Dear Old Stockholm serenades the remaining expanses of my consciousness. Its chords flow off the broken record player that fills the spaces between the fading blue paint that still lingers on the walls. The felted needle skips every one minute and thirty-seven seconds, but over time, I’ve come to anticipate this abnormality as a lone sign of spontaneity.

I lie on the rotting wooden floor that barely manages to support the weight of the elephant in the room. Staring up at the plaster ceiling I notice the countless stains there caused by the dark clouds that hover above the heads of every person that has ever resided beneath it.

Jongin is sitting atop the mattress that doubles as both a bed and a couch. With yellowing stains there to remind us of where we’ve been, the only thing left to wait for is a sign to show us where we’re going.

The desk in the corner is the only other piece of furniture in the room aside from the straight-backed chair that accompanies it. Lying upon it are the remaining essences of the life we used to lead. Underneath the used syringes and empty plastic bags sit Beatnik poetry and abstract prose written by aspiring authors both forever unknown and uncaring.

These are remnants of a time not so long ago when Jongin’s eyes showed signs of life and were free of the sorrows that permeate the inner workings of his realities. In a time before his tanned arms were adorned with track marks and before he began to bruise with every show of affection. His skin is now an unattractive shade of milky-yellow and his darkening eyes show no trace of recognition towards the fluorescent sunlight that used to shine above his dreams.

It is because of this change that I have now decided to live my life beneath the shadow of a drug induced haze. However, as of late, I've been having trouble convincing this shadow that I’m someone worth following.

Each day, the hopelessness sets in, and the only way I can seem to escape the voices that are forever yelling inconsistencies within the hollows of my clouded mindscape is by retreating into a world where no one else is around to pity my circumstance. The only person I have left in life is Jongin, and nowadays, saying even that is a stretch.

Looking back in his direction I notice he’s either fallen asleep or into a coma. I really can’t tell the difference any longer. I continue watching as his joints twitch in a way that almost makes him seem as he once was.

I walk over to where he lies and I lie down beside him. I stare at the pallor of his skin and the hollowing of his cheeks and I can’t help but wonder what he carries in the baggage underneath his eyes. His breath quickens while a lone tear falls down from closed eyelids. This is nothing new, yet I can’t stop myself from nudging him softly to wakefulness. Even today, in his new state of being, I sometimes find remaining pieces of the person he used to be.

His eyes crack open and while he struggles to keep the cries from reaching his throat, he doesn’t quite succeed. I don't think he can tell the difference between his laughter and his sobbing any longer. I open my arms and he collapses into them. My shirt dampens with the unobstructed version of his repressed sorrows.

Breathing in his scent, I can only seem to smell stale cigarettes and the musk of the rain on his skin.

Lately, his moods have changed. The things that once brought him joy now only suceed in bringing tears to his eyes. The Jongin that I once knew has been replaced by a broken copy, yet still, my heartbeat quickens when our skin meets. And still, I feel the butterflies rise into my throat when we’re together, or perhaps its bile.

I rub circles into his back to calm him down, but nothing seems to help. When Jongin loses control of his emotions, the only thing to do is wait.

With no other option presenting itself, I find myself watching the water droplets slide down the dirt encrusted window. They drip onto the ground beside my apartment complex without so much as a lingering trail to show where they once were. I know how they feel. I live a life devoid of color and aspirations. I won’t be remembered in death and it is only this that stops me from ending it. 

Jongin regains his composure and apologizes. He didn’t know what got into himself, he says.

I shake my head to let him know that it’s fine, it will always be fine.

Gesturing toward the mattress, we lie together with only a threadbare blanket to keep the tremors at bay. Sinking into the land in which there is no time, we both fall asleep. Together, we jump the moon and find that there is nothing awaiting us when we come back down to earth.

-----

We met for the first time in the middle of a night deeply drunk on the spring breeze. It was mid-April and the air smelled of new beginnings. 

During those days, I spent my time reading poetry underneath the cover of the storm clouds outside the window of a Turkish tea house on 56th and Main. Without a job or a dream, I provided a bit of atmosphere to a place that never asked for any.

There was a green easy chair in the corner with an unshaded lamp sitting beside it on top of a table filled with the beaten leather covers of books I’d never heard of. Miles Davis played through overhead speakers to provide a theme song to accompany the time lost in mindless wanderings.

For all the hours I spent inside, I didn’t notice Jongin until three weeks after I began frequenting the spot. He sat in the corner opposite of mine. The molding walls behind his back brought a dull glimmer to his skin. They correlated well with what I would eventually find to be his mindset: dying yet continuing to grow.

He wore a pair of cuffed blue jeans, Converse, and a fading green sweater. A beaten copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac was in his hands and a black americano was on the table beside him. He was nineteen years old then, but his eyes had the dark circles of someone twice his age.

Our gazes met once and I was already lost. His black eyes were expressive and full of life with a hinted feeling of nothingness residing somewhere just beneath the surface. A small smile peaked overtop the frown lines cemented to the area around his full lips.

With his head caught in the clouds, he walked towards me. In his absence he left behind a feeling of gracefulness that lingered in the spaces between his steps.

Jongin took the wooden chair in front of mine and turned it so we were face-to-face. A closer inspection revealed that he was even more attractive than I had once thought. Again, I found my mind wandering, lost in his trance.

“What’s your name?”

“Jongin” was his response. I told him mine was Kyungsoo and from that moment forward that look of nothingness that filled his eyes was converted to a look of warmth. He told me his favorite books and that he was in need of a reason to wake up in the morning. While the conversation only lasted ten minutes, his impression stayed with me during the following days.

Lurking behind my eyelids was the image of his smile and in my dreams I was met with the sound of his voice.

After that initial meeting, we began to spend the time preceding the midnight hours drinking coffee and discussing the state of the modern anti-conformist. Soon these discussions began to continue until the wee hours of the morning and with no one to come home to and no reason to sleep, we started to spend all our nights together in that tiny café cloaked in darkness and a need for escape.

We were each others distraction from the pain of living without a care in the world. Morbid thoughts and lucid dreams served as our only friends left to create a facade of structure underneath the desire for anti-depressants and a reason to go on.

Those weeks of comfort eventually led into nights filled with passion. In the morning, the small area of my apartment reeked of and burning incense.

We spent our free time together sitting by the shores of a lake filled with polluted water and trash. Some days we would find ourselves in the back allies of unnamed streets spraying the brick walls of abandoned buildings with graffiti crafted with stolen spray-paint and a lacking sense of artistic pride.

Some nights, Jongin would take me out to an abandoned warehouse filled to the brim with the smell of mildewed cardboard and withering dreams. Here, he would dance along to a silent lullaby sung by the moon. His movements flowed into one another in a way I’d never seen before. But, more than anything, he looked so serene, so at peace. 

When he stopped, he looked me in the eyes and told me that dancing had been the only thing he had ever truly loved. It was then that he took me in his arms and began to sway our bodies back and forth.

With the light of the stars infiltrating the dark atmosphere, I fell in love.

We never formally announced our relationship because there was no one else to tell. After a while, Jongin stopped going back to his apartment completely. Over time, his belongings, what few there were, found their way into my one room apartment and littered the already cluttered room with random sketches and journals filled with his illegible scrawl written in pitch-black ink.

I always told him how much I liked the contrast of black on white, I’d always felt it made complex things seem simple. As he watched me struggle to read through them, the only response Jongin gave me was that he thought I looked cute with my eyebrows scrunched together.

I never did figure out all that was written inside those tattered pages. One night, when Jongin first began his cycle of self-destruction, he ripped all the pages out and burned them in a fit of impulsive rage. He opened the window and watched silently as the ashes of his thoughts and dreams drifted through the night sky and far off to a place that we’ll never know.

When he turned away from the window, there were tears in his eyes.

His fists were clenched and he began to mumble incoherently shaking his head violently. I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his trembling shoulders. Jongin buried his face in my neck and encircled his arms around my waist.

It was always in this position that I felt the safest. No matter the circumstance, with Jongin by my side, I always felt that he’d protect me, even though now, he can no longer seem to protect himself.

That was the first of many times that we would fall asleep with our legs entangled beneath the light of a paper moon. The glow illuminated his body and showed me the stars hidden behind his cloudy exterior.

With a bursting heart and a mind filled with thoughts of him, I laid awake dreaming of the future that I now know will never materialize.

-----

Jongin first began using after he moved in with me. I guess now that he didn’t have to pay much for rent, he had extra cash left over to spend on other things. I never understood where he got his money from and I never asked, it was always simply there. Honestly, it didn’t surprise me when I discovered how he spent his spare time.

When we’d had before, I’d noticed the fading track lines decorating the curves of his arms and the bruises around his wrists and feet. However, I had always kept these observations in the back of my mind, hoping that ignorance truly brought about bliss. 

I knew Jongin was getting bad the night I came home to find him passed out on the floor with a used syringe lying beside him. That night I’d panicked, but now, when my key meets the lock and the creaking of the door greets me with the sight of Jongin strung-out and alone, the only thing I can do is sigh and continue to set down my things.

Although I put forth a strong façade, some nights it’s just too hard to see him like this and I’ll begin to walk the streets in solitude during the twilight hours. It seems that there is no where left in the world for me to hide.

It’s only when I’m alone that I can release the depression, the anxiety that I keep pent-up inside my chest.

I sometimes find myself contemplating jumping when I reach the edge of the bridge that hangs above the stunning darkness. Looking down at the rocky shore below, I can’t stop myself from thinking of how easy it would be; the shocking jolt of freezing water blocking my every pore and thought. I can almost feel the water invading my lungs, the oxygen leaving my brain preventing me of thinking about the consequences to my selfish actions.

The only thing that ever stops me is Jongin. The thought of him alone and helpless always brings me out of my mindless stupor.

I shake my head and rub my eyes with the backs of my hands. Without thinking, I feel my feet begin to pound endlessly against the cracking concrete of the city streets, creating a rhythm to a soundless song.

When I open the door to my apartment for the second time, I am met with a semi-sober Jongin.

His eyes are red-rimmed but clear. He grabs my wrists and begins mumbling promises in my ear. He tells me he loves me and that once he gets sober, everything will be perfect.

We’ll move out of this crumbling -hole of a residence and find a home. He says we’ll be by the water, by the ocean.

In the mornings, we’ll sit together encased in the deafening silence and watch the waves crash endlessly against the shores of our past. As the tide washes out to sea, so too will our troubles leave us and drift anonymously into the infinite realm of the earth. When he gets sober, everything will change for the better.

I smile because in my heart of hearts, I want to believe him. I want to believe that there is a brighter tomorrow awaiting us at the conclusion of this endless midnight.

However, I know that soon that glimmer in his eyes will again fade to darkness and these promises will be forgotten inside the ever-continuing cycle of twilight.

When I come home tomorrow, I’ll no doubt find Jongin in the same state I found him today. And one of these days, he won’t be here at all.

His body can’t take this abuse forever and at the rate he’s going, he won’t live to see his 21st birthday. He’ll leave me alone without even a lingering remnant of his life to prove to me that he was ever alive at all. The only thing remaining will be the memories that even today are becoming cloudy at best. Those days of nostalgic fantasies are long gone and replacing them are Jongin’s blank stares and melting brain waves.

Yet still, I can’t bring myself to leave him. I can't because I still cling onto the waning hope that he’ll change. That one day Jongin will decide he loves me more than the drugs and will start to write.

But, more than anything, I dream of the day that Jongin will dance again. When he attempts now, his movements are jerky and his face gets strained and flustered. He loses his breath after the lightest of physical activity and is unable to keep a steady rhythm.

All I want is to experience, just one more time, the feeling of Jongin’s arms wrapped around my waist, guiding me to the beat of the melody that he hums softly into my ear. I want to feel the touch of his cheek as he rests it against mine. I want to see the joy that alights in his eyes as he sways his body and the confidence he feels as he does the one thing through which he finds escape.

I want to go back to the time before Jongin’s arms were infected with the filth of junk and before his veins became darkened by substance.

-----

Again, I find myself looking across the room at Jongin sitting silently on the wooden chair by the desk.

Dear Old Stockholm continues to play off the record player in the corner, but this time, the soft chords fall on deaf ears. The syringe lies stagnantly in Jongin’s vein as his blood begins fill the capsule. He’s slumped over, but his face shows a look of relief. His eyes blink slowly and eventually fall completely closed.I lie him down and cover him with a blanket.

I don’t know when he’ll wake up. Maybe he never will at all.

Rising from the mattress, I stand alone in the middle of the floor. As I walk towards the window, the wooden floor boards rise then fall back into place, bringing up a cloud of dust in their wake.

The rain is falling again outside and the streets show no signs of life. Slowly, the sun begins to peak out from behind the cover of grey clouds.

For the first time in months, I feel a smile place itself around my lips.

I begin to feel the music reach my eardrums and I begin to dance alone. I close my eyes and picture Jongin holding me and suddenly everything else in life becomes nothing more than a piece of the background. We continue our dance together until the early hours of a gloomy Tuesday morning in October.

When the music stops, so do we.

Jongin kisses me and for a second everything is okay.

As I feel him pull back, I open my eyes.

Outside, the skies are clouded over and dark. Jongin hasn’t moved from his spot on the mattress. I let out a shaky breath, but I can hear no sound.

The music continues to play from its spot in the corner, the felted needle skipping every one minute and thirty-seven seconds.