Jaejoong’s eyes are glazed over with a faraway look that is forever situated just beneath his features, waiting for the right moment to take over. His skin has paled over the past months and now he rarely even bothers to eat, for even in his attempt at dying he is unable to put forth the effort to stimulate his progress. Always in his left-back pocket he carries a small composition notebook that is filled to the brim with the concepts he wonders about as the time breezes by around him. To him, people come and go, the faces changing but never the stories. Yet nevertheless, he continues to write it all down, small scribbles stemmed from a lack of inspiration and a dull sky hanging overhead with the quivering sound of a sobbing piano strumming at his heartstrings.

Sometimes Jaejoong sits alone in front of the mirror and watches as the tears drip down his face. He does this because it is only in his reflection that he finds someone who understands his sorrow and the feeling of his brain beginning to soften with the burning sensation of a melancholy overdose.

When Jaejoong awakes every morning, the sandman has left nothing behind except for his shadows that linger on the walls and the single grains of dirt that remain stranded between the cracks in the wooden floorboards to become food for a thought but mainly for the mice that have infiltrated the interior of the walls, their scratching footfalls becoming a lone sign of life in his near-empty apartment.

Lined pages lie scattered, blowing along with the synthetic wind of the upstanding fan that has been placed in the corner. The black ink has succeeded in wearing through the thinness of the paper and leaves its smeared imprint on the table forevermore. The soft tapping of footsteps drum a rhythm upon the floor, carrying the weight of a stocky figure into the view of the light’s glare that beams down from above. Jaejoong cranes his head and smiles back at the sight he finds. Yunho stands in the stark moonlight, the rays casting shadows over his skin and moving them up onto the ceiling. Jaejoong releases a soft smile, but his eyes remain sorrowful with the tenderness retreating and being replaced instead by quiet sobs that are muffled by the suffocating silence that pierces through the room. Yunho begins approaching Jaejoong, his movements just as they were once so long ago, just as Jaejoong remembers them.

Yunho’s image was captured by the recesses of his mind and there Jaejoong once believed it would stay, waiting anxiously for a somber rainy day were the smells of new life and joy brought nothing but tears to his eyes and the nostalgia of all those quiet Sunday’s spent alone in one another’s embrace, left alone without a care in the world. Yunho insisted on taking everything in at an unbearably slow pace, this he believed should be done as he and Jaejoong had the rest of their lives left to one another.

Little did he know how quickly that time would be cut short, a final syllable catching in his throat along with the metallic taste of the blood that was yet to be ejected from his lungs and dried onto his lips. Later, Jaejoong would try to kiss the crimson away, naivety filling his system with the belief that everything would turn out okay in the end. To the melody of dying songbirds, they had spent the last lingering moments staring sullenly into one another’s eyes with the final curtain closing as Yunho’s eventually darkened completely while Jaejoong’s merely took upon a blue-grey hue.

So now, Jaejoong writes to put a damper on the loneliness that wells up inside of him at the sound of the whistling wind. With the continuous sound of his pen scratching at the table, he is released from the solitude of the night-time sky as his darkest emotions are brought to life in the form of a lyrical line of prose, symbolism at its most heart-clenching and the feeling of words flowing listlessly off of the tip of his tongue and onto the supernatural brightness of the blank sheet of paper in front of him.

In time, these words fly from the page and create the atmosphere of a daydream that fills the room again with the smell of Yunho’s bitter haze of nicotine smoke rising into the air and the sound of his being roaming the interior of the small floor-space before resting with his hand entwined in Jaejoong’s.

Yunho’s facial features are blurry at best and Jaejoong has trouble seeing him in the light of day, so each morning Jaejoong watches as his works go up in the smoke of the chimney then are left to rest forever in the clouds. A cremation of Yunho’s body in the rawest form as the presence of his soul remains with Jaejoong in the way of his soft, pattering heartbeats and his timid breath that freezes alongside the winter chill. With every word, an underlying tone of longing is found but this too is burned as the moon is chased away by the sun from the morning sky.

An overcast parade bellows overhead as Jaejoong finds himself again in an empty apartment haunted by memories that are now his alone to reminisce. Closing the blinds of the windows, the small area of the room is again enshrouded in a velvet-red darkness usually reserved solely for the dimmest times prior to the approaching of the dawn. Somewhere, a melody rises up from a piano and is lost to the laughter of the children that roam the streets looking for adventure and a way to quench their desire for adolescent debauchery. Walking back to his writing, Jaejoong begins his daily ritual.  

Tonight Yunho wears a black suit with a gray pinstriped tie. It is our anniversary, 12 years on the spot and he comes home with red roses and champagne. A cigarette is dangling loosely from between his lips. When he reaches me, he allows it to drop to the floor…

Stopping there, Jaejoong looks up to find his fiction becoming his reality. There is a knock of the door that resounds and echoes through the hollowness of his expectations. As the doorknob turns, Jaejoong allows a shrill scream to escape his lungs. This Yunho is not as he remembers him, this creation is something of horror.

Yunho’s jaw is gapping with a thin strip of skin serving as the only line between it being connected to his body and to the floor. As he walks into the light, his sharp nose shows the tumultuous signs of decay and weathered heart-break. The pin-stripped tie is spotted with dirt and earthworms that have made their home inside the worn fabric. Yunho’s hand shows small amounts of white bone underneath his graying complexion and his fingers are clasped in a death grip around the cut veins of dying roses, suffering in the cold, their petals giving in to death’s temptation and falling to the ground.

With eyes ablaze, Jaejoong rushes to the candle on his desk and holds the paper over the flame. As the words begin to turn into ash, Yunho’s body is lost as well, the pieces of his flesh stripping away from the surface and melting into the floorboards.

Jaejoong begins to hum a soft tune as he absentmindedly pushes the ashes from left to right inside the fireplace.

Zooming out, he is seen sitting alone, his face being shined on by the sun and left to scald. Around him there sits blood soaked bits of printer paper and a flimsy stem of chloroplast. Outside the window, a bird cries and Jaejoong looks up. His eyes are red-rimmed and fading and soon his life will be lost for good. There will be no one left to write him back into existence, no stories left to find his words. Jaejoong pours the last essences of his soul into his final sentence, but still his fountain of youth remains half empty.

The world is a fantasy and I’m caught inside its dream.

In the fire, Yunho’s being cools in the charcoaled embers. Soon, Jaejoong will not be around to rekindle his flame.