Really, Baby (I Will Be Just Fine)

24

The cold night air is refreshing, like taking the first breath  of air off a fourteen hour plane ride. Hoseok inhales deep until his lungs are full and exhales slowly, stretching his arms out wide and collapsing into one of the chairs on the balcony. Taehyung sits beside him. The alcohol still makes his head heavy, but it’s wearing off now. He stopped drinking an hour ago after all.

The sound of Taehyung munching on chips fills the silence between them, and Hoseok is grateful because he’s at a loss for words and doesn’t know what to say. All he knows is that Taehyung makes him feel something close to home whenever he’s around, even for a mere few seconds.

“Do you ever feel like you’re living underwater?” Taehyung asks between chips, plate laying in his lap. “Like your head is submerged and everything around you is just jumbled noise that’s drowning out  into static and you’re just drowning with it? I don’t know, like, you’ve swallowed so much water that you’re full.”

Hoseok nods and grabs a chip off the plate. It’s dark out on the balcony, and he doesn’t know if Taehyung can see his movements. “Everyday,” Hoseok answers instead. “At this point, I just throw back  the water like liquor.”

There’s a long pause, and Hoseok feels eyes at the side of his face in the darkness. When he turns, Taehyung drops his gaze to his shoulder. The way the moonlight illuminates his profile is like witnessing a thousand stars twinkling before his eyes.

“I went on a jog this morning,” Taehyung says, fiddling with the round edges of the plate. “By myself down near the river. I probably won’t do it again, but it was nice, you know? Remembering what it’s like to need to breathe. There’s so much talk about wasting water and what not, but sometimes we just forget to set our phones down and acknowledge our lungs for once.”

“Sometimes you just get so caught up in the swimming that you forget to surface,” Hoseok mutters, watching Taehyung as he gazes at the sky. “Like listening to the subtle nuances in a song each time you play it that you only ever recognize the song in pieces, not the whole.”

“Let’s put it into perspective,” Taehyung says, turning his head to face Hoseok. “Let’s go swimming.”