Intro // Outro

to be content and happy are completely different.

    Kyungsoo was a wallflower in high school.

    Now, that isn’t to say that Kyungsoo is shy, because he’s most certainly not--he couldn’t be a singer if he were bashful--but throughout high school, he preferred to sit in silence, and would often take the seats in his classes that were closest to the windows.

    Kyungsoo dreamed of flying in high school.

    The desks at Kyungsoo’s high school were two-seater tables, but unless Sojin, one of Kyungsoo’s closest and only friends from his pre-school days, shared a class with him, Kyungsoo often occupied a seat for two as one. It never bothered him, nor did it bother the other students. Kyungsoo was simply the quiet one, the boy who was endearingly sweet if one happened to cross paths with him, but didn’t really seem to fit into a group of his own.

    He was not lonely; he was simply alone.

    And, he would sit in class, chair pushed close to the window, his phone, always with white headphones pushed into the headphone jack and music playing at a low volume, laying face-down beside a notebook of graph paper that was labelled History (or the subject of whatever class he might’ve been in) and a fine-point Sharpie pen, both of which saw more use out of writing poetry and housing without a melody than they did taking notes of his teachers’ lectures.

    He would always start every class the same--poised and greeting people with a smile, because even though he was a loner, people did like him, and would bid their salutations to him in passing, but within the first ten minutes of class, Kyungsoo would always find himself drifting, his posture falling, until his head was cradled in his hand, fingernails pressing along the underside of his chin, and his gaze was directed out the window.

    Kyungsoo saw everything and nothing in the blue skies that lifted so high above his head—saw plumes of smoke in the clouds that would roll above the school and linger there, so white and pure that Kyungsoo’s eyes could only focus on them for so long until he would be forced to direct his gaze to a different spot in the sky.

    He liked the cloudless skies the best.

    Cloudless skies gave way to the powdery blue atmosphere—gave way to his imagination—and if Kyungsoo let it wander enough, he could fly so high above everything—and look down upon not only his school, but all of Seoul, all of South Korea, until the towering buildings of the city skyline were only dots among the ground.

    Sometimes he would daydream about the night—for he had always found something so incredibly tranquil about the evenings, and if his high school offered night classes, he would’ve attended, if only to look out of a window bathed in darkness.

    It was all so arbitrary, Kyungsoo would sometimes realize, when the bell would ring and the clatter of chairs scraping against worn tile floors and zippers and backpacks being closed would draw him away from his window and onto another.

    Life was so arbitrary, and here he was, sixteen years old, a Sophomore in high school, spending his days daydreaming about flying and living a life beyond a window, and spending his evenings wide away, scribbling the fleeting lyrics of mute poetry as inspiration struck.

    Kyungsoo was content in high school.

    And he had foolishly told himself that contentedness and happiness were the same thing.

    When he saw couples in the hallways at school, looking at each other with the smitten gazes of puppy-love and teenage lust, Kyungsoo would sometimes feel something within him ache, something that he couldn’t quite name, nor properly describe in his History notebook, and he would spend mindless hours with ink-stained fingers, trying to print whatever it was he felt into the paper.

    When Kyungsoo saw teenagers his own age at the movie theater, paired off, sharing popcorn or a drink, he didn’t feel envy for those who had their arms wrapped around the object of their infatuation, though sometimes he would sigh and offer a soft smile in the direction of those couples who just so happened to catch his wandering gaze.

    Kyungsoo was not lonely in high school—he was simply a loner.

    Just before Kyungsoo turned seventeen, the winter of his sophomore year, he attended a late New Year’s Eve party that a sweet bo