My hands are still trembling, the blood rushing to my head in dizzying waves--waves of Jongin's voice, Jongin's laugh, Jongin's scent.  Jongin's hyung, what makes you happy.

I suddenly feel like answering with a you do, before realizing that I have never had--and never will have--the courage to.  The way I feel my shoulders dropping lower than my heart when I take mental pictures of Jongin's smile tells me this feeling is a just a little more than missing him.  

My mind is shaken and Jongin's footprints are still left on the edge of the cement where he stood moments ago, form hanging loosely between tumbling into oblivion and returning to where I thought he would be happy.  The drums pounding inside me pound louder, and the chasing fires come faster, wisps of Jongin's silhouette by the studio window finding its way back home.

I know my worst thoughts are written in my nightmares of living alone and trying alone and dying alone and suddenly all of this is coming to life--because I don't want to be alone.  But I can't come to believe that the person who has somehow mysteriously appeared and granted my most absurd of wishes, has suddenly...disappeared.  A storm that burned me up and left without a trace.

Jongin is a sudden bitter word and I eat up a bitter feeling that creates a lump of destitute where my heart lies.  

The lump of his shirt and coat--wings--are sleeping by his vacant shadow, silently, grieving the absence of their owner. So I retrieve them, scooping them under my arms like a child, bringing to life what I can remember.

Without them, I am human, he said.  Without them, I am alive.

It pains me that I have to question whether or not he was telling the truth.  It worries me to think that I've ever had doubt in believing him.

Jongin, with or without his wings...where is he now?

__

"I am hungry."

I turn over in bed, picking at the flowering cotton that escaped through a tear in my comforter.  

"I am hungry," I say again, louder this time.  

My eyes travel up to the clock sitting on the bedside table.  It looks like something past midnight.  I sigh, knowing that I have to be up in the morning to work.  My loneliness resounds in my eyes and ears, boiling in my fatigue.  My limbs ache, my head aches, and fingers and toes sigh like they've been trampled on.  I don't want to get out of bed.

My memory sweeps back but a few hours, when I was still standing on the rooftop of the old entertainment building, watching Jongin as he seemed to have dissipated into thin air.  No, I wasn't really watching, I think to myself.  I had been too afraid to watch.  

His coat and clothing still lie on the floor by the door where I had left them before hurrying into bed with disturbed thoughts.  A pile of black and white, of Jongin and his ups and downs and remnants of his comforting soul that suddenly seems so superficial.  So unfamiliar.  So foreign.

Assurance that Jongin is still somewhere out there, a thought that maybe he still waits to make coffee for me tomorrow morning--without any of that, the disparage and hot-headed anger ignites inside me, mixed with a simmering helix of where could he have gone?

I think about how many times he's mentioned about living outside of the camera's vision--his take on life and on death, the bitter and the sweet.  How many times he has hinted at his pitfall of mentality, within the mountains of his conjoined playing cards and bitter coffee.  Images of him living quickly to die quickly, or loving slowly to die slowly.  

How stupid was I to ignore all of that.

Jongin wanted to tell me that he was afraid of living while I tried to cope with dying, but I was oblivious.  Jongin wanted to tell me that he had stopped living a long time ago, stopped enjoying the routine of waking up and breathing and smiling and doing it all over again, a.  I was thoughtless to not understand.

The memory is still there, fresh like the first day Jongin stepped foot into the studio and all eyes lingered to him--even mine.  From head to toe all I could see was unblemished terrain of skin and bone and all he showed me was highlights of rough and smooth, plain and drawn.  Maybe on that day, the life that I had noticed inside him was all a mock, an act.  The passion that I had seen in him as a model was never really there.  I had imagined it, hoped that I had seen it, like I hoped to find it for myself.  And no matter how many times Jongin told me to be careful, before I lost all passion and ended up like him...was how many times I didn't listen.

But now it's too late.  Too late for the kind of person who was secretive in ways unexplained and who enjoyed leaving me out in the open to guess some more, want some more.  Too late for answering his mysterious questions.  Too late to look into his russet eyes to see the lines that told stories of Jongin from yesterday, and Jongin from the day before, and the day before that.  Too late to capture the wisps of his hair that ate away at the creases in his brow, telling of casual slip-ups and candid experience.  Too late to realize that wow, we haven't finished playing that game, Jongin.  Your game.  Give me those cards and we can keep playing.  The photo's that I took of you are still unprocessed.  Jongin, come back to play because we haven't found out who won.

It's too late to realize that this had somehow become Jongin to me, all these pieces and traits that kept him whole.

Or better yet, that all of this was once Jongin to me.  Shaping me, building me, but now I'm knocked down, and I doubt that Jongin will come to help me up again.

Now, or for a very long time, all of this--all of these too late's that should have come to me before, must mean no more.

Because without Jongin, all of me--my anger, my frustration, my repetitive routine, my fear of being caught behind the camera, my taste for passion...is no more.