My blanket is slowly becoming wet at the edges, where it is draped loosely over my mouth and nose and almost reaches my eyes. Yes, it’s pathetic. Yes, I’m lying in my bed at night while there are four other boys sleeping in the same room, feeling lonely as hell. Yes, I’m eighteen not eight. I know.

To say the reason for my sudden feeling of solitude is that I miss my parents (which would seem reasonable, because I just moved away from home) isn’t an absolute lie, but that’s not the main reason. It’s more about the seemingly reasonless blow of fear that hits me and makes me cry when I’m alone and imagine that there are about 10 and a half other humans scattered in the same town, and me somewhere among them. When the world becomes dark and the dorm quiet, I feel anxious about getting lost the moment I let my thoughts wander.

Trying to get rid of that emotion, I screw my eyes shut, fully concentrated on staying as silent as I possibly can. I am convinced that a clenched throat, lips pressed together, and a blanket over my mouth are doing the trick, but obviously, they aren’t.
Otherwise I wouldn’t be hearing a hushed voice the next moment, calling my name.
“Jonghyun?”

My answer is a hiccup. Or a sob or a gasp or whatever that hideous sound might be called. What really matters isn’t the name, but the fact that it made its way out of my mouth. And consequently into Kibum’s ear.
“Jjong, are you okay?” he whispers.

The problem that comes with a constricted throat and a blanket over one’s mouth is that it distorts every perfectly normal reply into mashed mess of syllables.

And so my “Sure, I’m alright.” makes me seem very far from being alright (which I am, in fact, not).
“Are you crying?” he asks softly.

The next sob that squeezes through my throat seems to be enough of an answer for him, as I hear his bed squeak and the padding of his bare feet first on the latter, then on the ground. I can feel his hand on my ankle through the blanket, and he says:
“Common, get up. It’s no use lying in your bed, crying all silently by yourself.”
Kibum’s right with that, so I wipe my face a few times and quietly climb down from my top bunk.

He eyes me for a moment when I stand next to him, but doesn’t give any of his usual crude remarks. I half expect him to hug me, because that’s what I would do if I stood in front of a friend looking like he’s been to hell and back.

But he reminds me yet again of how different we are (me: king of skinship, him: queen of meaningful gazes) and only locks eyes with me for a second too long.
Then he offers:

“Do you want me to make you a hot chocolate? It’ll calm you down and make you tired.”

I sigh a little shakily, nod, and reach for his arm as we leave for the kitchen, because yes, I’m the king of skinship and I don’t care if he’s one year younger than me.

When Kibum switches on the light, it feels like my eyes are falling out from the sudden brightness. He sits me down on a chair and after I can see properly again, I observe him stirring cocoa powder into a glass of milk.

With a “here you go” and a smile of both his mouth and his eyes, he hands it to me. It takes some time to empty the glass, so Kibum leans on the counter, staying silent.
“Do you feel better now?” he asks after I have put the glass down. “Do you want to go back to bed?”

I do feel better, but I’m not sure whether it’s really due to the hot chocolate or more because the lights are on and he’s here, talking to me. Thinking of going to bed and having that feeling of being dispatched from life again makes me shudder.

So I tell him that I don’t want to (knowing full well that I sound like a child) and that I won’t be able to sleep. “Stay up with me for a little bit.” I add. It’s selfish. We aren’t normal teenagers who might miss a lesson or two the next morning if they are too tired, we are idols with obligations and fixed schedules.
To my surprise he only sighs shortly; looking at me he agrees. “Okay, but not too long.”

Without warning he reaches out his hands and switches off the light, making me blink and call out his name in a frustrated tone. Laughing, he stalks away; even though I’m practically blind right now, I can still make out his white shirt in the darkness. I follow the light patch that is Kibum like a lantern, stumbling (ungracefully) into the hallway that leads to the bathroom.
“Let’s stay here.” he mutters and sinks down to the floor.

Every normal person would be amazed by this spot in the dorm, I conclude, and Kibum seems to be one of those.

The corridor is narrow and short but situated at the side of the building with big windows, which almost reach down to the carpet. All in all a great place to observe the beautiful nighttime view of the surrounding buildings.
Yet for me, well… it falls into the category of places that make me feel small, lonely, isolated. That bestows that shrinking feeling upon me, which has made me into a shuddering mess only minutes before.

I sit down next to Kibum anyway. Why? Because he has an impatient, almost commanding expression on his face and I can’t seem to not follow his demands.
We remain like that in silence and I study how his feet are pressed against the opposite wall, whereas I only manage to reach it with my toes. Now I feel even smaller, not only in the metaphorical sense but also in—

“Are you going to stay silent for the rest of the night or are you going to tell me?” he asks staring straight ahead outside the window.
He’s right. Of course he’d want to know why I was so upset. I’ve been avoiding the topic by distracting myself with stupid height issues. I trust him, so I shouldn’t keep this from him.
“Sorry.” I say in English and poke his knee.

“Tell me.”
“It’s hard to explain and probably pretty dumb. But I’ll try.”

I direct my attention to the sleeping world in front of us. With an expansive hand movement towards the window, I begin.

“It’s about… this. The city. The people. I’m afraid of it. Not in a practical sense like “I’m afraid of big cities because the crime rate is high and thus something might happen to me.” I sometimes feel like I’mlost, emotionally.
What makes me so uneasy is the feeling of not knowing, not being able to grasp.”

I pause, because I can’t think of a way to explain why it makes me so sad. Searching for help, I take a look at Kibum’s face. He seems to be at a loss and I make a mental note to learn how to express myself better.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you’re saying…” He trails off. “When I look outside, I see an apartment building and a few trees at a medium sized street. There are some bushes on a small piece of lawn. It’s calm because most of the people are sleeping. There’s nothing scary about it.”

“For me it is. It sounds stupid if I say that I’m afraid of big expanses, but it’s true. It is the feeling of seeing a lot in the blink of an eye, but not really knowing anything about what you saw except for what you see. For example… There are fifteen windows on the façade of the building over there. Behind two of them the lights are switched on. There are countless reasons why the people in those apartments are not sleeping in the dead of night, but I’ll never know. I can only observe that the lights are currently on.

On the other hand, when I look at you I know all those important details. You’ve got shadows under your eyes because you got up in the middle of the night to take care of me. Your skin has some flaws because you forgot to turn the humidifier on.

Still, if someone in that building looked out of the window like we do, he wouldn’t know anything about this, about us, about our conversation. We would be the same face- and nameless people.

When I think of the world in that way, I have the feeling of not being part of it, of not being part of anything anymore.”
Kibum exhales next to me, resting some of his weight against my shoulder and I quickly continue so that he won’t interrupt my train of thought.

“In cities you meet so many people in daily life. When you take a stuffed subway train, you brush shoulders and accidentally touch their hands. You see the faces of countless people who are just as much a three-dimensional human as yourself, but all you’ll get to see is two-dimensional.

And even worse. We have so many relationships to people we know but at the same time we don’t. The cashier at the convenience store you go to every day, who wishes you a nice weekend. Or our driver who we sometimes talk to on our way to concerts.

There are more than ten thousand people living in this city, of which we maybe know three hundred in one way or another. And so sometimes when I’m alone with my thoughts, I think of being swallowed by the city and of no one noticing my absence. I know such a huge amount of people, but none of them would care if I went missing.”
Even though Kibum has been quiet all along, he now interrupts me in a serious tone.

“Leaving without anyone noticing or caring? Are you kidding me? Jonghyun, you’re famous. How should you go missing without a huge uproar in our fan base? There are thousands of fans who love you.”
“There are not.” I am quick to cut him off. “That’s one thing that scares me even more. There are thousands of fans who say that they love me. But they don’t. Not a single one of them. They don’t even know me, so how can they say that they love me? That’s something I can’t wrap my head around. It makes me anxious and repulses me.

They might like me because of my looks, or my voice or maybe my sense of humor, but they don’t know anything about me except for some superficial data. When they see me on stage they scream their heads off for an idea they have of me, for an image. If they really liked me as a person, they wouldn’t scream. Nobody freaks out like that because of someone they love.

And that’s what makes me so scared about it. If I disappeared, they would go haywire because they miss the image they have created of me, what I am to them. Not who I am.”

“That might be true.” he argues with a stern expression. “But why are you leaving us out of this, your members? All of us would notice your absence the moment you were gone. And you really can’t say that you’ve got a superficial bond with us. Why are you even telling me this? Because you want to say that you’re not feeling close with any of us?”

I’m utterly lost at this. He has gotten me absolutely wrong, but what surprises me more is that it seems to affect him so much.

“No, Kibum, that’s not what I meant. I know that we are all close friends. But I was talking about fully knowing someone and not believing in the impression you have of that person anymore. We’re friends, yet we’ll never be close enough for that. I guess that every member will find someone like that though, someone to know fully, someone… like…”
“… a soulmate?”

The moment I hear that word, I burst out laughing. “Soulmates? Do you really believe in that kind of stuff? Kindred spirits?”
“What?” he snaps and the faint light that seeps through the windows makes his eyes gleam even more dangerously. “It’s obvious. From everything you’ve said, it’s just obvious that you’re in search of a soul mate and feel lost when you think that you’ll never be able to find him.”

“No, it’s not. I never said that. Did you even listen to me?”

I notice how his fingers dig into the fabric of his sweatpants.

He makes an annoyed noise at the back of his throat. “How can you ask me to listento you, if you’re not even able to look!”

That totally takes me aback. His sudden outburst seems completely irrational.

Kibum glares at me for another few seconds (and I begin to consider that the nickname “flaming charisma” might fit him better thanits actual owner) until he gets up abruptly.

“I‘m going to bed.” he declares.

Now I‘m absolutely certain that I‘ve done something wrong. But what? All I did was make fun the whole soulmate business.

Nonetheless, I don‘t want him to be mad at me. He‘s not supposed to, not allowed to even, he’s never really been.

Stepping over my legs, which are sprawled in the middle of the hallway, he sighs and I catch how he mutters under his breath:
“… neither able to look nor able to feel...”

That does it for me.

Before he has managed to put some distance between us, I manage to catch his fingers (which seems like a scene from those dramas Kibum likes to watch, only that it doesn‘t look half as dramatic) and hold him back.

Not leaving me any time to do something myself, he spins around.

I don‘t know if what happens next really takes place in half a second, but it sure feels like it.

Kibum drops to his knees, places his hands on my neck (or, to be accurate, the part where neck and shoulders meet), and suddenly his lips are on mine.

I‘m sitting there on my , my upper body awkwardly angled to the side; he‘s on his knees and we‘re kissing.

If you can call that kissing.

It is more like a simple touch of skin on skin, since neither of us is moving much.

We remain like that for some time and I think about how this kiss epitomizes everything we’ve been talking about. This kiss is the brushing of shoulders in a crowded subway train; it’s the “Bye bye!” to the cashier at the convenience store; and the small talk with our driver. It’s all the superficial contact that we encounter everyday.

From the outside, it seems to be just that, but on the inside I know that it’s not.

Because I know him. It is as simple as that.
Kibum is not like the people behind those windows in the nearby apartment building. The people whose stories, whose intentions and wishes I’ll never know.

On the contrary, I know all of that about him, and what’s most important: I know more of his heart than I actually thought.

He is here, he is warm, and I’m connected to him.

After that emotion has laid its soothing veil over the turmoil in my head, I gently detach out lips and pull him into a hug. Kibum stirs eventually, then slips out of my embrace.

“Sleep.” he murmurs after he has sat down next to me and pulled my head onto his shoulder.

So I do.

When I wake up, bright sunlight is hitting my face and penetrating my eyelids. It’s summer, so the sun rises early. Judging by the silence in our dorm, it seems as if I’ve awoken before the usual time.

Kibum is breathing calmly next to and against me (his upper body and head have somehow come to rest on my side.)

I don’t really feel like opening my eyes because I’m still dead tired, but when I do, I catch sight of something that seems to be attached to my finger. It’s a blue thread tied around my pinky and – now that the tiredness is slowly fading from my brain – I notice that there’s writing on the back of my hand.

When I lift my arm in order to read it, I feel a tug on my finger. Suddenly I register that the other end of the blue thread is tied to one of Kibum’s pinkies. The strand reaches from my finger to his finger.

Quickly, I lean down to make out the text on my hand.

It says:

I couldn’t find any red thread, sorry. ^^

There was only blue one left.

But I’m sure you get the message anyway!

- Key <3

After having gazed down at the blue strand, which connects us like a vein, for a few minutes, I begin to observe the building we talked about last night.

Through the glass I can see yellowed curtains being opened and an old lady cooking something on her stove. The daily life of these nameless people without stories begins.

But it occurs to me now that my story had already begun last night: When I opened our window, stretched my arm out, and reached my hand through it.