Work Text:
Time passes. Days bleed into weeks, weeks into months. Outside, the world keeps spinning. Trains hiss into stations, people laugh into phones, sunlight keeps crawling through her blinds. Inside Belle’s apartment, time has frozen. Dust on the shelves thickens. Her coffee mugs turn into small shrines. She stays where he left her, a body in a room, waiting for something that won’t return.
“You smell like strawberries,” he’d said once, stealing a kiss at the top of her head like it was something casual. “I don’t even like them. But I guess I like it when it comes in the form of you.”
She hears it now like a tape glitching, his voice slowed to a ghostly echo. Strawberries. Strawberries. She almost gags when she smells them at the supermarket. Her hands shake on the cart. She leaves without buying anything.
Belle swears her perfume still clings to Dongmin’s old grey hoodie—the one that once smelled like his apartment at 2 a.m. Now she imagines it on someone else’s body. Someone who fits it differently. Someone softer. Someone who doesn’t flinch at the thought of being replaced. She imagines another girl pulling it over her head, and she claws at the fabric of her own shirt until the seams strain. She imagines him tugging it over another girl’s shoulders like a routine he didn’t bother to retire. The sound of fabric sliding over skin, and her stomach folds in on itself.
God, Belle, move on already. She says it out loud now. Sometimes she screams. Sometimes she murmurs it into the sleeve until the cloth is wet.
Outside her window, children cross the street holding their parents’ hands. Cafés open. Someone’s playing a pop song too loud from their car. The city is awake and the world is busy. Inside, Belle’s world is a single room with a phone glow. She scrolls until her thumb cramps. Her stomach knots when his face appears on her screen, smiling brightly like a sky after the rain, like a man who’s learned how to breathe again.
Free. Easy. Unbothered. A man without her.
A man reborn in the wreckage she’s still buried under.
She presses her nails into her palm until little crescents bloom. Red beads rise. It feels good, like proof. A punishment. A penance for everything she had let rot until it all went downhill. She tastes iron when she swallows. Her lips are cracked. Her heart’s still beating but it doesn’t feel like hers anymore.
They ended quietly. No slammed doors, just two voices unraveled in the same room and created a catastrophe. Two sets of lungs tried to breathe different air while tears flowed down the cheeks. She had thought that meant they were both hurting. Now she knows she was the only one left bleeding after he walked out of the fire. He was already elsewhere long before goodbye.
At night, when the walls lean in closer than the sky, she talks to him in her head. The words come out like bruises she can’t stop pressing. There’s no other life, honey. I’m throwing myself into this one. I’m hurting myself in this one. I’m crying over you in this one. Oh, honey, even if I begged, would you ever look at me again?
She presses her palms to her eyes until colors explode—reds, purples, whites—anything to drown out the grey. Sometimes she hits herself lightly on the temple, trying to knock him loose from her brain. She hasn’t told anyone how sleep feels like drowning. She hasn’t told anyone about the marks on her arms from clutching herself too hard. She scrolls through their old messages until the letters swim. She deletes them. She undeletes them. Once she typed his name into the search bar twenty times in a row until her phone died in her hand. She cries until her throat tastes like metal.
The world outside doesn’t care. Neighbors argue about groceries. A delivery bike rattles down the street. The TV next door blares a sitcom laugh track. Somewhere, someone’s falling in love. Somewhere, someone’s touching his hair the way she used to. And the moon rises like it always does, indifferent.
In her head, she edits the reel. The mornings he made her laugh, songs sung off-key, and the way his eyes softened when they found hers. She cuts out the fights, the distance, and the leaving. What’s left is a perfect supercut of a love that never ended and a boy who never walked away.
But reality doesn’t care for beautiful edits. In the real world, he’s moved on. She’s seen it. Someone new texts him goodnight, reminds him to drive safe, laughs at the same jokes Belle used to. Someone whole where she’s cracked. Someone not her. She can see the girl slipping into the spaces Belle left behind—the passenger seat, the late-night calls, the small reminders, the easy laugh.
She hopes, almost bitterly, that the girl is kind. Because Dongmin is kind, too. But there’s a part of her that almost hopes the girl isn’t kind at all, because the idea of someone else being soft where Belle bled feels like salt in the wound.
And maybe she’s gone mad now.
The ceiling above her bed is the same blank white every night. She stares at it until her eyes sting, replaying her favorite version of them—over and over, until it hurts too much to keep watching. Outside her window, the city keeps breathing; inside, she’s holding her breath until her lips go numb. Once, she found herself on the kitchen floor at dawn. She hadn’t slept. She hadn’t eaten. She laughed until she sobbed. She sobbed until she couldn’t make a sound. She looked at her hands and didn’t recognize them.
This is supposed to be her only life, and it’s already fraying at the edges.
She knows she should stop. But stopping feels like erasing him for good, like erasing herself. So, she stays on the edge. Because in her head, they’re still running through the city, laughing, golden in the afterglow.
The world, her world, ended the day he walked away.
But, maybe, maybe, one day she’ll stop opening his name like a wound. But tonight, she’s one breath away from forgetting how to breathe.
If there’s no other life, honey, then let me die in this one—the one where you still love me.