Jongin needs to write. The words lie in his fingertips, hidden underneath his bitten nails at the end of long calloused fingers. He can feel them at night as he tries to sleep, words like sheep dancing across his eyelids. He tries sitting in front of his computer until the fountain starts again, but his words run dry like a river bed in a summer drought. He tries sitting in front of an open notebook, leather bound pages of creamy white just begging to be stained an inky black but he cannot will his fingers to dance and form music with their words. He goes to the cities’ cafés and libraries, each one bustling with a studious silence or symphonies of clattering crockery. He sits and he watches, trying to find a muse in the chaos of people, a rose amongst the thorn bush.  

Once, whether it is in a library or a café Jongin could not recall (he barely feels the difference anymore), he sees a man with eyes that tell a thousand stories he craves to hear. He feels the need under his skin, a crawl, a pull, hooks piercing his flesh and dragging him to the butcher. When he gets home and sits in front of that cursed leather notebook he feels a shroud has lifted from his mind and he can move his fingers. He writes of a man who had been cursed by the gods to see but never tell, who only wanted to move his tongue and sing his sorrows. Jongin realises he has amalgamated himself with the man at the library/café, and tears the stained pages out. It did not feel right to taint the man at the café/library with his broken hands. 

The moon has waxed and waned three times before Jongin sees him again. He had watched the moon each night, and observed that the phases were slow blinks of a large eye that reminded him very much of the man who had allowed him to write again. The memory of him, collecting his book or his coffee, is enough to spin more stories in his head (each is more terrible than the last but at least he is writing again). By now, though, his friends have noticed that his absence is longer than usual, and so they drag him away from his libraries and cafés (Sehun says he has missed him and asks him how the book is going; Jongin lies). It is night and there is no moon in the sky and Jongin laments that his muse cannot see, but he enters the club under a neon sign and begs Sehun not to leave him for a one night stand. He realises when he is at the bar feeling the fire of his fourth shot burn the back of his throat that he is alone in the most intimate of places, where bodies of strangers acquaint themselves and the stench of pheromones gives the lonely comfort under foreign sheets. Just as Jongin feels his bones giving up to carry him home he staggers into the eyes of his moon, his muse. And those eyes give him a look of disgust, and those lips form words and that throat yells “Get off me, creep!” and he is gone. The next morning, the throb of the club still clinging to his head and the sting of those words still ringing in his ears, Jongin writes of a man who has been hurt too many times with a scar across his eye where someone had tried to blind the moon, with a heart that aches for love but a mind that destroys it and a voice which doesn’t know which side to follow but always ends up destroying love anyway. Jongin, angry and pitying, names the story Consternation of a Celestial Body and turns the page, eager to write another story but emptied of ideas. He decides that he needs to meet his muse on better terms. 

He asks Sehun if he had ever met someone like that, being a frequenter of the clubs in the city and being someone who seems to know everybody. But he replies in the negative, saying he would remember an angry little man like that. Jongin doesn’t like his muse being described as an angry little man. Sehun says he would ask around if it meant that much to him, and that in the meantime he should go back to that club, and hope to see him again. He does just that, although this time he does not touch the alcohol, having realised that the acrid tang of it on his breath had pushed his muse away further. He does not see him the first night, nor the second, and by the end of the month he has visited the club every single night and the staff there recognise him and still his muse does not come. Jongin does not write a single word that month.  

It takes three more blinks of that otherworldly eye before his muse appears before him again. Jongin has become cynical, his dried up well of words turning him harsh and choking. Sehun stops calling after the twentieth missed call and Jongin stops trying to find his muse. He just feels sad now, melancholia enveloping him like the endless sleep he fills his days with. He knows he must be taking care of himself somehow, he never feels hunger or thirst, he just is no longer aware of the passing of time and his movements within it. The silence in his apartment is deafening to him, his voice unused and croaky. Then the doorbell rings, shattering his wall of silence, and Jongin ignores it. Again and again that droning two-tone bell rings until Jongin has no choice but to answer it, if only to bring the silence up and around him again like a blanket. Sehun is there at the door, a bag on his back and a suitcase in his hand and tears in his eyes. He is red-rimmed, bloodshot all over, and Jongin is vaguely aware of his speech. “He was so nice and I loved him but then he started hitting me and he was drunk and I ran away…help me, I don’t care if you are a ing recluse now or whatever, I just need a place to crash tonight, please”. Jongin feels himself nod, and moves to let Sehun in. A night turns into a week, and Jongin’s apartment is clean again and the blinds are open and the silence is gone. Jongin doesn’t miss it. He starts to speak again, and Sehun decides to take him back to the club and promises not to leave him this time (his last one-night stand had ended with him on Jongin’s door step). This time, the thump of the beat and his heart syncopate and Jongin dances, the music fluid within him. Sehun stays and dances too, and the two create a choreography between them, no words and no muse needed. And then they are laughing and it feels like a rupture in Jongin’s chest is finally closing. The song ends and so does the dance and they collapse by the bar into a bundle of smiles. Jongin becomes aware of a presence next to him, a breath on his neck telling him ‘you can really dance’, two eyes as wide as oceans pulling him in like the moons pull on the tide. His name is Kyungsoo, he tells him, and Jongin repeats the name, swirling it on his tongue like he was tasting wine as rich and deep and red as Kyungsoo’s hair. They swap numbers and his muse leaves. He doesn’t wait until he gets home, Jongin takes the napkin in front of him and the pen in his jacket and writes about a siren with wine-red hair and eyes like the tide who one day couldn’t kill the sailor, who had been searching for a treasure that he found in the sirens eyes.  

It feels like an eternity before Jongin sees Kyungsoo, but only a week later they are together in a café (he can tell the difference now; he is too afraid of silence) and Jongin can’t stop staring into those eyes because they are the most beautiful things he has seen in the world. But how can they compare to the blush on his cheek when Kyungsoo notices, or how his slender fingers curl around the mug, or his heart-shaped lips when he smiles or his voice like a song when he laughs. Kyungsoo is perfect, and Jongin tells him that and winces when he sees him retract, his hands holding his neck as he laughs that cracked nervous laugh and those beautiful eyes looking down in shame or embarrassment or fear. When they part, Jongin kisses him on the cheek and there’s that look again, like he doesn’t think he deserves it. That night, Jongin adds to his notebook, now nearly full of stories inspired by his muse, and he writes of a man who was afraid of a mirror because he feared what he would see and of the man who showed him the beautiful portrait, the masterpiece he saw when he looked at him.  

They meet again, and again and again until the moon has blinked thrice and Jongin cannot bear to leave Kyungsoo’s side. He has filled notebook after notebook with stories and has started to date them, making them into a journal. Now, the smell of the leather conjures the smell of Kyungsoo’s aftershave, and the creamy white pages remind him of Kyungsoo’s bedsheets and he has written story after story for Kyungsoo; every single word on those pages and under those bedsheets is for Kyungsoo. And the way his hand just fits perfectly into Jongin’s makes him think that maybe his hands aren’t so broken anymore.  

A year passes and Jongin stops measuring time by the phases and blinks of the moon. Staring at the moon is for the lonely, now he spends his nights with Kyungsoo. And when he can’t sleep, instead of wandering to the window he finds himself staring at the new moon of Kyungsoo’s sleeping eyes, thinking of the man with a scar across his eye who could only speak his mind and not his heart. Sometimes he traces his fingers over his eyelids, releasing the words that used to keep him up at night- I love you, don’t leave me, you’re perfect, I need you. Other nights he frames Kyungsoo’s face with kisses, gentle kisses, and Jongin is reminded of the man who could not see the art that was his face. And recently, he has started tracing the heart that is Kyungsoo’s lips, thinking of the man who could not tell his stories. Tonight, he threads his fingers through that wine-red hair, and thinks of the treasure the sailor found in the siren’s eyes.  

He decides to show his stories to Kyungsoo, and recounts the moment he first saw him, and the ache he felt as his chest fractured when he couldn’t find him again. He tells him again and again that he was his muse, his moon. He tells Kyungsoo that he loves him, and that he is the most perfect thing in the world and that every word in these stories was his and that the journals with their leather and their stained pages were his too. Kyungsoo looks up at Jongin with those celestial eyes, tears making them shine like stars, and tells him that he loves him too. And in the blink of an eye, making those shining tears drop to Kyungsoo’s cheek, making Jongin’s heart feel as though it needed nothing more and he could now live and die happily, in the blink of an eye Jongin no longer needed to write.