When you think “I want to die” enough, it starts to automatically deluge your mind, playing like a broken record. It really doesn’t mean much; it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s almost soothing, the familiarity of it. Other thoughts flow along its current, submerged by its viscous eddies. Then, there's something—a gust of wind, a flush of colour upon the horizon; from the tenebrous sandbox an iteration surfaces, and you remember the meaning. There's a mundane sheen to it, reared by social periphery, anointed by grotesque hilarity, castrated by human philosophy. You wait for it to go back to meaning nothing, but it's already settled in the riverbanks, an unprepossessing sediment inhabiting overcast shores. The echoes of its haunts slowly erode from the limpid strains of the tides of time, waiting for the still waters to inundate the land once more.

It's with the chimerical tenor of a child's naïveté that this portentous brook rudely splashes into your conscience, claiming the stream of your thoughts as its own.

“I want to die,” you say, abruptly interrupting Minwoo’s explanation of the track listing.

Jun Jin gives you a worried look. “Are you tired, hyung?”

Hyesung laughs. You can barely contain yourself with the caustic demands of social grace watching him laugh. You feel the corners of your own lips tug upward, automatically, a little too high. Your smirk doesn’t go unnoticed. “Eric’s just being weird again. He doesn’t mean it. Right, Eric?”

No, you don’t mean it. You echo it aloud to reassure the others, because Dongwan looks ready to call suicide prevention on you. You don’t mean it, just like how you don’t mean almost anything you ever say.

Still, not meaning it doesn’t stop it from coming to you at night, when you are swathed in your favorite blue blanket and petting Gomdori to sleep. It’s the last thing you think before your consciousness fades into a dreamless slumber.