Detached.

That’s how feels now, so much of the time. Not empty, because he’s constantly surrounded. His bandmembers, fans, managers, flashing cameras and blinking lenses- no, he’s neveralone. One may even think he’d feel crowded, suffocated by the never ending questions, pitying stares, suspicious whispers. Sometimes, yes, it seems like he has no air to breathe anymore, but that’s not truly the case either. He never feels crowded to the point where the threshold is crossed into the territory of being too crowded, simply because too much of the time he’s stuck inside his own head. He still sees everything, of course, but at the same time notices nothing of what whirls around him.

Yixing’s fallen into a sort of a funky slump, and he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

Detached is the best way to describe it, but perhaps it’s not all that accurate, either. Yixing still feels. He feels the fans’ love, their concern, their hurt and their worry. It’s what keeps him going, both his motivation and medicine. Despite all that’s been said and done Yixing’s no saint, but he’s never, ever lied about how much the fans mean to him. It still keeps him going, but somehow these days it never seems to be quite enough. He’s not moving forward, every step in place no matter how much he tries to leap ahead. Something’s bringing him back, forbidding him progress and yet he isn’t moving backwards, either, caught in a strange limbo of dance steps where he always ends up where he starts.

When he sits in the studio, pencil in hand, it’s not that he’s lost inspiration. Rather, there’s so much in his head, a cacophony of lyrics and melodies just waiting to be transcribed onto paper. But every time he tries to grab hold of a note, a phrase or a line, it slips from him, jumbling up in a mass of rhythms and syllables that won’t fit no matter how hard he tries. But there are also times where his mind goes completely blank, but not in a lost-inspiration sort of blank. Blank, meaning absolutely nothing is there at all, not even memories. Yixing will sit down at the keyboard and then suddenly jerk back to awareness an hour later, fingers barely brushing the keys and not a single note played.

No, perhaps detached is an inaccurate word to describe how he’s feeling after all, because Yixing aches. He aches so badly he wants to groan out loud sometimes. It’s worse than an itch, because the source can’t be placed. Sometimes it’s a longing, a yearning for familiarity or old times or a simpler world. A smoldering, desperate desire for everyone to just get along, an anxious worry that gnaws at his insides out of concern for well-being.

No, this isn’t detachment at all, because Yixing has always cared too much, loved too much, been willing to sacrifice too much if only it will make a difference.

That’s where the problem lies, because this time, Yixing can’t do anything.

His heart of gold is worth nothing beside diamonds.

A/N: Purposefully vague and free to interpretation. Do comment if you enjoyed!