“Today is January 1^st, 2013,” a voice says, monotone. “I was told to keep these voice recordings for later on, in the distant future when I won’t be able to keep a regular journal.” A sigh is heard and it’s quiet for a moment. After a minute, or two, one can hear the male recording shuffle around in his position. It sounds as though he’s moving papers of some kind, or re-situating himself in his seat. “I really don’t know how to do this,” he mumbles, and there’s a bit of frustration in his tone.

“Obviously,” a voice chides distantly, and the sound of clattering is heard as the recorder chases after the man who has spoken.

“Don’t interrupt!” the first man yells, slamming the door. He sighs again when he sits down. “That was Hoseok, in case you couldn’t tell. Well… In case I couldn’t tell. God, I don’t know who’s going to listen to these—is it just supposed to be for me? If it’s just for me, I don’t see why I should be keeping them in the first place, I—“ he cuts himself off, and one can easily imagine him placing his head in his hands.

Two minutes pass, and he starts again. “Let me start from the beginning. When I was nineteen, so, like, a year ago, I was in a car accident. It was my stepbrother, Hoseok, and I. We were leaving this party—yeah, I know, that’s how every accident story seems to start, but bear with me. We were leaving this party that our aunt had thrown. She’s really weird about family get-togethers, because she thinks that the world’s going to end soon, and she wants to make sure that, if it does, we’re all in the same tiny house.” He scoffs, but continues.

“We were not, I repeat were not, drinking. The only thing that I had was a glass of water because I swear that I ingested some of Aunt Jin Mi’s perfume—God, can she lay it on thick.” He clears his throat thrice, as though he can still taste the putrid cologne. “So, like, after a while, I made the excuse that I was sick, so Hoseok and I could go back home and watch some recorded shows. Well,” he pauses and there’s the sound of shuffling again. “Some idiot, who probably had been wasted off his , decided to run a ing red light.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and had anyone known better, they would have believed that the recording ended there.

“So, I don’t remember much,” he says slowly, and now the frustration, sarcasm, and bitterness has been replaced with confusion and sadness—making him seem far more vulnerable than he did when he had first begun to speak. “But I remember being in pain. I remember Hoseok crying, and… Hoseok hardly ever cries. It kind of broke my heart, y’know? But I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t get to him because he was crying over me.” He stops again.

“The doctors and nurses said that I looked really, really bad when I first showed up. My mom has a photo, but she won’t let me see it. Once, I saw Hoseok find it in our dad’s office. He just sat there, staring at it, with tears running down his face like Niagara Falls. But when I came in, he tried to hide it, like I was actually gonna fall for that.” He mutters a quiet insult under his breath, but smacks his lips, starting up again.

“Anyway, the doctors also said that I had brain damage, and I didn’t wake up for, like, a month. Wait, before you jump to conclusions—No. I’m obviously not slow, or delayed—though I’m sure my family and friends would beg to differ—but they said that it damaged different parts of my brain. They weren’t sure how to fix it without going into this dangerous surgery that my mom basically forbade, and they also didn’t know what exactly it was going to do to me. Some doctors, right?”

He snorts. “Well, a couple seizures later, they let me go home. Everything was fine, except our parents and our friends wouldn’t let us get in a car by ourselves. Hoseok’s friend Taehyung wouldn’t let him out of his sight—he thought that any little thing would put Hoseok back in the hospital, or that he’d suddenly break another rib just by walking to the grocery store.” He laughs, though it turns into a small cough. “My friends, well, friend—his name is Seokjin—was more concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to finish my essays because I was suddenly ‘handicapped’. ,” he curses.

“Well about ten months went by, and really all I had to complain about was headaches. Sure, sometimes they got bad, but doesn’t everyone’s? Well, I guess if you’ve been in an accident with diagnosed brain damage, you’re supposed to actually tell someone when you have migraines that make you feel like there’s an ax being shoved into your head.

“So I went to the hospital again, after I passed out in the middle of one of my exams—it wasn’t an excuse to get out of it, I swear. I’m actually good at English.  So, yeah, I went and they did some tests. The usual. But this time, they didn’t let me go home. They told me I needed to stay a couple of nights so they could run more tests and ‘observe’ me, like I’m some sort of experiment or something.” He mutters the last bit, but the volume of his voice increases when he goes on.

“That’s when weird started to happen. Like, my headaches were getting progressively worse, and I kept throwing up. Hoseok even said that I didn’t recognize him when he came in to visit me after his exams. Then,” his voice cracks, and there’s an edge of hysteria in his tone. “One day I woke up and—and I couldn’t see. It was just… There was darkness, all around me, and I couldn’t get out of it. It took me a couple minutes to get my sight back, but I was still scared—I’m not gonna lie to you. It was terrifying.

“After that, the doctors kept me for a bit longer, and I was there for about five days before they let me leave. They put me on different medication, but the blackouts kept happening, and when my headaches got real bad, I’d have these bits where it took me a minute to gather my thoughts, or recognize the people around me. When they prepared to send me home, they said that I would need to go to therapy, and come every week for a check-up. Later on, they’d make it every two weeks, possibly even once a month.

“They said they didn’t know what was wrong with me, and they weren’t sure how they could stop it. They said that parts of my brain were deteriorating slowly, and they didn’t have a name for it. But they summed it up pretty well.” It’s quiet for another minute before he exhales slowly. “I guess I should get to the point.”

“My name is Min Yoongi. I’m twenty years old. I don’t know when, but I’m going to go blind.” There’s a soft sigh in the distance, presumably Hoseok.

“And that’s just the beginning.”