It is the same heart wrenching desperation and fear that wakes him up. Screaming. Crying.

Sweat drenching his forehead and tears streaming down his face. His limbs feel cold and his heart is banging against the ribcages of his chest, his fingers digging into the blanket as if he's hanging on for his dear life.

Nichkhun's eyes are wild for a moment as they jerk open but the panic subsides as he catches the familiar view of his bedroom; The vanity beside the rows of coffee colored curtains of his windows, the wardrobe beside the half opened bathroom door, the alarm clock flickering lonely on his nightstand.

He blinks a few times and swallows. It’s hard for him to breathe, his everything everywhere aches terribly that Nichkhun fails to pinpoint what was exactly hurting. He feels like dying though he's not sure why, just that he was, that it's real, -it felt real.

His reaches into the drawer of his nightstand, his hands shaking as they rummage and takes out a canister of pills. He opens the lid, a movement his fingers had memorized so well for so many years, throwing a couple of its white  contents into his mouth and downs a glass of water  after. These were supposed to suppress his nightmares and he's been taking them like they're strawberry tasted candies.

It’s getting worse lately, the nightmares.

~

Nichkhun thinks life is one big complicated jigsaw puzzle.

Everyone was handed their own set with their name labeled on it when they were born. And along the way they learn to recognise the pieces, the shapes, the colours. It’s a trial and error thing, to try and place each pieces of the puzzle together, to build their life the way it was meant to be.  No one knew what their complete picture would look like, it could be a serene lake with raging currents of  life long struggle underneath, or a majestic mountain standing tall and proud with achievement, hard work and sacrifices along the way.

People feel content and proud when the pieces they assembled starts to shape up and take form, a sign that they're doing it right. They’d cry and left heartbroken when the pieces they placed together didn't fit in, and after all the work and time and love they've given it, they have to take it apart again, start over,  and to really look for the right piece to put in the right place this time.

Nichkhun enters the shower in the same manner he always did every day, letting the cold water hits him face first ruthlessly for the first few minutes. It feels like hundreds of small needles pricking his skin as it is icy cold, it is freezing cold and  like every other day, Nichkhun secretly wishes the cold would somehow stir that part of him still sleeping, refusing to wake up. It's wishful thinking hoping that he would wake up with a new recognition of his life one of these days. That he would wake up and actually remember everything, maybe then everything in his world would be different. He pulls up his boxers in silence, slipping in his bright yellow flip-flops and grabs a shirt before heading to the kitchen downstairs. 

The days are the same; waking up early, cold showers, making breakfast. It’s the same repeated pattern he had each day throughout the years, and every day while he switches the coffeemaker on ( Black & Decker, a Christmas gift from himself for times when he really, really wants to avoid sleep all together which comes more often than he will ever admit to anyone. ) Nichkhun switches on the autopilot in him too, retreating to a quiet place on the back of his head while watching himself going through life wearing perfect painted masks with overused smiles. He’ll glide through the days, eyes closed, living but no--, not really.

 Sometimes he feels this is just a dream, that someday he would wake up and then, and then, he’d truly be living.

Until that day comes, his days start the same and will end the same.  It is the same today as it was yesterday, and Nichkhun thinks it will not change tomorrow. 

The pancake sizzles and Nichkhun flips them perfectly. He stacks all three of them, medium sized and honey colored on his plate. He goes to the fridge and takes out a tub of ice cream, scoops a generous amount of it and slabs it on top of his pancakes. And then he sits.

Watching.

Waiting.

 Just like he always does every time he makes pancakes for breakfast. Waiting for the heat of the freshly made pancakes to melt the ice cream. Waiting for that first drop of white milky melting ice cream to touch the plate. And only when it did does Nichkhun lifts his spoon and begins eating.

Nichkhun thinks life is one big complicated jigsaw puzzle, and people need to place the right piece in the right place, only then it would reveal the beautiful picture it arranged into.

Nichkhun thinks that if his poor philosophical approach of life is true, then he's ed, utterly and thoroughly, because the beautiful picture would never be arranged for him. Because he knows for sure there will be pieces missing from his puzzle. Pieces he had lost.

All the years that’s hidden from him.

~

He first heard the word partial amnesia on one of his check up visit, he can’t remember which, everything was hazy and blurry on those recovering months, only that he heard it somewhere along the lines of good progress and lucky to be alive. For someone who survived a devastating car crash and had been in a coma for three whole weeks, Nichkhun supposed he was kind of lucky. His mother even used the word blessed.

So they said to wait for it to recover, it being the years prior to his accident, all the years he spent in Korea, all the years missing from his memory.  But then days turned to weeks turned to months and those memories never really return to him. There are only the daunting nightmares, horrible and tormenting. There is only him, screaming, gasping for air, holding on to the life that seems to be slipping away from his fingers and that’s when Nichkhun realized; It’s more of a curse than a blessing really, him being alive.

By the end of the year, with no signs of a complete recovery of his memory and having countless episodes of night terrors, they decided that it was a psychological issue, some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Saying that he was traumatized severely by the accident that his subconscious mind refused to remember anything that would relate him back to it, even going as far as forgetting the time he spent there.

With all honesty, Nichkhun doesn’t ing care what it’s called; he just wants the nightmares to stop. It’s been seven years since they moved from Korea yet his nightmares still torture him.

~ 

The office is a predictable place.

He'll sit on his usual table in his little cubicle by the window side. Perfectly pressed pants and color coordinated tie that never goes askew. He’ll have that autopilot smile plastered across his face and everyone would smile back and everything will be fine.  He’ll work all through the afternoon to the late of night, the shining ray of the sun that lit up his vast office replaced by dimmed shadows, lights being flicked off by co-workers saying goodnight, finishing their rounds and going home to where their family awaits while Nichkhun (more than just a few nights a week if he’s being honest) chooses to stay, making notes here and there, cross checking some more files and making sure everything sums up.

 It’s not that he loves his job so much, he couldn’t say he hates it either, it was just.. a job; his job. It’s a way to spend the hours and the days and he gets paid every month for it and that's enough.

“Have you opened it?" His sister asks through the phone, her voice soft and careful.

“Opened what?" He says, pinning the phone between his cheek and shoulder while his hand continues to type-in his report. Fingertips tapping gently and steadily as if they were dancing, as if in another time another place these same exact tips had tapped over something more exhilarating and moving than just dull laptop keys, producing something more heartfelt and harmonious than just constructing a monthly report on a buzzing laptop.

“The package I sent you last week?" Cherreen answers and Nichkhun catches that slight strain of uncertainty in her voice, the kind she always has when she’s worried about something but tries not to let it show.

Nichkhun winces, " I was busy. I’ll take a look when I’m home.” He says apologetically.

“You’re working too hard again.” Cherreen mutters but does not continue, stopping herself from talking too much about the obvious, treading carefully between the set of landmines , things that was just not to be discussed in their family,  things like their parent’s divorce, things like Nichan’s eloping to Europe, things like his nightmares. But even so, the question slips wearily from his sister’s lips. “ Are the nightmares coming back ?Are you still taking your meds?”

Nichkhun breathes in, blinking before holding the phone with one hand; mustering a laugh that even he knows is too fake and fabricated to believe. He’ll laughs it anyway, knowing Cherreen wouldn’t believe him, but she would pretend she does, despite. Because they both knew how he hate feeling so weak and helpless, but making his family worry over him is the one he hates the most. So she’ll pretend not to worry, and he’ll pretend there’s nothing to be worried about. 

“I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

Pretending, his family is good at that.

Still, he's a man of his word; at least Nichkhun wants to think that he is. So later that night he sit cross legged facing the brown colored box his sister sent him. The one she said she 'found in the attic and I think you should take a look at'.

Nichkhun solemnly opens the box and is quickly greeted with medals. His medals. The medals he won on swimming competitions back when he's in elementary school. Some memories return and Nichkhun smiles, firstly because he remembers how hard he trained to win it, but mostly because he remembers it.

His heart stops for a second when he sees his high school year book.  High school. A period of time stolen from him. Not because he didn't experience it, but because he can't remember it. As if the entire years didn’t exist in his life.

Placing the medals aside, he reaches in to take the book. He blows away the layers of dust that’s covering it, his fingers grazing over the hard cover slowly. A slight shiver of curiosity comes over him. What if something in there could make him remember?

What if it won’t?

What if he’s destined to be this way, a man with half finished puzzles and half missing pieces?

His mother had told him once that everything from his high school was lost at shipment when they moved back here. Nichkhun never really paid attention before; his only focus at the time was his recuperation and healing.  After that he was focusing on getting into a decent university and from there on, it was a new environment with new faces, new people and new challenges. It was easier to move on for him, especially when he can't remember what he left behind.

“How was prom night in Korea?" Friends used to ask him. " I don't know, I don't really remember," he’d answer them with an awkward chuckle and everyone would laugh because they would think he was too drunk then to remember and Nichkhun would let them. It was easier that way.

Nichkhun goes through the pages, eyes carefully examining every picture of students, every scribbled word beside their pictures, written in english for some and in hangul for most. He knows he shouldn't hope for much, but expectation grows nevertheless and Nichkhun finds himself wishing to find something, someone, a familiar face who would revive the frozen memory inside his head and yet there was nothing. The faces remain strangers to him, alien and foreign despite the fact he used to know them.

He puts the year book down, a small smile forming on his face when he sees a thick wooden frame. It has a picture him and the girls, Cherreen and Yanin, standing in front of their house back in Korea. Yanin had a copy of the exact picture in her album. Cherreen was standing next to Yanin, each holding a fluffy cotton candy while Nichkhun stands on the outerside, half of his body didn’t even get photographed in because mum was an awful photographer. Nichkhun huffs amusedly when he takes it out to get a better look, and that’s when he catches a glimpse of the things pinned under the frame. 

Pictures, polaroids, stacked messily one upon another under the wooden frame. His smile gets wider as he examines them closely one by one, not only because he finally found pictures that shows his high school years, but also because there is him in almost every photograph taken. Him, and a group of young boys in their school uniforms.

It was laughter and sunshine that he sees in their faces, with hands around one another's waist or around the shoulder as they posed on the group picture. Nichkhun sees himself, a younger version of himself, and was struck dumb for a while.

 He-, the younger he in the picture, looks thinner, eyebrows rebellious and wilder back then with hair all messy in its natural color. But what interests him is his eyes and smile. They were alive. They were literally gleaming, shining fresh with hope, excitement,  while his lips stretched into a smile so wide, so bright as if he never knew sorrow. He looked so genuinely happy. So hopeful.

Nichkhun straightens his back and takes a good glance of himself in the vanity across the room, biting his lower lip and lifting the picture in his hand to try to imitate the smile he found there.  He pulls the sides of his mouth as wide as he could possibly can, lifts his eyebrows higher in an attempt to catch that flare of glee his high school self seems to portray so effortlessly. His cheeks cramp and his forehead tires as Nichkhun realize he couldn't. His eyes are dull and his smile is nothing but bland. 

Brushing himself off the heaviness that’s growing inside his chest, Nichkhun continues to search the box. He finds one, quite large photograph that seems to have all of them in it. Six boys, all smiles and sunshine. There’s a tall tanned boy with funny teeth and huge glasses that always seems to laugh in every picture. Another boy looks like a foreigner, handsome, probably Italian, he's not sure. There's a really short dude with a smug face giving a playful headlock to a boy with the warmest eye smile Nichkhun have ever seen. And then there was himself. Laughing so wide and free with an arm slung casually around a too youthful looking boy with slanted uneven eyes that was probably in the middle of  a holler when the picture was taken, his lips stopped at the stupidest form.

There was handwriting scribbled on the picture. "Don't stop can't stop", " We'll reach for the stars", " Ya'll better watch me son" and "KY is forever".

His brows furrow at the last remark, not really sure what it could’ve mean as he flips the picture to see the names written at the back.  Taec, Chansungie, Jay, Junho, Khunnie and Woodong. Nichkhun bites his bottom lips, they must have been his friends.

There's a comfortable ring to it as he hums these words back to him.

Friends.