Sometimes you just felt like torturing yourself.

You knew it was far from healthy, scrolling through the pictures on your Twitter timeline, letting the vacant look in his eyes rest heavy against your throat like being stepped on by an elephant.

You were over the heartbreak. Over the sleepless nights when your nose was too stuffed to breathe and your skin around eyes sore from wiping tears. You were over the weeks of forcing food down your throat to stave off the dizziness despite the nausea you felt at the mere thought of eating anything out of pleasure.

You were over the anger. The anger was the quickest to leave. It hardly even had a foothold when the sadness had taken you.

If only you could get over the longing to see his face. If only you could stop yourself from zooming in on the airport previews from his fan sites for any sign at all that he was alive. Or that he was unhappy in any way. Perhaps any sign that he missed you or thought about you as much as you thought about him.

Even worse than the vacant look in his eyes were the shots of him smiling. Genuine smiles that reached his eyes. Jokes and playfulness with s, caught on the screen of some glorified paparazzi, showing him bouncing back fast. Showing him alive and vibrant and flourishing when you felt like you had been dead for weeks.

If seeing him with his friends was unbearable, the interactions with his fresh-faced and beautiful co-star felt like a quick stab with a knife so sharp the blade had pierced quickly down to the hilt and pulled out again before you had even seen the light reflect off the thin metal.

You closed the stupid app. The metallic taste of regret on the back of your tongue was the only evidence that you had even seen it.

Kyungsoo had been handsomely dressed in his finest black suit with his hair styled and the shine on his shoes enough to flare the lenses of the cameras that frantically flashed and screamed for his attention.

It was a film festival of some kind. Something where all the beautiful people dressed up like royalty and sold the regular folks on the life of glitz and glamor enough to buy into their products and sell tickets. It worked. You heard the movie sold out in twelve point three seconds this time.

The images, long since closed on your phone, were replaying in your mind like a movie. And just like the gif that had loaded moments before you had felt the blade, the film in the back of your eyes replayed the way his hand caressed lightly over the small of her back. The way his fingertips connected to the silk of her dress and actually made genuine physical contact; not a polite hovering hand over her skin that he usually adopted for situations such as this but he touched her, with his own hand, as he steered the black-haired, smiling beauty down a row of seats to take her seat beside his own. It was their movie that was premiering. It was their story for sale and the taste in the back of your throat grew bitter and dry.

**

You could hear it in his voice that something was off. He was overworked and tired and the kind of stressed that he needed to sleep off, yet the pull of his voice on the phone was too tempting. Despite the short answers, he pushed through his lips there was a warmth inside his voice that coated sweetly against your soul. You felt placated by his humming response to the story of your day you were telling him.

You often did this, got him on the phone after days and held on tight, refusing to let go. You got so little of him lately that you felt like a stubborn child refusing to go to bed for fear that you might miss something exciting.

Kyungsoo didn’t mind your ways. He usually responded to your whining with a soft chuckle and a promise to send you a picture later. A selfie with his dogs or a thumbs up and grin in front of his lunch, but lately, the phone calls and the pictures had been coming further and further apart. Lately, your text messages to him sat unread for hours or sometimes an entire day before he finally saw them and responded with one or two words and an emoji.  

Just last week you had sent him an entire rant about some entitled dignitary that ran a wandering hand up the back of your leg, aiming toward your before you could move away and how put-out you were that you had to request a different assignment away from the old ert. Normally, he would have responded to your complaints that instant, quickly demanding to know the name of the man or the names of the people in charge of such arrangements. Kyungsoo’s temper was quick when it came to injustices such as these, and particularly when they were against you. Your surprise was palpable when he didn’t see the messages until long after the matter had been resolved by your superiors and the ert was assigned to a male interpreter who wasn’t as easy a target as you had been.

When Kyungsoo finally did respond, it was merely to voice his relief that the situation was handled so quickly. He obviously didn't notice the entire two days of time that passed between the problem and the resolution and you didn’t bring it up after that.

He must just be too busy.

Perhaps your mood had been brewing since then. Perhaps coupled with his exhaustion and the stress he was under the pot was about to boil over anyway when you dropped the final piece into the pot with a splash.

He had fallen asleep on the phone as you spoke into his ear. You could hear the steady breathing and lack of any sort of response from him and you had been in the middle of asking him when the next break in his schedule was so you could use your miles on the flight before they expired. You had to call his name three times to get him to wake back up. Each time you called him louder and each time your mood sunk deeper into the pit you thought you had already reached the bottom of.

“Huh? What did you say?”

‘Nevermind.’ You wanted to say. ‘Forget it. I’ll never get to see you again and you’ll just keep on working and you never call me or text me first and frankly it feels like I’m dating a ghost at this point.’

“What? I think I fell asleep. I think I should hang up.”

“Of course,” your tone had been rough even to your own ears, “it’s not like you’ve got a girlfriend that wants to talk to you or come and see you.” The sarcasm you heard from your own lips made you uneasy yet you felt powerless to stop it. The mood had already been set in and you had been feeling too neglected to not say anything.

‘It’s okay, I understand.’

It was what you always said.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so busy.’

It was what he always said.

Only something felt different now and you could hear the slow and steady breathing change as he went silent. This time he didn't say his line.

“Don't do that,” he said, his voice more alert now than it had sounded throughout the entire phone call. The sweet warmth was gone and this version of him sounded much colder.

The draft was unwelcome.

“Why can’t I do that? I’m allowed to be upset sometimes, you know? You still haven’t gotten back to me about your schedule. Or maybe you don't want me to come see you again, is that it?”

“Of course I want you to come again, I’m just so ing busy right now. Why don't you get that? I don't even have time to sleep or to eat properly, how in the hell am I supposed to find time for--” The phone left his lips for a moment and you heard a low growl of frustration leave his chest. It was far away and his unfinished words echoed through your mind, ‘for you. How the hell am I supposed to find time for you?’

For you...You were just the girl he loved. Some girl who lived far away and bothered him sometimes with whining complaints about being neglected and forgotten. You were a list of whispered promises said when his guard was down and he was vulnerable to you.

For someone who swore up and down that he would never lie to you, he sure liked to collect unfulfilled promises. You were just some girl who he claimed to love, yet you obviously weren’t anything close to a priority in his life.  You could feel it so completely at that moment. Second place. Third place. Anything but first. You would never be important enough to come first at any point in his life and he knew that just as much as you did.

You heard your name said over the phone. His voice was low and blank. Tired and devoid of any more emotion than necessary and you must have gone silent for him to be calling you in this irritated tone like this.

“Don't worry, Kyungsoo, I get it. I’m only the one you love, right? I’ll never be your music or your career or...or the youtube views, or the fans, or the money.” It was a pity party at this point and Kyungsoo was too overstretched to have the patience for any of it.

“I said, don't ing do that,” he growled into the phone, his tone as red as the setting sun outside of your window. If it was dinner time for you it was well past midnight for him. You weren't nearly as exhausted as he was, yet you couldn't keep up with the ache in your heart.

“What do you expect from me anyway?” He was going now, his anger taking hold of his thinking you could hear the pounding of his fist against something wooden like a table or a countertop. It echoed in the background noises. “What the do you want me to do? Quit my job just so I can come over and hold your hand? Will you stop acting like such a ing child, please?”

Your temper responded in kind to his temper. Anger for anger. Hurt feelings and exasperation matched head to head.

“I don't expect a God damned thing from you, Do Kyungsoo. Not anymore.” You couldn't stop yourself even if you wanted to. You pulled the phone angrily away from your face and you disconnected the call with more force than necessary. It was the first time you had ever snapped at him like that. It was the culmination of weeks and months of missing him. Of not knowing where you stood in his heart. Of not knowing your worth to him and it mingled with your insecurities and bubbled up fast like an elementary science fair volcano, spilling out all over the feet of the onlookers who nodded and awarded the effort with a yellow 3rd place ribbon.

It was the distance that did it.

For the both of you, the distance had been so much stronger of an opponent than either of you had been willing to admit. Yet it set to work fast like a virus; attacking and destroying the healthy cells with ease. Your meager defenses never stood a chance against the distance.

**

You told yourself that you would stop checking in on him. Yet, again and again, you gave in to the obsession. Because that’s what it was, it was an obsession. You were obsessed with his face, obsessed with staring at him and analyzing through the pixels the expression on his face, looking for darkness in his eyes or traces of sadness in his smile. Desperate really for any hints that you weren’t the only one still feeling this, after months. ing months and months, how pathetic were you? Perhaps you were obsessed with the pain, because at least if he was giving you this horrible feeling inside then at least he was doing something for you. And you would take anything that wasn’t the silence you had grown so sick of withstanding.

You must be insane. You could find no other explanation for it.

It wasn’t that you didn't want him to be happy. Right? But...did he have to be so very happy? You knew you should want him to be happy and so you told yourself that as an excuse for watching him. You loved him, you would always love him and only him and you wanted him to laugh and smile and joke around and be happy and successful in his career and if you weren’t going to be involved in that happiness in any way then he should just have it all to himself. It wasn't that you wanted him to be miserable like you were, but the unfairness of it all was enough to make you lose your mind when you saw his bright smiles that would never again be directed at you.

When was the last time you heard his voice over your phone? It had been six months now. Since that last phone call that ended everything and left you feeling empty and destroyed on the inside as your body kept right on living and you had to keep functioning as a human being. You had to keep reporting to work, and you had to go on trips abroad with a forced smile on your face when on the inside you were nothing. Nothing without his smiles and his sweet words and the sounds of him singing in your ear in the middle of the night when you were snuggled under your covers and he was hidden away in a bathroom somewhere.

Remarkably, you could somehow still stand to listen to the music. Sometimes you could even stand to put both headphones into your ears as you let the soft sounds of his singing voice dig deep pits into the chambers of your heart and leave behind cherry bombs that exploded, wrecking the walls and filling you with smoke.

Before the bombs exploded though, you could feel it. Just a little bit of that same feeling from before. The flutter of happiness, light as a butterfly’s