Bend & Break | Wooyoung [Ongoing]

1 | he is oafish

Him.

Muye: I was wondering if you could assist me? If it's not too much to ask of you.

MY THUMBS STAYED OVER THE screen. I could feel them working up a sweat. While they busied themselves copycatting ghosts, I ran through the pack of words commingling to seal my fate.

8:46 ᴘ.ᴍ., it was about an hour-thirty since Changbin left with more than half my bottled water supply. He said he ran out. With his absence came the reasoning that it was rather early to die. So my doom should wait. Lies could do their catching up some other time.

I thought it everyday, and everyday I never got any keener about admitting it. Just picturing a sick grin light up that ridiculous smug face of his, very son of a bitch like, I told you so-infused, made me surmise that I would die before I let Changbin know I clinched: he was right, I was wrong. He was always right, though. Seven years later and I could count on just  one hand the amount of times he has thought with his ass.

Seo Changbin was the sense in our friendship, while I was sense gone wrong but never knew right. My father had a name for it.

Oafish.

Currently it's dark. My weary countenance was lit up by the computer screen. I had no idea how I looked, but I bet to a third eye I gave off hopeless vibes. I was a man, settled in the middle of age twenty and thirty, intentionally fired from his job last month, and trying to make a name for himself in a tiny room of a work space. But not two-by-four.

No.

The room I dubbed office in my single apartment was large enough to fit a queen-sized mattress, probably a tall standing dresser too. Over the process of attempting to be someone, in humanity's race to not be nobody, I had laid out dreams. Where one failed, I moved on to the promising next. This meant I documented bright ideas whenever the bulb came on and when it stopped being bright, it was on to the next.

Sometimes a dream lasted a few days. Other times, a whole week. For the ones that managed to touch a weekend, you'd find me scribbling lead or ink into a notebook. That was probably the only reason to hold a pen or pencil these days. Yet I surprised myself when I realized I wound up writing a lot. There were books, sufficient to kick off a mini repository, enough to make a bountiful donation at the local library.

I conceived better working in the dark, a founded theory credited to my brain being a tank of delusion. I got so paranoid that I believed the heat from the lights would eventually cremate my brain cells. These days, however, I'd come about realizing I could have lost all of those—the cells—a long time ago. Maybe the moment I told Kim to go kiss his mother's behind before flinging a bundle of spreadsheets in his face. Happy days. Then afterwards came the return to reality engulfing me like that first time, that I was jobless, soon to be homeless, none the wiser.

The agenda of the hour: Zeroes. So many of them glowering at me. I think they're six, but I look again, and deduce seven. So I told myself it was just the seven, leading on there as a significant figure, meddling with sanity when I try to visualize six. Regardless, I drew out my left pinky and counted them, one by one.

More than six.

I didn't feel better.

My bank statement consisted nearly the same amount of zeroes, hence why I tried not to dwell on rent or unemployment, bringing to mind all the people that have let it kill them. My dignity must've diminished with the sack letter, but I had some self-worth to spare. It wouldn't let me storm up many floors into Kim's modish office (which deceived him to think he was with the times, a twentieth century progeny in tune with speed of the twenty-first) and demand—supplicate, like my life depended on it (as it did) until my old job was restored.