Chapter Text
Jungmo first sees him through the kitchen window- it is a brief moment, suspended in a golden afternoon.
He is tall, his arms are wrapped around a large cardboard box.
He stops for a moment in a spot of light. He has bottle blonde hair that curls around his ears.
Jungmo pauses, elbow deep in dish soap.
☼
He’s packing his bong when his mom FaceTimes him.
“Shit.” He runs into another room and picks up the call.
“Hello!” his mom chirps. Jungmo thinks she looks noticeably older- she has more grey hair, her wrinkles are deeper.
“Ah, hey Mom.” He hops on to the kitchen counter. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t mean to alarm you.” she smiles. “Your father says hello.”
“Alright.” Jungmo says. His father does not come into frame.
“Is the house fine?” she asks, still smiling.
“I’ve only been here three days.” Jungmo says. “Yes. It’s fine.”
“Oh, Jungmo.” her smile slips. “I was just calling to check in.”
“Okay,” Jungmo says. “That’s fine.”
“Are you okay?” she pauses. Jungmo does not say anything. “I wanted to meet you when you came, but the plane tickets, and… oh, and your father, you know how he is.” she shrugs.
“Yeah, of course.” Jungmo smiles, somehow. “I understand.”
“Good, I knew you would.” she sighs. Jungmo would like to smoke his weed.
“I’m gonna keep watching my show.” he says.
“What are you watching?”
“You wouldn’t know it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well… don’t have too much fun.” her smile is just a ghost now.
“Okay.” he says.
“I love you.” she says.
Jungmo is not cruel, as much as he wishes he could be.
“I love you too,” he says, and hangs up.
☼
He can barely sleep the first few nights.
The blankets are comfortable, the pillow is expensive and tempurpedic. He didn’t bring it with him to college, though, and he’s slept better on the RA-issue pillows that are nothing but air.
Jungmo lays in the bed where he slept as a teenager and does not fall asleep.
☼
He spends Tuesday poised in front of his laptop, fingers itching.
He wants to write- there is nothing better for when he feels swallowed whole by emotions. When he was in high school he wrote dozens of stories and poems, all bruised into his laptop in fits of fury or sadness.
His fingers are itching but he cannot write. He stares at the white screen and cannot grasp a first word or a first sentence. There is nothing to say, no matter how much his anger coalesces.
It is evening when he shuts his laptop.
He microwaves a frozen burrito and watches the sun set through the kitchen window. The colors have always been more striking in the summer, when Jungmo had been able to spend his evenings kicking a soccer ball around the front yard instead of doing homework indoors.
Jungmo doesn’t come home very often. There is not much to come back to- just a pretty sunset and a pockmarked sidewalk.
The microwave beeps. Jungmo plates his burrito and considers, for a moment, eating at the gilded dining table.
He eats in front of his laptop instead, fingers itching. He types a few half-hearted sentences about fathers and dinner and an empty driveway before deciding that it just makes him angrier.
At least anger tires him out, puts him to bed on his stupid, stupid pillow.
☼
Wonjin: miss you
Wonjin: summer is weird w/o u
Jungmo: you okay?
Wonjin: yes. asshole. i just miss u
Jungmo: thank you
Wonjin: jfc. hows ur mom
Jungmo: HAHAHA
Jungmo: she left the key under the mat they went to ITALY
Wonjin: oh jesus christ
Wonjin: that checks out unfortunately
Wonjin: do u wanna call?
Jungmo: uhhh not right now. at some point, though
Wonjin: that’s fine
Wonjin: stay safe jungmo
Jungmo: I hope you can hear my sigh
Wonjin: i can, don’t worry ^.^
☼
Jungmo thinks about Wonjin’s text when he locks himself in the bathroom and turns off the light.
Stay safe, Jungmo.
God, he wants to tear out his hair- instead, in the dark, he folds his body into the empty bathtub.
The expectation that he will fall apart is not a farfetched one. He often feels like he is about to break.
☼
He spends a whole day writing, fingers flying over the laptop keys. His chest hurts something overwhelming and he tries to be vicious, an attempt to echo the hurt he feels. When he reads it back to himself, though, it just seems sad.
He frowns and closes his laptop. He does not need the sadness.
☼
Something drags Jungmo outdoors, away from his laptop and frozen meals. Perhaps it’s pure animal instinct, telling him he’s been indoors too long. Perhaps he’s Vitamin C deficient- either way, he finds himself sprawled on the front lawn one afternoon, unaware of making the choice to go outside or to lay down.
Pleasantly warm, he wonders if he has so little shame that he’ll fall asleep on the lawn in full view of the neighbors’ windows.
He decides he will.
☼
Jungmo wakes up a bit later to the setting sun. He blinks his eyes open- sees orange, pink, the barest dust of purple.
There are eyes on him, too. He can feel it.
He sits up quickly, pushes aside any remnants of sleep, looks around.
On his neighbors’ front porch sits the guy with bottle blonde hair. He is bouncing one of his legs up and down. Jungmo wonders if he has grass in his hair.
“Are you watching me?” Jungmo calls, raising his arm to shield his eyes from the setting sun.
The guy’s leg stills.
“Well?” Jungmo says, smiling a little. The guy stands up.
“I- no.” He says, wiping his hands on his pants. “I mean, yes, but I was worried you were dead.”
“Ha!” Jungmo says. “Well, I’m not.”
“I’m glad.” The guy says stiffly.
He’s the type of boy Jungmo would flirt with in college, lanky and awkward and sorta beautiful, probably easily flustered. Jungmo would see him in the communal kitchen and never leave him alone.
At home, though, Jungmo does not find any easy rhythms- not with boys, not with anything. He looks at the guy from his seat in the grass and doesn’t really have anything to say.
“I’m Minhee, by the way.”
Minhee.
“Hello, Minhee.” Jungmo says, and Minhee just nods before promptly walking back into his own house and slamming the front door behind him.
“Huh.” Jungmo says into the sky.
The sun is a smear on the horizon. Jungmo goes back into his parent’s home and heats up some boxed tomato soup.
☼
One morning he wakes up, smokes a bowl immediately, and spends an hour looking at the flaking ceiling of his childhood bedroom. He plays music from his phone even though it’s a little canned and it doesn’t shake through his body like speakers do, or mute his thoughts like earbuds do.
He follows that up by sitting in front of his laptop and pulling together some sentences that feel anemic. Maybe there are only so many times he can write about being angry at his father, angry at his mother, angry at himself.
Maybe he just isn’t that angry right now.
He lays back down in his childhood bed and feels… content. He’s comfortably high, settled into his skin like a well-worn glove. He’s afraid to breathe too hard- he’s afraid that the comfort will fly out from the space between his open lips and all that weed will have been for nothing.
He stays like this, though. He stays under the covers, he stays content. He falls asleep at noon and does not dream.
☼
Jungmo was not a happy teenager.
There are traces of it now, in his bedroom- in the notch in his desk from where a pencil was jammed into the wood, in the loose floorboards under his bed that now hide nothing.
“We’ve gotten word from the school,” his mother had said, wringing her hands, “that some of your friends are worried about you.”
He is not exactly a happy adult, either. He wakes up with a sense of melancholy and usually falls asleep the same way, a little bit uneasy, a little bit restless. He finishes his schoolwork on time and stays mostly sober and has a few close friends, but he is not happy.
Happiness has always been reserved for others- for Wonjin, who smiles honestly and easily; for his father and his father’s friends around the dining table, drinks in hand; for strangers. For television and movies and people who are not Jungmo, who do not live in his body, who feel more than he feels.
“I was cleaning your room,” his mother had said, staring at the ground, “I looked under your bed.
He has outgrown the violent sadness of adolescence, sure, but he doesn’t know if he’s ever been happy.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t go to Wonjin's this summer. He doesn’t belong there- he belongs here, sequestered in his childhood bedroom, feeling sorry for himself.
☼
The doorbell rings.
Jungmo has spent three weeks at home, completely alone and undisturbed, when the doorbell rings.
For one horrible moment he is certain that his parents have come home two months early. This would be especially bad- his bong is on the coffee table in the living room and the entire first floor reeks. He’s also high, like, right now.
He remembers that his parents have keys (he takes a deep, relieved breath).
The doorbell rings again. Jungmo stands up and goes to look through the peephole.
It’s the neighbor, Minhee.
Jungmo opens the door. Minhee wears a too-big t-shirt, athletic pants, and an unreadable expression. His brow is furrowed.
“Hello.” Jungmo says.
“You’re smoking weed?” Minhee asks.
“Oh.” Jungmo says. “I mean. Maybe.”
Minhee raises his eyebrows.
“I can smell it from my bedroom.”
“Huh.” Jungmo says, and makes a mental note to close the kitchen window.
Minhee stands there on the porch with his brow furrowed.
Jungmo stands inside the doorway, blurry from the high.
“Is there something you need?” Jungmo asks.
“No.” Minhee says. He’s looking past Jungmo and into his house. What catches his eye? Is it the ornate mirror gifted by his fathers’ business partner? Is it the color of the Entryway, dark blue and oppressive?
“Okay…” Jungmo says, feeling a little bit uncomfortable.
Minhee sighs, big and dramatic and very unlike a stranger. The absurdity almost makes Jungmo laugh.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Jungmo.” he says.
Minhee’s brow relaxes.
“Cool.”
“Cool?”
“Yeah.”
Jungmo wonders why Minhee is on his front porch.
“Is that… all?”
Minhee’s brow re-furrows. Jungmo feels like he’s lost.
“Yeah.” Minhee says. “Sorry for interrupting.”
Jungmo watches him turn around and walk back to his own property with something vague in his chest. Amusement, maybe. Curiosity.
He can hear the front door slam.
☼
Wonjin: we miss u <3
Wonjin: [IMG 405]
Wonjin: hope you’re alright
☼
Hyeongjun: IF UR STAYING INSIDE ALL DAY SMOKING WEED ALONE I AM GOING TO KILL YOU KOO JUNGMO I AM GOING TO KILL YOU
Hyeongjun: YOU COULD BE HANGING OUT WITH US BUT INSTEAD YOU ARE IN SELF IMPOSED EXILE! REMEMBER THAT!!
Jungmo: self imposed exile…….
Hyeongjun: text wonjin back :(
Hyeongjun: asshole :/
☼
Jungmo: you guys look good
Wonjin: AWWWWWWWW
Wonjin: thank you jungmo i can’t wait to see u in the fall :D
☼
The problem is- Jungmo writes, the problem is that I hate my friends.
He deletes it. It’s not true. There is no use lying, even if it justifies the tension in his chest.
The problem is- Jungmo writes slower, the problem is that I feel distant from my friends.
The problem is- Jungmo writes, because that’s not the whole truth, the problem is that I feel distant from everyone in the world.
That’s as close as he can get.
☼
He’s awake in the early morning hours.
He always had a tendency to do that- now, though, there’s a new freedom. He keeps the lamp in his bedroom on and plays music from his laptop speakers. There is no one to wake up, no consequences to suffer through. Through the window he can see that someone is awake in his neighbors’ house. At least, a light is on in a second floor window.
Jungmo wonders if it’s Minhee.
Jungmo stops himself there. He’s tired, all of a sudden.
☼
“Hey, mom.”
She doesn’t FaceTime him this time, thank goodness. It’s simple to pick up a phone call- no need to check the surroundings for any telltale weed paraphernalia.
“What have you been up to, my love?” she asks.
He can hear her smile through the phone. He does not… rage. He does not smile, either.
“I’ve been writing a little,” he says. It feels like a lie even though it’s not.
“That’s wonderful!” she says. “Any of your assignments, maybe?”
She’s teasing him.
He grits his teeth.
“Not yet.”
“Let me tell you about Rome-” she starts, and maybe Jungmo is cruel, because he interrupts her.
“You have new neighbors.” he says, looking out the bedroom window.
“Oh...” she starts, but takes it in her stride. That’s his mother- peacemaking to a fault, a little too passive. “The Kangs? Did you meet them?”
“I met this kid.” Jungmo pauses. “Minhee.”
“Oh, yes, he’s so sweet. Just got his high school diploma.” his mother coos. “They moved here a couple of months ago. Oh, I’m so glad you’re talking to him.”
“He lives with his parents?” he asks despite himself.
“Mhm. Doctors, both of them. Impressive people.”
“Cool.” Jungmo says.
“I’m glad you haven’t just…” she sighs. “Been alone for a month.”
“Oh,” he says.
There is silence on the line. He wonders-
“I’m gonna go order some food.” he says instead, and she laughs.
“Alright, I love you.” she sighs. “I miss you.”
He is glad he cannot see her face- like this, he can pretend she’s lying.
“Have fun in Rome, mom.” he says, and hangs up.
☼
He closes the kitchen window before he goes to sleep that night.