Moonlight centers in on an area of the ground. We watch from our spot atop the moon, a concrete jungle filled with animals of passion, lust, and greed. Neon lights linger in back alleyways, casting shadows over-top the men and women who remain on their knees, the stress away from strangers for the spare change kept deep in tattered pockets. A shift in viewpoint and we focus on a single man.

Rising from his spot on the pavement, his joints pop alongside his change in position. He holds $15 dollars and a world of sorrow in the palm of his hands. A white substance drips from the side of his slumped jaw, and with the back of his sleeve he wipes it away before giving a strangled cough. He smooths his jacket and clears away the stones that still cling to his knees before beginning to walk.

We follow him in silence, small steps echoing into the infinity that resides outside the span of time. The man walks solemnly, no spring in his step visible beneath the black trench coat of despair that he wears like a cape around slumped shoulders. The man takes a cigarette from the crumbled pack that sits in his back pocket. He strikes a match, but the wind blows the away the flame. He continues walking for a time, cigarette unlit but hanging between his teeth. He wears it as an accessory, a gold necklace of nicotine to excuse the bitter taste the remains in the back of his throat.

Cupping his hand some seconds later, he strikes another match, almost as an afterthought, before succeeding to encompass a world of light and smoke and chemically induced solitude with one inhale. Filtering through the night sky, a cloud rises up from his lungs and mingles with the dimming stars above. He doesn't notice.

He seems to walk with no destination in mind. Every so often, he'll stop to gaze at the reflection he finds in mirrored glass. Ripped jeans, mud-caked sneakers, and a thin leather jacket complete his look, but he wears no expression on his face. Symmetrical if only for the eyes, thick brows attempt to shield them from the dark curtain that hangs over the world that meets him after each blink. He could be 15 or 25, we have no way of knowing whether the innocence of his features remains there by nature or by the request of a cynical God. Still staring at the afterimage of his being, the man pulls a grin that twists into a grimace before spitting at the ground and looking away.

The man stops on a street corner and leans against a wall covered with the graffiti of a forgotten age of youth. In large letters there lies a message, seen by all but remembered by few.

Kim Jongin loves Do Kyungsoo – November 3, 1994.

We watch as the man stands motionless facing the fading message that has seeped into the brick and remained there all these years. He is overwrought with a sudden flooding of despair and sinks to his knees, nail scratching at the letters and tracing over them until his fingers bleed and crack.

He mumbles something beneath his breath and we strain our ears to hear above the silence.

“Do Kyungsoo loves Kim Jongin. Do Kyungsoo loves Kim Jongin. Do Kyungsoo loves Kim Jongin.”

He continues his mantra as he removes the matches once more from his pocket and proceeds to burn the money earned minutes before. It seems almost to be some kind of offering, but we understand that it cannot be so. On some other level, some other plane, Kim Jongin watches and weeps, seeing who was once his lover as a stranger. Dead eyes taking in the sight of this Do Kyungsoo crumbling alongside the rubble that latches so tightly onto the world of the dead and gone for good. 

Kim Jongin watches in silence as the man he loves falls soundlessly into the depth of his dreams, shivering from the ice that the world has frozen over his heart. He hugs himself to warm the void left in his chest.

For some, death is a means of escape, but for those who are left living, it is nothing but emptiness, desperation, and the hopeless yearning for someone or something that can never again envelope you in its embrace.