Jongin couldn’t understand his emotions sometimes.

The next morning when he woke up, his chest and head were lighter than a feather, which contradicted what he brought before he slept. All the weight was gone to a place he had no clue about.

He felt nothing. 

And he knew he wasn’t supposed to feel this way.

Today, it most likely became his second consecutive days spent crying if he was being in his usual character. But he didn’t even shed a tear since last night.

It got him pondering, was Seulgi never really that important to me in the first place?

Jongin got his own argument broken when his eyes met another pair of his eyes in another medium. Like, the sketch that Seulgi made at their first (official) meeting. He still stuck it on his desk, next to the boring stacks of his textbook for last semester. Then, tons of photos they have taken together look at him back straight to his eyes. He never regretted any second from the memories he shared with Seulgi, ever. 

The wrongness, he concluded, was in him. 

Jongin went through the rest of his day by conducting an autopilot mode. The water ran down from his scalp to his feet, his heart beat like a marching band drum as the speed on the treadmill increased, his fingers typed words by words on his keyboard before he pressed the send button—and the void remained unchanged. Once in a while, he would stop doing anything he did at that time because it didn’t feel real as if his body wasn’t connected to his mind. He was detached from anything he did, and he had to remind himself that it wasn’t a bizarre dream at all. 

The realization of his abnormal emotional state escalated when going to the dance studio didn’t even spark the same enthusiasm inside him. Yes, he still caught all the moves precisely, but at what cost? The practice even felt fleeting. He blinked his eyes, and then, boom, it already finished. 

I need to feel something.

But what kind of feeling, exactly?

He spent the next day playing PUBG with Chanyeol and some of his friends from morning to midnight. Tons of win streaks, one fast food meal, two cups of water, and barely three hours of sleep later; Jongin stopped playing after Chanyeol gave up and told him to play again next week. 

The only thing left inside Jongin was tiredness. It was not the kind that made him want to sleep, but the kind that made him rethink why he chose life over death before his soul was thrown into the world for the first time, 21 years ago. 

Jongin tried to watch the saddest movie he could find at that moment. Sehun once said to him that he was a crybaby—the tragic part hardly started, but Jongin’s eyes already wallowed in water. He admitted that it was true. An external event could easily poke on his sadness and played with them nonchalantly. Subjectively speaking for Jongin, the highest form of the sad movie was if the dog character died, and that was why he spent hours putting ice on his swollen eyes the night he watched Hachiko back then in high school. 

Two hours passed and Jongin closed his laptop’s lid with a blank face.

Part of it caused by the way he couldn’t concentrate the whole time. And the other part, he often questioned to himself: should I feel sad about this scene? 

The hollowness turned into rage. All of his effort to feel something didn’t produce an immensely satisfying result, but it was a paradox that he finally felt angry for not feeling anything. So, now I can feel something because I can’t feel anything? What kind of ing sorcery is this?

Jongin stared into the mirror above his sink, and his reflection returned his gaze even stronger. Both corners of his eyes raised and his eyebrows furrowed, jaw clenched, and there were a couple attempts to bring his breath pace into normal. At this point, even the previously most unthinkable ways to hurt himself resurfaced. He wondered how much force he should put into his head if he wanted to bang the mirror into pieces. How much blood would flow from his head? Would it be worse than the bleeding from his legs six months ago? Maybe not. It was just his head against the mirror, not two objects moving at 90 kilometers per hour. 

But his cowardice weighed more than his willingness to hurt himself. Jongin found it funny that even at this moment, his urge for survival still won, no matter how much everything made him want to end it all. He ended up laughing while looking at himself in the mirror. 

The next afternoon, Jongin put on his all-black tracksuit and sneakers with the same color. The sun still set late because of summer, and it was a perfect occasion to jog through the residential complex. He couldn’t open his eyes before 9 AM anymore—so it was impossible to exercise when the sun was just above his head. 

Jongin wanted to feel exhausted. By that, he would be able to sleep at the regular hour and reset his biological clock. And bury his train of disturbing thoughts to the most bottomless pit. Lifehack? No. Jongin just didn’t want to process anything he felt thoroughly anymore. 

So, he ran. Passing house by house, pond by pond, road by road, until he eventually completed the first leap. Jongin continued through the second leap. Some of his neighbors greeted him along the way because his father was quite well known in the neighborhood. Jongin had to generate the closest thing to a smile when someone he didn’t even recognize addressed him by a phrase he loathed the most.

Mr. Kim’s son.

He scoffed a few meters after that lady with a baby stroller greeted him with the same phrase. I’m not his son anymore, am I? 

Jongin’s wrath became his fuel to run faster. He raised his left wrist, where his smartwatch was placed on and observed as his heartbeat rate elevated. Good. Keep running, Jongin.

He stopped calculating how many leaps he had passed after running for an hour. If someone took his tracksuit off and squeezed it hard enough, the amount of sweat would be able to fill a whole basket. His calves and thighs became the part where the throbbing pain centered, and he thought, will I break my legs again this time? Doctors said I won’t have the same ability like I used to, right? Not even finding an answer yet, he substituted his question with another one; , am I going to die with my current heartbeat? Will my heart explode from beating too much?

Jongin didn’t even bother to answer everything he had in mind as his lungs were gasping for more and more oxygen. His vision was getting blurry, partly from the sweats and partly from tons of imaginary static ants. 

I can’t do this anymore. 

No, I can. I should keep running. I should push my limit. 

A red car going inside the garage of a house a few meters in front of him was the last thing Jongin saw before everything turned black. His body tumbled to the ground, generating a loud thud.

And finally, his mind went quiet. Like what he always wished for.

~***~

This was Seulgi’s first thirty minutes inside the train that carried her to her hometown, Incheon. The landscape that this train passed had varied from mountains, lakes, rivers, busy highways, to densely populated areas. She had to spend another thirty minutes before she arrived at the station, and her trip to home was still a long way to go.

Seulgi had not been home for quite a bit. The last time she went home was during the end-year holiday. Her brother came home too for a shorter period than she was because he had to work again. Seulgi fancied living alone, but there were times when she wanted to be surrounded by her family. 

Like, being heartbroken. 

She didn’t have to converse with her Mom and her Dad about a guy who broke her heart. Them being in the house doing everything they please was already enough to give Seulgi a sense of security, that she wasn’t lonely. Because being alone and feeling lonely were two disparate things and Seulgi only favored the former. 

The second thirty minutes passed like a blink of an eye. Seulgi took a deep breath when the cold air from inside the train was replaced with a more humid and warmer aerial. Every corner and side of this station was filled with people, people, and more people. Clutching into the handle of her backpack, Seulgi walked away from the crowd. The sunlight hit on the back of her head as soon as she stepped outside the station.

The watch on her wrist told her it was still two hours before her parents came back from work. Three, if the higher-ups nagged a lot. Seulgi needed some time to be alone first before she surprised her parents with her arrival, just to make sure she still remembered how Incheon looked like (although it was just an hour away from Seoul). So, she took a subway to one of the main roads in Incheon. There was a relatively well-known cafe that she knew there, where she usually hung out with her high school friends after coming back from Seoul. Although a new cafe always popped out every day in Incheon—and in Seoul too, Seulgi swore to God why people like to open a cafe business that much—sticking to a familiar place won her choice. 

Seulgi sat at the utmost corner of this cafe where no one but the waitress would pass. She needed to be alone while sipping on her yuzu berry drink. Putting her chin on top of her palm, she stirred the sweet-sour beverage with the straw while fixating her gaze on the wall. Sometimes she saw unreal objects made from patterns of water stain and dirt, that every time she shook her head off, a different thing would be formed. 

Gestalt. A concept where our visual perception will force us to fill the empty spot just to make it a cohesive object. Like it or not, our brain is a perfectionist, and a perfectionist would not want incomplete work. Seulgi knew it was applied only to visible patterns; hence, many interior designers were using this concept for aesthetic purposes. But Seulgi wondered, did it apply to abstract ideas too? 

What if months she and Jongin spent learning about each other end up with a loose end instead of a dead-end? Maybe their fight wasn’t really the end. There were two main paths if her assumption was valid: restart everything with Jongin, but this time, none of them were allowed to fall for each other; or verbally articulating to Jongin that their relationship officially ended.

Even technically, it hadn’t even started yet. 

 Whatever it was, Seulgi desperately wanted to close the gap. But when she diverted her eyes into her phone, where tons of their pictures and chats still resided, her mind went blank. 

What should I say to you, Jongin? She muttered inside her mind while looking at the first photo they took together. What would be the words both of us want to hear the most? 

“Seulgi?”.

The imaginary Jongin’s figure ruptured into pieces when she heard a male’s voice calling her name. And that man currently standing in front of Seulgi with the broadest smile she ever saw—

“Baekhyun?!”, she stood up from her seat, eyes widened in disbelief.

“Whoa, what’s the Yonsei student doing here in her hometown?”, Baekhyun spread out his arms, ready to receive an embrace from Seulgi, only for him to remember...Seulgi did not like to have physical interaction. “Right, sorry, I forget that you’re allergic to touch”, he said as he put his arms down. 

Seulgi let an awkward grin. “I just come back from Seoul. Did you come here alone, or should I come back to spacing out on my own?”.

“I’m actually waiting for a friend”, he scratched the back of his head numerous times. “But, hey, never mind. We haven’t met for years, okay?”.

“It is actually just six months”. Seulgi came back to her seat, and Baekhyun followed, facing her. “How are you doing? Still suffering? From all the chemical equations and numbers?”.

“It is not suffering if I get an A. Yeah, just an A, and the rest are Cs and Ds, if you’re wondering”, Baekhyun raised his eyebrows.

Seulgi laughed along and leaned her body forward. “You were working hard, I know”.

“And how about you? Asking you since we never even texted again”.

“I’m...doing well in college”, she said. “Sorry! You know I prefer to talk to you directly rather than texting you”.

“So we can only talk like, every six months”, Baekhyun folded his arms right on top of the table. “What do you mean in college? You have to sacrifice your social life for your academic success?”.

Baekhyun hadn’t changed from what Seulgi knew in the past four years ago. They first met during their freshman year after enrolling in a theatre club in their high school. The moment Baekhyun walked through the door, he made the atmosphere livelier with his quick wit, straightforwardness, and naturally funny trait. Everyone always flocked into him to hear his jokes and stories, and being one of his closest friends, she enjoyed the privilege a lot.

“I guess so?”, Seulgi shrugged her shoulder, took a sip on her drink once more. 

“What is that, you have trouble with some guy?”.

Seulgi instantly furrowed her forehead, took out the straw from her glass, and then shook the remaining liquid in Baekhyun’s direction. He dodged it by reflexively raised both of his arms while he laughed.

“How did you know?!”.

“It’s written all over your face”, Baekhyun made an invisible circle around his face with the tip of his index finger. “What, you got friendzoned again this time?”.

“