“The people you love become ghosts inside of you and, like this, you keep them alive.”

******

            Yixing has always thought the dark was cold.

            He’s not sure why he associates the two, because a dark apartment in the summer is no less hot and a dark evening in the tropics is no less stuffy, but with the sunset for him come chillbumps and shivers and blankets upon blankets. It feels as if his entire life has been spent shut in a refrigerator. Not any refrigerator, either – maybe the kind in hotel rooms that people fiddle with but never use. Full of potential, but empty of results. The light of day is like being swung open, but the brush of dusk is like being slowly, painfully closed, and he spends his twilights curled up in its icy sheets, wondering where the warmth has gone.

            Yixing has always thought Myungsoo was cold, too, but he supposes he can’t always be right twice in a row.

            They never strictly met, he thinks, because Myungsoo has always perpetually been, and Yixing had just been blind to that for a little while. There are spaces in his head that he keeps empty for the sake of being able to fill them, and Myungsoo managed to float right through them, over and over again, until the day that he served him coffee one too many times and told him to get a life. It was a rude awakening (emphasis on rude) that caused Yixing to notice his impatient waiter fully for the first time, all huffy breath and coal-colored eyes and black aprons and contempt.

            Yixing’s not sure how many times they’d interacted before – ten times? Maybe twenty? – but to him, time spent doesn’t matter so much as time spent well. He likes to think he spent his time before Myungsoo well, too. (Even if the time he’s spent with Myungsoo has been spent better.)

            Yixing, for all his muddled thinking, is the kind of person who never forgets a person once he remembers them. He stuffs them all in a corner of his mind so he can open himself to everyone else because even he knows that he has limits. They’re neatly organized, stacked in labeled boxes in his head and filed away like paperwork – Park Chanyeol, sales representative at work. Kim Sunggyu, high school best friend. Byun Baekhyun, man from the park who chases all the pigeons. Lee Howon, park cop who lets him. His brain looks the layout for a newlywed’s new home: furnitureless and full of crates, where he keeps all their names and various facts he’s expected to know about their lives. It’s tiring, really, remembering so many people, but Yixing doesn’t complain. He only tidies his tiny living space and makes room for the next person to waltz into his life.

            Maybe this is why it took so long for Myungsoo to fade into the forefront of his memory, but once he does, it’s all hopeless from there. Myungsoo becomes a battle of sorts that Yixing is determined to win. The way he stomps around topples Yixing’s people towers, sends whirlwinds of systematically stockpiled papers flying across the span of his memories until he can hardly keep straight who was female versus male versus nothing at all, who was young and who was old, who was a McDonald’s waitress who’d asked for his number and who was a model he’d lost contact with because he got too famous to be bothered. When Myungsoo glares at him, Yixing can remember nothing but the sparks of dislike swirling like snow in the air between them.

            Yixing isn’t just the kind of person who never forgets. He is also the kind of person who has never met a person he didn’t love. Myungsoo challenges this every day.

******

            Yixing can’t rightfully say he’s ever been the popular sort. It’s true that he’s never met a person he didn’t like, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s never met a person who didn’t like him, either. He’s had plenty of those. Most of them cite his eerily blank smile as the cause of their displeasure.

            “You look like a ghost,” one particularly clever sixth-grader had once told him, and even as his posse had laughed behind him, Yixing had blessed him with a dimpled grin and a look of barely sedated confusion because he’d checked his pulse many times and he could most definitely confirm that he was still breathing. He wasn’t sure what was funny then, but he’s since figured it out. It’s a memory he still laughs at for far different reasons than what five silly middle schoolers could have possibly intended.

            Because since then, Yixing has become the only living fixture in his life. The rest of the people who come and go have long since disappeared, and if Yixing loved them any more than he did, he’d be irked by this. As it stands, Yixing has loved each and every one of them the perfect amount, so their presence or lack thereof has no lasting impact on his life. He’s happy if they stay, and he’s happy if they tread their own path without him because, in the end, he thinks they’re more responsible for their own happiness than he is.

            This is how Yixing learns to let go. Except he never really learned it, anyhow; it’s been part of him since he was a child, and he’s perfectly fine with that.

            Myungsoo becomes about the closest thing to permanence that he’s had in a long time, but Myungsoo falls solidly into the category of “People Who Resent Zhang Yixing.” He has a sharp tongue and a sharper heart. On his best behavior, he’ll set Yixing’s food in front of him without spilling anything, and on his worst, he’ll give him a completely wrong order and charge him twice as much for it. Sometimes, he won’t bring the check for thirty minutes after Yixing has finished, and other times, he’ll bring it while he’s in the middle of the meal and essentially throw him out. Yixing doesn’t do much more than dutifully obey, but this only seems to make Myungsoo angrier.

            Myungsoo is crabby on good days and insufferable on bad ones, but Yixing’s long since decided that the worst days are the one where he doesn’t come in at all. Partially because Yixing worries. Mostly because Myungsoo is absolutely explosive the next couple days afterwards.

            If Yixing asks, Myungsoo sneers at him. If Yixing doesn’t ask, Myungsoo insults him. If Yixing says nothing at all, Myungsoo scowls at his food as he brings it out and clatters it on the table in front of him, as if angry with it as an extension of Yixing.

            Yixing doesn’t really know what he’s done wrong. He used to pass it off as Myungsoo’s general demeanor, but when he starts observing Myungsoo more carefully, he realizes he’s the only one on the receiving end of his temper. Myungsoo smiles at old ladies and laughs along with rambunctious children. He carries heated conversations about sports teams with single dads and talks about classes with university students attending the technical college down the street.

            Yixing considers himself a pretty boring person. He works in an office for a man who works in an office for another man who works in a bigger office overlooking Seoul’s endless skyline, and most of what he does involves Microsoft Excel and thick folders full of formatted papers typed up in dull standard fonts and dry standard languages. It’s really much too mundane for Yixing’s dim attention span, but he’s in a small, insignificant position, so his flawed work ethic has very little effect on the overall company. No one minds him, and he doesn’t mind anyone, either, although he makes it a point to keep to himself so he won’t unintentionally fill up his heart with more unnecessary people. His office is a tiny cubicle in a sea of matching tiny cubicles, and he keeps his desk bare because it’s easier than trying to fit in everyone he cares about.

            He wonders if this is why Myungsoo hates him. Myungsoo, who is balancing two jobs, one at the café, one at a club, in order to take care of a sister who’s too young to know how to be alone. Myungsoo, who uses his free time to write music and paint the cherry blossoms in the park, and who likes the shading in pencil-sketched drawings because it brings out the light. Myungsoo, who loathes normality, who despises societal standards, who hates being polite just because he’s expected to.

            Myungsoo, whose entire life has revolved around an axis and has never moved. Whose goals have never gone stagnant, but whose methods have. Who struggles more than he’s rewarded because he won’t do anything he doesn’t want to, even when life dictates that that’s the only way to get by.

******

            It hits Yixing all at once how much he knows about Myungsoo just by idly talking at him, how much he’s learned by wheedling until Myungsoo makes a simple, seething comment that sheds more light on him than the shading in between his brows. He’s always wanted to be in a band. He was well-known and well-disliked in high school. He will try anything artistically-centered at least once, and he has no family besides the little princess he picks up from elementary school at the end of his shift. It hits Yixing that Myungsoo, for all his snappy words, is as full of corners and edges and polymetric shapes as everyone else Yixing has met.

            So Yixing makes a decision to be one of the people Myungsoo has met, too, even if he thinks Myungsoo is good at discarding those kinds of things.

******

            “Why do you always come here?”

            A coffee cup is carelessly dropped in front of Yixing, but when the liquid sloshes onto his lap, Yixing merely offers Myungsoo an empty smile. “Because I’ve always been coming here.”

            “Don’t you ever want a change of scenery?” Myungsoo quips, making no moves for a napkin before Yixing reaches for the dispenser himself. “A change of pace? A change?”

            “Change is okay,” Yixing muses as he mops the front of his dress pants. At least he’d been wearing black. “But static is better.”

            Myungsoo scoffs and pulls out his order pad. When Yixing starts to talk, he holds out a finger to silence him. “I’m not giving you your usual today, so hurry up and choose something different from the menu.”

            Yixing smiles dreamily up at him, and Myungsoo’s glower deepens. “You have to give me my usual. You’re my waiter.”

            “I’m not your anything. Now choose something different or I’m leaving you to starve.”

            Yixing ends up choosing something different because he functions just as he said – preferring the stationary, but accepting the dynamic. (He does lead Myungsoo in circles for a few minutes beforehand, just to see if he can make him hate him even more than he already does. Myungsoo’s irritated look gives him the vague idea that he can. He decides this means that Myungsoo’s contempt for him isn’t quite complete yet, at least.)

            Myungsoo seems pleased with this, and he actually sets Yixing’s order down instead of throwing it, as per usual. He lingers while Yixing takes his first bite. And his second. It isn’t until Yixing shoots a happy thumbs up that he snaps into sense long enough to wander away and tend to his other customers.

            He’s back in a flash when Yixing starts the plate clean. He's started fidgeting like a new driver behind the wheel of a car as he waits to take the dish. Yixing’s grin is automatic. “If you’re wondering whether I liked my meal, the answer is yes.”

            “No, it’s not that.” Myungsoo rolls his eyes as if to accentuate the point. “It’s just… I have a question for you.”

            Yixing regards him curiously, but he shrugs and gives him the okay. Myungsoo takes a shallow breath, hardly glancing up as he speaks.

            “If you were static in a position that you didn’t like, would you try to change it?”

            Yixing thinks a moment, eyes sweeping impassively down Myungsoo’s expectant face. It feels like a loaded question. He's dealt with as much from many of his past acquaintances and friends, but Myungsoo has never felt like a loaded person to him. Yixing mistakenly trusts that.

            “No,” he smiles, “because it’ll change on its own.”

            Myungsoo looks surprised at first, then disgusted, then exasperated, and he snatches Yixing’s empty coffee cup away and snaps, “You’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met.”

            Yixing doesn’t have time to be confused. Myungsoo leaves without another word, and when he asks the waiter who comes to pick up his dishes, he’s informed that Myungsoo had walked out without telling anyone.

******

            When Myungsoo returns, he's just as irritated as always, but no more than that. He clatters his food, cuts short his small talk, and brings Yixing his check early, as if eager to have him leave. (Yixing doesn’t want to leave. He couldn’t tell you why that is, though.)

            Yixing wonders how Myungsoo could have possibly disappeared on the job without getting fired. He knows that he's done it before; ever since the day he documented the name "Myungsoo" in his inner directory, he's seen him abandon his work halfway-done plenty of times. Yixing has had other waiters serve him in the middle of his meals, and they're always very eager to discuss Myungsoo's discrepancies whenever Yixing asks.

            If he's honest, though, he probably wouldn’t have fired Myungsoo, either, if he were the one in charge. Myungsoo is hotheaded, but he’s also a good worker to everyone but Yixing, and he rakes in customers left and right. Not to mention the fact that he’s been in desperate need of an income since he was first hired.

            Yixing knows this because Myungsoo talks about his sister to anyone who will listen, sans Yixing himself.

            To the old ladies, he’s loud and proud about raising a seven-year-old girl by himself because grandmothers eat that stuff up quicker than raisin bran oatmeal. They coo over him and clap for him and the more bold ones pinch his cheeks and ask him if he’ll marry their granddaughters, although he usually laughs off their not-so-subtle matchmaking attempts and stealthily walks away. To the rambunctious children, he asks them if they know her, Kim Dasom, and when they reply in negatives, he ruffles their hair and promises that he’ll introduce them, one day. To the single dads, he discusses how difficult raising children is when you’re stuck as a solitary caregiver, their entire lives piggybacking on how you instill their morals, and to the university students, he tells them how he wants her to grow up and pursue her education like they’re doing, someday.

            To Yixing, he says nothing of his own will. To Yixing, he is nothing short of guarded. To Yixing, he grunts and rolls his eyes and stalks away without a word. So Yixing takes the initiative one day to ask about her himself.

            Myungsoo pauses. "You don't have to," Yixing reassures, and Myungsoo scowls at that.

            "Of course I don't," he snaps. "I know that. I'm just debating."

            "Debating what?" Yixing asks, spooning a tiny piece of omelet into his mouth and studying Myungsoo with glossy eyes. Myungsoo plays with his apron. Yixing wonders if he's always done that.

            "Whether you're worthy to hear about her, obviously."

            "Save your brain," Yixing laughs. "I already know I'm not. I was just wondering."

            Myungsoo doesn't respond immediately. It isn’t until Yixing starts packing away his stuff and asks for the check again that he ultimately relents.

            "She's at the top of her second-grade class," he muses, picking up the knife Yixing has abandoned and toying with it as he speaks. "She takes her smarts after me."

            His face lights up as he speaks. How fascinating, Yixing thinks.

            "One time, a kid pushed her over in the playground, and instead of crying, she socked him in the stomach. She takes after me in that respect, too. Man, I had to fight so many teachers that day to let her off the hook."

            He starts chuckling at that, rubbing the back of his neck as if sheepish about the affection coloring his voice. How endearing, Yixing thinks.

            Then, he gets shy and mumbles, "I promised her I'd never have a girlfriend because she's the only lady in my life."

            "I see," Yixing says. How charming, Yixing thinks.

            And then Myungsoo actually takes a seat next to him, bubbly laughter filling the hollow of his gut as he reminisces about the various times she’s forced him into princess makeovers and teatime with Mr. Pots, her favorite stuffed elephant. Yixing laughs with him because he actually feels like he can.

            How absolutely lovable, Yixing thinks.

            Yixing has never met a person he didn’t love, and after hearing about Kim Dasom, the light of Myungsoo’s life, he decides that Myungsoo won’t be his first.

******

            When Yixing comes back the day after talking about Myungsoo’s sister, nothing has changed. Myungsoo still taunts him and spills his food and never apologizes, and Yixing still drifts through their interactions in a daze, but at the same time, it seems new. Yixing feels a spark of something different than indifference, and he thinks it must be obvious because he sees his spark reflecting off Myungsoo’s eyes, too.

            Yixing makes the new dish that Myungsoo demanded he get his regular. Myungsoo rolls his eyes and glares, but he doesn’t try to make him change again.

******

            Yixing’s first boyfriend was also his last.

            He never had suitors in high school, mostly because he was too polite and too distant and too withdrawn. He never had suitors at work, either – because he was too polite. Too distant. Too withdrawn. (Yixing is fine with change, but he prefers the static, and this includes within himself, too.)

            His first and last suitor was actually a mistake. Yixing had come to the café, and Myungsoo had been out of work for something. A surgery for his sister, the new waiter had explained, and Yixing had asked no more than that. He didn’t note the waiter, at first, the same way he hadn’t noted Myungsoo until he snapped at him the first time. But then, he did.

            The difference between Myungsoo and Junmyeon was that it was Myungsoo’s actions that had gotten Yixing’s attention, while for Junmyeon, it was his smile. It was his soft-spoken words, his gentle laughter. It was the way he delicately set down a porcelain bowl full of sugar packets, and the way he’d winked afterwards and said it was on the house.

            It was easy for Yixing to love Junmyeon. So, so easy. Loving Junmyeon was seamless, just like most everyone else in Yixing’s life. When Junmyeon started catering to him instead of Myungsoo when he visited the café, Yixing had smiled and let him. When Junmyeon asked to take him out for coffee on his own terms, in his own time, Yixing had smiled and let him. When Junmyeon leaned in and kissed him outside the door of Yixing’s one-bedroom apartment – Yixing’s first real kiss, his first real anything – Yixing had smiled and let him.

            But Yixing’s love for him was perfect. It was not too little, not too much, and if Yixing has learned anything about humans and love, it’s that perfection isn’t enough.

            Junmyeon begged him for more than his half-there smile. He asked him to look at him instead of past him, and when they lay together, staring at the grains of Junmyeon’s ceiling, Yixing cuddling closer because the dark made him shiver, Junmyeon asked him for his life. He wanted his whole mind, not the corner that Yixing tucked him in. Yixing tried to explain that he needed the space to love everyone, but Junmyeon hadn’t understood. Junmyeon couldn’t have possibly understood how someone who filled his entire heart could only spare a portion of his own.

            So Junmyeon left. He cried on the phone, quit his job, moved somewhere else and didn’t tell Yixing where he’d gone. One day, he was there, and the next, he was another one of Yixing’s ghosts, blending into the walls of Yixing’s too-full heart.

            And because Yixing’s love was perfect, he had smiled and let him.

******

            “I heard your boytoy left,” Myungsoo says one day.

            “I heard, too,” Yixing smiles.

            There’s a pause as Yixing idly stirs the ice in his glass of water with a straw. Then: “I’m sorry.”

            Yixing thinks he sounds almost tender. “Thanks.”

            Myungsoo sets his coffee down and leaves. He doesn’t come back for his check, and he doesn’t bring a porcelain bowl full of sugar, either, like Junmyeon had the first time they’d met that Yixing actually recalls.

            It’s okay, Yixing thinks. He prefers his coffee black, unsweetened.

            He thinks Myungsoo knows that.

******

            Yixing doesn’t know what possesses him to go to a club for the first time, but he already knows it’s a mistake when he glances behind the counter and finds Myungsoo there, raising a curious eyebrow at him as he polishes glasses.

            “What are you doing here?” he asks out loud, even though his body language had already communicated that question long before Yixing approached. Yixing sits at the bar and twirls in his seat, smiling down at clasped hands. “Finally realize your life is a boring piece of ?”

            “No,” Yixing sighs, tracing five-pointed stars along the countertop. “I was wandering and ended up here.”

            “Then why were you wandering?” Myungsoo leers, slinging his washcloth over his shoulder.

            Yixing’s lips upturn, but it doesn’t quite feel like a smile. It feels like his face is twitching. Like the skin holding it together is sagging in the wrong direction. “Because my life is a boring piece of .”

            “That’s more like it.” Myungsoo sets a now-clean glass in front of him, nodding towards it. “What drink can I get you?”

            “I don’t drink,” Yixing muses, poking at the side of the glass with the node of his pointer finger. Myungsoo scoffs. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

            “Then why the hell are you here?” he asks, snatching the cup back before Yixing can fondle it anymore. He runs his washcloth over the side that Yixing touched. Yixing laughs quietly.

            “I heard you were here,” he answers honestly, glancing over his shoulder to the square patch of dance floor stuffed with sweaty bodies. It pulsates with movement, lit from above by multicolored fluorescent lights. No one looks human beneath them. Yixing wonders if he would love all of them, even when bathed in unnatural reds and greens and fiery oranges. (He would.)

            “Are you my stalker now?” The glass has become a toy under Myungsoo’s fingers. He twists it absentmindedly, the tail of his dishrag hanging out from the inside, and Yixing has to fight a laugh once again. “Who did you hear that from, anyways?”

            “You.” Yixing turns his back to Myungsoo, staring out into the crowd. “You know, I used to dance. Not in places like this, but…I used to.”

            “That’s the first artistic thing I’ve ever heard of you doing.”

            “Just because I’m not artistic anymore doesn’t me I never was.” Yixing turns back with a smile that only fades when Myungsoo’s eyes hit his, looking all too serious. He shifts awkwardly, fingers slowing to a stop at his star’s third point. “What?”

            “You should keep dancing.” Myungsoo nods out at the crowd. “Go. Now.”

            “Won’t you miss my company?”

            Myungsoo snorts. “I’d enjoy your company much more if it was over there.”

            Yixing doesn’t much want to go dance. It’s been too long, his limbs are too stiff, the floor is too crowded, and Myungsoo’s eyes are too dark. There are too many strangers that run the risk of becoming real, and Yixing is scared to squeeze into a horde of phantoms. When Myungsoo shoves him off his chair and points, however, he realizes he no longer has a choice.

            Blending into the crowd is a lot similar to blending into his life. The only difference is that every interaction on the dance floor requires no memory, and every movement he makes requires no love. People dance with him, dance on him, dance beside him and dance behind him, and it makes him dizzy with emptiness and wanderlust. He roams betwixt body forests, caught by vines of arms and brushed with leafy fingers curling around his wrists, hard enough to beg him to stay but soft enough to let him go.

            He can’t decide if it’s torture or release.

            He starts frequenting the club more often, and each time, Myungsoo talks him into ambling into the thrumming crowd.

            He doesn’t notice Myungsoo’s eyes on him, lips caught somewhere between a smile and a frown as Yixing loses himself to something bigger than he is.

******

            Myungsoo disappears from Yixing’s life all too suddenly. He’s not at work one day, and when asked, the newest waiter shrugs and says he doesn’t know for once. When Yixing drifts to the club later that night, Myungsoo isn’t there to greet him, either, and Yixing can’t find it in him to dance when he’s actually given the power to decide for himself. He goes home with the lights still drumming in his veins and Myungsoo’s face repeatedly escaping from the box he’s neatly trapped it in, demanding his attention.

            The next day is a repeat. The day after that, too. And as much as Yixing likes the static, he feels uncomfortable with this one.

            It isn’t until a few weeks pass that he knows what’s happened. The discovery is a mistake. It’s hard to miss a funeral when black limos and cars full of crying families clutter the streets, though, so Yixing likes to think it’s not his fault that he happens to pause by a graveyard swarmed with people and catch sight of Myungsoo in a dark suit.

            Yixing waits on the outskirts. He watches the entire ceremony from afar, even though he can’t hear a single word spoken. He doesn’t have to hear anything to know that Kim Dasom is the one who’s passed away. He can see it written all over Myungsoo’s face.

            He doesn’t bother going to the café. He doesn’t bother going to work, either, and he sure as hell doesn’t traipse to the club, even though he could do with a shot or two. He lays in his bed all day, staring at the ceiling, and when the darkness coils around his bones, he makes no move to ward it off. Surprise doesn’t even begin to color what he feels. It’s not confusion, not shock, not unsettlement. It’s akin to hysteria, he thinks, and he’s not even entirely sure why because he’s never met the girl before. He’s never talked to her, never touched her, never even confirmed that she was real at all. To him, she was an entity he never would have known about were it not for his addiction to routine and a testy waiter he could never seem to get a handle on.

            The pain of loss is still there, sitting like a stone in the cavity of his lungs. It ignores rationalization. It ignores him. And he thinks she feels all too real despite everything. She’s real because Myungsoo makes her real, Yixing realizes all at once, and then it occurs to him that it could go both ways – that she could make Myungsoo feel real, too, and a Myungsoo without reality is not a Myungsoo at all.

            Yixing’s blood runs cold, even though the sun is still out, just barely on the tips of dusk. Yixing doesn’t know much about imperfect love, but he knows that it drives people to do imperfect things that don’t make sense – things like yelling out windows and throwing furniture and crying into cold hands and falling. Yixing has seen people fall before. It’s some sort of poetic attempt to mimic the physical accompaniment of “falling in love,” and Yixing doesn’t comprehend its literary value, but he thinks Myungsoo might. Myungsoo, who cherishes art like he cherishes his little sister, too frail to cast her shadows on the world any longer.

            Yixing doesn’t know when thoughts of Kim Dasom blend into worries about Myungsoo. He doesn’t remember how or when or why Myungsoo’s face comes back to be his mind’s centerpiece.

            He’s not sure if it ever wasn’t.

******

            Nightfall finds Yixing shivering in a parka and a beanie that covers most of his head outside Dasom’s graveyard. He supposes it’s many people’s graveyard, but to him, it belongs only to her, as if her possession will make the stab of absence in his chest ease. He wanders aimlessly in search for her marker, noting all the names engraved on stones in passing. He lets them fill his heart, one by one, like little grains of sand in an hourglass that’s already up. Real ghosts, he thinks, are far more suited for his love than the ghosts of vacancy that haunt him with their flawed affections. Ghosts like Junmyeon, like his coworkers, like his friends in high school and his not-friends in college – all the people he’s let down by loving them the only way he knows how.

            Ghosts like Dasom are the kinds he thinks he deserves. Outlines of ideas in the forms of human beings, already long gone, already past the point of caring back – these are what Yixing feels comfortable with. And even though his heart is heavy when he comes across her tiny granite rectangle, half-buried in freshly sifted ground, the tears are rewarding. They’re for her, and for the bodies that surround her, grouped together like the figures in Myungsoo’s club, but much stiller, much quieter, much less living and yet much more alive. They’re for people like Junmyeon, who want too much, and for people like himself, who want nothing at all – whose want of nothing makes objects feel cold and people feel overheated.

            He doesn’t cry for Myungsoo. Not now.

******

            Sunrise finds Yixing in the same place, curled up by the stone marker, beanie askew and parka discarded for use as a pillow instead of a blanket. Myungsoo finds him, too, at the same time.

            “Yixing?”

            Yixing stirs, brought to life by a voice he’s already heard too much in his dreams. He blinks his eyes rapidly and shifts to sit up, shading his eyes with a slender hand. Myungsoo looks tense and confused. Yixing feels sort of the same way.

            “What are you doing here?” Myungsoo whispers, voice muffled by the scarf around his neck. There’s a lavender bouquet in his hands, white baby’s breath punctuating silk roses, and Yixing belatedly wishes he’d thought enough to bring flowers, too, instead of just his heartache. He rises to kneel, but doesn’t make any move to stand, rather choosing to warily peek up at Myungsoo’s strained expression.

            “I haven’t seen you,” Yixing responds instead, brushing dirt off his jeans and removing his beanie to shake it around. Myungsoo narrows his eyes, even as Yixing flicks his head and replaces it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

            “I’ve been busy,” Myungsoo says curtly, pointing his bouquet at the tiny gravestone beside Yixing’s knee. “Why are you sleeping on that? Isn’t that disrespectful?”

            Yixing taps his chin in thought. “I don’t think so,” he mumbles, casting a long look behind him. “I wanted to be closer to her. I’ve only ever heard of her in words, you know, so I thought that maybe, if I was here, I could feel her instead, and…” He trails off at the hard stare Myungsoo is giving him. His expression is unreadable, for the first time Yixing has known him. He doesn’t look angry or frustrated or at the end of his patience. He looks like nothing.

            “How did you know she was dead,” he breathes, and it falls just short of being a question. “I’ve never even told you she was sick. I didn’t tell anybody that.”

            “I saw it,” Yixing explains methodically, gesturing to the graveyard around them. “I saw the whole thing.”

            “You weren’t here.”

            “I was. You just couldn’t see me.”

            Myungsoo runs an unsteady hand through his hair. “Why do you even care.”

            Yixing winces. “Should I not?”

            “No, you shouldn’t.” Myungsoo breathes quietly, in through his nose, out through his mouth, once, twice, third time’s the charm, until he seems calm enough to speak. “I’m nothing but awful to you. I don’t want to be anything but awful to you. Every time I see your face, I just get so bothered, like just your presence is an inconvenience to me, and you…” He waves the bouquet at Yixing ambiguously. Petals shower over the unkempt grass, but Myungsoo doesn’t seem to notice. “Why are you here. Why.”

            Yixing bites his lip, unsure of the answer Myungsoo wants. He settles on honesty. “Because you made Dasom feel like a real person to me, and I…” He swallows. Words stick in his throat, thick and heavy. Perfection never hurts quite like this, he thinks. “I loved her.”

            “Is that why you’ve been following me around?” Myungsoo accuses. Yixing blanches at the words and shakes his hands around.

            “No, no,” Yixing wheezes, “it’s not that. I… It just hurt too much when I saw you out here. It hurt for her. And…” He peers up. “I was worried about you, too.”

            That’s the last thing Myungsoo can take, apparently, because he flings the bouquet down at Yixing at that and raises his voice to a yell. “I don’t need your worry! I don’t need your anything!” And then he’s stomping off, and Yixing swears he sees the glitter of tears in his eyes before he turns his back.

            Yixing doesn’t follow. He’s never been one to follow when someone leaves from his life. But he finds that he desperately, desperately wants to.

******

            Myungsoo has quit his job at the café. It feels like Junmyeon all over again, except this time, Yixing feels decidedly emptier. The routine doesn’t feel quite the same without Myungsoo there, after all, casting a dark cloud over the corner Yixing sits in. Yixing blames this for his emotional distress. He does like static, after all.

            Yixing quits the café a couple days after Myungsoo does, albeit in a more emotional sense. He starts going straight to work in the mornings instead of stopping for breakfast and coffee, and while he doesn’t particularly like it better, he finds that it feels fairly the same. The only difference is that he gets more time to sleep. Sleeping is all he really wants to do nowadays, anyways.

            Months carry him through the worst of heartbreak, although even during the troughs of it, he wouldn’t have called it heartbreak at all. He isn’t sure what heartbreak is. He doesn’t know why his heart feels like it’s cracking in his chest when he passes the café and Myungsoo isn’t there. He doesn’t know why his head spins when he thinks he sees the back of his head or the tips of his flapping winter coat disappearing into a crowd.

            He doesn’t know what it feels like to wish someone would do something they don’t want to do, but that’s exactly what it is. He wants Myungsoo to take his job back and start serving him eggs and coffee again. He wants him to be angry and sulky and sad somewhere where Yixing can see him and act accordingly.

            He wants to hug him. (He wants to hug him too tightly.) He wants to be his happiness. (He wants his happiness for himself.) He wants to remind him that he exists, like Dasom did. (He wants to be his reality.) He doesn’t know what any of that means. (He won’t admit he knows what any of that means.)

            It takes him a while to summon the courage to go back to the club for the first time. He’s not quite sure what he’s expecting, but something jumps in his chest when he thinks about it. It’s not like he’s garnered any hope that Myungsoo will be there because it’s an unrealistic dream. Myungsoo just as likely quit that job, too. Maybe Myungsoo moved away to start over. Maybe Myungsoo decided to finally start the band he’s been dreaming about. Maybe Myungsoo has finally accepted that life is what you make of it, and moved away to do just that.

            Or maybe Myungsoo fell. That thought haunts Yixing. He’s pretty sure that thought is part of the reason he stands outside, hands in his pockets, beanie on his head and mind reeling through memory snapshots of Myungsoo smiling behind the bar.

            There are a lot of things that Yixing was expecting, and a lot of things that he wasn’t. He was expecting a new bartender, maybe a pretty girl or a male model in the works. He was expecting a new DJ; it's been a while since he's been back, after all. He was expecting a full crowd, just waiting for him to melt into them, to stop being Yixing and start being a wraith.

            One of the very last things Yixing would have thought he would see is Myungsoo being pressed up against a concrete wall outside the entrance with lips on his neck.

            Yixing drifts to a stop, and it takes him a second to register his own surprise. No, not surprise – not confusion, not shock, not unsettlement. None of those things. It’s akin to hysteria, and it makes him speak out.

            “Myungsoo?”

            His voice is so unsure in the night. It almost feels like it’s been swallowed up by the temperature, distorted by the chattering of Yixing’s teeth, but Myungsoo’s eyes fly open and his hands push out to dislodge the man on his chest. The stranger lets out a strangled growl, casting his eyes over his shoulder at where Yixing awkwardly lingers.

            “What do you want?” he demands, hardly tearing his body from where it’s welded to Myungsoo’s. “Can’t you tell we’re busy?”

            “Sungyeol,” Myungsoo hushes, but the man isn’t having any of it. He shoos Yixing away with a hand.

            “Get lost,” he says, turning back to his task.

            Yixing decides that’s the last thing he wants to do at this moment – especially because Myungsoo’s eyes have not closed again. They follow his movements with something like fear, and he makes a tiny noise of discontent, something in his expression begging Yixing to stay.

            “Myungsoo,” he speaks again, but this time, it’s a wail. The man pressing Myungsoo against the wall draws away completely, whirling around on his heel and stalking towards Yixing with shadows in his eyes. He grabs his collar and shakes him. Yixing’s head bobs as if it weren’t attached to his body, and all his coherent thoughts filter out of his ears.

            “Didn’t I tell you to leave?” the man snaps, throwing Yixing down to connect with the ground. Yixing yelps, but it’s Myungsoo who moves, taking three strides forward and forcefully turning the man around to shove his fist into his jaw. The man holds the side of his face in bewilderment. Myungsoo only points.

            “Get out,” he seethes. Yixing has heard Myungsoo’s irritated enough times to have the sharp sound of it memorized, but this admonishment renders him completely speechless. It’s cutting, rigid, urgent, and the man may have no problem tossing Yixing around, but he backs away from Myungsoo in an instant.

            “You’re both bags of ,” the man says, brandishing his arms in some sick last hurrah before taking off for the parking lot. Yixing watches him leave in awe.

            He thinks he’s found the one person on earth that he couldn’t love.

            The thought makes him burst into peals of laughter that sound like thunder.

            “What the hell do you think you’re laughing about?” Myungsoo’s voice snaps Yixing out of his temporary insanity as he stands over him, the glare he’d reserved for the other man now piercing into the space between Yixing’s eyes. Yixing looks up sheepishly, making no move to get up off the ground.

            “I don’t know,” he whispers, and he knows it’s a lie, but he can’t help it. Myungsoo wouldn’t understand. Nobody really does. “I just think this is a weird situation is all.”

            Myungsoo sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “What are you even doing here?”

            “I don’t know,” Yixing repeats. He finds that it’s partially true this time. “Dancing, maybe?”

            “You don’t like the dancing. You don’t like the crowds, the detachment of it all. You want meaning.”

            “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were watching me.”

            Myungsoo holds his gaze steady. Then: “I was.”

            Yixing doesn’t have the words to explain the way his stomach plummets straight into the ground. “What?”

            “You heard me.” He crosses his arms and purses his lips, and Yixing thinks he looks far more like a boss reprimanding an employee than anything. “I watched you because I thought it was interesting, the way you interacted with people you couldn’t really see.” He pauses. “You know, I really don’t understand you.”

            “I could say the same about you.” Yixing finally finds the heart to stand, shimmying to shake off loose asphalt from his legs. “Who was that guy?”

            Myungsoo quirks an eyebrow, waving his hands dismissively. “Do you really think you’re my only customer? Ever?”

            “You say customer as if I tried to buy you,” Yixing points out. Myungsoo shrugs. That’s his only answer. Yixing takes a slow, tentative step forward. “Did…did he try to buy you?”

            Myungsoo wrinkles his nose and shakes his head firmly. “I’m not that cheap. That smells like liquor and bloodlust. He couldn’t have bought me with money.”

            “Then…” Yixing trails off, glancing behind him in the direction the man had run. Myungsoo snorts and shrugs again.

            “I was lonely,” he says finally. “I guess you could say he bought me with company.”

            “I don’t think Dasom would approve.”

            Myungsoo visibly tenses, and Yixing holds his hands up defensively. “Listen, Myungsoo. Listen, okay? I know it hurts, I know. But I’ve talked to her. In my head, in my dreams. And she’s worried about you. She’s worried you’re going to ruin yourself without her. Are you ruining yourself?”

            “What right do you have to talk about my sister?” Myungsoo demands, but something chokes him up, and Yixing is suddenly aware that he’s crying. His hands are balled into fists, his face contorted in something so heartbreakingly gnarled that Yixing can’t even make out its normal features. Yixing takes another step forward. Myungsoo, for all his tears and rigidity, still doesn’t back away.

            “She wants to be talked about,” Yixing says softly. “Don’t you think? Don’t you think she’d want you to remember her? Do you think the dead want to be left behind, either?”

            “She left me behind.”

            “Myungsoo, you know that’s not true.”

            “Then what else am I supposed to believe?” Myungsoo sinks down to the ground. Yixing joins him immediately after, tracing five-pointed stars into his back as he curls his arms around his knees and whimpers quiet tears into the fabric of his uniform. Yixing doesn’t know much about imperfect love, but he knows it’s best to wait until the words come of their own accord.

            They do. “Yixing,” Myungsoo manages after a few minutes of sniffles and silence, “did you know I used to hate you?”

            Yixing laughs, but it’s strained. “It was kind of hard to miss, even for me.”

            “You know, I didn’t always.” Myungsoo turns to look at him, eyes shiny and red with salt and water. “When I first met you, it was fine. And the next time, it was, too. And the next. But then it occurred to me that you had no idea who I was. Every time, you looked at me as if I was a new face. I even called you by name once, and you just gave me this…this blank look, as if I’d pulled your name out of the clouds somewhere and just stuck it on your body. You know how angry that made me?”

            Yixing quiets. “I do that to everyone,” he mumbles. “It’s not… It was never personal.”

            “You think that matters to someone who’s being forgotten?” And Yixing has nothing to say to that, so Myungsoo continues. “I started hating your presence, hating the fact that you didn’t care about a thing I did or said or felt. I hated it. Because…” He swallows, a small movement, but one that doesn’t fall from under Yixing’s sweeping gaze. “Because I wanted you to like me like everyone else did. But I just… I couldn’t get you to, and then I snapped. And after that was when you finally looked at me, when you learned my name and my story and you remembered. Why is that, Yixing?”

            “I don’t know,” Yixing says for a third time, and this time, it is completely true. He’s never been sure why Myungsoo was so extraordinarily special to him, so precious in his heart. Myungsoo is a different kind of precious than Yixing’s ghosts. Maybe it's because he shimmers with life, even behind Yixing's eyelids. Maybe it's because his humanity is so bright that it dazzles him. Maybe it's because Myungsoo is imperfection.

            Myungsoo coughs to dislodge something from his throat, and Yixing draws another star in between his shoulderblades. “When I asked you if you’d change a static situation you didn’t like and you said no, I hated you even more. Because that’s all I do with my life. I try to make change and I hardly even make a ripple.” He laughs, and it’s not full of mirth, like when he talked about his living sister. It’s hollow and yet full, overflowing with emotions that make Yixing’s skin crawl. “You were right, of course. I should have just done nothing, should have let the static situations in my life sit and change on their own. It would have ended up the same, anyways. The only difference is that it hurt me more this way.”

            “What situations?” Yixing asks under his breath, peeking beneath Myungsoo’s fringe. Myungsoo clears his throat.

            “Dasom. My job. You.” And he turns away, looking out at the skyline.

            Yixing says nothing.

            “I spent so much money trying to save her, and it didn’t work.” Myungsoo falls onto his back, staring up at the sky. Yixing follows the movement with his eyes. “My jobs were always meant to fail. This will probably be my last day here, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. All I want is to be…something else. Something more.”

            “And me?” Yixing prods gently. Myungsoo’s eyes flicker to him and away so fast that he could have probably blamed it on the fading streetlamps illuminating the outside of the bar.

            “Trying to know you was a mistake.”

            Yixing shifts to sit down, staring at the wall of the club instead of the sky. Then, he says, “I was wrong, you know.”

            Myungsoo regards him curiously. “About?”

            “The static situation thing. Waiting for it to change on its own.” He leans back on his hands, pursing his lips. “I was wrong.”

            “How?”

            “Well,” Yixing starts, pausing to sort out his phrasing. “I don’t like the static situation between us, and I want that to change. But I don’t want to wait for you to change it.” He peers down at Myungsoo’s face, trained into impassiveness so obvious that it makes Yixing laugh out loud. “So I’ll change it myself.”

            “And how do you plan to do that, princess? Woo me with your nine-to-five office job?”

            “No. I’ll woo you with the prospect of quitting it with you.”

            Myungsoo raises an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

            “You leave the club. I leave the office. We run off somewhere where we don’t know anybody and work on your art career. I’ve got money saved. I’ve got time saved, too. And I’ve got room.” (He doesn’t mention that the room isn’t just physical.) “What do you say?”

            Myungsoo taps his chin in thought. Then, he turns. “I think I’d like that.”

            He smiles up at him, a sight so rare Yixing thinks he might have imagined it, and Yixing smiles back the best he can when his face threatens to tremble and fall at any second.

            Yixing doesn’t know much about imperfect love, but he can learn.

******

            Yixing has more ghosts than people.

            He had, for a long time, forgotten that they were real people once. He remembers them all fondly, like grains of sand in an hourglass that still ticks for him, and he knows that they’ll never leave his heart, although he’s not scared of it being too full anymore. Rather, he’s scared he’ll never be able to fill it, because with every moment that passes, it swells a little bigger. It’s as if it’s accommodating, now, for having such a large piece of it overflowing. Yixing thinks he likes it better when it takes up his entire chest. He wants it to spread from the tendrils of his veins to the skin of his toes to the webs of his fingers to the folds of his brain. He wants it to grow big enough to fill all of his body, and then he wants to fill it all up with people – living and dead and known and unknown, and all their in-betweens. By the time he’s as cold as stone markers, he wants to be completely filled up with love.

            With Myungsoo at his arm, it’ll be impossible to die empty, at least.

            Myungsoo still insults Yixing, but Yixing doesn’t mind it much anymore. There’s an innocence to his voice now, and it almost makes the curses and names seem endearing. It’s sort of like when a three-year-old calls his brother a butthead amidst wild giggles, except Myungsoo’s voice is deeper, his laughter richer, and his hooded eyes wiser. Yixing still sees Dasom reflected in them, but now she’s smiling instead of crying, and it makes Yixing smile back.

            He feels her presence in Myungsoo, and he thinks that even if he didn’t have Myungsoo, he’d still be full enough with love for his sister, still so alive in their lives. Yixing has never heard her, but he hears her in Myungsoo’s voice; never seen her, but sees her in Myungsoo’s smile; never felt her, but feels her in Myungsoo’s fingers; never known her, but knows her in Myungsoo’s heart. He sometimes sits and pretends that she's there when Myungsoo falls asleep on his shoulder, watching from the chair across the room or the carpet flooring or maybe from right in front of them, giggling because they can't shoo her away from them this way.

            As it stands, he does have Myungsoo, and Yixing has never felt more selfish in his life. Even if Myungsoo decided to pick up and leave one day, Yixing knows he’d follow him. He’d yell out windows and throw furniture and cry into cold hands, and he might not fall in reality, but he would in his mind. Because Myungsoo, he realizes, is the kind of imperfection humans crave. Myungsoo is real, and Yixing knows that perfect love will never be enough love for such a creature.

            Because when Yixing is near Myungsoo, he is warm. Even at night, after the sun has died out from the sky.

            It is like this that Yixing learns not to let go. It is like this that Yixing learns that ghosts cannot hold him. It is like this that Yixing learns how to dance, and how to love, and how to live.

            It is like this that Yixing learns. And it is like this that Myungsoo smiles and lets him.

******