I think, unfortunately, it’s often this way with love.

It starts off a beautiful, full red, all passion and desire and feeling and touch. And all you want to do is spend every second of the day with them, because they’re just so different from you. You want to do all the things you’d never do on your own, you want to run away with them without shoes on, and dive off cliffs with them and everything is just so red and imperfect and excites you beyond compare.

But after a while, you could become silver. And everything just feels like one plane, like one-sided glass that you can’t see them through anymore. And you feel alone, like their mind is still in the red while you’re just reaching for the gold. The colour is bleaching and growing limbs and sparkling and it’s awkward but it’s comfortable, but it’s too much limbo for you to deal with.

The lucky ones burn golden. They swell and grow into a perfect circle and everything just turns slowly and perfectly and you can see their face again and you know there’s not a minute in your life that you’ll spend without them. Their imperfections become more pronounced, but their perfections hold you both together and no one else excites you anymore.

It’s fairly difficult to fall out of gold, but red and silver can be fairly precarious. And that’s when black makes its move.

Black is everything that both of you promised not to do. You promised not to leave them and the black will take you and make it your fault. You promised to love them, so the black will laugh in your face and steal that love, and pass it on to another. And no matter how much you believe that it should be the first person, your first red, and silver and gold, you let them go and follow the black like a shadow.

The bronze is the lull. The nothing, the curveball, the guilt. The times when you want nothing more then to be held and kissed and loved, but you are the one at fault, and you are the one the black will creep up on. And the black will come, and steal it all and you’ll be left wondering where and when it started going wrong, and why you feel like a something with bleach white bones and a crimson heart, bleeding sideways in front of you.

And it will be your choice.

I stayed that way in the closet for a while after he’d gone, knees bent and knuckles scraping the cement.

A few things about Donghae immediately came to mind.

He had been wearing mascara. Mascara to a dance practice. And his hair, his hair was the same as the first day I had seen him (albeit a dyed caramel as opposed to his natural black hair). He’d had it tied back in a half ponytail, the rest of his fringe and hair curling around his neck and blending with his eyebrows.

And dear God, he was so beautiful.

But he had changed, a