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Jimin’s not a fan of the absolutes. Of the concrete, the cold hard facts, the unescapable restraints of a diagnosis or of a judgement.
It’s so much easier to lie, to lie along the beaten track of half-concealed truths and wait. Wait for something undeniable to hit him smack in the face so he can’t continue his little game of play pretend, playing patty cake with the side of himself he doesn’t like to talk about.
Because putting a name, a diagnosis, a label on it would make it real, make it wrong. It would mean he would have to stop. It would mean that he was lying.
Staring at his reflection in the mirror, he realises that he can’t stop yet, not yet. Not because he’s wrong, but because he isn’t just right yet.
The light above him bathes him in an unattractive yellow hue, turning his bags under his eyes into black charcoal smudges, his multicoloured array of bruises from dance and absent-minded swats turtle-shelling into formless dark blobs. It’s like looking at a stranger, a poor clay imitation of what he actually looks like, except this bad quality is real. As real as the cool smoothness of the glass under his fingertips, as real as the skin pulled tight in the coil of his fist.
Underdeveloped film, Jimin thinks, eyeing the marshmallow puff of his cheeks, the slight give of his stomach, the xylophone of his ribcage threatening to burst out of its skin prison. Poor craftsmanship, Jimin seethes to himself, poking angrily at the tensed muscle of his thigh.
The sculpture was flawed, as it always is. The mirror image is alien, with its sunken eyes and bony fingers, yet it’s wearing his face. He can’t remember what day is it or whether he’d already showered, transfixed in the slithering shadows casted by the liquid yolk of the light oozing steadily along the curve of his shoulder bones.
It’s unnerving. Like a horror movie, Jimin can’t look away, forcing himself to spot more and more room to improve, always more to lose, lose, lose. But he’s fine. Just wants to get they little bit more, just reach that little bit higher and higher on the blood-slicked ladder, climbing closer and closer until the Jimin he wants to be pulls him to his feet. Until he stops.
“What the fuck Jimin,” Jimin mutters to his reflection, tracing the slug trails of smudges along the edge of the mirror, “Get it the fuck together, what the fuck, you wannabe fucking hipster. So fucking weak, you fat bitch.”
Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation or the screaming behind his eyes turning the floor into soft jelly, but he crouches, sways dangerously and has to clench his fingers stone white against the tomb-cold sink to stop himself falling to his knees.
“You pig,” He sneers, the hollowness of his cheeks hardening his every word until it’s spat through clenched teeth, nothing but pure, molten disgust tricking down his throat, “You just keep on going, too lazy to get it right.”
The mirror image hisses back at him, taunting him of his own incompleteness, playing the predator’s game of exploiting a vulnerability to back him further into a corner. His reflection twists monstrously, but doesn’t change.
There’s something like despair prying at his seams, the patchwork of helpless self-awareness unravelling against the dark whispers of disgust, of hatred.
“You fat pig,” Jimin says, looking almost crazed, half-naked and crouched in a tiny bathroom, “Oink, oink, bitch-“
“Jimin?” A knock at the door, tentative yet intrusive all the same, “what the hell are you doing?”
It’s one of the hyungs, the shared worry in all of their voices making them indistinguishable from each other. Just another TV channel of empty concern and good intentions. Jimin can’t find himself to ever respond other then to close it up, tape it down, put bandaids on the crumbling wall of his perseverance in his decay.
They don’t know, and they won’t know. After all, a pig doesn’t squeal until it’s last breath.
He glances at his reflection helplessly, but only spots the motion blur of his cheeks smudged into roundness.
“Nothing!” He replies hurriedly, relaxing minutely as his clothes render him shapeless, billowing out his body until it just blurs together into soft lines rather than sharp ridges. “I’ll be right out!”
His voice cracks at the last part and he can almost hear the feet shuffling uncertainly behind the door, almost hear the pity in a conversation he hopes he’ll never have. The hair on the back of his neck stands upright, adrenaline making his hands shake as he tugs on his socks, almost making him hit his head on the cold nothingness of the sink.
Jimin’s not sure why he’s so scared. It’s not like he was doing anything wrong.
Either way, he rushes out of the bathroom without a second glance behind him, stepping on the feet of whoever had tried to kneel at his alter with offerings of well-wishes and good intentions, in the hopes of cracking the stone wall he’d carved around himself.
Only when he pulls the covers tight under his chin, the expanse of their king sized bed never feeling more like an ocean drifting them further apart, does he slip his hand carefully under his shirt and just feel.
Trace the curve of a smile into the prominence of his ribs, the guns for hips and the dimples of shoulders. Lazy satisfaction crooning him a lullaby of his own demise, the ever ringing alarm bells rendered inaudible in their insignificance.
Fulfilment and horror wrestle for control within his mind, clashing together in sparks of inner conflict. Something uneasy gnaws at his subconscious, something too self-aware for him to pay attention to. Something too close to a symptom, a signpost pointing him towards the direction of discovery.
He prefers to hide behind his pesky little half truths, that feel less like lying and more like victory. He’s both the pawn and the player, keeping his poker face perfectly rehearsed until it all crashes around him, until the cards fold and the game’s up. The strings puppeting him in his game of truth and cracked mirrors lead to his own fist.
Jimin doesn’t remember what he dreams of that night, and he’s not sure he wants to.
______
The script he follows is for the character of himself, of the stranger wearing his face that doesn’t have anything like the real Jimin has.
That Jimin smiles and laughs, steals samples from the saucepan, and tells Taehyung without using it to soften an excuse or a dismissal.
That Jimin isn’t real.
The real Jimin spins his web of half truths and excuses, listening, always listening for the twinges of distrust or second-guessing, ready to repair his web of consistency until it sticks. Until they all believe that the Jimin they see is the only Jimin there is.
He’s not lying. Lying would mean he’s doing something wrong, and it’s not wrong, but he just wants to make sure no one wrongly assumes he’s something he’s not. The labels are difficult to scratch off, easier to be a face in the crowd than the one in a million statistic.
Those pesky half truths. Half the guilt and half of the truth, just a teaspoon of sugar to distract them from the arsenic beneath.
There’s always more he never says. Instead, he says what they want to hear, what they expect.
“Yes, I have eaten. I ate at lunchtime.” Jimin’s not lying. He had two satsumas and a boiled egg. Namjoon doesn’t have to know that he peeled the satsumas as slowly as he could, letting the sweet taste of the juice coat his mouth and roll over his tongue so it would last until the evening when he brushed his teeth
“No, I’m not very hungry. I had some of those gummy worms, I’m sure car tires have more flavour.” It’s not dishonesty if Jimin did cave, after staring at the packet of gummy worms trying to calculate what half of his dinner he needs to give up to allow himself to have it. Hoseok doesn’t have to know that the hollowness in his stomach never fades, never relents, always bites at him until he bares his teeth in pain, which they mistake as a smile.
The hunger reminds him he’s real, a bowling ball sinking him deeper and deeper until he can’t move. Until he can only blink listlessly at the kaleidoscope of the setting sun against his bedroom ceiling, wishing he had the energy to be something else. It gnaws at him like a dog with a bone, patiently waiting as he rots to reveal the festering, pulsating, nothingness he is on the inside.
“I’m not in the mood Taehyungie,” Jimin doesn’t want Taehyung to undress him with dictionary definitions, to trace labels and stamp on a fragile sticker across the juts of his body. Doesn’t want Taehyung to look at him with so much love when he doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t compare. The Jimin Taehyung sees isn’t there anymore, the light’s on but no-one’s home. Taehyung doesn’t have to know how much it hurts him to pull away.
The only real truth in Jimin’s life is the flashing numbers on the scale, the dark whispers in the dark of his mind of his obligation to continuation, and the guilt. Jimin feasts on guilt, is a glutton for self-punishment, and gorges himself full on the satisfaction at his own decay.
The truth eats him alive.
________
Jimin remembers faintly of some strange scenario he’d heard of in school. The bowling ball and the feather.
At one point, they fell at exactly the same speed, right? At one point, they weighed the same and were the same. Identical.
He can’t rememberer if it’s true or false, or what happens when they hit the ground, which he finds almost comically ironic.
A half remembered afterthought. A failed intellectual example, a wannabe reaching for the stars as if they were ever alive enough to care. That’s him, that’s Park Jimin, the consequence of empty plates and empty minds, hurtling faster and faster towards the end of the track, the ledge at the end of the river.
He’s the bowling ball and the feather, both so so light he feels as if he’s about to fly away, like a balloon deflating into the open sky, and so heavy, weighed down until he’s drowning on the liquid tears of his failed potential. He’s both of them, mid-flight ignorance blocking out the reality of the impact.
An oxymoron of weight.
Hitting the ground was always going to happen. It was just a matter of when. It wasn’t why, anymore. No, he can lie to himself, lie to his friends and his family, but the truth has become background static buzzing insistently in the back of his mind. The truth isn’t fooled by the honey sweet lies oozing out from between his lips. He knows why.
_______
Jimin’s so cold nowadays.
Shrugging off his fleshy winter coat he’d had on all his life, to reveal the undercoat of decomposition lined with accents of bold bones, leaves him shivering on a warm day. Unable to get back the heat he’d lost numbing himself. No amount of blanket will ever shut out the cold, because it’s him, he’s the cold. The storm blocking out the lighthouse, hiding away any other path besides the one he’s walking deeper and deeper into, blacking out his guide to safety.
Like the light-headedness, the dizzying whirl of the world under his feet that follows a dance practice, it’s locked up under layers and layers with all the other things he doesn’t want to think about.
It’s a side effect, one easily ignored for the bigger picture. Except, Jimin’s not sure anymore what that looks like. He holds pieces of what he wants, trying to slot them together and finding them incomparable.
What he wants and what he gets are two very different things. Jimin’s doesn’t get anything he wants anymore, nothing outside the parameters of what he needs.
But Jimin is fine, thank you very much. So what he doesn’t have the energy to drag himself out of bed, doesn’t have the strength to glance in the mirror? So what he draws on what scraps of math skills he possesses to calculate the degree of guilt he should feel after every meal? So what his legs cry out to him after four straight hours of dancing into the night, his body pleading with him to stop mistaking the light at the end of his tunnel as anything other than the train about to collide?
So what there’s something he’s not telling the others, telling Taehyung?
Park Jimin doesn’t have anything like an eating disorder. No, never. He swore he’d gotten over his depression, didn’t he? He’d promised he’d gotten better since his debut days of overwork, didn’t he? They all saw him claw his way back into their good books, watched him put on the mask of normality until they were so sure of his smile that they’d forgotten what was once under it.
Jimin was better. He wouldn’t pull anything like an eating disorder and not tell them. After all, it wasn’t an eating disorder, so he didn’t have to tell them.
Jimin doesn’t like names, or definitions, or the concrete. He still eats. He doesn’t skip meals or anything. Jungkook feeds him sliced up pieces of fruit, Hoseok pops almonds between his lips during water breaks, Taehyung presses kisses to his cheeks, and they all are inherently aware that he’s fine.
It lurks in the background, always the crackling radio station in the back of his mind, a pot of boiling water ready to overflow at the slightest sign of deviation. In the background, out of sight, it is not in the domain of the definite.
Consistency helps him slip under the radar, helps him push the boundaries of his excuses until they’re just another expected given. Playing the game, playing the role day-to-day of the Jimin they expect helps the Jimin they don’t see remain in the shadows.
One night, in a hotel room that couldn’t feel like home, he was alone.
Taehyung had forgone their usual post concert cuddles to do a vlive. Jimin had been invited and waved off the suggestion, but Taehyung always asked. Always was watching him with that gooey affection gleaming in his eye, the ever present undercurrents of worry made Jimin paranoid he was slipping from his scripted excuses.
It was hard to keep Taehyung at arms length, keep him from eyeing the fat of his inner thighs and the bloated puff of his cheeks. Taehyung was warm. Maybe that was another reason for Jimin’s never-ending winter, giving himself purposeful hypothermia to stop Taehyung’s knowing looks and wandering hands from thawing out the ice between them. From cracking the ice fortifying Jimin’s heart.
Lying to Taehyung, no, not lying, but neglecting to tell the whole truth hurts a little bit more than lying to the others. Taehyung has seen all of Jimin, poked at all of his vulnerabilities from where Jimin had unlocked the contents of his heart, seen him cry and scream and shiver. To look at Taehyung’s concern and worry and feed him excuses felt like spitting and stomping all over Taehyung’s open heart.
Even though it hurt, even though Jimin had to force himself to leave practice a little earlier or offer to wash the dishes to escape dinnertime, keeping Taehyung at a distance was the only way.
Jimin could pretend he wasn’t being selfish when he justified his subtle steps back by thinking about how Taehyung’s heart would break if it was ever defined. Taehyung would make him stop, walk on eggshells around him and wouldn’t forget it ever happened, and Jimin’s stomach turned just thinking about it. People knowing meant that people changed, and Jimin didn’t want pity, or concern, he wanted to be alone in his comfort zone where no one asked if he was lying.
Not that he was trying to, not anymore, but Jimin was acutely aware that he’d overdone it today. At first it was ebbing away at the usual little by little, but it worsened until he could barely look at instant ramen without seeing the flash of numbers magnified beyond their microscopic reality, unable to watch the bubbles of oil in Seokjin’s cooking without feeling his stomach heave. A dial cranked slowly over time until he hadn’t noticed how high it had gotten.
The frog in the saucepan unaware it was boiling to its own death.
Overdoing it meant the guilt was an iron blanket wrapped around him. Overdoing it meant slimmer, thinner, less dinner. Overdoing it was yesterday’s average to today’s standards.
Too much, he was always too much. Too many steps back, away from what he should be doing. Oink oink. Stuck in his fleeting thoughts of ‘what the hell, why am I denying myself?’ Always so greedy, the guilt weighing him down until his knees buckled, kneeing in front of the toilet.
His fingers, short as they were, could do it. They could do it, they could stop the guilt of never being strong enough to put his money where his mouth was but-
-in this moment, with the cold of the tile seeping in through the rips of his jeans, Jimin hesitated.
This is a symptom of a concrete diagnosis. This was crossing the line into easily defined. This, this was what would get him caught, make him stop.
This is what would make the others worry, make them walk on tip toes around him as if he was about to shatter into a million snowflakes of glass, make them soften their words into the cotton candy of sugar-sweet intentions. This would make him cross the line, one he couldn’t go back from, one he’d be haunted with no matter how hard he tried to make it appear like it had never happened.
They wouldn’t forget this, not like they had when they found him aged 17 passed out from overwork, not when they found him dangling his legs over the side of a bridge to see if he had a survival instinct left or if the numbness had taken that from him too.
Jimin had a reputation, an expectation to be who they wanted him to be. A golden, gilted god, worshipped by thousands of disembodied eyes and words, tended to by the soft chiding of his friends. The truth, one he hated to admit, was too human to ever be seen.
Taehyung would be disappointed.
That moment of hesitation was the teetering along the fine line of right and wrong. The wobble of the scales. There was a knock at the door, always intrusive, and Jimin rose to his feet. Switched off the light behind him, plunging his moment of weakness into the cover of darkness, of those troublesome half truths.
_____
“I bought you some rice!” Taehyung says happily, holding up the takeaway container like a prized trophy, the sunshine optimism twisting their previous argument into irrelevance.
I bought myself a lower dose of guilt, Jimin thinks. Not with money or plastic.
His currency of one of blood and bone, of exchanging smiles for masks, hugs for hits, friends for nothing. The transaction required strips the smile off Taehyung’s face, fills his eyes with despair as the excuses roll honey-sweet from Jimin’s tongue, the takeaway box a rejected white flag.
It pays off, in the end. Jimin buys himself another step forward? Back?
He has rules, rules no one but him abide by. Rice is a once a day dessert.
The distance between he and Taehyung is widened by the walls Jimin’s built between them. Glass walls, visible yet untouchable. Taehyung has no chance of getting close enough to come into focus, trapped in the peripheral watching unknowingly as Jimin double-glazed the wall between them.
Later that night, Taehyung shifts past the no-mans-land of the sheets, flowing like water across the silken rivers of fabric.
His eyes in the dark glitter like that of stars in the night, always guiding Jimin back home, guiding him towards warmth and love, the eye in the storm raging in Jimin’s head.
Taehyung deserves better, deserves someone worth the effort. There’s not enough left of Jimin to love, anymore. There was never anything for Jimin to love about himself to begin with.
Jimin’s slumped like a corpse, the oozing, creeping ache of exhaustion blanketing him in layers of heavy weight. His body is not his own, not in the domain of the dark, of the unseen. Fingers twitch instinctively as Taehyung carefully, so gently, wraps Jimin up in his arms, yet there’s no response. Not when he doesn’t have the energy to be who he usually is when being seen demands consistency.
Cocooned tightly by the warmth of Taehyung’s arms with soft puffs of breath against his neck tickling him lightly, Jimin slips his eyes shut and floats away higher and higher; safe in the knowledge that he has Taehyung next to him to moor him down, anchor him out of his head.
He’s been a bad boyfriend. Not just about the dieting, but by the emotional starvation. Jimin sighs flatly at the frown pressed against his skin, forcing his arms to breech the surface of his self induced lethargy until they wrap like spider webs across the wide planes of Taehyung’s back.
Warmth. Finally. The cold retreats pettily deep into his bones, where Taehyung can’t reach. Never fading, but yielding just this once, as a once a day dessert.
Except, it fizzles and pops back into dead embers as Taehyung takes a risk, steps into dangerous waters. His hand slips up the back of Jimin’s pyjama shirt, and before Jimin can withhold the shudder of surprise, Taehyung’s tracing the exposed ladder of his ribs, the sharp points of his hipbone, the knobs of his spine almost desperately. Feeling all the things Jimin keeps beneath warm smiles and cozy sweaters. Feels it before it’s done, the unfinished project, the irregularly shaped sculpture yet to be formed.
Feeling what Jimin won’t say.
The anger, along with a little bit of fear, is like a bucket of cold water thrown over him because of course, Taehyung wouldn’t understand. He’d want him to stop, and there were no words Jimin could ever say to make him believe that it wasn’t what it looked like. No, it wasn’t, promise.
Jimin rips himself out of the quilted comfort of Taehyung’s arms, unravelling the stitches of love and warmth that had just started to piece his energy back from where it had scattered like a dropped jigsaw.
Tugging his clothes back down, the cold numbness that freezes him throughout the day chips away gleefully at the lingering heat trails from Taehyung’s fingertips, sucking the borrowed warmth out of his skin until he’s shivering. From fear or from cold, it’s indistinguishable in the formlessness of the dark. Anger makes Jimin set his jaw, because Taehyung has his heart in his large palms, and that should be enough.
Trust is just an extra letter from love, a synonym. Trust is what Jimin relies on to sell his con of consistency. Without it, his web unravels, leaves him poisoned by his own actions.
It should be enough, but judging by the betrayal twisting Taehyung’s face bitterly, it still wasn’t enough to black out the dictionary definitions of preempted judgements.
“You’re a liar,” Taehyung seethes in the dark, anger sparking his every word until he’s illuminated by his fury. But Jimin knows him like the back of his hand, and knows that the barely visible twitch of his lips and the frantic blinking means that his anger was just an easier emotion than despair. “You said you were eating better. You told me, specifically, that you weren’t going to keep skipping meals. You’re a liar, Jimin. I can tell you’re not eating.”
“I am eating better,” Jimin protests, shoving himself upright until he’s face to face, until he can see the shadows twist and curl around Taehyung’s features as they cloud with conflict, “We ate together at mealtimes with the others, you’ve seen me. We ate dumplings after practice yesterday. It’s not like I’m starving myself, I eat three meals a day and snacks. I do eat, mother. Don’t sit there and accuse me of lying when you have nothing to back up your bullshit with.”
Taehyung opens and closes his mouth uselessly, twisting the sheets in the tightness of his fist until his knuckles turn the same colour. Tugging at the back of his head in frustration, the cogs and bolts in his head are visibly whirring to no result, because Jimin’s right, as he prepared himself to be. Taehyung can see the obvious yet can’t slap the label on, can’t stick a star next to his name without the evidence Jimin will never give or ever allow himself to show.
Taehyung knows Jimin’s right, and trying to protest the concrete evidence of Jimin’s claim would make him wrong.
Right or wrong.
The game Jimin’s playing is starting to blur all the rules he thought he’d knew together until they’re indistinguishable from each other, just white noise distorting each excuse until even Jimin can’t tell the absolute truth from the white lie. Gambling each piece of himself just to reach the grand prize of perfection, of completeness.
Right or wrong, the scale tips back and forth to each side like a seesaw. Jimin’s right, but even he knows that he’s wrong, he’s doing something so deeply wrong that it sends electric shocks of fear down his spine. Fear of what else he’d mistake for being right.
It’s so hard to tell apart what’s a lie to the others and a lie to himself. Sometimes he wondered if he fooled himself too.
Sometimes, deep down, Jimin knows that he’d purposely clouded the truth to avoid seeing the storm behind it, corrupted his judgement of right and wrong to better hide behind his empty words. He’s not lying, so why does it feel like he’s said something wrong?
Jimin’s trapped Taehyung in the same half-truth he’d lured the others into, beckoning them closer into the sugar sweet prevarications, giving them puzzle pieces without the picture so they can’t see the rancid decay that is the whole truth. The whole truth even Jimin doesn’t admit, too easy to swallow the placebo than the medicine.
Jimin does eat at mealtimes. Trails behind Taehyung or Jungkook or whoever as they shove themselves full to the brim of foods he wouldn’t even look at if he was alone.
They don’t see the hundreds of push ups. The sweat beaded on his skin as he exercises long into the night, burning, always burning the guilt away. Unshackling him from the constraints of regret, stopping him from always, always being too much.
There’s two sides to a coin, but to everyone else, Jimin’s the double headed coin winking at them to try a little harder. His currency is exclusive to him only.
“I’m worried about you.” Taehyung mumbles, ducking his head so he fades away into the charcoal hue of the night, “I don’t think you’re eating enough, and I can’t tell whether you’re lying or not.”
Jimin taps the sheets restlessly, something inside him pleading him to see sense, to grab the buoey Taehyung’s thrown into his dangerous waters. Suddenly and desperately, he thinks of cutting the strings that had rendered him a puppet to his darkest thoughts, smashing the porcelain mask everyone had grown to recognise as his own just to have Taehyung hold the broken parts of him together, to have Taehyung stem the bleeding of his broken heart.
The conflict within his mind wagers war on his body.
Jimin could tell Taehyung that looking in the mirror was a throw of a dice.
Sometimes, he’d see the gaunt, hollow cavern bordered by jagged edges, trace the protruding edge of bone and wince at the never-ending hunger begging him to just throw away all the stupid things he’d decided were wrong.
Sometimes, Jimin was scared of himself, of what he’d do to achieve unattainable perfection, and eat and eat and eat everything he swore was off limits. It came back eventually, the guilt. It always did.
More often than not, Jimin would look in the mirror and see the prized pig, puffed comically large, ready to go to the market and never return. The pig who never would be good enough if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, who’d never fit in a world of show horses and pedigree dogs if he didn’t try and fit the mould.
But saying all of that would make it real. Taehyung would remember his words and hold them against him. Saying the whole truth would mean it was real, and it wasn’t real, not if he never voiced it. Pretending it wasn’t a problem until it went away was what he was best at, after all.
Jimin stays silent.
Watches the nervous wringing of Taehyung’s hands, bone white in the dark, and tries not to wince at the phantom sensation of them along his fatty strips of incompleteness.
“I miss you,” Taehyung breathes, as if he’d preferred not to be heard at all. Looking up, the pure concern in his eye is almost enough to crack the ice of numbness around Jimin, so close to giving in and swiping away the dirt burying him alive.
“I miss you. Don’t go away from me. Don’t shut me out somewhere I can’t find you” Taehyung curls into himself, wrapping his arms around his own chest, squeezing tight to hold all the tears threatening to fall safe inside.
Crouched in on himself, he looks almost like a child, like the scared teenager he was when Jimin first met him. Jimin loves him so much, has loved him through good times and bad, but he can’t bear to see how Taehyung will inevitable change if it is ever clearly defined. How Taehyung will stop loving him when he sees how undeserving of it he is.
Tears, Jimin knows how to deal with. Taehyung, Jimin knows.
Jimin can’t help this gnawing of guilt, that he’d made Taehyung cry, that he was wrong in his selfish quest for self improvement. His heart, beaten into shreds of submission, stirs weakly at the sight of tears trickling silently down Taehyung’s cheeks, begging Jimin just this once to be honest with him.
Jimin’s too far gone to stop, now. He’s not sure he knows how.
“I won’t,” Jimin promises blindly, shuffling closer until he’s leeching the warmth straight out of Taehyung’s skin, “Don’t worry about me. It’s just my diet for the comeback. It isn’t what you think.”
Taehyung buries his fave into the hollow groove of Jimin’s shoulder, bumping the crown of his head against the marble slope of Jimin’s jaw.
Taehyung doesn’t reply.
_____
It all collapses around him eventually, on a Tuesday of all days.
Swimming through the murky waters of unconsciousness, Jimin groans as the ripples of pain lap through him, squeezing his eyes a little tighter against the dizzyingly bright light against his eyelids. His bones feel as if they’re made of pure lead, shackling him immobile against an uncomfortably firm bed. Turning his face into the pillow, Jimin frowns minutely at the lingering scent of disinfectant, of cheap bulk bought detergent.
He’s not in his bed. There’s no creaking of springs or digging into his spine, no loose arms around him or a body warm next to his. No, Jimin’s alone. Alone in what his foggy brain assumes to be a coffin in its sterility.
The pain is cold, burning through his veins like liquid ice, melting what little strength he has left in his muscles into weak pools.
Blinking his eyes open takes longer than usual, his head filled with the cotton candy nothingness of a dreamless sleep, only the dull throbbing coursing through him rekindling the wet spark of energy, of a survival instinct. Even when Jimin opens his eyes he can’t see, the usual black spots forming a kaleidoscope of white walls and white sheets.
Jimin breathes deeply in and out only to realise with a jolt that there’s a tube shoved tight in his nose. Blinking away the black spots quickly, the room slowly fades into focus, the cotton candy behind his eyes beginning to unravel into sugar trails of light-headedness.
Faces blur into view, and Jimin’s heart sinks as suddenly, right here right now, he realises that the game’s up.
It all depends on whether he won or lost. Deep down, focusing on the tear trails accessorising each expression of pure despair, this was never a game he could ever win.
Fear begins to buzz a SOS morse code in the back of his mind, solidifying his tired limbs and biting back the insistent ache of pain. But there’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. The heaviness of his body condemns him in more ways than one.
Briefly, Jimin tries to gather the dropped breadcrumbs of memory, tries to retrace his steps that led to this, but comes up empty handed save for a fuzzy memory of Hoseok almost dropping his limp body down a set of stairs.
There’s only one reason Jimin would wake up in a hospital bed with the members all in varying degrees of distress around him. The one, solid reason written neatly on a document at the end of his bed.
The end of the line, the waterfall at the end of the river. This has tipped the scales of truth and almost truths, leaving only the cold, impersonal diagnosis scribbled hurriedly under his name.
Despite the blankets wrapped around his chin doing nothing to keep out the never ending hypothermia, despite the needles digging into his arms and the tubes snaking around his face, Jimin smiles brightly. Tries to raise himself by his elbows and bites his lip to hold back his cry when his arms can’t support him.
Taehyung, sweet, trusting Taehyung, who was perched so close to Jimin’s side he might have well have been in bed with him, gently props Jimin upright. Taehyung fluffs the pillow behind him with shaking hands, his hair obstructing his eyes as he oh so carefully puppets Jimin upright.
There’s only so much denial can do. This, this is the undeniable. Jimin’s beginning to feel the hysteria of being trapped into a corner of his own maze twitch his fingers.
“So,” Jimin breaks the silence that’s suffocating all of them, trying not to squirm under the six pairs of eyes looking at the reality so plainly clear under fluorescent lights and paper thin clothes. He doesn’t continue, any explanation, any excuse, quickly dying on his tongue as he realises that they will shrivel up and explode under the crushing weight of the obvious.
Taehyung fishes his hand out of the depths of the blanket, but can only hold two fingers from the number of pulse clips and wires. The tightness of the grip isn’t enough to scatter the marbles of fear that are steadily growing into boulders in Jimin’s stomach.
Now that it’s real, it has to stop. Checkmate.
The white hot roar of being caught red handed, the shattered glass ringing of regret that always leaves him scrambling in the dark for anything to cling to to save himself, sends Jimin shrinking into the sheets. It’s like he’s a child again, facing down his parents and trying desperately to figure out what to say to make them stop, stop punishing him by ripping out the roots he’d planted to support his con, stop seeing through the distorted mirror he’d placed around himself to prevent people seeing through the gaps.
Jimin has been caught in more ways than one. He’s caught in the web of the truth he’d spun from every unsaid sentence and too long stares at calorie numbers. More importantly, he’s caught in a diagnosis, in the obvious. This was a step too far, a symptom too persistent, a pattern too irregular to be anything but planned.
Everything he’d planned, everything he didn’t say, every pesky half-truth that had ever been thrown at attempts to crack past his walls had suddenly turned on him, condemned him. What he didn’t say allows them to fill in the gaps, picking out the shreds of truth in each excuse. In the end, Jimin was his own worst enemy. By trying to hide the reality, he’d ensured that they’d seen through it.
“You’re malnourished. You collapsed during practice from dehydration and exhaustion,” Jimin instinctively looks towards Yoongi, the cold, calculated tone giving nothing away a distinctly Yoongi trait. They always relied on Yoongi’s clear headedness, his composure during the worst of the worst to keep their world from falling apart in its chaos. Seokjin had once joked that Yoongi would monotone the news of the end of the world as if it were a book report.
Yoongi’s lips are pulled into a thin line, shoulders shaking as silent sobs seize control of him. Namjoon, usually so above emotion when the situation requires a leader, is huddled next to him, equally as silent.
Yoongi hadn’t spoken. Jungkook had.
“The doctors said you’re critically underweight. Sooner rather than later, your organs will begin to shut down,” Jungkook says clinically. The first to cry at any argument, his heart was bigger than his pride and his self-interest. To see him so calm, so detached, only makes it more serious. Rendering Jungkook unemotional and uncaring if his words hurt only meant that he was past the point of crying.
Taehyung stifles a sob next to Jimin, almost jolting one of the many wires and tubes snaking up Jimin’s arms like a second set of veins out of place.
Seokjin and Hoseok nod grimly in support, their hands clasped tightly together. Jimin is a lot to handle, even he admits it.
Taehyung’s grip on his fingers is tight enough to border on numbing, as if Jimin were about to deflate and melt forever out of his grip, like his hold on his hand would keep him from running away from the truth.
Hoseok’s eyes are tinted pink, and Jimin can just make out the impressions of the jeans he’d been wearing fading on Hoseok’s arms. The impressions made from where Hoseok had carried his unconscious body, without caring about his own comfort, to get him to the hospital.
Another stone drops deadweight in Jimin’s chest, anchoring him to the now, to the consequences. No more is he allowed to drift away, lighter than air from the sheer nothingness eating him alive. The wires and tubes imprison him in a way that’s so dissimilar to those pesky half truths Jimin was so fond of. The words are meaningless against visible truths, unable to hide behind excuses when the inexcusable is dangling in front of him.
There’s no reply, no excuse. Jimin looks briefly at each of them, opening and closing his mouth like a fish and his honey trap backfires and drowns him alive in the sweetness of all the lies he ever disguised as truths. Drowning in the glittery tar that had coated his every smile.
“You’re killing yourself,” Namjoon utters hoarsely, wincing subconsciously as the sight of Jimin, frail and a whisp of what he was, suddenly takes on a new meaning, “This will kill you if you don’t stop, Jimin.”
‘this will kill you, Jimin’
Do they think he doesn’t know that? Do they think it was all an accident, a coincidence, a bout of bad luck?
Jimin’s not sure if he ever managed to fully fool himself. If his excuses were ever rattling on the back burner of his mind as he accidentally exercised into the night to burn off phantom weight, coincidentally shoved his fingers down his throat once he gathered the courage, spun the dice and was forced to skip a meal due to fate.
It would always end here. All paths led to the end of the river, the end of the line.
It wasn’t just about losing weight, about being perfect. The outside reflected the inside. Jimin wanted to see how grotesquely rotten and decayed he was on the inside on the outside, so he did. Pain and sadness demands to be seen. His self destruction had manifested with each rung added on the ladder of his ribs. He wanted to suffer and hurt, chipping away more and more at himself until there was nothing but the decay, the hollow shell he is.
Jimin wasn’t stupid. He was a liar.
As if he’d heard all of Jimin’s thoughts, Taehyung gasped softly, holding Jimin’s fingers so tight they started to hurt.
“I’ll be better,” Jimin’s promise hangs uncertainly in the air. They all know it’s empty, all of his hard work building up the pillars of trust effortlessly demolished. No one is fooled, as Jimin scans each of them to try and find a crack of trust to pry onto. “It’s not super serious. I will eat normally, I promise. I’ll always get better.”
The false optimism, the bravado of self-confidence, isn’t enough to keep the waver out of Jimin’s voice, nor is it enough to disguise the wobble wetting his sunshine. Helplessly, Jimin curls his free hand into a fist, waiting, waiting for a response, for something for him to strike down. Offers of betterment and dismissal of seriousness, isn’t that the formula? Isn’t that what always works?
Jimin doesn’t have the strength to move his own limbs, his body not in own in the domain of reality and overexposure, and the gaunt hollowness of his face twists his optimism into just another addict’s justification. That’s what he is, now. Addicted to the taste of his own self destruction. He never did know when to stop.
Small and skinny in his nest of sterile hospital sheets, Jimin is not as convincing without the sunny mask to hide behind, without an exit plan to hide away from things he didn’t want to think about. He begins to panic, Taehyung sadly gazing down at the rise and fall of his rib bones with each high-pitched breath.
“You’re staying for a few days until your vitals look better,” Hoseok continues as if Jimin hadn’t spoken, his lips pulled tight and his brows creased as he stares at Jimin as if he was just a complicated choreography yet to piece apart, “The managers and the hospital have given you a set meal plan to try and build you back up.”
Control was slipping like melted ice cubes from Jimin’s grip. They didn’t understand, it wasn’t serious, it wasn’t something that needed to be stopped. Only Jimin knew what was best for him, and truthfully, his days were like a merry-go-round cranked to light speed. A nauseating carousel of lights, camera, action action action blurring together faces and stages, his days preplanned for him, and Jimin just wanted to be selfish. He wanted to have something for himself only, something for the real Jimin, not for the Jimin on paper or press.
The member’s grave expressions and tear blotched cheeks were a jarring realisation that his quest for perfection, for completeness, was borne of selfishness.
How many nights had Jimin shivered, but pushed away Taehyung’s love and affection to wallow in his self pity? How many times had Jimin ignored Jungkook or Hoseok’s advice about overdoing it just to make sure he worked off his minuscule snacks? How many times had Jimin lied to them?
Guilt was an old friend, the tree he’d inevitably hang himself on. Weighing him down further and further as he shrunk deeper into his ocean of blank blanket.
Yet Jimin wasn’t ready to stop, not even when the proof of the point of no return was stark blank in front of him. This was what the clock was ticking down to. This was evidence, proof that Jimin couldn’t deny anymore.
Denial was always easier.
“No, I don’t need a meal plan-“
“You don’t get a choice in the matter,” Seokjin hisses icily, “You’ve proven already that you aren’t capable of looking after yourself.”
The panic and hysteria sounds a drumbeat in his ears, his usual defence of excuses and lies only leaving him more vulnerable. Jimin can’t reply, because Seokjin’s right.
The members all nod in agreement, the jury approving the execution of the Jimin they thought they knew. Jimin wasn’t sure if they were prepared for the real Jimin, the Jimin who pushed them all away to bleed to death quietly, the Jimin who slapped his hand across his mouth to muffle his sobs as he wobbled in dirty bathrooms. He wasn’t sure if he was prepared either.
“You’re going to get better.” Taehyung says softly next to him. With his hair brushed from his eyes, Jimin can clearly see the liquid diamonds of tears glittering in them, the slug trail of dried drops that makes his heart twist in pain.
There’s no room for argument, but it’s hesitant, like he’s waiting for Jimin to agree with him so he knows he’s not overstepping. Already walking on eggshells broken by spiderweb cracks of mistrust.
Jimin tries to raise his other hand to reach out, just to feel the warmth of Taehyung’s skin, but is unable to lift the deadweight of his arm. The dull ache of pain dancing like lightning bolts under his skin briefly surges white hot. Jimin tries not to visibly cringe at his own weakness, but this is as low as he can get, stuck in a hospital room surrounded by reminders of his failures.
“I want you to get better,” Taehyung murmurs loudly in the quiet of the room, squeezing Jimin’s slack fingers tight enough to border on pain. Sniffling under his breath, Taehyung looks so scared, like Jimin’s drifting away somewhere he can’t reach never to return. “I love you so much. You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me?”
It’s not an accusation, but a plea, a white flag for honestly. The game’s finished, his strategy laid bare. The love of Jimin’s life starts to cry silently, so quiet that each hitched breath appears painful.
The guilt never fades. The answer to Taehyung’s question isn’t one words can form.
“Stop pushing us away,” Yoongi rasps suddenly, tearing Jimin’s gaze from Taehyung’s slumped form, “You pretended everything was fine after you overworked yourself during debut and even now you’re denying it. You have an eating disorder, Jimin.”
Jimin can’t help but suck in a breath in shock. The penny drops, the shoe fits, the million dollar catchphrase that had haunted Jimin’s dreams and days with an iron fist until he wasted away. The label slapped onto his back, ready for selling at the market of normality. The prized pig finally squeals when it can no longer pretend it’s a show pony, exposed for what it is.
Hearing it out loud, outside of the brief glimpses of self awareness in his mind, makes it so devastatingly real.
The bowling ball in his chest and the feather in his throat. An oxymoron, that’s Park Jimin
There’s nowhere to run, now.
“It’ll be difficult, but you’ll get through this. Just let us help you, please.” Yoongi leans forward in his uncomfortable plastic chair, face open and genuine as he searches Jimin’s face for a sign of remorse, of motivation.
All of them wait for his response, for his motivational speech about getting better now that it’s so clearly defined and inescapable. After all, that’s why things are diagnosed. That’s why Jimin was avoiding it.
All of them want him to stop, want him to be the version they like. Taehyung squeezes his fingers encouragingly, a pinkie promise to always be there.
If only Jimin could gorge himself on the banquet of life. If only Jimin would take the lifeline thrown into his choppy waters.
Jimin doesn’t want to stop. It’s not wrong or anything, even though he has a pesky half truth called an eating disorder. After all, he’s not just right yet.
The sculpture’s almost finished, the artist willing to die for their craft.
The job’s half done.
And Park Jimin doesn’t know when to stop.