It was good. Everything about it felt nice and fuzzy but sometimes things end, don’t they?

You know how you were a kid, first time on a swing and someone gives you a push and you feel like you can fly. Fly to the sky and even beyond that. How you believed the stars were at your reach. Still, sometimes it had to end. There’s two options to how the swinging stops:

You either jump, successfully or not, or someone grabs you and in both cases you lose the speed immediately. That can sometimes hurt. Something abruptly changes and you have to get used to normal life again. The hard ground welcomes you, you stop swinging. You can’t get the stars.

Realizing it hurts.

Sometimes you get to enjoy the speed as long as it lasts. Sometimes you have so much fun and swing and swing and laugh and you forget that there even is a thing called ground. Once the swinging stops you slowly come to realize how you’re not up in the sky anymore, you realize how your life becomes dull again. You lose the sparkle, the speed, everything exciting.

Realizing it hurts.

The other one, he lost the speed. He didn’t even realize how the swinging turned to swaying and stopped all together. Slowly but surely it seized to nothingness.

The other got yanked away.

They were both hurting.

Jinyoung didn’t see it coming. He wasn’t even lying, he was only enjoying the full speed of the swing. He was too busy to search for the stars to see the other digging for worms on the ground. He was going too fast to even see that the other had gone from his side.

That’s what love does. It messes up with your knowledge, with your whole being. Like as a kid, you truly believe that you could stay up high forever but you can’t. It ends. It hurts.

Jinyoung hadn’t even taken full speed before he had lifted his legs from the ground. He had always been going slower than Mark and had been slowing down even more. He had been looking at Mark’s back, wondering how did the other boy do that. How did he swing with a smile on his face, without fear. They never went equally fast, not high enough, not together.

Maybe the stars weren’t for them. If you think about it, the stars don’t actually belong to anyone. You maybe could buy some, but all they really are is nothing but a hopeless dream from your childhood. Mark had to do it, he had to pull Jinyoung away from the dream.

Mark had stopped swinging,

they had stopped.

There’s not even a ‘them’ anymore. Just Jinyoung. Just Mark.

Swinging alone never felt good.