Taekook Oneshots

Lost

We all get lost sometimes.

There's something scary about it, the way you can be standing somewhere you know better than anywhere else, take one turn, and then suddenly nothing makes sense anymore. You don't have a direction. All you have is one or two suggestions,taking you a million ways at once. It's disorientating.

One of my earliest memories isn't actually a memory. It's a dream.

When I was very young, maybe three years old, I owned these mittens, and I loved them, because they were warm, they were fluffy, and they represented something that I couldn't yet understand. The dream was simple, but I remember everything about it.

I remember it being cold, the wind blowing my mitten off of my hand (yes, off of my hand, yes that doesn't happen very often, dream physics are different), and I remember wanting to follow it. And that moment would always happen just a few metres away from home. Maybe I was on a walk with my parents, somewhere familiar. I never remember the context of the dream. Maybe there was never any context.

But I always walked away from them. I always tried to chase the mitten as it blew away on the wind.

And when I turned around, having finally caught it, they were always gone, without exception.

That was a nightmare for me even then, losing the one part of me that I understood. I knew them. They were adults, plain and simple, and they cared about me. They brought food, heat, shelter, love. Everything I needed. And I thought that everything was easy. I thought that all I needed was to be at home, and I'd never be lost.

I was wrong.

Being lost doesn't always mean that you have to go somewhere, just as being trapped isn't always in a cage. Years later, that same childish fear comes back to haunt me, like a childhood demon come back to shadow me through the darkest parts of my life, follow me with no explanation or ulterior motive.

As I get older, I've realised that life isn't a single path. It's not meant to make sense. It's a maze of confusing twists and turns that all lead to dead ends and the moment a door opens, the world seems to shut down around you. Some people get the answer handed to them on a silver platter, and they can see the final destination from miles away.

I never got that. I'm still searching for my own. And nobody can make that decision for me, which road to turn down. That's what adulthood is really about. We don't become mature until we find out what we want, until we figure out where we're going. That's what I thought.

But I thought I had time. I thought I had years, so many years. I thought I had a chance to be a child, a chance to ignore the growing fear within me that I was running out of time. I thought that I could avoid the responsibility of controlling my own play through of life forever. And I thought that being young was totally different from growing older.

But I've learned that I was wrong.

We all try to find our direction, no matter how old we are, no matter our experiences, no matter what the background music to our own personal movies are. We just go, wherever, whenever. A decision has a ripple effect on the rest of your life, and yet we don't think about it. We just move forward, press forward with every day and don't even think to look back at the way we've come.

There's no magic switch, no guiding light, not even when you grow up. I always believed that I would have the answers, a cheat sheet, some sort of guide that would help me understand where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do. Where I belonged. But that doesn't exist.

We're all searching for something, whether we're five years old or ninety.

That mitten was a metaphor, perhaps, for my biggest fear. There's a reason why that was the nightmare that stuck with me for the rest of my life, beyond when it made sense, even when I knew that I could find the way home. We're all scared of losing the people we love. We're all scared of losing the light.