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Lee Minho knew too well what it is to suffer.
He could feel his thoughts running circles in his head, ricocheting off his skull, piercing his mind. An endless ping-pong battle, running back and forth back and forth back and forth to each side of the court to keep playing this sick game with himself. Running, running, running.
A million charged, scattered thoughts, denting the flimsy walls of his mind as they ricocheted, leaving their little bullet marks on the soft stone, on cracks haphazardly patched up by sweetened smiles and upturned eyes. Sweet, sickly sweet, sour.
It didn’t matter how many concerned but loving glances were sent his way, how many fleeting touches and back-hug crushes his family afforded him. Not when he knew all too well the truth that lay behind their eyes. Their words had long ago dug under his skin, shooting tendrils of red-hot, seething hate into his veins, poisoning his mind.
Or maybe it wasn’t quite so their words. For if you asked Lee Minho to pinpoint a moment, a phrase, the first drop of poison (soon to come steadily), he would draw up a blank. For there was no pinpointing he could do in this hazy maze of his mind.
Or, no - his parents were really nothing but kind. When Lee Minho went walking along beach shores, looking for sea glass - as he seemed to enjoy doing - his parents would startle! given a fright, for (though he was not a mischievous child) he would always have to sneak out if he wanted to collect his seaglass. His parents would find him, wind shuddering through him, the sea crying from his fingers, his seaglass not fitting with his missing piece. His parents would clutch his wrists, pull him back with red-stained fingerprints, for he may be swept up by the sea, too, caught up in its wind.
Lee Minho used to love the wind. He loved when his parents had him hand in hand, swung their arms back and – wee! His wind would surge, and though his fingers would shake and his palms would ache, he let it run through him, breathe life into his moving lungs and he would fly, fly, and – when his parents would drop him, the wind would catch him, hold him close, hold him up, up, up far away, up past the world, past the clouds, all the way up to the stars.
He truly felt he could do anything, be anything he could possibly dream of. He would be an astronaut. He would giggle, overcome with glee. His parents called him their little stardust.
Sometimes he couldn’t help but lay awake at night, the incessant running of thoughts in his mind urging him to question where exactly it all went wrong. On nights like those, he clawed at his silk cotton pillows for comfort, clutching it as if the tighter he hugged, the fuller his empty chest would feel, lusting for a dreamland that could coddle him from his own inescapable reality.
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Click. Click. Click.
His hooves hit the ground frantically in a relentless routine. The wind ran through his tangled mane as he ran, ran, ran, propelling himself forward with every ounce of desperation and pure, unfiltered fear he could summon.
But he wasn’t fast enough.
Bam!
An explosive shot rang through the air, piercing his eardrums with its shrill sound. The bullet hit his front left leg. It fell to the ground with a sickening crunch, his flesh burning and withering, suffusing the air with its sickly scent.
Blood hit the ground. Pat, pat, pat.
But he kept running.
If he focused hard enough, if he focused on nothing at all, he couldn’t feel the pain. So, he ran on.
Bam!
His right hind leg was the next to go, staying attached to his body by his charred skin before tearing away, leaving a gaping, dripping wound.
As he struggled to keep pace, he teetered back and forth, ears ringing and hooves jingling, his ripped flesh his robes and his ichor his bright red nose. He has a job to do. Was he not entertaining enough yet? That wouldn’t do.
Ha, ha, ha.
And so he ran on.
Bam!
His left hind leg tore off his rushing flame, gushing his life from his body. He hit the ground. His blood squelched underneath him as his suppressed pain came crashing down on him, a tsunami on his senses, sending rockets of white-hot pain through his bones, whiting out his vision. Any remaining oxygen was knocked out of his lungs, his throat closing up, his body collapsing in on itself, flesh falling and meeting with the ground.
His last leg reached out, dragging his corpse forward against the serrated rocks, ripping open his flesh. His leg trembled violently with the effort, shooting rockets of pain up his spine as he struggled to cope with the weight of it all.
He ran on.
Inch. Collapse. Inch. Collapse.
He made his way forward.
But–
Bam.
His last limb was gone.
Squirming back and forth, like a fish on dry land, he discovered he could not progress further, no matter how hard he tried to slam his broken, bleeding body onto the stone hard land.
Caught on the rocks, his heart tore out of his splintering ribcage, arteries and veins tugging and pulling free like a twisted puzzle, and splattered onto the ground beneath him.
So there he stayed, marinating in a pool of blood and regret, staining the ground ruby red.
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It’s not that he didn’t love his family. No, no, he certainly did – a tantalizing ache that had long settled deep into his bones, making them creaky and weary with exhaustion. A dried up piece of wood, soft and brittle. Maybe that was just how he loved.
They were his gasoline, but he was the fire.
What do you do when you were only born to destroy?
It seemed everywhere Lee Minho went, he left ashes in his wake.
He tried his best, he really did. He didn’t quite understand why that didn’t seem to work. His friends did seem to, though. Like angels, they were, enlightened one by one - rising to the sky, leaving him on earth.
All he ever wanted was to be loved, but the devil doesn’t love.
He burns.
He reminded himself he was the monster.
He would wake just to make his mother’s favorite scrambled eggs, which she loved from her mother, but never from him, and he would hand her her plate and she would smile, and he would smile, and it never fixed the venom behind their eyes, never satiated the poison running through his veins.
It all made him so inexplicably, irrevocably angry.
Their invasive questions of faux concern and overly cheery jokes and laughs that blatantly dripped with concealed disgust. They swarmed around him like angry wasps, fueling the static bzzzzzz in his head that seemed to be growing louder every day. Every smile stung more than slaps to the face ever could, every praise laced with more venom than their screams. Actions that once filled him with love and warmth now only served to further ice over his heart, to stack his walls up so high the stars dared not to show themselves above. He was an ironclad fortress, an emperor sat up in his forbidden city holding close only his golden goblets and diamond-etched daggers. Except no, he was Lee Minho. And he had nothing.
But he smiled through the pain, because what would he be otherwise?
He was a lie. That’s all he was - an amalgamation of his parent’s failed prospects, of expressions and comments and behaviors all specially curated to best please their prying eyes.
All of it was built on a mountain of lies, and he was well damned to be the one to take the fall when it all came crashing down on him. He was a ticking time bomb, every overthought word, gesture, action pushing him closer and closer to the edge.
Atlas carried the world on his shoulders, however bruised and battered. Damned to submission. A meager hope of something better to come, if you could manage to fantasize so. A job to do. Could, should, would.
How does one keep going?
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Hold my hand, please. Just this once. Take my poison and make it your own. Cradle my fragile body, envelop me in your sweet little lies.
Take the pain away. Shield me with your grasp, hold me away from the prying eyes of the world. Make me feel small, make me feel worthless. Become my oxygen, let my lungs fill with black, empty promises when I’m with you.
Be my guiding star, be my fallen angel. Be my undying curse, damned to brand my soul till I die.
Be my drug. Invade my mind, invade my senses. Leave me always craving more, never satiating the monster you grew inside me.
Take the budding life inside of me and make it your own. Shatter me, bruise me, abuse me. Throw me away and pick up the pieces, tenderly fumbling to piece them together. Kill my starlit dreams with your love.
Hold me, until all that’s left is fallen stardust.
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He lays there, staring up at the vast, endless sky above him, a million twinkling stars gazing back at him, welcoming him to join them. There was something so comforting about the stars, so constant in their twinkling. We’ll be right here if you need us, their little lights spoke. He would have loved to be someone’s constant, but it was too late for that. He loved tracing patterns with the stars, art flowing from his fingers. Maybe up there, in the sky, he could be someone’s star. Maybe he would belong there.
His art breathed its life - inked the ground with its colors, pushing him up, up, up. It swirled, it danced, it wrapped him in its wretched song.
He closed his eyes, and took a breath for the first time.
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“Hey Mom and Dad,
So, I’m sorry it had to be this way, but know that I never meant to cause you any pain. And know that the pain will be worth it, and you’ll move forward eventually.
Every time you miss me, just look up at the sky.
I’ll be watching over you! So don’t worry, because there’s finally nothing to worry about anymore. It’s all okay.
Please move on — I love you dearly, and I hate to see you suffer.
Love,
Your little stardust, Minho”
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Raising a child is a lot like glassmaking.
Once you’ve heated your materials, fine-picked and pristine, you get your liquid glass to sculpt into your mold, soon to send off to the world to see.
You’ve got some time, to play with it and shape it, to smooth out as many imperfections as you humanly can.
But at a certain point, the glass breaks.
They were persistent, though, throwing and molding, pushing and pulling in a determined haze, till too many fissures to count had spread all throughout their creation.
It shattered.
Frantically, they sought to put their glass back together. They searched for the missing pieces, gluing and gluing over shattered ends and cracks, until at last, they had reassembled their creation –
Into what, they couldn’t know.
The glass would never be the same. Would never be perfect, finished and polished.
But they believed.
Their precious glass was broken.
Their precious glass was a starry night sky, fluffy clouds of glue and cracked stardust.
Maybe it hurts, to see the object of your time, your costs, your care, become nothing more than wasted goods, unusable and irreparable. Maybe, it’s hard to form new realities when all you had ever pictured was your old fantasies. Maybe, when all you look through is what’s distorted, what you see becomes your only comprehensible reality.
Maybe, it’s just easier to pretend.