Jonghyun has always been on the receiving end of his mother’s razor-sharp words.

Each day she gives him new cuts, thin lines that barely show on the surface but perforate deeply and painfully. Little things riddle his heart with shame and fear, like a look from the corner of her eye as she walks past or the way she scrutinizes all his belongings or the distasteful curl of her lips when Jonghyun is too late in hiding the self-composed sheets of music in a stack of homework.

Sometimes he lays awake at night, fighting the lump in his throat by summoning anger. He wants to strike out, but it’s not as if he wants to hurt his mother.

There had been good times.

First snow when she had taken him out to the back yard to take photos of him making snow angels, the striped tie she had bought him to wear for his first music recital, the midnight snacks delivered to his door when he was studying for finals.

But those memories are being crowded and crushed by ones of screaming matches, nights spent locked in the bathroom crying silently because the intent to strike are real in those eyes lined by crow’s feet and he’s afraid to leave the only room in his house with a lock.

She accuses him of being ineffably selfish for wanting anything. An empty pot forgotten on the stove leads to daily reminders of incompetence, rare confessions of his dreams are faced with ridicule and attack, and there is no communication between them; he doesn’t know how to react to such blatant, unaware passive aggression.

She takes any chance at a jab where it hurts, and it hurts because she knows him too well yet at the same time knows him not at all.

When she goads him, prods him, Jonghyun endures silently because one day it’ll be different. She won’t be in his life and he won’t have to feel these feelings that threaten to tear him apart from the inside. One day, someone will love him and respect him at the same time and he’ll be able to reciprocate the same. One day there will be a room where his shoulders can relax, and he can be lost in composing music without emergency hiding spots for when those footsteps draw near outside his door.

He wonders if he’s like her, tries extra hard to do the right thing and be a good person. He often crumbles under the weight, but doesn’t stop trying because her values aren’t his values.

Even the presence of sweet, kind Jinki ceases to comfort him when things are bad. Jonghyun compares himself to his best friend and can only see the ugly magnified in his reflection.

Jinki is an angel, he doesn’t deserve Jinki, he resents Jinki for being so effortlessly wonderful in areas where he’s lacking and hates himself more for feeling this way.

68 days until D-Day.

Until he can dig himself loose from under his mother’s thumb, Jonghyun crosses off squares on his calendar and continues carrying around inside the things he has nowhere to set down.

The red X’s give him a reason to keep living.