The fest I was participating in seems to be inactive. I've given it about three days. I'm going to proceed to post it here now, however, if there comes to be a change, I'll  be changing the story to private. 

As Daehyun writes down his thoughts in a little, torn notebook, in a little rundown coffee shop, nothing makes sense.

It’s barely passed daybreak and the clouds are still strung up in the sky like magnificent puffs of smoke. It’s misty and foggy and so many other things. The windows are dirty with condensation, decorated with tiny beads of water that cling to the glass.

He’s shaking his right leg out of poor habit, causing his body to bounce rhymically. But he breaks the smooth tempo to wipe at the window, letting the small detail of the dew being on the other side, slip his mind. There are slight streaks marring the glass from the spots where he tried to clear away the incessant, cold haze, but they’re barely noticeable.

The untouched droplets reflect the surrounding area, revealing slight details while exaggerating others. It’s like capturing the entire world in there. He’s able to make out the trees lining the roads, as well as the local mom and pop’s shops. There aren’t many people. The avenue’s streets are empty at eight am. It’s that rare sight of absolute sereneness that always evades him––more accustomed to three am life and twelve pm mornings––and the grey windows act as yet another obstacle.

He has coffee in one hand and a pen in the other. The ink in his pen runs the faintest of blacks along his notebook and usually requires a good couple shakes before it becomes of any actual use. It’s old and long passed its prime, but who really has the time to get another.

The corners of all the pages are dog eared and stained with the scribbles of his pen’s ink checks. The book’s seen better days, and even the best are quite unflattering. There are about a dozen or so more back at his place just like it, too: one is of a prince on a quest; three follow their own respective couple; one has a happy ending; two are of war; several are a tragedy; another an anthology; and, his current one, an autobiography (well, really a journal because what if he becomes famous one day and people want to know about what he had for lunch once when he was twenty-two).

(and youngjae had warned him about writing his own biography and how it would inflate his already gigantic ego, but daehyun never listens.)

He’s got an editorial due for the local paper at noon; however, he’s got a chapter of his life that needs writing first. He’s been putting it off for months and maybe for a while more if he continues to stare blankly at the lined pages. He does several of his pen, forcing the ink to run free. He creates a deep impression on the paper before anything comes out.  

He titles the thing ‘.’ Plain and simple, just like him. There are other words on the page, those are scribbled out, though. Some have x’s and some are angrily ruined beyond recognition; however, Daehyun can still make out a few of the crossed out words, like ‘damn’, ‘the day i ed up’, ‘the day i really ed up’, and ‘youngjae.’

There are reasons why these aren’t chosen for the final draft: syntax’s all wrong, diction’s bad, too short, too long, and the fact that they’ve all already been used before.

Unconsciously Daehyun flips back a couple pages, letting his fingers skim over them, enjoying the feel of the imprints left by old sentences. The happy ones are light and airy, he can barely feel them against his skin. The sadder ones, on the contrary, are dark and heavy, resembling almost the feel of braille.  

He moves further back until he touches upon the first mention of Youngjae in his book. It’s barely even a sentence, no more than two syllables: cute boy. Daehyun, at the time, hadn’t foreseen the role the boy would have later in his life or that the attractive stranger would become the subject of dumb flattery and flowery descriptions that would even make Nathaniel Hawthorne cringe in disgust.

Funnily enough, though, Youngjae doesn’t actually make his first appearance in his self-entitled chapter, but in the one called ‘ birds.’ It’s an entry dated well over two years ago and the starting point for all the writing which follows.