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Four of my biggest mistakes that bled into each other. Four facets of one larger falling: no one cared for Jung Wooyoung, not even myself.
Kim Hongjoong
A ringleader, a bully, a sadist. Three things I knew immediately. A ringleader, a bully, a sadist. Three knives I found in my chest. I think I may have liked Kim Hongjoong once and maybe in some other reality we actually got together. As for this reality, we were kids, and he was cruel just as kids are. Kim Hongjoong wanted me dead, yet my mind couldn’t let him go. I wanted it to stop. I wanted him to stop. I stopped wanting to live. I let myself fall hard, and all he did was kick me while I was down. At my lowest, there was still nothing but hellfire behind his eyes and he wouldn’t rest until I was resting in the burning brimstone with him. His name was choked out of my vocabulary for years and the sight of him to this day brings nothing but memories of the pain he caused me. Kim Hongjoong hated me, yet the butterflies never died. I live mortified in that truth. He stuck three knives in my chest and I smiled, mouthed “Thank you”.
Song Mingi
Brutish. That’s all he was. He sought power over me knowing the damage Hongjoong had done. He mistook me for weak, but I was simply permissive. He had a lust for my body. I let him have it because he was enjoying my cage, it almost felt gilded. I was the star. I was his attention. He had a fetish, I had what he wanted. I rented my body to him and gave my mind a break from all the thoughts of hatred I had towards myself. He was selfish. Truly a predator, all he wanted was a doll. I didn’t say no, I couldn’t say no. He wanted to break me into pieces. When I finally stood up for myself, the world I knew and the people I cared about shattered around me. I was alone. I was scarred. I was burned. And no one knew it. Song Mingi shot my love life in the chest, yet left me holding the smoking gun.
Choi San
He was supposed to be a perfect match, a Yin to my Yang. But we turned out to be more like two of the same half and left a hole in each other that neither could bend to fill. He was supposed to be who he said he was, a strong protector type with a kind heart that was bleeding to love me and only me. But Choi San was never a mountain, he was a pile of quicksand, leaning on him just made me sink into the depths of him and myself. I learned who I was through sinking and suffocating through what he wanted me to be. When I failed, I had lungs full of mud and false hope and a heart full of disappointment.
San looked to the past and called his shadow his mirror. Coincidentally, he only loved me in the shadows, like Mingi, he only loved me in his shame. I wasn’t supposed to be seen, heard, talked about. One of the most outwardly loving people I knew, one who gushed about everyone he dated nonstop, couldn't spare an ounce of that energy for Jung Wooyoung. He was embarrassed to be around me because he couldn't control me like the rest of them. I was his boyfriend, but I wasn’t his bitch, I wasn't his slave. I didn’t fold and call him daddy. I didn’t want him to fold me and fuck me until I submitted.
I realized his open admiration came with requirements I simply didn’t meet. He tried to force me to meet them and when I stood my ground, he left. This, along with this unending undercurrent of unusual emptiness made me feel disillusioned with my understanding of myself. There was something missing from him that even in his most saccharine moments, there was something that felt fundamentally wrong with this whole situation. There was something fundamentally wrong with me. I wasn’t meant to love him. He was my boyfriend. And I realized I didn’t love him at all. I loved the idea of this perfect match, what Hongjoong was supposed to be, just for me to realize, I never liked Hongjoong at all. I never loved any of them. I liked the perfect ideal of what I wanted them to be. But they never were, they never could be.
My expectations were too high and in my delusion I accepted treatment from hell. San ended the relationship when he realized I would never meet his requirements. The pain of disappointing him stung, the pain of my whole perception of myself being shattered killed me. For months, I couldn’t be me until I reconstructed who that was. And who I made was someone who I thought could never be shattered like that again.
Park Seonghwa
Knowing who I was hurt him. Stabbed him. Left him to bleed. Standing in who I knew myself to be made Seonghwa bleed out: was saying who I was really the best idea? Watching him bleed out after confessing his love for me was making me reconsider. Maybe I could be who he wanted me to be, just so that he could feel nicer. Place a bandaid over that bullet wound and let his heart bleed all over me. It was the best solution I could think of. It was the worst decision I’ve ever made. I gave that mouse a cookie and the slightest bit of vulnerability and he became entitled to the whole bakery.
I trusted him with something I hadn’t dared to with all who came before, I confessed all the struggles I had with my eating disorder. The one I almost let kill me when Hongjoong wanted me gone. The same one that made my mind want to shut off and take a much needed break when Mingi just wanted a way in. The same one that I wanted to tell San about when I thought he was my perfect match. I told him in a moment of trying to comfort him. He gave me a confession, I gave him my undoing. I didn’t want to be saved from this disorder, I don’t want to be saved at all. But in that moment, I became his project and my will no longer mattered. I told him at the beginning it was just a small secret. I could handle myself. I didn’t want him to do anything. I am unfixable. I was complacent, it’s not a problem, it’s not his problem. But he didn’t like that, he insisted that he was just a “good friend” and wanted to help. When I told him that being a good friend to me meant letting me have my own space to handle myself, he didn’t like it at all.
From then on, in all aspects of life, he found me wholly incompetent. He needed to know what I was doing at all times, who I was with and why. He was overbearing, consistently overstepping his bounds, and whenever I brought it up, he would just say “It’s because I love you. Why won’t you just let me love you?” He wanted full control over my life and everything I did because he “saw something greater” within me that he wanted to realize. When I reminded him I wasn’t his personal project he again rejected the idea that he was treating me like a doll that he could dress how he wanted, talk to how he wanted, and could see in whatever state of undress that he desired.
He wanted full control over me to fill his desires. He was just like Mingi, but this time he truly believed he loved me.
He believed his own hype, he thought he was this gushing bleeding heart full of compassion only for me. He was just like San, but this time fucking wasn’t his only goal.
He felt entitled to my body, to feel and undress me whenever he desired, to request more and more until I couldn’t take it anymore. My mind couldn’t even escape myself in hedonistic shut down anymore. It was no longer an occasion to let myself be defiled. He violated me with impunity and it only made me crawl into myself further.
No matter how much he claimed to love me, nothing could soothe this endless feeling of being violated over and over. Clothes being pushed off of me, hands being shoved under clothes. It was all too real, too physical. With Mingi, it was pictures and videos, those truly meant nothing to me. With San it was all long distance, he couldn’t actually do any of the things he detailed. But Seonghwa was right in front of me, holding me down and kissing me all over as I stared at the ceiling and begged for it to stop. As he pulled off my clothes for the thousandth time, I felt nothing. It was an agonizing burn as he would plunge his hands into my pants just to feel all the parts of me I wanted to keep to myself. No matter how innocent it started, this is always where it ended.
There was only one line I was vocal about never crossing, yet he tried it every time. I gave that mouse a cookie, and he tried to devour me whole.
But why is Kang Yeosang different?
He loves me this time, I promise.