Taekook Oneshots

This Is Where I Belong

(unedited, messy, and weird, here's an update after ages. this is kinda metaphorical but I really loved writing it so I hope you love reading it. Possible tw: couples fighting (no physical fighting tho), mentions of therapy, mentions of old people being ill, mentions of death/funerals, fluff).

Love is a mess.

They say that the world was built on chaos, the bricks piled on top of each other in a disorderly fashion, creating a universe that thrives on confusion, on things that don't make sense. They say that our souls have been crafted from fire, from ice, from opposites shoved together and told to make friends, like children caught fighting at school. They say that our bodies are merely flesh, merely bone, a canvas and a ship to carry our consciousness through life. When they begin to fade, we stop moving. 

We all start from nothing, and burn out like candles in wind. Some of us are able to melt all our wax, warm up more of the universe. Some of us are blown out the moment the match is struck. It's a game of chance, of chess, a tic-tac-toe for the universe to play with itself. The individuality goes away, at that distance. The criminals can live longer than the innocents, and justice flickers in and out of existence like an uncertain flame. 

If the world was built on chaos, then love was the one that did it. Love, burning like fire and ice, blazing through us like tempests, like arctic blizzards. If love was a person, which I doubt, it would be a villain. Or maybe it would be a hero, driven to madness by the cruelty of the world. If love was a person, it would go insane, left alone and ignored by the people it tries to save. 

Why do people fall in love? Why do we even call it that? Why can't we call it burning with love? Why the fuck is it always something seen as soft, as easy, as natural? When someone matters to me, my heart burns. My heart clenches, expands like water turning into ice, makes me cold and hot and confused. When I'm in love, I can't breathe, too busy inhaling the smoke of the fire from within, too busy letting my ribs contract so I don't get stabbed by Cupid's arrow. So I don't get hurt. 

Love makes no sense. 

When your ribs aren't enough to protect you from love, when your heart is hit, or maybe your lungs, why does it have to hurt? Why does it have to fester like an infection, turn into hate, when nobody listens to the cries of people newly in love? Why do we punch each other, break our bones, fill each other's veins with liquid poison? Why can't we patch each other up like normal humans? 

There's something about it, that pain, that makes people believe it's right. Something about the way people describe it as delicious, as beautiful, as something to be cherished. There must be a trick, played by love, something that rips me limb from limb. And when I'm trying to put myself back together, why do I mourn the agony that came with the fire? Why do I grieve for something that broke me? 

Lying there, the love of my life a comforting warmth against my back, his legs drawn up beside mine like a second skin, it feels right. It feels like I'm sitting in the summer sun, a gentle breeze passing over me and keeping me cool. Love sits calmly in my chest, a passing thought in the corner of my mind. 

And yet when the fights happen, as they inevitably do, the sun engulfs me, burns me, leaves me with sunburn that stings in sudden hail. The warm shield at my back disappears, replaced with a cold absence, and the man who owns my heart sleeps with it in another room on the sofa, or on the other side of the bed, separated from me by a fortress of pillows or by walls and doors. 

In the middle of the night, I lay on my back, in the emptiness, feeling like driftwood lost in the ocean, lost in a continual vertigo, dizzy without the lifeblood that keeps me functioning. The world is dark, and my eyes ache with every blink, bloodshot from tears. The air is thick, hard to process, and my throat tightens with every breath. As if oxygen itself only exists in the presence of love.