Anterograde Tomorrow

part two: invisible walls

"I'm Jongin, and I'm here to—"

"Write."

Jongin's jaw swings open, shock registering slowly on his tilted eyebrows. The seconds come and go, skittering along a thin line of hesitation. Outside the window the grass dissolves into the sky, burred colors and bright chaos. Kyungsoo waits.

It's not until Jongin spots the scrapbook lying open on the kitchen counter does he relax into the doorframe, "Oh. So you've read up on your notes already?"

"Yup," Kyungsoo nods, and doesn't quite notice the look of fleeting disappointment over Jongin's expression.

Today the conversation resumes in Jongin's apartment next-door. It's a white-washed box cluttered full of balled papers, half-empty cans of beer, a myriad of achromatic shapes: sheets brittle and distorted over the nude mattress; tapestries dangling limply like surrender flags. Little cigarette stubs and yellow pills are arranged on a plastic coffee table to spell, "KYUNGSOC". Everything is a thin veneer of white fragility, barely holding away the post-modern asbestos. It ostracizes Kyungsoo but takes in all of Jongin, laps up all of his lethargic steps and long lashes.

Kyungsoo thinks that Jongin herds everything in the room together. Splayed out against the couch, Jongin is the kind of guy to belong in this sort of place, probably, or the kind of guy who has gotten used to this high class superficiality. A kind of stuffed, hollow man, shadows falling between the emotion and the response.

"You don't like this place, do you?"

"It's all black and white. It doesn't look like anyone's ho—"

"Here," Jongin calls suddenly.

Kyungsoo almost doesn't turn around fast enough to catch the bundle of still-packaged yellow sticky notes that Jongin tosses him. "What's this?"

"Come on, really. You've got to recognize these."

"No, I mean, why are you giving them to me?"

"You were the one who said my room is black and white," Jongin shrugs, leans back onto his couch until the hollow of his throat is fully exposed and suddenly he's all jagged edges of chins and cartilage and elbows, knuckles, nails, "So color it. I bet you're dying to. And look, it's the color of the sun. Makes you feel alive, doesn't it?"

"You're awful."

"Your admonishing stare," Jongin grins, "is my favorite."

So Kyungsoo gives in, though only after ordering for Jongin to, "Call me hyung from now on. It's ridiculous how unmannered you are."

Jongin laughs dismissively, smoke exploding like glitter clouds over his head and mouth wide with glee. Pulling a chair up against the nearest wall, Kyungsoo helps himself up, half-tottering as he tears open the first package and slips his thumb under the first note. Aligning it at perfectly perpendicular angles, Kyungsoo runs his thumb over the edges and smoothes down the corners. The wall is toasted warm from the sunlight and Jongin's voice comes in a comforting hum from behind him, mists of little insignificant words drifting over wistful grimaces.

"Do you ever wonder this—how many ten o'clocks have you spent doing the same precise thing, with the same glue gun and same bucket of marbles and the toy from the day before the day before the day before all of yesterdays? How many times have you sat down at your empty dinner table and wondered if tomorrow you will remember today?"

With time Kyungsoo notices that Jongin is really not asking questions. He's answering them. Filling the footprints that Kyungsoo had left behind. Gentle and entrancing, consonants broken full-stop and vowels tapering to infinity. Gaze dipping far, far, away, lost somewhere in Kyungsoo's as Kyungsoo lights his walls ablaze in a field of golden conflagration.