I stop time and go back to you

Yixing stands up from his swiveling chair, presses a few keys on his keyboard and walks toward the stereo just beside his laptop.

Play. Pause. Stop…

How Yixing wishes that life would just be like that, too. He can choose to play in those blissful memories and probably hope that they will never end. He can choose to pause in those hard times when he needed more than sixty seconds to think, more than six minutes to say something and more than twenty fours to act what’s right. And of course, he can choose to stop.

“Stop,” he says nonchalantly.

And she did. “W-what?”

“I said stop,” he repeats, standing up and grabbing his coat that is hung at the back of his chair.

“I just said I will be really happy if you’ll write me a song…”

It is barely a whisper but Yixing doesn’t hear it because he’s already opening their favorite café’s door, putting on his beanie and stepping outside.

It’s like a routine now. Every time she’s able to coax Yixing to take a break and have a coffee with her, she’ll be the one to talk while he’ll mostly just nod his head or be absolutely nonresponsive. She’ll try to fill in the gaps they had when he’s busy working with his music and lyrics with her words. Then, she’ll unintentionally say something about him writing her a song and Yixing will not like that.

“A song isn’t something planned,” she murmurs to herself, clutching her skirt tightly and looking down.

A song isn’t something planned. A good song, that is, for Yixing. It’s something inspired by the lyricist that’s put down on words and harmonized with music. It’s not forced or prearranged but instead, it’s inspired by something or by someone.

“A song is born through here,” she continues to murmur alone, even when Yixing is long outside by now. She touches the part on her chest where her Yixing lies.

A song is born through the heart, not the mind.

Yixing takes out the CD from the stereo, the latest he has made. He started the lyrics yesterday when he’s on the subway going back home, finished it while eating his dinner and put music to it with his old piano the entire night.

He carefully placed it into a red disc container and notices that his disc containers are almost gone. He decides to buy some more because he has yet another song to write. He puts on the red disc he’s holding at the cabinet where he’s keeping all of his work. There are about a hundred of them.

“There are so many of them now,” he says, thinking aloud. “But where are you now?”

Seven days before Christmas.