diet of lies

Chapter 15 - P'il Chae

     JIMIN'S A MANIPULATOR. Amidst his swoon and sway, I broke down in his hip movements. His grit curved into the form of steel cannonballs aimed at a single, formidable target. My walled exterior. The attempt ended in mounds of brick chunks and scarlet dust as Jimin successfully made his opening. 

When Jimin reached inside the hole he'd blasted, he liberated everything. My anxieties, my fears, and the facts I've chosen to disown and smother with my chest-- they all failed me as my fortress laid in ruin. 
This scribbled cluster of fervor ranged airily out of me like balloons, and, in the flash of a mindless thought, that's not a Hallelujah moment.  It feels like I've been locked in a chest and dragged to the bottom of the sea by two-hundred pounds of misery, with bubbles seeping from cracks in the wood, climbing to the surface of the water and bursting with my gnawing shriek.

      A blazing sensation engulfs the marrow of my mortal bones, stirs them angrily, and spreads throughout my body. I'm left powerless in this second. There's no trying arrest a single strand of emotion, they're already drifting away like smoke off a campfire, and gone. I do, however, find the power to helplessly gaze beyond Jimin's ear. I'm deathly still but swirl my eyes enough to meet a black sheet refusing to share the sky with any life of light. I start wondering about how the unreachable smoothness of the pitched and selfish colored sky is painted like Jimin's hair. From brushing the edge of my hand against his hair I know it's a wonder of softness and texture. And, I imagine if I could touch the sky, it'd feel the same.

    I'm drooping at a standstill and softer now. I'm lost in a sky so undesirable yet ironically perfect that my connection to the world thins. I think I'd feel better if one star tried to own a place against the blackness of night.

    Jimin swaddles me more tightly, with my thoughts bumbling, until I'm numb. There's a figment of a home-like place inside his arms. It makes me glow. I'm hooked on the hallucination. The rolling, one-syllable sound of "Home" is tender and satisfying in of itself. But, the newness of it does not welcome you without its side effects first- a gut-wrenching, stomach twisting, sweat pouring extravaganza. I'm starting to remember why home didn't exist until Jimin shoved it down my throat like it was a health supplement.

I'm fighting a gag. I never felt home in my youth. Even now it's still a quaint stranger. Home to me, if it even rules under that idea, was the moldy, wall-less attic of The Happy Smoke Shop on Grayson Street.

Reflecting back, I blame everything and all that happened on my fragility, because regardless of any manned layers I imprison my galling fears in, a sliver of it still sweats through cracks and stings for decades.

***

         I fought nausea to open my eyes like a newborn; hazed. I feel my body tense, as it accepts the extra weight applied to my shoulder and neck. My view is packed by jet hair and jeweled portions of an ear, but I know Jimin has his head comfortably enclosed in that nook. We're hugging tightly in an alley. I can't quite click the finishing pieces to a puzzle that explains how I got myself into this situation.  Lightly, I feel vomit reserving itself in the back of my throat because I feel I'll dislike the answer.

I remember, my pocket is full of cash and the panic hits. Fuck, the deadline is tonight. And if I don't make it back to the motel before 3 a.m, there's a bullet out there with my name etched on it.

      I stick my finger into the chub of Jimin's face.
"Get off. I need to go home, now."
He lifts his head off my shoulder, and my joints crack with relief. The moon shines down in yellow hues across Jimin's face and unmasks the hard black outline of a small dagger. It's tiny and clings under his right eye. I blink dizzily at him like he's a Dad telling younger Chae the crushing truth about the tooth fairy. I feel like I've just been injected with cement, I can't move. Was that...always there? I ask myself.