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They say that a forest helps you lose your mind and find your soul. Namjoon doesn’t know whether it has to do with the sheer bravery of the trees and plants and little creatures that thrive outside of the busy concrete jungle the humans have created, or with the fact that his mind was so exhausted that it simply chose to shut off for a while, but that saying is completely true.
He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, inhaling all the dreams of love and whispers of falling stars and waves of hope that seemed so out of reach in the caginess of a world that frowns upon dreamers and believers, and exhales all the harsh words, all the crushed wishes, all the memories of people who have been unkind to him.
As he lies sprawled on the grass, he lets himself become one with his surroundings. He allows himself to dream again.
He imagines how the happy trill the birds are singing is a rope that he can climb to reach above the skies and overlook the entire world among angels who also started off as humans but fell in love with the vastness of the sky and watched the birds lovingly and longingly before the sky helped them grow their own wings so it could give them back all the love it had received from them. He imagines the grass growing tall enough to protect him from the world, from the worries and responsibilities of a mundane life, from the cruelty and unfairness of being born in a poor family and having to work a thousand times harder to ensure that he can earn enough to live a decent life. He imagines all the squirrels and rabbits and rodents coming to sniff at him, coming to make sure that he won’t hurt them, that he loves them. He imagines they’ll stay by his side, making him feel safe and loved and protected. Making him feel like he belongs.
He imagines himself standing there for centuries, not moving, not talking. Just breathing. Just watching the sky, the same sky that was there millennia ago and that will be there until the dying of the Universe. The same sky at which Thales and Platon and Einstein and Shakespeare gazed upon and wondered if there was more to life than what they already knew. The pure immovability and eternity of such an unreachable blue ocean in the sky makes Namjoon feel at ease. It makes him feel like he’s not so alone after all. He shares the same sky with centuries of dreamers and stargazers that found the same comfort in it. Searched for the reassurance that the sky is infinite and eternal and it holds thousands of stars in his arms and they all look down upon them even when the sunlight tries to hide them.
He imagines roots growing through the soil and curling around his arms and legs and neck, hugging him with such force that he is unable to breath, dragging him beneath the earth’s crust to hug him tight, keep him safe as he crumbles and decomposes and his lungs forget how nice it feels to be filled with air, and maybe the memories of how it’s like to laugh will return to him.
He hasn’t laughed in awhile.
Someone once said that the earth laughs in flowers, that the more genuine and bright its happiness was, the more vibrant the colours and more mesmerising the smell of the flowers. He wonders if the has stopped laughing in the urban area, if they have stolen his happiness by building an empire of filth and pollution on top of the lush vegetation that was once there, before they have suffocated it with cities that are so impressively beautiful with their grand and expensive buildings, but oh so toxic and sickening.
But nature always finds its course, right? Give it a few years and an abandoned building will be home for rats and spiders and bats. Give it a few more years and the concrete will break, the building will start crumbling and breaking and little plants will start growing through the cracks, finally claiming back the place that once upon a time was theirs, rendering it green and lively and beautiful again.
“Hello, stranger,” a voice sweet as honey whispers somewhere near Namjoon. He would’ve turned his head to see where it was coming from, but his body feels heavy as lead and so he can’t be bothered to take away his eyes from the endless blue of the sky. “You’ve been here for awhile. Are you alright?”
“Perfectly fine,” he barely moves his lips, the words almost a murmur. And he is. He has never felt better, more at ease.
“You came here to die.” It isn’t a question, and Namjoon is startled by the absolute certainty of the words, by the sharpness of just how right and how deep they seep inside his head. They have the sense of a truth that he is too scared or too blind to admit. Oh, he thinks, so that’s what it is.
“No,” he answers despite the realisation. “I came here to live.”
And he thinks that that’s closer to the truth. He has never felt more alive, away from the struggles of keeping straight A’s, of devoting every moment of his life to completing assignments that drive him crazy with the sheer boredom they hold, to learning formulas he hates and memorising facts he’ll soon forget, despairing from the pressure of not working hard enough despite repeating endlessly the lessons in his head and sleepless nights. And above all, the pressure of having wasted his time, his life, his passion, to become a soulless slave to learning that’ll grow into a soulless slave to working.
Back when he was still allowed to dream and hope, he wanted to be a writer. He wanted nothing more but to create stories, to change the world a little bit, to offer an escape to those who needed it, to those like him who were chained by a broken society and locked in a cage of unchanging facts and a set of strict rules, a certain way to be, to live, to exist. He wanted to let his mind break free, to be an inspiration, to offer hopes and dreams and worlds built with only words and a strong desire to feel alive.
But why would anyone want to read what he writes when nobody ever wanted to listen to him talk? How could he know that his stories would be great enough to make anyone want to read them? Just because he put into them all the love and the passion he was capable of giving, it didn’t mean they would also turn out to be loved by anyone else but himself. It wasn’t something secure, something that’ll make him earn money.
So he took all his love and all his dreams and threw them out the window. They weren’t secure. They were just a luxury he couldn’t afford. And he knew too well what happened when people like him tried to follow their passion.
“Why have you stopped writing?” The soft voice asked. He still didn’t bother to open his eyes.
“Because I know that people like me aren’t allowed to have silly dreams.” And oh, how well he knows that.
His mother wanted to be an actress. She went to every possible audition for a while, and she actually managed to grab some small roles in theatres. Namjoon pictured her, young and passionate and ready to burn bright for her passion, to spend every hour of her life devoted to becoming someone else for awhile, to shed her skin and be born anew for a short period of time, to be watched and admired, applauded and loved, praised and important for a few moments. She was destined for greatness. Destined to become a huge actress, to move out of this poor village and make it big, make it huge, actually; be famous, be rich, be happy.
But those things were meant to remain only dreams. She had figured that out the hard way, when the pitiful amount of money earned with her minor roles wasn’t enough to put food on the table every day, when they lived in cold and darkness during winter because she couldn’t afford to pay the bills, when she was so famished she could barely breathe, let alone memorise her lines.
And the worst thing was, her passion didn’t burn out suddenly. It fizzled out. It died slowly. There had been moments where she was done with it all, buried her passion and longing to be on the stage, ignored what was supposed to be her true calling. But eventually, that little annoying spark of hope always came back to life, that tiny thought of maybe, maybe this time will be fine, maybe her time was now, maybe it was her only chance to make it big and she couldn’t risk to lose it, now could she?
But it never worked. She tried and tried and failed every time, and it was the most painful thing in the world for Namjoon, to watch her fade away, to see little bits of her light, of her heart, being clipped away until there was nothing left but a shallow carcass of someone who once could split the seas and bend the mountains with the sheer intensity of their love and passion for acting.
This is where dreams had gotten Namjoon’s mom. This is where poor people who follow their dreams eventually end up. Somewhere dark and cold and humid, lost along the way towards a twisted hallucination that only the mad could dream about.
“But did you enjoy writing?”
“I loved it with all my heart,” he answers with all honesty he can muster, and he closes his eyes. And sometimes when he keeps his eyes closed, he can actually remember the exact feeling. That feeling that he can’t describe no matter how hard he tries, that little longing to be at his computer with the tips of his fingers typing away on his keyboard, or holding a pen a little too tight in his hand and scribbling blue ink on white paper that made sense and had meaning and transformed into images and action and stories in someone’s head once they did as much as decipher those signs, those letters, and be completely transported into another world, a world made just with thoughts and ideas and love; and wasn’t that magical? Wasn’t that something that bent a little the laws of the universe, creating something that wasn’t there to begin with? Making the readers believe? Making it a real, tangible thing, no more just images in his head that he had never have the ability to describe in spoken words.
And it wasn’t just that. It was the glittery traces of stories always at the corners of his eyes. It was always looking in the distance and seeing something no one else could see, it was distracting himself during the boring classes so that everyone looked with amazement at him, including the teacher, wondering how can someone be so radiant, so vibrant, so happy during the most boring moments of one’s life. It was never getting bored. It was always thinking, always creating, always witnessing in his head something new, something grand and daring and twisted. It was his mind making him believe that fairy tails are real and happy endings are for everyone.
“Oh, my sweet Namjoonie… How have I let all these things happen to you?” he heard and the voice was a little cracked, a little unsteady, a little too close and too real to be only in his head. He feels a cold hand on his cheek, spreading something wet, something that was already there. He vaguely registers that he has started crying, but he remains numb to it. He has been numb to pretty much everything lately.
He finally opens his eyes and it’s like he finally sees, finally sees for real after he has been blind for years, or maybe even from birth. He locks eyes with the man above him and everything falls into place and everything feels right and everything has life.
“Jimin,” he whispers, because somehow, somehow he knows. There is that immovable certainty about the man looking down at him with falling stars drowning into his sad eyes, with his hand still on his cheek, the chill from it spreading through his body like electricity, and it feels like they are connected in the most intimate of ways, like he is that part of him that he was missing, that little part of his stories that he always falls in love with, that part in every character of his that gave them life, gave them meaning.
Jimin bites his lips and sighs deeply. “I wish things would be different,” he tells him and Namjoon doesn’t think it exists something he can relate more to.
He had this feeling pretty much all his life, because sure, things were never really good, but he was happy for most of the time. With the lack of money and the pressure to be the best in his class to be certain he’ll get a well paid job, he was feeling pretty good actually.
That’s until his mother decided to give up. Give up on everything: her passion, her son, her own life.
Even now Namjoon can’t close his eyes without seeing his dead mother hanging from the living room ceiling.
He was writing the afternoon it happened, as he always did in his free time, when he heard strange gurgling sounds coming from downstairs. It sounded like smoothing got stuck in his mother’s throat and it was so voluminous that she couldn’t even cough, like she just had a little accident with food or gum or who knows. Something common and easily fixable.
The gurgling sounds had stopped suddenly and the complete silence made his heart hitch. He went downstairs to check on his mom. He doesn’t remember much of it at all, but he remembers the panic. He remembers the frantic thoughts flooding through his mind, he remembers shoving them away; as if ignoring them, refusing to acknowledge the possibility, would render them untrue.
He remembers his mother’s face. He remembers the drool down her chin, her eyes rolled so only the whites were showing, her purple skin. He remembers her dangling. Her feet not touching the ground.
“Mom?” He asked, his heart racing, like she would actually answer him. “Mom, is this a joke?” He tried again, and that foolish, hopeful part of him remembered that when he was a little boy his mother would always act his childhood stories for him, would always play the roles of his favourite princes and princesses perfectly. He remembered her being Snow White and pretending to be dead after biting the poisoned apple. He remembered how real it had felt back then, how he actually believed that she had died before she suddenly jumped off the floor and tackled him to his bed. He remembered screaming and being tickled and laughing like a mad person because it had been just a joke.
And then he hoped, he prayed, he begged that it was still a joke. A well-rehearsed joke, just to give him a little scare. He refused to believe otherwise.
“You got me,” he tried to say with a nervous laugh, despite what was actually in front of his eyes, despite knowing. “You can stop acting now, mom.”
Because it was just a joke, right? A stupid fucking joke and she’ll get down from there and laugh and make fun of his scared face, make fun of the fact that he had actually believed her.
He doesn’t remember much of what happened next. Just the fact that he had called the police. Not because he believed what he saw, but just because he wanted to scare his mom enough to stop acting. Surely she’d stop after the police were there, right?
He remembers telling them “I think something happened to my mom,” And even though his voice was shaking and his body was trembling, he remembers how calm he was as he described to them what he saw in front of his eyes: his mother hanging, the noose around her neck, her arms hanging limp by her body. He resisted the urge to call them lifeless.
He remembers that when they asked if she had killed herself he went hysterical. He remembers screaming and swearing and throwing the phone across the room. He remembers it shattering. He remembers not hearing it doing so because of his screams. He remembers squatting and crying and yelling until his voice went hoarse and his throat was raw and aching and he was tugging at his hair until it came lose and he didn’t feel anything.
He just felt broken.
He doesn’t remember much of what happened next. He doesn’t remember the funeral, but he knows he attended it. He doesn’t remember how he came to be adopted by his aunt, he just woke up one day in her house and it was like he had always lived there.
He doesn’t remember smiling. He doesn’t remember dreaming. He doesn’t remember creating a story.
He doesn’t remember writing.
And it’s because he doesn’t write anymore.
“And it’s all my fault,” Jimin says and Namjoon can see just how endless, how regretful his onix eyes were, dark and wide and asking for his forgiveness for some strange and twisted reason.
Namjoon is starting to doubt that the young man is only in his imagination. The hand on his cheek is too solid, too cold to be something else, and the handsome boy is so close that he can feel his breath on his face. And above all, it feels real, but oh so wrong, like this shouldn’t br happening, like they have broken some kind of universal law and disturbed the balance between worlds, like they rebelled against something greater, more powerful than them and they’ll have to pay dearly for it.
And still, he asks. “What’s your fault?”
“Your life,” Jimin says and lets out a sad, broken laugh. “How miserable it is.”
And despite how illogical, how unreal it sounds, Nomjoon somehow knows it is true. He knows that Jimin would never lie to him. And he is not angry. Just sad. Just hollow. Just aching and longing to be fixed, to be whole again.
“What have you done?” His voice is so soft it is almost a whisper, almost lost under the birdsongs and the tune of the wind.
Jimin lets out another broken giggle. “I have angered the gods.” He starts stroking his cheekbone with his thumb and Namjoon’s heart makes a little leap, a little twist, a little stutter. “I thought that I was free. I played with fire and I got burned.” He sighs. “No, not burned. Scorched. And the fire spread all around me and destroyed everything I love. “ He makes a pause, and then, “The gods punished me.”
“Do they really exist?”
Jimin’s crooked smile is blindingly beautiful and maddeningly broken. “Only when something risks becoming stronger than them.”
“What could possibly be stronger than the gods?”
“Us.”
And the weight of that single word stabs Namjoon’s heart. It sends cold shivers throughout his body and chills him to the core. The world around them stills and nothing else matters but Jimin, this magical creature that dared to talk about the mysteries hiding in the crevices and corners of all the worlds and all the dreams and all the hopes that have ever existed.
Namjoon gets up on his elbows so he can look better at Jimin, so he can give him all the attention he has. Jimin crosses his legs into a comfortable sitting position and watches him, patient and expecting and still smiling with those sad, endless eyes, his head a little tilted to the side.
“What are you?”
And so Jimin tells him. He tells him a story about this guiding spirit that the ancient romans called “genius”. He tells him that this was considered a kind of deity, the master of all great works. It was thought that writers and musicians and artists each had a genius of their own that helped them create, bring masterpieces into being, and thus they could never take full credit for their work, but neither did they suffer the shame and guilt when they failed to write or compose or paint something breathtaking. The people just shrugged and said that their genius wasn’t in the right mood.
He tells him about how, with time, people started to receive all the credit and suffer fully from their failures, thus becoming geniuses themselves and the guiding spirit slowly became just a legend, a myth, a story for little children.
He tells him that the story about the genius is actually true. He tells him that he was once a genius himself. Namjoon’s genius.
He tells him why the gods are angry at him. Why he has been forbidden from whispering stories and showing dreams to Namjoon ever again. Why he is now a cast out.
“I fell in love.”
And Namjoon knows he fell in love with him, He knows and he leans forward to kiss him, and on his lips he tastes an infinity of stories and dusks and stars, he tastes the night sky and sunshine and mysteries, he tastes love. And he also knows, that this is exactly what his stories were made of. What else would be able to create other worlds if not love? And he feels a sudden surge of shame that he only now realises.
Stories are born from love. Jimin’s love. Namjoon’s love.
Their love.
“They ripped off my wings, Namjoonie,” his voice cracks as he hunches forward to fold onto himself, his hands gripping his elbows. “Not cut. They literally ripped them off and abandoned me. They left me there on the ground to freeze and bleed to death.” He starts shaking and Namjoon’s heart shatters. He can’t even imagine the immensity of the pain, the agony that Jimin had gone through to have part of his body, his wings, brutally ripped as he was conscious and screaming and squirming. The heartlessness, the sheer cruelty of the act astonishes Namjoon.
“Jimin-“ Namjoon reaches out a hand to comfort him, but he quickly cuts him off.
He gulps and looks up at him. “I’m fine,” he struggles to say even though it is an obvious lie and he is so very far from being fine. But still, he tries to smile. “They made you suffer more.”
Namjoon doesn’t know if that is exactly true, but he sure as hell had his fair share of suffering. From being born dirt poor to having his mother and stories and finally, his will to live, taken away from him. He doesn’t know if all these hurt more than having part of his body ripped off, but they certainly left a ragged, gaping wound in his heart.
But still, something is gnawing at Namjoon’s mind, something he cannot exactly pinpoint, and so he asks.
“But why am I suddenly able to see you now?” Because it didn’t make sense to live all those years without seeing him when he could just appear in front of him like that.
“Oh,” he says, eyes empty, hollow, boring into his soul. “It’s because you’re dead.”
Namjoon’s heart stops in his chest - was it even beating to begin with? - and he just stares for a few moments at the boy, having the exact same feeling he had when he saw his mom hanging from the ceiling. That something is utterly wrong, that there is a huge mistake somewhere, that it isn’t actually true.
But he’s done with refusing to believe when the answer is right in front of his eyes. He is done with pretending that the world isn’t a twisted, mad place, that it is fair to everyone and it has a reason for everything. So he just gulps, swallows the hard truth, and resigns.
“How-“ his voice is shaking, so he clenches his fists to steady himself and tries again. “How did I die?”
“I pushed you,” another verbal punch to his gut. “You were miserable, Namjoon,” he tries to convince him. “You wanted to die but you were just too much of a coward to do it yourself. Can’t you see I’ve helped you?”
Namjoon wants to scream. He wants to lash out, to cry, to run, to hide, to demand his life back. Instead, he closes his eyes and clenches his teeth in order to soak this in and accept his current state of being. Dead. He is dead.
And he remembers. He remembers standing on top of a building, overlooking the city and thinking about how dead it seemed, and then how anyone can bring the outside world inside of them and interpret it however they wanted to. The city wasn’t actually dead. Namjoon felt dead, and so he saw death in everything that surrounded him, deciding to ignore all the lives dreaming and hoping and laughing inside those concrete buildings, decided to ignore the little weeds growing through the cracks in the sidewalk, decided to ignore all the good that was hidden under an ugly, broken facade.
And as he thought of that, something - someone - had pushed him. And off the building he fell. He didn’t slip. He didn’t jump. It wasn’t suicide.
Jimin had pushed him.
His life was the only thing he had left. Everything else was taken away from him. And now, Jimin had taken away his life too. He has literally nothing left.
And, in a madd, twisted way, isn’t this a good thing? There’s literally nothing left for them to take away from him now. He is free. He is dead and he is finally free.
“So,” he says as he opens his eyes. “You’re a fallen angel. A devil, for short.” Jimin nodds. “And we’re in Hell now.” He nodds again. He looks around him, at all the trees and flowers and natural beauties, and it makes no sense. “But this place is beautiful,” he states. “How is this Hell?”
Jimin doesn’t hesitate before he answers him.
“The thing that makes this place Hell, is that we will never be able to fly again.” And his voice is so sad, so lost, that Namjoon’s heart breaks for the millionth time that day.
And then, he looks at him and understands, because it is truly heartbreaking and soul-crashing, when the sky is so beautiful, and yet still unreachable.
“And now we’re both stuck in here,” he says and he wishes his voice would sound less hopeful.
But maybe this is actually a good thing. Maybe it is a second chance for both of them, a fresh start. Maybe this is the beginning of something wonderful.
And besides, who needs flying when they can fall - fall in love - and never hit the ground? And maybe, just maybe, this time they will both be allowed to love freely until the end of times.
Because they may not be allowed to fly in there, but they sure as hell are allowed to dream at least.
To create stories.