I wanted to breathe.
"You can."
My mind travelled to the author's story, to a particular chapter, a certain passage that had made me wish I'd discovered it sooner when the world had been crashing down before me and the atmosphere refused to let me breathe in its oxygen.
"Relax and just listen to me. I'm right here."
I closed my eyes and remembered the conversation which took place between the two characters, remembering how relieved I had been to see them finally interact after chapters and I was begging the author for some kind of fluff.
"Breathe in, breathe out"
I sucked in a breath,
"feel the tips of your toes"
I curled in my toes,
"feel the weight of your fingers"
I clenched them and flexed them,
"feel the the strands of your hair"
I shakily exhaled and felt their lightness,
"feel the temperature of the room"
I opened my eyes and ran my fingers along the rug, tugging at the wool and feeling my heartbeat slow down. I stared at the ceiling, watching headlights of cars come and go along the dark walls of my bedroom, my haven. And the pain and the panic was now slowly floating away like foam upon aqua green waters, the calm pooling around my cold feet.
This is who I was - and I couldn't escape it. Not only was the world a place of physical aesthetic, it was a place that only adorned itself of physical aesthetic and I, for certain, was not aesthetically pleasing. This body that reacts too easily, cries too easily, panics too easily - it could die all so easily but not live too easily; it panicked and feared.
Everything was an abyss, a routine that couldn't be escaped. From the skipped meals to the staring at mirrors for hours and hours because I couldn't leave the bathroom and meet the eyes of strangers, couldn't bring myself to just speak.
I was a mess, a broken machine that didn't have a manual.
And what good was a machine if it couldn't be fixed?
I couldn't be fixed. The thoughts that had suddenly creeped up on my mind one day couldn't be fixed. I so desperately wanted to be like everyone else - didn't these people know how privileged they were to have the ability to express?
They could laugh freely, smile freely, eat freely and even speak freely - all without a single drop of sweat.
And I couldn't.
Because all I could do was calculate calories, dice and cut up food into the tiniest pieces possible, hide in bathrooms and stare at mirrors and shake with fear, silently scream into pillows and try to learn how to breathe.
And so I unlocked my phone and clicked on his story, wiping my tears with the back of my hand and gulping air softly. I scrolled down to the latest chapter, when the world felt dark and grey, reading those words of comfort, of rebirth, of beauty, brought clarity upon these tired hands.
Because I knew that even though I could never be the protagonist that held dark demons and battled them all in the end,
I could at least hope.
And such words that were written in his stories were meant only for one thing that was missing the most for me - hope.
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