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“and i don’t wanna live that waaaay! reading into every word you saaaaay!” jisoo kim snatches the microphone off my grip and continues on. “you said that you could let it go, and i wouldn’t catch you hung up on somebody that you used to knooooow!”
my grip encircles back around the microphone but this time cradling jisoo’s hand as we scream the chorus simultaneously. perspiration drips out of my forehead and i don’t care! not at all! i’m fine just like this, chugging beers i never thought i’d like, and singing breakup songs that i should have been over with a long time ago.
but here i am, still wishing it is over.
“let’s toast, please!” seulgi shouts through our exhilarated spirits thus i pacified myself down to a minimum of 50 percent and sit down beside her. i take a shot glass and offer it to her awaiting bottle of smirnoff, a baby-pouting look etched on my gorgeous face. she sniggers before pouring, as we both hear a “cheater!” from jisoo who poses the same way i did. she doesn’t have a baby-pout though.
“i have a flight back later at 11 a.m. yet i’m drinking like it’s my last.” i mutter and down the glass with my head held high. “god damn it!” i groan and bring the glass on the table with an alarming “thud”. “shit, is it broken?”
“it’s your last, in here, technically.” smarty seulgi kang responds with a look of something i can’t recognize on her face. “why do you want to drink, anyway? were the bands so bad you had to forget about it?”
jisoo’s body has a mind of its own when she’s drunk so she answers for me: “see sow her eggs with somebody elsa” which didn’t help as i thought it would because seulgi doesn’t understand and i can’t pretend i don’t know because this is about me.
sighing, i move my tongue around to utter the same words, unslurring. “she saw her ex with somebody else, jisoo, two thousand eighteen.” i steal the bottle of smirnoff and drink directly into it, discarding proper etiquette, and, well, sense.
i can’t scratch it off my mind, to no avail. i’m not certain i can drown it either.
i don’t want to be happy for her.
i’m responsible for this, i own this — her taut arm draped around her shoulder, the light head bump, the soft smile. all of them for her new girl.
it is unfair, and i want her to think the same.
how dare she tranfix her entire attention to a fragile body of a woman unaware that i stare at her with lasers shooting from my eyes? how dare she allow me to witness this love i was promised of but never handed to? how dare she look so lovesick and in awe?
how dare i to not want her to be that way?
“i’ll just wait for the breeze, to carry these words hidden.” the indie band was playing this song a few hours ago, and in those exact words, i thought: no. she should never know. this is all i have left of me. this is all i have left of her.
and right now in this moment of weakness i beg to differ: yes. i want to haunt her. i want to do so like she does to me so effortlessly — and if she flinches when she does, maybe it means she was hurt too.
lisa has to. it is only fair.
and that will come for a long time and maybe it won’t at all. hence i drink straight from the bottle once again. jisoo looks like it doesn’t matter if i am the man who can’t be moved from this couch because of how drunk she is. seulgi doesn’t mind this either, although tipsy, because she considers my feelings like she considers we’d get back in the hotel room in one piece.
surely i’ll complain all the way back to sydney later when i wake up with the worst hangover of my life. yes, i keep track of them. but that will be alright. in fact, it is better than to be awake the whole night sober whilst the GIF of them replays in my head. i won’t allow myself to stomach the fact that she’s sleeping with someone else in their unmade bed as i soberly think about her sleeping with someone else in their unmade bed.
it is better this way. drunk and hurt. and if i let the bruises taint me with the same color it did two years ago, then lisa could only shrug it off and say: my ex drunk texted me.