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“Hey,” Himchan asks, watching sunlight lazily spills its molten gold into the musky lived-in air “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
Sometimes, a stranger would look familiar to him. Half remembered eyes flicker pass in a crowd, or one of the new freshmen would have a way of smiling that reminds him of something he can’t quite put his finger on. Himchan never paid it much notice – such a thing is common after all. The mind is a wandering thing that stores and loses faces easily.
Meeting Youngjae was the first time he was stabbed with the sense of acute, heartbreaking déjà-vu. An involuntary sharp gasp tightened his ribs. –and, surprised at the sudden expansion of his chest, Himchan bends over with one hand clutching tightly over his lurching heart.
Youngjae had thought he was bowing, and immediately bowed back, spluttering nervously, unsure why his new tutor is behaving so oddly. And then Himchan had gotten embarrassed and bobbed a small bow back – which in turn prompted Youngjae to keep bowing. A third onlooker would have seen two people apparently bobbing their upper bodies up and down like two broken see-saws. By the time they un-flushed enough to look at each other properly, Himchan is desperately searching for--- for something, anything.
The almost comical widening of Youngjae’s eyes was like an oasis to Himchan’s desert of unexplainable panic.
“H-have we met before?” Youngjae asked, and then hurriedly added “Himchan-ssem”
“Please call me hyung.” Himchan said, and risked a smile “I don’t want to feel old just yet.”
The affection he shares with Youngjae is sweet and easy. It comes naturally, like rediscovering a skill mastered in childhood, like remember something that just slipped the mind momentarily. When Youngjae kissed him shyly one late evening after streaming a movie with an obscenely satisfying number of explosions years after Himchan stopped giving guitar lessons for pocket money, it didn’t even occur to Himchan not to kiss back.
Himchan had laughed softly, while Youngjae giggled against his lips. Himchan knew Youngjae probably had three dirty jokes lined up about hyungs that kiss their dongsaengs and will spend the rest of eternity teasing him mercilessly. That’s okay though, because Himchan already had three dirty jokes lined up about dongsaengs that kiss their hyungs, and he was going to exact his revenge as soon as he figured out how to stop kissing Youngjae.
Youngjae sometimes tells him that he has affection to spare – that he’s a sea of fondness and casual touches that the unwarily can drown in.
Himchan doesn’t think that’s true.
There’s a pattern to his madness. He thinks. He can’t help noticing how his closest friends are all people that cause a sweet ache in his soul with their casual familiarity. He bestowed waves upon waves of affection on them because he knows that they’ve learned how to ride his waves instead of sinking in it – because they’ve done this before - tested their push and pull already until their relationships rest easy and deep.
Except Bang Yongguk.
Bang Yongguk is new and exciting. Bang Yongguk talks with a growl underlining each careful word. Bang Yongguk doesn’t break into a smile for days but visibly tries to make himself less intimidating when he passes a small child on the street. Bang Yongguk burns with music and words but can’t speak his thoughts without pausing every few seconds to think. Bang Yongguk who’s ideals are embarrassingly righteous, and his conviction embarrassingly steadfast and who sweeps Himchan up with them anyways because Bang Yongguk talks with a growl underlining the careful words that deliver ideas with a quiet swagger and a sincerity that melts Himchan’s spine.
Himchan gravitated to Yongguk, finds himself laughing softly and bestowing little touches - but the flashes of déjà-vu never comes.
They are both fairly tipsy when Himchan takes off his shirt between kissing and gulping soju mixed with sweet yogurt. Yongguk stops short, startled, as if he wasn’t practically trying to invade Himchan’s mouth and begin a new reign there a mere five seconds prior.
“What.” Himchan says, leaning in and fishing for another kiss. Yongguk might talk like a half crazed poet, but the man kiss like a sandstorm, powerful and urgent, hot and biting and wild.
“I-… wait, Himchan – “ Yongguk holds on to Himchan’s forearms, and grimaces faintly, as if straightening out his thoughts is a deathly difficult task. Himchan deflates slightly, and sits back down on his heels, forearms still trapped in Yongguk’s grip. “-it’s just, you and Youngjae. I don’t know exactly what - but I don’t want to – you know--“
Himchan stares, and then understanding dawns. “Oh. Oh, no. No. I love Youngjae and everything, like, it’s different. I’ll always like, love him, but like it’s not like, loving him? Like, I don’t Love him, with a capital L there – “ Himchan stops, running out of breath. He can’t seem to stop staring at Yongguk’s lips. His fingers are going numb at how tightly Yongguk is gripping his arms.
“Anyways, I don’t sleep with Youngjae.” Himchan finishes.
“-anymore.” He adds, because he is, basically, honest. Damn this alcohol.
“Nowadays it’s mainly Daehyun.” he can’t seem to stop talking.
“Or Seulgi.” He pries his arms out of Yongguk’s grip. “Look, I can see you’re not interested anymore. Let’s just, forget this ever happened, yeah?”
“Wait, Himchan-“ Yongguk grabs his face this time, effectively stopping Himchan short because he’s so close. Oh god. “Himchannie, I’m – interested. But, well, you sleep with people you like, right?”
“What? Of course I like - ?” Himchan splutters, “The whole point of friends with benefits, is that there’s friends and, well, benefits. But yeah, friends. First I mean. Friends first.”
Yongguk gives him a long look. “I might like you a bit more than that.”
That sobers Himchan right up.
Something bizarre is happening to his intestines, and whatever it is making his face tense up in strange ways. Whatever Yongguk sees there makes him let go of Himchan and look away. One hand comes up to run through his hair shallowly as he says “I thought that you should to know, before we…rush into anything.”
"Uhn” Intelligent use of words, Himchan. Very good job. “yes. Ok.”
Amazingly, Yongguk chuckles. Himchan catches him sneaking a glance back at him, eyes sweeping over Himchan’s increasingly flushed cheeks “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“Give a man a minute, okay?” Himchan mutters, and then moves back into Yongguk’s personal space “…Alright I -- I want you to fuck me.” he says seriously - because he’s an honest drunk - a trait that Himchan considers to be a source of valuable information in others but a terrible character flaw in himself. “I’ve wanted, for a while-“
He stops because he’s still staring at Yongguk’s lips and his thoughts are completely derailed as Yongguk’s bottom lip pulsed at his words. Honest to god pulsed.
Himchan had to cough to get his own attention back to the matter at hand. “But – it’s just, sex. Yeah? You have to understand. I have considerable affection for you, but like, fucking isn’t the same as a confession? Like this isn’t a ‘getting together’ thing, it’s a -”
“Fuck-buddy thing?” Yongguk supplies, smiling loppily and letting Himchan’s wandering hands lift his shirt off his chest and allows Himchan’s questing fingers trace reverently over the lines of ink splattered there.
“I was going to say, an intimate exploration of casual sexuality between two people who have considerable affection for each other, Mr. Lyricalist” Himchan says reproachfully.
Yongguk snorts, and then attaches his mouth to Himchan’s neck.
“Wait, like, you have to understand before –“
“I understand.” Yongguk says against his neck “I will not monopolize.”
“You’re – you will be okay with this?” Himchan asks, incredulous.
“You should” Yongguk, smiling, whispers the words onto Himchan’s lips “try living in the now.”
And then he kisses him again.
He never tells Yongguk about those painfully tender moments of déjà-vu.
Once, for laughs, he and Seulgi went on a date, even though both know that their attraction to each other is purely physical, and their affection for each other purely platonic. Even as Himchan made two coffees in Seulgi’s small kitchen the next morning as she slept, even as he nudged her awake with teasing and tickling – even then he knows that they have an understanding, that they are not meant for each other. Not as lovers.
And yet, Himchan can remember loving her. Their play date was filled with moments of half remembrance. He ruffled her hair and thought – I’ve been here before. They walked hand in hand next to the river and Himchan thought of trees, a dirt path, white silk. In his mind’s eye he can see a faded echo of bellowing whiteness around Seulgi’s beautiful, happy face.
Faintly, he can remember loving her. But the memory is as like the real thing as floorplans are to architecture.
Himchan suspects that he might be becoming agonizingly in love with Bang Yongguk, and that is a problem. It’s a problem because he never tells Yongguk about those painfully tender moments of déjà-vu. It’s a problem because Himchan doesn’t know why he never felt that disconcerting feeling of warm familiarity with Yongguk.
The next time they got drunk, it’s at Himchan’s place, during a rare afternoon when neither of them has anything else to do. They drink a little, and fool around a little, and Himchan thrums the hours away on his guitar and practices a bit of drumming and Yongguk graces Himchan’s apartment with his voice rolling smoothly over melodies and then they drink a little more.
Late afternoon finds Himchan nicely buzzed, sprawled on the ground against the couch that Yongguk took over. It’s that time when the sun has already disappeared, but its presence is still felt. The room is filled with the tentative darkness that seems to glow with the embarrassment of having to replace the wondrous play of rouges and blues the sunset had bestowed. – Glowing darkness sounds right, Himchan thinks as he sips at his beer – if darkness can glow, then this is it. If gloom can drape itself in warm blankets, then this is it.
Soon it would be the true darkness that would require Himchan to get up and turn on the LED lightsbulbs that Yongguk brought over one day. He had insisted on switching out Himchan’s old lightbulbs, because Yongguk may look like a teenage delinquent, but he is a new-age constructionist revolutionary at heart and a sixty-year-old pacifist Zen environmentalist in the soul. The LED lights are efficient and power saving and give a light that is easy on the eyes – but they will chase away this warm, blushing darkness and ruin the mood. Or perhaps Himchan will not turn on the lights at all. After all, in another ten hours, it will be dawn again.
Himchan watches the darkness slowly gain its confidence.
“Hey,” He’s too hazy with alcohol and too comfortable in this welcoming gloom to sit up, so he settles for nuzzling his face into Yongguk’s palm that’s conveniently right there. “hey, do you believe in reincarnation?”
Yongguk’s hand begins to stroke his cheek, quite absentmindedly, it seems. With some admiration, Himchan realises that Bang Yongguk, writer of harsh rhymes, is actually pondering the question seriously.
“I don’t know.” Yongguk says. His thin fingers gently take up a strand of hair near Himchan’s temple and then weave it between thumb and forefinger. “I don’t really like the idea of predestination. But reincarnation, it’s not quite the same, and – it’s a theory with merit.”
“wha-“ Himchan says dumbly. He blinks up at Yongguk’s still pensive expression. Yongguk takes a draft of beer. So does Himchan, carefully to make sure he doesn’t dislodge Yongguk’s hand, which is still resting warmly over the right side of his face.
“I mean, it’s a theory I would like to be true.”
“I thought you’d be all over the karma thing. You know, the evil people come back as pigs, or whatever.”
Yongguk chuckles, slow and slurred with alcohol. “Poetic justice is… very satisfying. But, satisfaction and … morality, it’s not the same. Yeah? Like, to return and live again, different but the same – it’s like humans have a chance to … accumulate understanding. Like we can experience the whole spectrum of causality and –“He trails off, sipping beer and staring into the middle distance and caressing Himchan’s face like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do while philosophizing about mortality.
Himchan suspects he might be agonizingly in love with Bang Yongguk. And it might be a problem. But then, it might not.
Himchan wakes with Yongguk’s snoring mass flopped over him. Sprawled chest to chest, Yongguk’s head is resting just under his chin and he’s drooling slightly on his shoulder. It is slightly too warm and Himchan’s right leg is falling asleep and sending little twinges of discomfort up his spine sporadically. And yet, Himchan cannot think of any other situation he’d rather be in. There needs to be a word, Himchan muses, to describe that feeling of bliss even when the body is not entirely relaxed – that muzzy happiness that occurs just after escaping the clutches of sleep and the just before the consciousness kicks in. There needs to be a word that describes that moment when the body is still sore from inactivity but knows that nothing during the day will come close to this moment of comfort.
Himchan imagines time as a line of tiny moments like this one. Each small but full of detail, one moment after another, marching over the point of history marked “the present”.
Live in the now.
It seems that he’s always living in anticipation. Most of his waking moments are spent unconsciously pondering the future and the infamous uncertainty principle. He’s plagued by pockets of anticipatory dread, randomized guilt and nervous expectation. Maybe this is what Yongguk means. Live each second comfortably. Do the things that are right for the present, instead of doing things to make the future more tolerable.
Live in the now. Be the architect of his own causality.
Himchan thinks of his multitude of friends. And then he thinks of the precious few that he opened his heart to, each one inexplicably familiar to him in the soul.
He found a safety net the familiarity of Jongup’s lopsided smiles, the way Seulgi bites her lip when thinking, Daehyun’s laughter full of vowels, Jieun’s little head shakes, Junhong’s inability to do anything the easy way, and Hyosung’s unwavering confidence. And he realizes. He chooses them now, because he chose them then. He trusts them with his precious heart, because deep in his soul he knows they’ve already proven their trust. They loved him, in another lifetime, and he them. They had. So they will. Past. Future.
It’s not a bad way to live. It’s quite a good way, actually, completely comfortable in his trust. But now, Himchan is faced with a ‘now’. Well, lying under a sleeping ‘now’.
Maybe it’s high time to try something new. To immerse himself in the present. Weave himself a new net.
He unthinkingly wraps himself, octopus like, around Yongguk. Himchan tightens his muscles, then relaxes, feeling his limbs loosen up beautifully. Yongguk grunts slightly against him, and gives his collarbone a half hearted bite to show his displeasure at being woken. Then he lifts his jaw and give Himchan’s throat a longer, more thoughtful scrap of teeth and tongue. Yongguk is bitier than a teething baby – a fact evidenced by teeth marks throbbing cheerfully on the back of Himchan’s shoulders from the night before.
Somewhere behind Yongguk’s curtains dawn is happening.
“Hey,” Himchan asks, watching sunlight lazily spills its molten gold into the musky lived-in air “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
Yongguk mutters something indistinct into the hollows of his throat.
Himchan drags him up so they can kiss properly. “because I think I might need a second lifetime just to live with you.”
Yongguk kisses like an on-coming storm. Powerful and rolling, heavy and blanketing, steady and urgent.
Then, he laughs low and warm against Himchan’s cheek. “That was so soppy, Chan.”
When he looks down at Himchan, his eyes are sleepy and pleased. “-but, you mean it? You’ve decided?”
Himchan leans up to taste the storm again, his smile small and sweet and sincere.