He likes to drown. Slowly sink. Let himself go down in the blue and black totality forming his shapeless liquid being. Meter after meter, until there is no daylight to warm him and his surroundings, and the water grows from cold to freezing – and still – and silent.

Taehyun thinks that there is nothing louder than that – that deafening, violent, sudden silence that pulls him in its embrace and leaves him .

It’s painful and cathartic, to have that time for himself.

Everyone around him knows the length and width of his craving for such moments – for the loneliness he seeks. Taehyun is the weird maknae everyone dotes on that likes to lie down in a candle-lit room with the right different scent every night, that picks the right song for the right mood, and sometimes – maybe too many times – loves to sink in the melancholia of a heart-breaking piece, in the velvety sensual charm of its sadness, and in the spleen that follows.    

Everyone knows that – and everyone loves him that way.

So he sinks, and drowns, and sometimes even swims in the ocean of uncertain, in the dark – so dark that it seems thick – vastness of his passions – and his hands get dirty of paint, and his clothes get soaked with perfumes, and his eyes get sore as his soul gets fed of what he reads – and sometimes he trembles as its deepest love resounds within him.

And yet it becomes hard – to open himself this much to external stimuli, to the point he will let out things that should be sealed down in a depth he never willingly reaches. On the bottom of the sea, where time zeroes and disappears, and there is no more falling, and the surface is too far away to give any figment of hope.

There the darkness is too thick to find a way – is he really trying to escape upward or he’s just circling around the same spot? – and maybe it’s just that there is no way out, as everything falls and folds around him, wrapping him in a clock of night that could fit in the fist of his merciless mind.

Any sense of direction is lost, when the silence cuts him open, and his own ocean betrays him.

Taehyun is grateful for having him, then.

With his way to sit by his side, half a smile looped on his lips, with his lack of words and jokes and punch lines, with his whole special self – his own silent presence is enough to bring him back to the shore.

It’s peculiar, and amazing, how Taehyun can sense him entering the room, even if he doesn’t make a sound, how his whole being emanates a certain specific warmth that will spread and reach him in few moments, how he welcomes him like a harbour welcomes a lost ship after a storm – he’s there, and that’s all Taehyun needs.

Because he knows, just as much as Taehyun, the depth of his own soul, the pleasure of sinking in search of self-awareness and intimacy, and yet he knows much more the darkness of memories, the weight that pulls him down like rocks chained to his feet, right to the bottom.

Seungyoon knows on his skin, on his soul, all the scars that are hard to show and tell, all the pain he’s gone through, all that will never heal and never will be ok, and maybe it’s just for this that he says nothing.

Sometimes Taehyun lets his hand slip over Seungyoon’s, and even if the first touch is shy and probing, he easily clings on him when Seungyoon doesn’t pull away.

Their palms touch, their fingers find their way, like knowing exactly how well they’ll fit – how much they’re meant to hold, and grasp, and claw – and sometimes intertwine, skin against skin, till there is no space dividing them.

Taehyun likes to think that one day, when he’s stronger, he’ll let him see another side of him, and let him dip in the sea of feelings flowing with every soothing and every small touch.

For now, he holds his hand and enjoys how Seungyoon hugs him with just his presence – the home he makes for him, just between their silences.

inspired by taehyun talking about his dad