He spent half his life chasing shadows out of mirrors, shattered glass nursing bare knuckles and red tainting the colors. He hated his glassy eyes and pale skin. And maybe he hated not being Jongin anymore. Because somewhere along the way Kai had swirled little Jongin down the drain of some granite sink, left him forgotten between black ink and yellowed pages, flushed him down the toilet with glitter and sleeping pills sprinkled over vomit. Now he was just the afterimage of a photograph, a robot trying to be human, a corpse trying to claw it’s way out of the coffin. Besides, he mused, the ability to breathe isn’t the dividing line between the living and the dead.

It goes much deeper that the heaving of a chest or the pumping of an organ. It all comes down to whether you talk with the lips or the throat, what you say and what you leave unsaid, and whether you see how the light hits a street sign or how the darkness seeps from cracks between skyscrapers. Whether you spend your nights exhaling lungs and smoke, drowning in melancholy music in a rundown bar somewhere in the maze of sidewalks and road signs or eating a homemade meal saturated in light and smiles with roommates or spouses, cuddling up to laugh at the shenanigans of variety shows before bed. It comes down to whether you bleed kimchi sauce or alcohol, and whether your lips taste like a summer breeze or concrete floors. Whether the polaroid pictures in your scrapbook depict price tags from fish markets and beach sand in jars or mementos from a journey down a crack in the sidewalk.

And yet maybe, just maybe, it’s even simpler than that. Maybe all it comes down to if your bones curl into a cage or a door and if your skin molds into a prison guard or a key.