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A musky smell tangles with the linen sheets. There’s testosterone in the air and the feeling of burning skin against one another in bed. It is Minho’s perfume. It is Minho’s skin. Minho’s bed, sheets, breath, smile and lips. All of it belongs to him. Hyunjin himself belongs to Minho.
‘’You are all I need,’’ Hyunjin whispers against his ear, loving and devoted to the person holding him.
A rough hand caresses his cheeks, full of tenderness and support. Hyunjin is expecting his company, his understanding. He needs a person he can rely on while trying to find himself.
‘’That’s not true,’’ Minho deadpans, dropping his hand and refusing to make eye-contact with him. His voice has turned cold. Has it turned cold or was it always like this?
‘’You are the love of my life,’’ Hyunjin tries again. He means everything he’s saying, but once the words come out of his mouth he can’t help but notice that Minho is right.
‘’That’s not true.’’
‘’You are…’’
There is no point in trying to lie. This Minho knows everything about Hyunjin more than he himself does. There is no escaping from what has settled inside of him, an omnipotent being with the power to reach every single one of Hyunjin’s nooks and crannies.
The thought of Minho warms up his heart, fills him with a rush of serotonin and dopamine, making him feel nice and floaty. It locks him in a cocoon of safety and assurance. But when has Hyunjin desired safety? Never.
The thought of Minho makes his heart cold and heavy, surrounds him with sorrow and regret and locks him in a cage from which he can’t see a way out. When has Hyunjin desired anything other than freedom? Never.
Minho’s tears come out silently, like the only other time Hyunjin witnessed him crying. This is the one image that his brain seems capable of reproducing nowadays, Minho’s hot tears falling on Hyunjin’s chest. He had laughed that time. They both had laughed and made out and made up. Everything turned out fine and kept moving as it was supposed to be.
‘’You don’t love me anymore,’’ Minho declares. It is a statement, not a question. Scalding drops come out of his eyes and Hyunjin knows that this isn’t right. Minho hadn’t actually cried that time, and he shouldn’t be doing it now.
‘’I was crazy for saying that.’’
‘’Do you really think that, Hyunjin?’’ Minho asks, voice sweet and calm.
‘’What do you think?’’ Hyunjin asks back
‘’I think you are unable to take responsibility for your own choices,’’ Minho stops hugging him. His arms get further away. Minho is beyond reaching. Hyunjin stretches his arms but they are too short and Minho is too far away. ‘’fucking bastard,’’ he adds with spite.
Hyunjin wakes up crying. And alone.
His grip on the sheets from the empty side of the bed is painful. He needs to drop it so it will stop hurting his hands. There’s a desire inside of him, I wish letting go was as easy as disentangling oneself from these sheets.
***
Hyunjin doesn’t ask himself if what he is doing is selfish anymore, by now he knows it is.
It is greedy of him to hold on to the things Minho left behind, to lie and say that he has no idea where Minho’s shirt is, to refuse to give him the flowers that Minho planted in the garden, giving excuses about the time and effort it would take from both of them.
And Minho, of course, believes his excuses. After all, it was Hyunjin who broke things off. Why would he hold onto the memories printed on objects that belong to a relationship he himself ended? Minho can’t know the real reasons behind Hyunjin's selfishness.
As beautiful and metaphoric as it would be, Hyunjin is unable to water Minho’s flowers with his own tears. They always end up on his pillows, on his hands, on his shower walls and on his mom’s shoulder. There are no tears left when he kneels in front of Minho’s flowers. Nothing to water the plants with.
Water.
In his dreams, Minho keeps on drinking water. One glass and then another and then the whole jug. You are supposed to drink it when you cry, since shedding tears dehydrates you. Hyunjin cries a lot so he drinks a lot of it, and he gives water to the plants as well, they need it to live. Why is Minho drinking water? He didn’t cry that time, he doesn’t need it.
In his dreams, unlike reality, Minho cries. Hyunjin breaks up with him and Minho cries and is devastated, he pulls his hair and screams and begs Hyunjin to not leave him.
That’s not what really happened. Hyunjin broke it off with him and Minho didn’t even look sad. He nodded and said that he had been waiting for this. He got up and left Hyunjin thinking that he was finally free.
Had he known that one imprisonment was going to be exchanged for a different, more dreadful one, maybe things would’ve gone a different way. The pain of a relationship can be nothing in comparison to the pain of not being in one. Of not being in the one.
The musky, earthy and woody fragrance of Minho’s perfume is still present in the shirt he left behind. Just barely, enough for Hyunjin to want to put it on and turn around, laughing and thinking of better memories, of better times. The shirt is another one of the receivers of Hyunjin’s tears. Every time his eyes betray him, the shirt loses a little bit of Minho’s smell. As he cries, Minho fades away.
No one knows how he feels. He doesn’t tell his friends nor his coworkers, just his mom. Everyone else thinks that Hyunjin is just fine being single.
You’ve always been a player, I can’t believe you lasted that long.
Now you can have all the fun you want without someone nagging at you, right?
We can be drinking buddies again, hyung.
People say things and Hyunjin laughs. He gets home and he cries himself to sleep. In his dreams, Minho drinks a lot of water. Minho doesn’t need it, he didn’t cry that time.
***
Fungi thrive on the energy extracted from the plants on which they live. As the fungus grows, the plant withers.
Minho’s flowers are starting to dry out and weird-looking things are starting to appear on them. An online search tells him that spraying baking soda on the plants will kill the fungi and prevent them from growing. An easy fix.
Even though most days Hyunjin barely has the will to wake up, he does get up to spray the flowers with the homemade solution. He does it every day, more than once. He does it when he comes back from drinking, he does it before saying goodbye to whatever stranger happened to lay on his bed on a given day, and he does it every time he makes up an excuse to not meet his friends.
***
Today is their anniversary. Would be, if they were still together.
Not their wedding anniversary, not even their ‘’getting together’’ anniversary. Today marks two years since the day they met each other. After all, there is no other date to celebrate. They weren’t supposed to be that kind of couple, they weren’t supposed to have any labels. It was going to be something chill, something manageable.
And yet here is Hyunjin, five months after breaking up with Minho, eyes red, bloated and hurting, with a sore throat and alcohol running in his veins. It was supposed to be something relaxed, something that someone like Hyunjin could be happy with. Two years later he knew that there was nothing chill, manageable or relaxed about it. There was nothing about it that Hyunjin could handle.
He thinks of messaging Minho and embarrassing himself. Luckily, Minho has him blocked everywhere.
‘’Happy anniversary,’’ he mumbles to the flowers as he showers them with champagne, wearing Minho’s shirt even though his smell has now completely faded. At least the flowers haven’t died. Not yet. Not like the last hope he had on finding some meaning in this life.
***
One day Minho unblocks him from his social media. Hyunjin is a fool with no self-respect, but there has been too much pain to not try.
1 Hyunjin 17:32: Hey hyung, you look really nice in that last picture you posted. ☺
The little one in front doesn’t disappear. A day goes away. Two days. A week. Minho hasn’t read his message. He hasn’t even opened it.
1 Hyunjin 12:07: How are your cats doing?
The little one in the text doesn’t disappear.
He waits for fifteen minutes trying to decide on what reaction he should send to a selfie Minho uploaded on Instagram Stories. Would a fire be too much? Maybe the face with hearts for eyes would be even worse.
This is wrong. It was Hyunjin who broke up with him. Does he have the rights to come back looking for his attention? Of course he doesn’t, but what else can he do? What can he say when after just a month of being single he happened to come to the realization that he had lost the one thing he actually cared about. It’s been half a year since that. Half a year of agony.
Regret fills him up from head to toes. It pushes from inside-out and generates an emptiness within Hyunjin that he has no idea how to overcome. His regret-filled thumb, on a slip, presses the surprised face to react to Minho's story. Should he say the truth, say that his finger slipped? Or should he just let it be whatever it has to be?
Five minutes later his phone chimes.
Minho: ▶ Photo
Minho: You still haven’t died?
His hands tremble, the palpitations of his heart accelerate and even some sweat comes out of Hyunjin. Sitting straight on the shitty chair his work provides for him, he re-reads the notification again and again without opening it. Is this his chance? Is this where things go right again?
The photo is a selfie of Minho rolling his eyes. In the background he sees one of Minho’s cats, his familiar couch and the shitty television he has. A single tear falls on the screen of Hyunjin’s phone, making the image go away. The app doesn’t allow him to see the photo twice.
As Hyunjin cries, Minho fades away.
Hyunjin: Can I call you?
Minho: …
Minho: Are you trying to make me block you again? If that’s it then you can just say it.
No. Anything but that. Hyunjin has lost Minho one too many times to allow himself to be separated from his ex once again. He let him go, didn’t have access to his photos or posts for months, his perfume faded away, the image that can’t be replayed and the flowers are starting to wither. He can’t lose anything else.
A voice inside of him tells him, if he is going to block you again then you might as well just say what you feel.
Hyunjin: I miss you.
Minho: Fuck off, Hyunjin. Go back to work.
***
Minho lets Hyunjin talk to him again. It feels as if Minho was allowing some kind of relationship to grow back between them.
Hyunjin: ▶ Photo
Hyunjin: How do I look?
Minho: You know you look hot, dude, what kind of question is this?
Minho: Go get them, you’ll have any guy you want.
Hyunjin likes to think that he is hopeful but at least not stupid. Scratch that, he knows he is stupidly hopeful, but even he is able to read between the lines, to see how Minho always hides a message in the texts he sends him. I’ve moved on. Go find someone else. Get over me.
This is the true meaning of his words
One day Minho uploads a picture of him with a blond guy. The caption says Happy three months, baby <3 <3 <3 . Hyunjin spends the rest of the week crying twice the normal amount and stalking the fucking guy on his social media.
***
Hyunjin: Your man doesn’t look very good in that last pic you posted, hyung.
Minho: Are you saying my taste in men isn’t good???? Well sorry, but not everyone is pretty like you and gets stopped in the streets to be asked to model.
Minho: …
Minho: Idk why I said that. Chan hyung looks amazing so shut up.
***
Holding his breath, Hyunjin hears the sound of the dial tone. He doesn’t know which outcome will be worse, to get ignored or to get an answer.
‘’What the fuck makes you think that you have the right to call me at three a.m.?’’ Minho half whispers, half barks on the other side of the line.
‘’You sounded really…friendly,’’ Hyunjin swallows, trying to think why he has decided to do this, ‘’On text, I mean. You sounded really friendly when we texted each other.’’
‘’Yeah, and that got me in trouble.’’
He has to be talking about Chan. Are things not going smoothly between them? Are things working in Hyunjin’s favor for once?
‘’Did he get jealous?’’ he asks, sounding shocked but unable to hide his happiness.
‘’Yes, Hyunjin,’’ Minho sighs, defeated and just plain sad, ‘’are you happy now? You break up with me, I get over you, I find someone new, someone I can actually construct a life with and you come back to stir things up and ruin it. How miserable do I have to be for you to be happy?’’
In the middle of the night there’s nothing to be heard. The sound of Minho’s breathing on the other side and his own heart palpitations are the only thing filling up the air, the thumping of it against his ribcage.
‘’Minho, I am the miserable one. I… I miss you so much,’’ he sobs, unable to control the feelings that are eating him on the inside. It is something dark sticking to his guts and kicking him again and again.‘’I cry myself to sleep every night, I can’t go out, I can’t eat, I can rest… All I can think about is you and how stupid I was to break up with you.’’ Another choked sob. He can’t even describe the pain he is going through. ‘’You… you are the only thing that ever mattered in my life.’’
A pause. And then Minho’s voice comes out angry
‘’Just…just get over me already, Hyunjin!’’ he says, as if it was something easy.
‘’You think I haven’t tried that?!’’
‘’Yes, I think you haven’t tried. You are in a rut or whatever and have decided to fixate on me instead of looking for the real source of your pain.’’ Minho is being harsh and cold, just like Hyunjin’s dreams had predicted.
‘’Why would I suffer on purpose? If I could get over you I would’ve done it by now.’’
‘’Hyunjin, you were over me even before we broke up. Do you even remember how our relationship was?’’
How can he ask that? Hyunjin has been repeating every single moment of their relationship in his head. How could he not remember how it was?
‘’We were in love, we were obsessed with one another,’’ Hyunjin says after a moment, voice choked and pathetic.
‘’No, Hyunjin, lots of fucking doesn’t mean that we loved each other. The first year.... there was something, I won’t deny it, okay? I won’t come and say that whatever we had meant nothing,’’ he takes a deep breath before he continues talking, ‘’but after that you started trying to find any excuse to not spend any time with me, you didn’t want to see me and I couldn’t stand your whining when we did. We said that we just weren’t the one for each other and that’s the truth.’’
‘’I was stupid, I was crazy.’’
‘’Yes, you were fucking stupid and you made me suffer a lot, you dickhead. I still remember the day I knew you weren’t interested in me anymore, it was so fucking obvious- I cried so much because of you and you kept on saying that everything was okay.’’
Minho sounds desperate, prisoner to the kind of distress that overtakes a person when they are unable to convey a very important message. He sounds like Hyunjin has sounded every time he has tried to get Minho back.
‘’Yes, yes, curse me,’’ Hyunjin begs.
‘’What the fuck?’’ Minho is exhausted. He probably only wants this conversation to end.
‘’Curse me, say all you have to say. Call me an asshole, a dickhead, whatever. Curse me until we go back to being what we were.’’
‘’You don’t love me, Hyunjin. There’s no ‘what we were’ , we were nothing.’’
‘’Then why am I crying so much?’’ Hyunjin asks, his heart physically hurting and the wetness of his voice making him sound hysterical.
‘’Because you hate your life and your job. Go get someone to help you, I can’t be the person to do it.’’
‘’I want us to get back together,’’ he whines and cries and feels like a child that won’t ever be understood by the adult he has to face.
‘’Hyunjin, you aren’t even listening, that’s how little you care about me. I don’t want to get back together, and you don’t want that either. I want Chan, I love him. You? Well, I don’t know what it is that you want, but you won’t find it in me and I won’t be able to give the answer.’’
‘’Why didn’t you cry that time? Why didn’t you cry when I broke up with you?’’
‘’I had cried a million times before that... I knew we were going to break up a month before it happened, and... I cried when I realized, but after that I was able to accept it.’’
‘’But…’’
‘’Goodbye, Jinnie. I won’t be talking to you for a while. Get some help, and I’m not trying to insult you, I really mean it,’’ There’s no emotion left in his voice by this point. Any vulnerability he had shown by admitting to have cried is now gone.
Minho didn’t cry that time, and it wasn’t because he hadn’t loved Hyunjin at some point, it was because he had already accepted their ill fated story.
***
On the brink of withering, the flowers look almost dead. This is the last mark left, the only thing that proves Minho was here. Now the last impression of him is dying. Soon nothing in this house will be able to prove that Minho was once here.
With the morning star visible in the face of dawn, hovering above him and keeping him company, there’s only one thing left to do.
Hyunjin wonders if Jungsegyeong, the goddess of farming, is also keeping an eye on him, if she is silently trying to guide him to the seed that will revive…that will revive what? The flowers? His relationship with Minho? His relationship with himself?
Perhaps it is time to stop expecting for other people to look after him. It’s time to dig into the dirt and find what’s wrong in it.
He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and buries his hands in the soil under the flowers. It feels wet and rich and healing. The dirt gets under his nails and soothes those places where he has bitten them too much. The bugs don’t bother him and the roots are easy to go through.
It becomes harder as he goes deeper. This is a job that should be executed with a shovel, with proper tools, with anything but bare hands. But there are no proper tools to fix a shattered heart, or to extract the sticky darkness that’s within Hyunjin. His hands will have to do for now.
Soon one of his neighbors will wake up, soon they will go on their morning runs with their barking dogs and take their kids to school and go to their life draining jobs. The things they repeat again and again, year after year. Only this time they will find their crazy neighbor digging in the dirt with his bare hands like the madman he believes himself to be. Maybe they will be jolted awake before their usual hours given that Hyunjin may or may not be screaming in frustration.
What is it? What is hiding here? What is set there, not allowing the flowers to bloom like they are supposed to do? What’s in the dirt, what’s in the darkness? What’s in the emptiness that follows Hyunjin in his everyday life, which attaches itself to him from morning to twilight and all through the night?
He finds it.
It is him. It is Hyunjin. The soil has a white lump, that’s the cause, bicarbonate has accumulated and mixed with the dirt. It has been Hyunjin, in his poor attempt to quickly fix a problem, the one that hasn’t allowed the flowers to grow. He must’ve sprayed too much baking soda. The baking soda seeped through and became bicarbonate, which affected the nutrients of the soil and fucked up his poor flowers.
One, two, three. The tears fall over them, over the violet flowers that once bloomed in his garden. Maybe letting things out is what will allow them to grow. He won’t fix them with his tears; his sole pain will do nothing to help him. It is the digging what helped them. It is the painful process that put light on what was hidden beyond the apparent.
He lets out a shy laugh and tries to wipe away the tears rolling down his face. With his hands full of dirt, he only manages to cover his face with mud. The mud on his face elicits another laugh from him, less shy and more chaotic this time.
Kneeling, he fixates on the sky as if it was the only thing that could help him make sense of his recently discovered, tumultuous lessons. Looking up, the first rays of sunshine meet him. Minho’s words and Minho’s flowers. The clear, blue sky and the sun seeping through the mud in his face.
A new beginning.
With the characteristic dramatism that his mannerisms carry, Hyunjin lets himself fall to the ground, in between the flowers and the dirt and the poor, disturbed ants. His neighbor’s dog barks at him when they pass through the front of his house. Hyunjin waves at them and keeps on crying and laughing. They do their best to ignore him, and even the dog stops barking.
His phone is in the back pocket of his trouser. He retrieves it, messing up its screen and making it difficult to both type and see what’s happening. Once he finds the profile of Minho’s new boyfriend, he sends him one message.
Hyunjin: Hyung, I’m sorry, I won’t be meddling anymore. Please believe Minho hyung, he doesn’t have the slightest interest in me. He loves you. Sorry again.
***
A week later, he texts his mom asking her to book him an appointment with a therapist, just like she had asked him to do several times before.
Minho appears less and less in his dreams. He doesn’t need water anymore, he doesn’t cry either. It is bittersweet, but it certainly is better than whatever it was before.