Head Down

◤one ◢

In a small town, is where everyone lives. In a small town, there aren't many people. So everyone isn't that many people. In a small town, is where Mark Lee finds himself.

From a big city, to a small town. From a big city, to a quiet town. From a big city, to a warm town. Mark doesn't belong in a small, warm, quiet town.

The taste of the air; it tastes stale. The smell of the air; it smells like the neighbour. There's no broken glass bottles on the sidewalks, and there aren't any people on the street. The stores, oh God, the shops are small. They're tiny and they're almost all family run. They're open limited hours during the day, and their stocks are limited. In this small town, everything seemed to be small. Population, the messes, the shops and even the people. Mark felt like a giant when he walked down the streets, when he goes to the grocery store. Mark feels like he doesn't belong in this small town.

Because he doesn't.

In this small town, there aren't basketball courts. In this small town, there aren't bars which let you in underage. In this small town, there aren't people he knows, people who'd know his kind. His kind being fun people. People who don't garden or go to the park all day. People who actually go out and get wasted, people like him.

Perhaps a friend. Perhaps an acquaintance at the very least. Just someone to share common interests with. Someone he can drink with, smoke with, someone he can be himself with.

But this was a small town. Selection was limited to whatever you could get. And there wasn't much to choose from.

Mark Lee, city boy from Vancouver can't live here, in a small town in Korea. It's preposterous in his opinion, how could he? How could he be here, when his friends were in Canada?

Mark Lee can't even make friends. As outgoing and different Mark described himself as, Mark is such an awkward boy. Mark turns red when the slightest amount of attention was put on him, especially when strangers were the ones who interacted with him. Mark felt comfortable in his circle in Vancouver, and now he was thrown into the wilderness to fend for himself.

He can't deal with this, with this fresh start. For his whole life, Mark has known one thing: Vancouver. He's only known big houses, late night parties, underage drinking and weed. Now, all he's surrounded with is small houses, a curfew, fucking apple juice and the closest thing to weed was kale.

Mark had known public schools, where you'd meet someone new everyday. Mark has known carpooling because there were people who'd do that because parents had jobs which started early in the morning. Here, Mark sees that kids leave before their parents do. They walk because the town was that small.

It stretches his brain and makes him uncomfortable. Change makes him uncomfortable.

In a small town, people were close minded.

In a small town, you can find Mark Lee, who hates the towns he lives in.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

When you're a high school student in this small town, Mark learns, you're some of the eldest. Perhaps there were families who've had elder children graduate and leave, but that was the point. They left, so they weren't all too important in the town anymore. However, high school juniors like himself, well that was another story.

If you so much as stepped into the secondary school in this town, everyone knew who you were. If you hadn't directly met them, they'd figure out who you were from a friend of a friend's daughter's sister's friend. Word seemed to travel fast here, and it was probably the most annoying thing ever. Compared to Vancouver, where Mark Lee was a nobody with a whole of two friends, here in this town, Mark Lee was the eldest son of the new couple in the neighbourhood, who was in their junior year of high school and wanted to become a pharmacist. Everyone knew everything. And that was something Mark wasn't used to.

Everyone knew he couldn't speak Korean that well yet, everyone knew he was adjusting to the culture and tradition. Everyone knew they couldn't just approach him, just like that. Everyone knew, which is why they stayed away. Did they think that was going to make Mark feel more welcomed? He feels isolated, if anything. Back in Vancouver, God does he miss Vancouver, at least people would acknowledge him, give a smile, hold the door open for him, compliment his shoes or his shirt. Here, if you don't know anyone, in turn, everyone acts like they don't know you. Even if they know you, know of you, because who wants to be caught associating themselves with a loser? A foreigner?

Mark walks down the halls of school with his head down, because if no one wanted to look at him, the foreigner who wasn't as pale as them, the weird kid with an accent, the boy who didn't fit in, then he didn't want to look at any of them either. Small towns meant narrow minded people. And Mark didn't want any trouble.

If people were like that, Mark didn't want to hear it. They could be however they wanted to be, regardless if their ideology and conceptions were socially, and or, morally, incorrect, because Mark wasn't here to tell them how to live their lives.

Mark was here to finish high school, and then leave this horrendous town in favour of going to university. Going to school, to make his life something bigger than what it is. Something bigger than waking up at 6:45am every morning, something bigger than sitting in classes for eight hours a day, something bigger than doing six hours of homework every night.

Because Mark was bigger than that.

Not that people here would understand, of course.

If Mark has a choice, he wouldn't be here right now. He'd still be in Vancouver, in Canada, with Johnny, with Jaehyun.

But he wasn't and he hates that. New starts? What were the point of those? What was the point of starting over, when there was nothing wrong? What's the point of throwing everything away, only to start from scratch? There is no point, and Mark knows that, which only adds fuel to his fire. He's sick. He's sick and tired of living like this and it's only been a month. Yeah, in Vancouver he was a nobody, but at least he was a nobody who had two friends, a nobody who lived somewhere nice, a nobody who lived somewhere with a lax community, a nobody who could be anybody. Here? Thinking that he could be himself was a joke. Thinking that these people, who were all stuck up and always had something up their ass, were lax, was a joke. Thinking that this was somewhere nice to live, was a joke. The only nice place to live is home.

And this isn't home.

This isn't Mark's home.