so far away | yoonkook

night : 40

10)

this is our song.

synthesized and modified to fit a critique's demands, looping over and over when the forty minute afternoon rerun ends. a belt of names cascading as it plays, credits, not ours but for someone else's fame. simple, easily forgotten, a casualty's favorite, it denotes nothing complex. only we know what the half-beat and droning melody represents. it's us with our feet in the sand, ankle deep, toes digging into grains of pulverized gold and brown like cocaine. silent. half-expecting for the waves to drown us, half-hopeful to witness the sunrise.

we're never walking on that tightrope without our blindfolds on. it's never easy to see ourselves stripped bare, naked to the bone, as we're surrounded by mirrors, all well-kept, clean and glistening, while we're bruised, skeletons bleeding, elbows scraped.

lack of safety, we retreat towards it for we both know it sustains us, keeps us driving faster and faster until we're no more.

this is our creation.

the heavy background crescendo to our destruction. a three-second long pause as we crumble. hell-bound and seething with empty dreams and change in our pockets we force to last us for days.

we've written our names on fallen petals, let them float through streams as we pray they'd reach waters worlds away.

our youth has dispersed with the morning fog. we are no longer our mother's youngest son, we no longer yearn for her lullabies for now we listen to our own symphonies. our bodies tick to the same mechanism, our songs echo like the buzz in the spaces in our bones when the wind enters through the hollows.

what we seek is perfection in our timing. what we thrive for is a dial's alignment. we consider the sun selfish for abandoning our pleas. we consider the moon our long lost lover, hiding behind a forest of could be's.

as humble as the way our skin glows against the nightfall, as gruff as our voice sounds in the attempt of battling sleep, we are no more than just thieves in ripped up jeans living within barren seams. a safe haven trapped in rims of blue bottles. twice the luck we had as a child hanging from a ceiling that's five feet from our heads. the grass further rises to kiss the heavens, we live the way we see the life of a man who sleeps in a tomb.

mangled thoughts. tinted all over by rejections we made, rejections we faced, and love-marks left by rejection's lust-filled anguish.

we are time bombs ready to go off, missiles ready to fall, sparklers ready to die out after four songs from a cassette. the things we once imagined before our lids fell over and we're momentarily blind gone simply because our limbs were too short to reach out and grab ahold of it. though please let them be in a better place.

our minds twist around linear equations and the painful nine to five. lackluster exists not merely for show. dejection paired with incompliance fed the fire which ate us whole.

this is us.

a soulless end, a quiet combustion. cells that have disintegrated, blood that ran cold on pavement, sight robbed of its former glimmer.

the reality that knocked twice and ran when the door opened. the tomorrow which we considered once was, never was, or will be, all but a ploy by the memory. we were deceived by the rhythm of the earth. we submitted to the ticking of taxing clockwork. we crawl, nails biting onto moldy linoleum, in hopes to quicken our demise.

it is our fault but we sing along. it is our doing but we dance along. on tip-toes, our feet hurting like tired ballerinas, twirling by, pretending, braving, swaying by, still seeking to regain our former beauty. from the way our breaths fogged when we emptied our mouths of innocent wishes, how we stepped with our school shoes tapping and our heels clicking, how we greeted today the same way we greeted ourselves in the mirror ever so kindly, to the way we slept with our hands clasped beneath our heads, awaiting our friends in the realms of unknown disasters, sugar filled and purely sweet, our dreams, the way we desired.

this is you.

this is me.

an assortment of fraying photographs, a vinyl collection washed broken by the rain, an old book you tore a page from by accident, a grave we both forgot to visit after six months, the lies we both made to make ourselves look brave, the fear of diminishing when we hit fifty-five, the tales your grandmother used to tell you before you went to bed, the lamp at the end of the street that flickered when I left, the window I never closed and the window you never opened.

our song is simple. you hum the tune while I write the lyrics. and no one will ever know we made music together.

-10:11 pm