‘I hope you don't mind that I put down in words,

How wonderful life is, while you're in the world.’ — Elton John, ‘Your Song’

i.

“Hey, mister… sick helmet,” the kid with the red snapback called out, perched on the edge of the road with his two little turd friends on either side of him, the three of them noisily popping bubbles and the gum back into their mouths. One of his friends said, “where’s your bike at?” and made motorcycle noises with his lips. They all snickered in unison.

“My bike is so awesome that it cannot be seen by the eyes of mere mortals,” Chanyeol said flatly as he walked past; they were clearly making fun of him, but no better response came to mind. Anyway, it was a pretty sick helmet.

The bell went off when he walked through the door of Amber’s shop, signalling his arrival, but Amber didn’t look up right away. “Hey,” she said, only looking at Chanyeol for a second; then she saw the gold helmet on his head and had another look. A smirk curled the corners of her lips. “You know, C-3PO called. He said he wants his head back.”

“Yeah? Well if he calls again, tell him ‘finders keepers’.” Chanyeol took the helmet off, messing up his hair a little to un-flatten it. He’d seen the helmet while browsing in the new bike shop that had opened up on The Avenue — a pointless exercise, really, since he couldn’t even ride a bike anymore, and didn’t have a skateboard, or a scooter… in fact, nothing to justify the purchase of a helmet at all. So he didn’t know why he’d felt so compelled to walk out the door with it, being the type who hated drawing attention to himself, but there was just something about it — the flashy, shiny, LOOK-AT-ME-I’M-GOLD!-ness of the bloody thing — that made him feel brave somehow, and so he bought it.

“Will do.” Amber chewed her lip for a moment, looking thoughtful. “So what’s the occasion? Did you get new wheels?”

Chanyeol leaned against the front counter. He felt foggy in the head again, and attempted to blink the feeling away. “Not quite,” he said. Yet another one of his weird little coping behaviours… how was he going to explain himself this time? “You know how I fell and bumped my head really bad? Well, since I actually enjoy having a skull, I thought maybe I’ll start wearing this.” He rubbed his forehead, tracing over the bump with his fingers; it was much smaller now, but definitely still there. He hadn’t even tripped over like any normal clumsy dip would, that was the frustrating part; instead he’d fallen asleep mid-stride, tumbling all the way down the stairs leading into the station. The pain in his head hadn’t hit him until a little while after he woke up, sprawled on the tiled floor with other travellers stumbling and muttering and spilling their caffeinated drinks on him. He remembered lying there for a good few minutes, partly because he could never move right after waking up from a sleep attack, but also because he was still coming down from the high of the dream he’d had while he was under, a beautiful dream about dancing.

He’d been having a few dreams about dancing lately: always with someone he didn’t know, but somehow felt on the verge of recognising. He would be cruelly yanked back into consciousness just before he could figure it out.

“You’re gonna wear a helmet just to walk around in the street, huh.” Amber stopped price-tagging vintage sunglasses and frowned at him. “You don’t think that’s a bit extreme..?”

Chanyeol shrugged. “Dunno. Is it?”

Amber shook her head. “I guess not. It’s just a shame you don’t have a sweet new Harley to go with it, but I guess that’s only a minor detail.”

“How many narcoleptics do you know who get around on motorbikes?” Chanyeol said, scoffing at the idea. Perhaps he should buy one, he thought, and keep it parked out in the street for the sake of appearances.

“I don’t know anyone else with narcolepsy, to be fair… you’re one of a kind, my friend.” To Chanyeol’s relief, Amber changed the subject. “Anything you want to have a look at while you’re here? I just got a whole rack of smoking jackets in, and a stack of new hats. There’s some really cool stuff, if you don’t mind that most of it’s been scabbed from deceased estates.”

“I’ve been eyeing those shoes you’ve got in the window display, actually, but I’ve got no idea where I’d wear them.” They were silver, with three white stars on the toe cap, and another one on the back of the heel — the sweetest kicks Chanyeol had ever seen. Definitely boogie shoes… not that he did much boogie-ing, but walking past them every morning kind of made him want to start.

“You always go for the sparkly , don’t you?” Amber chuckled to herself. “I’ve got two pairs left of those, as new, dead-stock from the late seventies. The pair in the window’s a size fifty or something, so you might be in luck.” She got up from her seat and beckoned Chanyeol to follow her over to the front of the shop. “Come and try them on. They'll only fit a behemoth like you, anyway.”

“Excellent,” Chanyeol said, rubbing his hands together. He really liked Amber’s little boutique, which she co-ran with her boyfriend Kibum, and he stopped by to visit whenever he had the time to poke around. Shinee Shack sold vintage clothes and records, and all sorts of fun old-school stuff for decent prices — a real treasure cave, even if it stank of camphor and that peculiar smell old people have. The most important thing was that he felt safe hanging around in there. Amber was one of his closest friends, and wouldn’t ever judge him for randomly nodding off while browsing… although what Chanyeol did was more of a full-body collapse than a simple nodding off, and anything or anyone standing nearby was in danger of being taken down with him — a rolling rack of taffeta formal dresses one day, a hat-stand full of vintage fedoras on another. One time he’d passed out on top of the ladies footwear display, and had woken up with several pairs of pointy stilettos poking into his back. He sometimes thought it was a wonder Amber still let him into the shop at all, but Amber was cool like that, and he always helped her put things right afterwards. A few people in their sleepy seaside town had taken to calling Chanyeol insulting things like ‘spaz’ and ‘leaning tower’ behind his back (and occasionally to his face) and, for whatever reason, found his strange condition amusing, but Chanyeol knew that Amber didn’t share the joke; neither did his other best friend, Jongdae. Even Chanyeol found the whole thing more amusing than they did, and he was the one who had to live with it.

“Well it’s nearly two, and I'm pretty hangry.” Amber handed Chanyeol the brown shopping bag with his newly-purchased shoes inside — they’d fit him perfectly, what luck — and then she picked up an apple from underneath the counter, taking a bite out of it. “Why don’t I shut shop for a bit, and then we can go for a late lunch together or something,” she said, between juicy mouthfuls. “Have you eaten? I know a good place we can go.”

“Let me guess,” Chanyeol said. “Spags again..?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

They went to Spags a lot when they met up for lunch, mostly because it was close to Amber’s shop and the service was quick. The cafe’s real name was actually ‘Space’, but they called it Spags because the font used on the sign out the front was hard to read. While they were walking there together, casually chatting about nothing important, Chanyeol was startled by a small boy tripping over a crack in the pavement, falling right near his feet, and the shock of it triggered him — his knees felt like they’d been kicked in at the back and he dropped to the ground, all of his muscles turning to jelly. ‘Cataplexy’, this phenomenon was called, although Chanyeol preferred to call it ‘body melting’, since that was what it felt like. He’d done it enough times by now to work out that there was an art to the collapse: to not resist or remain rigid, but to make the body as lax as possible to avoid injury, fold himself up and fall in stages. He had little choice in where or how he landed, but would usually be granted a few seconds to prepare himself for the worst. Sometimes he fell asleep and sometimes he didn’t; just lay there fully conscious but paralysed up to his eyeballs, until the muscle weakness eventually wore off.

Either way, it was never a fun time. Chanyeol groaned and lay there in the middle of the walkway for a few minutes, until he could move again, with Amber looking down at him worriedly. “I am an effing disaster,” he muttered; he hated doing this in a public place. It was embarrassing, and the people around him usually overreacted to the situation. He’d already woken up three times in the back of an ambulance because someone had found him out cold somewhere and had called emergency — it was always awkward, having to explain to a pair of frazzled paramedics that he was fine, really, he just had this strange condition where he sometimes went to sleep in some very inconvenient places. To avoid further misunderstanding, he now had a medical alert bracelet with I have narcolepsy engraved on it, which he wore on his left wrist.

“You’re not an effing disaster.” Amber bent down, holding out a hand to help Chanyeol get back up. “You’re just… a bit effing different.”

Chanyeol wanted to laugh at that, but he didn’t have the energy. He rarely laughed anymore; any sudden spike in emotion was a potential cataplexy trigger — not just surprise, but the tiniest giggle or flash of fear or anger was enough to send him to the ground in a boneless heap if he wasn’t careful. Even now that he was medicated and things were a bit better, it had become a habit to bring his hand up to his mouth and stifle a chuckle before it could escape. “Let’s just go, before something else happens.”

“Did you hear?” Amber said to him a little later, while they were in the middle of lunch. “They're finally gonna knock down Big Smokey at the old plant. But not until next year, I think.”

Chanyeol poked at his pasta with diminished interest. “Oh. When?”

“Dunno… no set date yet.”

“Are you gonna go watch it this time?”

Amber shrugged. “Probably. It was good fun watching Little Smokey fall, and Big Smokey’s nearly twice the size.”

Chanyeol breathed in deeply through his n