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your sister’s really cute, you must love her very much.
i mean, if you have someone you want to protect, maybe life would be more joyful.
maybe i.. want someone like that too.
Jian Yi thinks he might like to have someone he wants to protect. Or maybe it’s that he wants to be in that position. Maybe he wants to be the light falling into a room, reflecting off a pane of glass, and to have those eyes looking at him - the shine.
He feels like glowing would be nice, instead of this dull dimness. The shadowed path of all the things that can’t be said. Maybe he would like to be a star, the sun, a bright conflagration showering those watching eyes in light and all the rest of him in warmth. Maybe, just maybe he would like to tumble like a benediction into his life, a cascade of everything he wishes he could be. It’s in the way he hurls himself into his hands again and again, hoping to be caught, hoping to be taken as a gift.
if you ever fail to return, i will never forgive you.
Xixi clutches the back of his head, like he’s falling, like he’ll disappear beneath the grey waters, some nameless deep yawning below. His fingers bore into his skull, like he wants to reach right through the cold mist of Jian Yi and dig his pulsing heart out of the dense wet ground inside.
Cold, resurrectionless clay. The bedrock of a light that burns at both ends. Too dim, is what he is. But Jian Yi thinks he might like to let go, to explode into a million points of light across the sky. Jian Yi thinks that maybe.. maybe he would like to dazzle, to catch his eyes like a gift of light over the mountain, forever and ever. To blind him to anything else.
Jian Yi thinks he might like to fall without burning up on the way down, but isn’t it a beautiful way to die? Maybe he just wants him to look, to see the flames.
do you like me? is it that kind of like?
Jian Yi thinks he might just die from how all the air is sucked out of the room, the way Xixi just sets off an entire hydrogen bomb, no hesitation. Blinding light and the deafening whoosh of all the air leaving the world at once. His heart bleeding out the tips of his fingers. Impossible fractals of time spinning out in every direction, echoing with silence. Jian Yi thinks he might never be able to say another word ever again, except they’re already crowding his throat, his pounding heart caught behind his teeth. Like a bite from a poisoned apple.
Maybe if he could just sleep for a thousand years his heart won’t fracture, won’t break apart like an overripe fruit tumbling from his hand, seeds spilling out across the fused glass earth of the ground. All the pointless dreams gathering like dust bunnies in his empty head, his courage whispering sand between his fingers.
Jian Yi thinks that maybe, maybe he would like to stop time. Or jump forward, far forward, maybe right to the epilogue, the handful of dirt dropped and spattering across his box of lies. The quiet strain of longing rising into loud elegy. He sits behind the closed door of himself, and the space is full of time running out.
Jian Yi thinks that he might not have the spark to ignite anything as bright as what just wiped out the biggest dream he’s ever held. Maybe it’s true, maybe he is the wrong shape for catching, for being caught. But he thinks he’s going to jump all the same.