Today, he is frail.
His joints creak traitorously as he swings his legs over the edge of his mattress. The checkered pajama pants that had fit so well yesterday are two sizes too big around his bony waist, swallowing his thin legs in a sea of cotton. There are folds of wrinkles on his hands and his fingers tremble as he tries to grip the headboard for some leverage. There will be no going out today. When he feels like this—broken, a little bit out of commission—he doesn’t like battling his body just to take a walk. When he looks like this—weak, and maybe even worth a modicum of pity—he doesn’t bother trying to garner sympathy from wandering eyes. Minseok doesn’t actively look for sympathy. He kind of avoids it.
It’s a bit of a struggle getting from his bedroom to the laptop he has sitting on the dining room table but it’s a necessary challenge, a crucial part of his every day routine. Minseok’s memory is by no means sub-par but faces and bodies come and go and he thinks it’s important to remember them. It isn’t sentimental. This simply isn’t something he can be sentimental about.
His entire body quivers with each step he takes across hardwood floor. His house sometimes does feel daunting; it’s usually only when he’s old, frail, or small, and lonely. Today the halls seem a bit longer and the floor extra slippery. Minseok sucks in a sharp breath as he shuffles as carefully as he can toward the laptop he unwittingly left on last night.
The process goes a little something like this: every morning, he wakes up either in someone else’s bed or his own. If it’s in someone else’s bed, he makes sure to wake up extra early so they don’t have to see who he is or who he isn’t. He leaves, he comes home. He changes into clothes that fit the best they can. He measures his feet to see what shoe size he is today. He sits in front of his laptop and takes a picture of his face. He renames the file—Day 1,Day 2, Day 3… In the evening, before he leaves home or after he comes home he opens his laptop again and pulls up the camera once more. A video, this time. They all start with, in a wide variety of voices, “I’m still the same on the inside, but…”
It’s been a couple of months now. Minseok runs a hand through wisps of graying hair. He lets fingertips linger on the sunken in flesh of his cheeks, dotted with large pigmented spots indicative of age. It will be Day 45 tomorrow. Forty-five days of waking up as a different person on the outside but the same person on the inside. Forty-five days of gazing imploringly in the mirror for some sort of indication that things might return to normal the next day. Forty-five days, forty-five different faces. Minseok’s never felt more trapped.
--
First draft
He and Baekhyun separate on a Wednesday.
Minseok remembers this because the coffee shop where it happens has a Wednesday special—a twist on a regularcafé au lait. It’s called the Hemingway, presumably because of the memoir, A Moveable Feast, where Hemingway details a café scene. He wants to point it out and bring Baekhyun’s attention to it but Baekhyun is on an entirely different page per usual.
They separate and Baekhyun says, clearly, with that bright smile that Minseok has grown to love so dearly, “This isn’t a goodbye, hyung. I’m not saying that we should break up because I don’t love you—I do. I do love you. It’s just…” His smile fades as he trails off and Minseok wonders if he should order a hot chocolate or something. Baekhyun likes hot chocolate. “I don’t think I can do this anymore, hyung. I thought I’d be okay because it’s been so long. We’ve known each other for so long. But, I just… there are just too many instances where it feels like you don’t care. And I know you do. I’m not saying you don’t. I just—it’s hard. Because sometimes I see you and you’re Minseok hyung but then other times I see you and it’s like you’re a complete stranger. It’s like you’re standing behind a bulletproof glass wall; I can see you but that’s it. I can just see you as who you are on the outside but… that’s it. That’s all I can see. Shouldn’t I be able to see more?”
