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All Summer in a Day
At thirteen the only thing that mattered to Min Yoongi was basketball. He played on his school team, short guard most of the time, on weekends he played pick up games in his neighborhood, and he filled the time between watching games on TV and babbling to his dad about draft picks. Once a year, his dad would take him to see a professional game on his birthday. (Yoongi knew tickets were expensive and money was tight. Money was always tight.) Those were his favorite days of every year.
And then Yoongi hurt his shoulder. It was summer and a larger kid fouled him in a pick up game. It was an accident but that didn't mean that Yoongi hadn’t flown backward and landed on the hot concrete with a loud crack and terrifying force.
He dislocated his shoulder and fractured his scapula.
And that meant going to the hospital while he mother tried to be cheerful and wrung her hands with a pinched look on her face when she thought he wasn’t looking.
And that also meant no more basketball for the summer.
A few days later Yoongi’s mother came into his room where Yoongi was supposed to be resting. Really he was staring out of his window and angrily recounting all the ways his life was over. All the games he wasn’t going to play.
It looked like resting, though, so he figured it counted.
His mother smiled at him fondly and took away the empty lunch dishes from the nightstand. In their place, she left three paperback books.
Yoongi read, of course, his house was full of second-hand paperbacks filling up the shelves and littering the coffee tables. It would have been almost a challenge not to. But at that point it was just another thing he did. Nice. Not that important.
But he was getting tired of being angry (it actually took a lot of energy for a thirteen-year-old boy to keep cataloguing the sheer volume of all the things he was missing because to a thirteen-year-old boy, everything in summer seems very, very large) so he picked up one of the books.
It was a book of short stories, interesting but bite-sized enough to hold the attention of his frustrated mind.
Eventually then he landed on the story of a girl whose family had moved to Venus from Earth. On Venus there was only one hour of sun, every seven years. None of her classmates remembered the sun, so they didn’t believe her descriptions, laughed at her, and locked her in the closet as a prank.
The sun came out that afternoon. And left too soon. She was forgotten in the closet.
Yoongi felt his heart constrict and expand all at once in empathy and recognition.
Yoongi only had to wait a summer while she had to wait seven miserable, stormy years. But still. Basketball or the sun, it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that the thing they wanted more than anything was out there but here they were, locked away.
* * *
Kim Taehyung lived with his grandparents for almost a year after his parents died. He wouldn’t say it was a happy time. It’s almost impossible to feel happiness in the wake of losing both parents, particularly for a child, particularly when the thing took them away was something as sudden as a car accident.
But even though it wasn’t a happy year he remembered good things, things he’d barely been able to appreciate at the time. He remembered his grandmother laying comforting kisses on his head and quietly bringing him meals when he locked himself in his room for hours. He remembered his grandfather telling him the names of birds in the trees around the house in a cheerful patter that let Taehyung say nothing but filled up the space. He remembered warm arms when he cried and gentle encouragement when something piqued his interest enough to draw him back into the world, even if it was just for a bit.
Taehyung spent most of that year reading. He liked short stories, Ray Bradbury was his favorite. Sometimes his worlds were warm. Sometimes they were full of sadness. But they were always just far enough away that Taehyung could escape for a bit into somewhere strange and new. Somewhere where he could feel the characters joy and pain without trying to reconcile it with his own empty existence.
He read one story about the only girl in her class who had seen the sun and was locked in the closet for the one hour there was light again. It was dark. She was utterly alone and no one in the world could understand how she felt.
Taehyung’s eyes lingered on the last page.
He pulled his blanket tighter around himself.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Yoongi was fourteen when poetry began to devour him. Hip-hop was the first thing that found its way into his brain. It was like the summer without basketball had opened up a new space inside of him, just waiting to be filled with another thing to love.
He’d listened to a lot of music already but he started listening to the words, really listening to them. He looked up lyrics and tried them out on his tongue discovering the ways that rappers stretched them, bent their sounds and used them like clay to build mansions inside drumming rhythms.
It was beautiful and fascinating.
It wasn’t long before he realized the same thing could happen on the page. Words couple be manipulated into rhythms, stretched into rhymes, or sometimes disintegrated into benevolent or malevolent chaos, letters dancing like a dervish.
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold
And bid them wander obeying your will,
* * *
Taehyung couldn’t stay with his grandparents forever. They were old and his grandfather’s health was starting to fail. They loved him but the truth was, they weren’t able to raise another child.
Instead, Taehyung went to live with an aunt and uncle from the other side of his family. He was a dean at a well-respected university. Taehyung’s aunt worked as an attorney in a large firm. They had a son and a daughter but both were already off at college. The son planned to follow his mother and go to law school, the daughter hoped to be a doctor.
The first time Taehyung walked into his uncle’s house, he noticed it was cold. It wasn’t the temperature; it was the beginning of September and the last of the summer heat was just beginning to fade. But the house was cold. Every item sat in its place without a speck of dust. The furniture was perfectly arranged and there wasn’t so much as a sock on the floor or a glass of water left on a table.
It was like a house where no one lived. It was tasteful and pretty in its own way but as Taehyung looked around he wondered if there was a single object that was there because it was loved.
Flame under flame, till Time be no more;
Have you not heard that our hearts are old,
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still.
* * *
Hip-hop made you cool. Poetry made you a target. It was a lesson Yoongi picked up pretty quickly after he started carrying around books with the words “the collected poems of” in the title.
The insults the boys threw at him were stupid and unoriginal. They still hurt. Some of them came from boys he’d played basketball with for years. That hurt even more.
So Yoongi learned to keep the books in his backpack and wait until he was home to read.
His nascent expertise in hip-hop brought his social stock back up. Music was cool. Understanding lyrics and recommending rappers gave him an adolescent cache.
Sometimes, though, he’d want to scream. It’s the same thing, you assholes. Why can’t you get that?
Sometimes at night he’d stare at the ceiling and his lips would move with barely a breath behind them, reciting words and rhythms he’d burned into his brain. Sometimes from songs. Sometimes from pages.
Sometimes while he stared and whispered he felt like he was casting spells on who he might become.
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
* * *
The only good thing about living in his uncle’s house was the library. One room in the house was a sort of den with wall-to-wall shelves, filled with a galaxy’s breadth of books.
Taehyung’s aunt gave him permission to read any of them. So long as he didn’t write in them. Or damage them. Or dog ear them. And remembered to put them back in exactly the spot that it had come from. Hopefully, perfectly aligned with the other books on the shelf.
That was fine. Taehyung could be careful and anything that could get him out of that house, even if it was only just in his own mind, was worth exacting care.
One of the things that Taehyung pulled off of those shelves was a book of Irish poetry and that led him to a W.B. Yeats and from there to a week lost in myths and fairy tales and ordinary things until they all collapsed in on themselves and the whole world seemed extraordinary.
Taehyung stared out of his window one night, eyes on the stars.
What would it be like to be in a world that felt like that, he wondered. A world with its own deep tragedies like his own but also so much richer and freer than the flat constricted world Taehyung existed in.
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.
Taehyung stared at the sky and felt for a moment as though he saw his own reflection in a way.
All the dishevelled wandering stars.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
They liked to meet behind the bleachers. Yoongi loved how cliche it was. He loved how completely text-book high school romance it was.
It was hilarious.
Mostly though, he loved that he got to slip away to kiss a boy.
He loved that he got to slip away to kiss this boy.
The boy was also on the basketball team, taller than Yoongi, with sweet eyes and a great three point shot.
He made Yoongi's fifteen year old heart pound in his chest in a way that embarrassed him.
And that was why Yoongi loved the cliches so much. It gave him something to laugh at, something to do ironically, some way to keep up his front that he was cool without admitting that he'd turned into a starry-eyed pile of hormones and softness.
When he got home, though, and was safe behind the closed door of his bedroom he'd give in to the feeling and roll in it. He'd pull out the poetry he'd learned to hide and let the words swirl around him, a comforting vortex that captured how he felt.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
* * *
Taehyung had never been to private school before he moved in with his uncle. Public school had been just fine with his parents and fine with Taehyung. Now, though, everything was perfectly sharp collars and neckties and a jacket with a crest on it and words in Latin that symbolized the kind of person he was supposed to be for the rest of his life.
He'd always liked school in a sort of backwards way. His grades had never been better than average but he liked learning and liked every one of his classmates so his teachers loved him. He didn't exactly excel academically but there was more to life than numbers on papers and being good at tests. He energized his classes and was kind to everyone. He would be more than fine.
The school his uncle sent him to was different. There were no teachers smiling and assuring his parents that once he found a passion, he'd throw himself into it and do wonderful things. Instead, student rankings hung in the hallways and that was everything that mattered.
The only saving grace at school was English. He still loved to lose himself in stories and loved to think about them. Everything the teacher threw at them he devoured, no matter how difficult the language was as it twisted and turned. And maybe it was because he'd already been through so much at a young age, maybe it was because he'd already fought his way through so much pain but sometimes he saw things his classmates missed and understood things on a level they could barely grasp.
Everything was different and strange but words were still the same.
Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me
* * *
If kissing a boy behind the bleachers had been cliché, breaking up was even worse. It's not you, it's me. I need some space to figure things out.
The next day Yoongi saw his ex walking down the hallway holding the hand of one of the prettiest girls.
He wanted to scream and slam his locker door. He wanted to get on the PA system and tell everyone about the bleachers and what a bastard the boy was and how no one should ever talk to him again.
But he didn't. Yoongi didn't crack, he wouldn't give anyone that satisfaction. Instead he shoved it down behind a stoic wall and made jokes when anyone asked.
Just like before, though, things were different behind his bedroom door. He let himself break on the page.
It felt good knowing that he wasn’t alone.
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
It was nice knowing someone else had felt like this, too.
* * *
Taehyung did his very best on his first test. He felt like he owed his aunt and uncle for taking him in and good grades seemed like the only thing he had to give them in return
It was hard. He was playing catch up in so many classes but above all math. Even if he had been on the same curriculum, he’d spent the last year in a daze, shrouded by a haze of grief where nothing penetrated.
But he pulled himself together, studied harder, asked for help when he could.
When his first grade came back, he felt like crowing at the sky. He’d been put in front of a mountain and he’d proved to himself he could climb it.
That evening he couldn’t even wait until the end of dinner to show his aunt and uncle the small stack of papers with the victorious letter on the top.
Normally he wouldn’t have felt over the moon about a B+ but he was sure they knew how hard he’d had to work to make up for that empty year.
His aunt had grinned at him warmly as he passed the test to her. The moment she looked at it, the smile slide off her face. She wordlessly passed the papers to his uncle. His uncle looked at it, frowned and handed the test back to Taehyung.
"I know things were different when you lived with your parents but in this house we expect As."
Taehyung sat there, shell-shocked.
His aunt looked at him more kindly. "Don't worry," she smiled at him again but this time her expression was laced with pity. "You're a smart boy, you'll do better next time."
Later in his room, bent over his books, Taehyung was sure he wanted to cry. But the feeling wasn't quite the same as sadness. Instead he felt something heavy and almost frightening mixed in with the pain.
He buried himself in his English assignment instead.
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake.
For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.
He sighed while he read. Maybe it was relief.
The Picture of Dorian Grey
His second to last year of high school Yoongi realized two things. First, it really sunk in that his family was broke. He’d always known they didn’t have money and lived mostly paycheck to paycheck but it finally hit him what that meant. It didn’t just mean not having the nicest sneakers or the latest phone. It meant that if he was going to go to college he was going to have to work for it. He’d have to work at his studies and he was going to have to work the whole way through if he wanted to have any chance of paying his tuition and eating at the end of the day.
Second, Yoongi realized he wanted to go to college.
The second realization surprised him, maybe a lot more than it should. He’d always believed there was more to life than school. By now he was completely engulfed in hip-hop. He’d scrounged for money to buy a keyboard and mixing equipment. He’d poured his life into his music and spent his free time hanging out in rap clubs and on forums, sharpening his lyrics and picking up new beats. What did school mean when you already had what you wanted in front of you?
But one night he’d been frustrated with a verse he’d been working on and had taken a break to bury his nose in a book.
Words. Yoongi loved words. And suddenly it felt clear that he was playing with them like a toddler smashing together blocks, instead of drawing up detailed plans for an enormous tower.
He needed more. He needed people who really knew how they worked to help him figure out how to draw those plans.
He started paying even closer attention to rap lyrics, pulling out the ones with the brightest images and the ones that most creatively bent the sounds and beats to curve the words into what the rapper needed.
He started reading out loud, too. Listening to the sounds of the language, as much as the meaning. He started with poetry but then surprised himself by moving into prose, as well. There were fascinating changes in voices and the sounds there, too.
There were sounds in everything. His palette was actually endless. And he realized he desperately wanted guides to help him navigate that infinity.
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
* * *
By the time he’d gotten to high school, Taehyung knew his uncle’s rules. He lived by them and tried as hard as he could to never break them.
His grades stayed high. He won a place on the student council. He was quiet now, except when he spoke up in class. He wasn’t the boy who made everyone smile with unrestrained energy anymore. He was just Taehyung. The good student. The good boy.
And things seemed, if not fine, then not bad.
Until art club.
Taehyung loved the art club, it was probably the only thing in school that made him actually happy. He’d fallen in love with the language of images. He could lose himself in strange shapes and landscapes that seemed like they called his name. He could build his own home on canvas and in photographs, making himself a world that he belonged to. A world that would love him back.
He got lost in it, he’d admit. It ate up more and more of his time, other things falling by the wayside. His grades began to fall. One B. And then another. And another. Each one followed by a lecture. And then another. And another. Each one elevating in fury.
Then one night his uncle called him into his office.
“It’s the art club isn’t it.” Taehyung stood there silent, bracing for the barrage that was going to come next.
Instead his uncle simply said, “you’re going to quit. Your academics are much more important for your future.”
Taehyung felt a black cloud edging out his vision, devouring him with hopelessness. And so he grasped the only life line he could.
“No.”
His uncle’s eyes widened slightly and then his jaw set.
“This isn’t a debate, Taehyung.”
“And I said no,” Taehyung repeated resolutely. “I won’t quit.”
His uncle stood up from his desk and walked to where Taehyung was standing. The air in the room went cold. A dizzy blackness at the edge of his vision darkened like a warning.
And then there was a cracking sound and everything went white.
It took him a moment to really register what had happened. The jolt of surprised horror at the feeling of a hand on his face and the sharp pain that immediately followed.
“I will not be contradicted so long as you are in my house.”
Taehyung felt himself nod. All his resolution drained away and was replaced by hot fear. Cold air. Black into white. He wanted to run and burst into tears but he did neither.
“Yes, sir.” He said quietly.
Back in his room he sobbed until he was tired of crying and flipped through a beloved and well worn book instead.
His uncle was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There was so much more than the tightly constrained world he believed in.
Taehyung clung to the words and the feeling that he wasn’t alone.
“What of Art?”
“It is a malady.”
“Love?”
“An Illusion.”
“Religion?”
“The fashionable substitute for Belief.”
“You are a sceptic.”
“Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.”
“What are you?”
“To define is to limit.”
On the Road
Freedom. Yoongi was finally free. He'd managed to not only finish high school but to score high enough that he was headed to university without worrying about tuition.
He'd done it. He'd slogged through so many equations and presentations and essays he'd hated and he'd won. He'd crossed the finish line and gotten his prize. He'd still need a part time job to cover the rest of his living expenses in a different city but that was fine. He was used to hard work.
For now, though, he had a short but glorious gap between one school and another and he planned to spend every moment he could in the other side that made up half of his life. The dimness of the rap clubs felt like sunshine to him. The stuffy alcohol soaked atmosphere felt like fresh air on his face.
He was surrounded by words there. He was free.
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”
* * *
The thing that made Taehyung's teenage years survivable, bearable even, was his ability to dream. He could live inside his head and no one could be the wiser. No one could tell him to let his dreams go or that they were wrong because no one else ever saw them. They were his. They were private. They were free.
He could go anywhere he wanted, he could do anything he wanted. More than ever now, he dreamed of freedom.
Currently, he liked the idea of the open road. The American daydream of driving and going and going just because you could. The beautiful bus of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Hunter S. Thompson scrounging around in Las Vegas and the Nevada desert through a drug induced haze for some aimless, formless thing called the American Dream. Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise driving on and on in On the Road.
Taehyung dreamed of that, space in all directions and going as far as you wanted, just because you could. There it didn't matter that the walls were always closing in on him. Inside his mind, he could go on forever.
“But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?”
* * *
His last night in the hometown clubs, Yoongi killed. He didn't care anymore, he was leaving, so whatever breaks he'd managed to keep on his stupid mouth before were gone.
In the retelling, Yoongi would have a hard time explaining just how happy the clubs made him. Why he liked standing on one side of the battles while other rappers tried to throw all his weaknesses in his face.
But to Yoongi, it was the culmination of so much poetry and rap and prose. Everything he'd poured into his brain sat there waiting to be twisted into something new. It was a test of how fast he could make his mind work, just how much the words had gotten into his veins.
Something came over him, though, the last time he got on the mic. He didn't want to just show off, he wanted to go out on top. He knew he was one of the best there and maybe it was because it was his last hurrah but he wanted to win.
It was kind of funny, in a way. It was one thing to see someone get upset because you threw mean shit in their face. It was another thing to see someone bare their teeth like an angry dog because you were throwing mean shit in their face with artistic precision and literary skill.
If Yoongi had been smart, maybe, he might have made sure he didn't leave the club alone after that. But he wasn't. His whole face was covered in a goofy, drunken, exhilarated grin when he finally stopped replaying his triumphant moments with his friends and stepped outside.
The door of the club came out on the side of a building and let out into small side street that was barely more than an alley and completely empty at this time of night.
Yoongi had sucked in five seconds of fresh air and was still laughing to himself when a pair of hands shoved him back against the wall. The next thing he knew a fist was hitting his face and sending his head back to smash into the bricks, filling his eyes with black and stars.
It broke up quickly. There were bouncers, after all. And the guy was an idiot.
Once the pissed off loser was in hand one of the bouncers came over to check on him. Yoongi had slid down and was sitting with his back against the wall. When he wiped his nose on his sleeve he saw blood and he could taste blood on his teeth.
"Are you okay?" The bouncer asked him.
Yoongi looked up at the bouncer. The dim street lights glowed behind him and behind that there were probably stars in the night sky.
All the wandering stars.
Yoongi was getting out of here. He'd graduated. He'd won. He was going on to better things and bigger stories.
He felt a warm, sticky trickle from the top of his lip slipping down the side of his face while he laughed.
"Yeah," he said honestly. "I'm great."
“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
* * *
Taehyung imagined there probably wasn't anyone in the world more excited about going to college than he was. He knew he was going, there was no argument about that and that was fine with him. He knew he would also probably be told what to study but that didn't matter to him much, either. As long as he would be away, he'd have room to breath. He could start painting again. He could get up and go to sleep whenever he wanted. Maybe even have a boyfriend without being told it was a waste of time at his age.
It sounded like heaven.
His excitement lasted until shortly before his last year of high school.
His aunt asked him to come sit with her at the dining room table. He sat down across from her at the corner of the table and she smiled at him warmly.
"I want you to know that we are so proud of you, Taehyung. You've come so far since you came to live with us."
Taehyung felt his face get warm. He wasn't used to being praised anymore. He wasn't used to being acknowledged.
"Thank you." For a split second he felt like he was being seen.
And then his aunt slid a course catalogue across the table at him.
"You should take a look at the courses you're interested in now so that you can use you last year to make sure you're prepared."
"Courses...?" Taehyung glanced down and his heart sank.
Of course. Why did he think he'd go anywhere other than the college where his uncle was the dean.
It felt like a set of heavy doors closing in front of his face.
"Sure thing," he flashed a lying smiled at his aunt.
He'd gotten good at that.
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was...I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
Frankenstein
Yoongi woke up with a copy of Frankenstein on his face.
He pulled the worn paperback off and set it to the side.
He'd fallen asleep comfort reading a book he knew half by heart.
He hadn't really been reading it for the story, though, as much as he'd wanted to feel a little close to the author.
Yoongi shut his eyes again, not entirely willing to let go of the soft grey of sleep, and let his half-there mind drift back to Mary Shelley.
Travelling through Europe with an inconsistent lover in wake of a war. Her father cutting her off because he didn’t approve. A premature birth and a dead child. Depression. A summer at a lake where not even the weather was on her side.
Absolutely none of those things were part of Yoongi's life.
But Yoongi empathized deeply. He was pretty sure now he knew what it was like to go off on what you thought would be the most important adventure of your life only for reality to push back and eat you alive.
Yoongi picked up the book and opened up the back to where a cheap grayscale print of a painting of Shelley stared at him over the author's bio. Yoongi stared back. He was older than she was when she'd written the book, even if it was just barely. It made it easy to identify with her and at the same time, it made him ask himself what he was going to pull out of this part of his life.
His eyes narrowed a bit. Like she'd lean out from her portrait at any minute and tell him exactly how to make a masterpiece in the middle of being swallowed by a mess.
"I hate you," he said out loud to the portrait. "You are one of my favorite people and I hate you so much for writing a stupid masterpiece so young and making the rest of us look bad."
He shut his eyes and dropped the book on his chest. His problems weren’t that dramatic but they were bad enough. Yoongi had been paying for food and rent and everything else with a delivery job. But then last week he’d been in a hurry and taken a bad spill. He’d gotten out pretty much unhurt other than a pair of ruined jeans stretch of road rash up his left thigh. But he’d also managed to dump about his entire paycheck in food into the middle of the road and bust his bike.
He’d been fired and now he didn’t have enough money for groceries, let alone enough to take his bike to the mechanic and get it fixed so he could get another delivery job. And that was the problem with paycheck to paycheck. You missed one and you were just in freefall, looking for a handhold.
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
Yoongi glanced out the window.
It was pouring.
“Great,” he sat up and shook his head. “Maybe this means I can write Frankenstein now.”
* * *
College wasn’t all bad. Taehyung was able to move into the dorms and finally get at least a little space to breath. And he fell in love straight off the bat, even if it wasn’t in a romantic kind of way. His roommate was an exceedingly pretty boy with a giant smile who was always willing to laugh and from the moment they met it was like he wasn’t talking to who Taehyung had become but to the person underneath that had been hiding for years. They stayed up eating ice cream and complaining, made elaborate weekend plans together, and learned the secrets of each other’s lives in a matter of weeks.
Taehyung finally had a best friend, someone to be his soulmate and his home who felt the exact same way about him.
But his uncle was still waiting in the wings, somehow even closer now tucked away in his campus office. So Taehyung was also still the person he’d learned how to play in public. The good student. The good boy. University student council and all that.
But this time there was the stupid captain of the basketball team. Golden child was never the person Taehyung had wanted to be but for some reason, he grated against Taeyung and brought all his worst traits out ten times worse. They only saw each other except when they had to talk about coordinating with the other student groups but that was enough to raise the hair on the back of Taehyung’s neck.
Stupid Min Yoongi with his earrings and his bright blue hair and his stupid attitude and that look on his face like he thought Taehyung was less than nothing. It made Taehyung throw his weight around a little more, grin with a little more plastic politeness, and lace his smiling words with a bit more condescension.
Who was Min Yoongi to think he saw Taehyung? He didn’t know anything.
But what else was he going to sing?
When Taehyung reread Frankenstein, he saw so much of himself in the monster.
No one asked him who or what he’d wanted to be. He was half empty and filled the only spaces people made for him.
But he was more than that. He was sure of it.
“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”
* * *
Yoongi fought for it tooth and nail but in the end, he couldn’t have found a better solution to his problem. One of the literature professors that Yoongi loved needed a TA. Yoongi pushed and pushed and argued his case until finally the professor agreed to hire him, even though he wasn’t a graduate student.
No more deliveries. No more worrying about bike accidents and lost orders. He’d be making less and probably have less time to work on his music but he was okay with the trade off. He’d be spending his time talking and thinking about words and literature. And that meant that he’d have more to take back to his music, anyway.
The literature class Yoongi was assisting with was a large lecture course, around a hundred and fifty students. The good thing about that was that as a TA, Yoongi got to lead discussions for his own smaller group. It was almost like having his own class. Sort of.
If Yoongi had been more prone to giddiness he would have probably been bouncing on his heels the first day his group met. Instead, he smiled at the first year students filing in while a bubbling feeling welled up in his stomach like his insides were made of seltzer water.
And then all the bubbles popped at once.
None other than Kim Taehyung walked through the classroom door.
That golden boy with the empty smile and a head that was even emptier. The dean’s pet student. Yoongi saw him in and out of his office all the time.
Yoongi loathed special treatment.
And now he was going to be here for an hour and a half, twice a week while this kid condescendingly rehashed Sparknotes to Yoongi’s face.
This is just a grade to you, Yoongi thought, his jaw tightened as he gripped the book in his hand. But it’s real for me. This made me. This is how I survived.
“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine”
* * *
Taehyung settled into his seat, his limbs feeling leaded and heavy. This was his one thing, his one out and he was stuck with blue-haired Min Yoongi judging him and rolling his eyes twice a week for a whole semester.
This is just a job to you, Taehyung thought, angrily unzipping his backpack. But it’s real for me. This made me. This is how I survived.
“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine.”
Ulysses
“HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!” The dark stout in Taehyung’s glass threatened to slosh over the sides as he held up his beer. Several people crowded around the lobby bar in the theater cheered with him.
Yoongi lifted up his own beer and gave Taehyung an indulgent smile.
Really for as much as they both loved to read and had close enough taste most of the time, James Joyce was a dividing line in their relationship.
Yoongi liked Dubliners , he could even admit Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was pretty good. But Ulysses ? One average dude wandering around Dublin with a potato in his pocket written in fifteen increasingly incomprehensible literary styles was not really a great book in Yoongi’s mind, it was a stunt. Mentally he put it up there with Proust. Sure, it was impressive when you looked at the writing but it also wasn’t anything anyone really read unless they were a grad student or a masochist.
Except Taehyung.
Well, Taehyung and a theater full of people, anyway.
And several other theaters and parties around the world.
But the point still stood.
The bigger point was Taehyung loved it and Yoongi loved Taehyung, so he was here, just like the year before and the year before that, wandering in and out of a theater where people were reading the whole, enormous book out loud on stage and getting day drunk off beer and whiskey being sold for cheap.
Sometimes someone would break into loud, half-drunk Irish poetry - Yeats or Seamus Heany or something like that - and everyone else who knew it would join in.
“Thanks for coming with me,” Taehyung gave Yoongi a half-smile, his eyes twinkling beneath the wavey bangs that fell over his forehead.
Yoongi scoffed. “I’m your boyfriend. It’s in my job description,” he said nonchalantly, taking another long drink of his stout.
“Still.” Taehyung hugged Yoongi from behind, hooking his chin over Yoongi’s shoulder.
There was so much about Taehyung that had changed from when Yoongi first met him. Aside from the fact that he’d hated Yoongi and Yoongi had hated him, too. Underneath that plastic, overachieving exterior had been someone who’d been boxed in and learned to hide himself. Someone sadder and much more frightened.
Yoongi swiveled his head and gave Taehyung a very brief kiss on the cheek before shrugging him off. In the background he heard a few instruments being picked up and gently tested to make sure they came out of the speakers properly.
“So, we’re going to do a cover first and then going into some folk music,” the lead singer’s voice drifted over the crowd. “But I think you’ll all agree it’s appropriate.”
Then there was a wave of sound, guitars and drums and a piper, of all things.
“I got laid in James Joyce's grave
I was hopin' his genius would rub off on me”
“Come on,” Taehyung grabbed Yoongi’s hand and tugged at him, “let’s dance.”
“No one else is dancing,” Yoongi protested. But he still set his beer down.
“And I don’t care!” Taehyung laughed, a little wildly. It was a laugh that sometimes reminded Yoongi of being punched in the face outside the rap club. A moment of being absolutely free.
Yoongi let himself go with Taehyung and jumped around goofily to the Celtic-punk song with him and a dozen other half-drunk attendees that joined them, making Taehyung laugh.
Yoongi loved making Taehyung laugh. He loved the way the sound of it made him want to be braver in public, to let go a little more.
Yoongi hadn’t quite understood the depths of how alone he’d felt until after Taehyung. The way he hadn’t had anyone who’d been able to appreciate the words and how they tied the seemingly contradictory parts of his life together: the fiery rapper, the literature student, the guy who worked his frustrations out on a basketball court. Once he’d gotten past the vision of the privileged kid that had rubbed Yoongi so far in the wrong direction and understood the ways he'd been hurt, Yoongi had wanted to steal him away somewhere, to protect him and heal him although he didn’t always know how. It wasn’t until he was running down that path that he realized, maybe Taehyung was saving him, too.
There were things Yoongi would never forget. He’d never forget Taehyung tanking his papers half on purpose. The angry dean coldly informing them both that Yoongi was going to be his tutor until his grades went up. The day Taehyung showed up in the library with a fresh bruise blooming on his jaw.
The day they kissed for the first time over books in the exact same place.
The day that Taehyung had shown up at Yoongi’s door with his hands stained and a missed spot of blue on his cheek and started excitedly babbling about how his uncle was furious but he was an art major now and I’d just spent half of his budget for the month on acrylic paint and brushes.
The day Yoongi had been signed to a record label. They day they’d moved into their apartment together and fallen asleep in the middle of a pile of boxes. The day Taehyung had finally hung up the phone on his uncle, looked at Yoongi and simply said, “I’m done.”
The song ended and Yoongi noticed that the more sober people (and a few of the drunker ones) were trickling into the theater. This time, Yoongi was the one to grab Taehyung’s hand and lead him along. Taehyung gave him a sweet and sincere smile.
Yoongi loved who Taehyung had become as he’d had more space to grow into himself. He could be thoughtful and reserved, sometimes responding with non-sequiturs that Yoongi never understood after Taehyung’s mind had skipped fifteen steps down the conversation. And he could be a giant golden retriever of a man, full of energy, gleeful and physically affectionate. It was as though there had always been this strange, brilliant, charming man just beneath the surface, waiting for Yoongi to come along and give him permission to emerge.
A strange man that Yoongi knew would be upset if he missed one of the longest sentences in English literature.
The auditorium was mostly full by the time they made it through the door and a single actress sat with an open book in front of her in the middle of the stage. Taehyung and Yoongi stood near the back, crowded together with a number of other eager faces, some mouthing along to the words barely noticing the pints still in their hands.
“...and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
In the satisfied sound that filled the auditorium, Taehyung turned to whisper in Yoongi’s ear.
“Yes. Always yes.”
* * *
“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
- James Joyce, Ulysses