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The clock reads 1:46 AM. The television mounted on his wall plays a documentary on the reproduction of seahorses. The male carries the young, the narrator explains, his body becoming the place where new life develops. Jiyong turns the volume down. It’s as if he’s being mocked. There is almost something unfair about the way the world has devised for living beings to belong to one another.
In recent years, romance has ceased to be a priority for him. He's too busy, he tells everyone, he couldn’t possibly make the time right now. He doesn't mention Seunghyun. He doesn't talk about loneliness, the persistent fear that perhaps, despite everything, love is simply not something meant for him. He wonders if there are seahorses with the same fate and if they ever feel this way, but he pushes that thought away as soon as it comes. He sounds insane.
In truth, he knows he’s fallen behind everyone else. Youngbae has a family to take care of. Seunghyun has moved on to a simpler life, something easier to accept for most. Even Daesung—whom he drags into his jokes, the ones where he pretends he is capable of being loved—simply plays along. They both know what it is. A joke.
Maybe this is how he copes. By pretending the loneliness is a choice, that the empty space beside him is just another thing he's too busy to fill. That the nights spent alone in his cold, king-sized bed, staring into the dark until his eyes adjust to nothing, are unremarkable. That the hurt in his chest is something he can sleep through, but he knows better than anyone that you can only get so far playing pretend.
Both him and Seunghyun have always known it would never work out, they were never quite given the luxury of an easy beginning. But Jiyong, ever so stubborn, still persisted. So, really, he doesn’t have anyone but himself to blame. He can convince himself that accepting this makes it easier, but you can’t starve the hunger out of existence. He’ll tell himself he’s better now but a dead thing will always be dead and no amount of prayer will bring it back.
He stopped believing in god a long time ago. He remembers the ache in his knees from kneeling more vividly than he remembers the prayers themselves. Still, he drags his gaze from the TV to the twinkling stars scattered across the dark sky, searching for a divinity that has never been there. He’s been looking for a long time. Since he was thirteen, maybe. Back when he still considered that if he wanted something badly enough, someone, somewhere, might hear him.
Perhaps that was the first lesson he learned about faith: you can hope for something with your whole heart and still receive nothing.
Some small, naive part of him used to believe that God wasn’t ignoring him, that he—or she, or whatever else there might be—was simply working on some grand plan to save him. These things take time, after all. And one day, all his troubles would amount to something. It’s all a part of God’s plan. Like his mother would say. One day, he’d look back on it and understand why it had to happen.
Sometimes he would even consider dusting off his bible. That’s when he knows things have gotten really bad.
He doesn't know whether it's God he misses, or the idea that someone might be keeping track of all this, that none of it could possibly be for nothing. It's silly, he realises. He’s not one to rely on others, a lesson learned through years of experience. But there are nights when even the smallest possibility of being heard feels worth the embarrassment of asking.
A knock on his door shocks him out of his thought process. He reaches for the remote and pauses the television. The seahorses linger in his mind ias he drags himself to the door. Normally, he would be full of energy at this time. He wonders if he really is getting old.
The other side reveals a disgruntled Youngbae.
“Why are you up?” He asks. Youngbae doesn’t reply at first, simply pushes past Jiyong and lets himself in. His moves are slightly sluggish and he yawns before turning to face Jiyong.
“You weren’t at rehearsal today, or here,” he says and looks around the apartment, at the unwashed glass on the coffee table and the television he’s just paused, before turning back to Jiyong. “They were looking for you.”
There is something vaguely embarrassing about this, about the idea of people having to look for him at all.
“Sorry,” he says eventually and he means it, mostly. He doesn’t like worrying people and he has spent the better half of his life being the person everyone looks up to that he’s slightly ashamed to be caught in a moment where he cannot even manage the simple business of answering his phone. He's almost forty. He should have figured out how to be alone by now.
That’s the thing he keeps getting wrong, he thinks. He has figured out how to live alone by now. The difference is worth noting.
Youngbae yawns again and rubs at one eye with the heel of his hand and Jiyong wonders if he has dragged him out of bed. It would be just like Youngbae. He has always been like that, even when they were only trainees. Jiyong would utter harsh words and Youngbae would follow with comfort. Where Jiyong could turn a problem over in his head until it became something unrecognisable, Youngbae tended to meet things as they came. He would ask if you’d eaten and he would tell you to go to sleep and he would show up to your doorstep and wait for you to explain yourself.
Sometimes Jiyong envies him for it. For this gentleness that he has managed to sustain despite growing up in the same environment as Jiyong, despite growing up around Yang Hyunsuk. It's not that Jiyong thinks of himself as someone cruel, not anymore at least. But there is something particularly soft about Youngbae that he has never seen in anyone else. But other times, like now, he finds it unbearably annoying.
“What happened?” Youngbae asks. There’s a seriousness to his voice that Jiyong finds unnecessary.
“Nothing.”
Youngbae gives him a look.
“What?” Jiyong says, already feeling the familiar urge to laugh, to make the conversation into something neither of them has to take seriously. He’s never been good at vulnerability. He can go on about work and regrets and childhood and people who have disappointed him and people he has disappointed in return, he can make a joke out of his worst experiences and tell stories about himself that leave nothing to the imagination but ask him about how he's doing now and suddenly he has nothing to say.
“You could’ve told someone.” That is the trouble that comes with Youngbae's concern. He doesn't ask Jiyong for anything he cannot give. Jiyong can do everything asked of him, he does it every day. He answers emails and returns calls, shows up to meetings and remembers birthdays and sends flowers when he knows someone is having a difficult time. Youngbae never requests anything unreasonable, so, Jiyong has a hard time refuting him. He is very good at being there for people.
Unfortunately, Jiyong has never been particularly good at asking anyone to be there for him.
Not that he has much to ask for, in his opinion.
He’s not lacking in friends, not really. Maybe close friends, the kind you can fully open yourself up to, but Jiyong finds that difficult to do with even his own family. So, he decides that's on him. But he has a job he enjoys. He has a home that is too large for one person and a bed that would comfortably fit two. He thinks back to when he bought it, Seunghyun had laughed once at how absurdly large it was. He hadn't known back then that the bed would spend most of it's lifetime half empty.
And yet, he has the sort of life that people congratulate him for, the sort of life people would kill for. He would feel ungrateful to an extent if he were to ask comfort for something like that. There are days where he looks around and thinks he ought to be happy and there are even days when he is, days that have him wondering why he was ever sad in the first place.
But then someone mentions Seunghyun in passing or Jiyong sees a picture or a video he knows he shouldn’t linger on and something in him goes very still. Sometimes he thinks of texting him.
He moves towards the sofa, leaving Youngbae to follow him if he wants. The television is still on and the screen is paused on a pair of seahorses drifting through the water. He can’t remember much of the documentary now, only the strange, unhurried way they moved.
It isn’t that Seunghyun has done anything wrong. Jiyong knows this. He has known for years that there was no promise between them, nothing either of them could reasonably have expected to keep. Whatever they had, whatever it was that neither of them had been brave enough to call anything, belonged to a time when they weren’t in a rush to make a choice. Jiyong had told himself he had time but he never called it waiting, because waiting suggested he was expecting something in return. He had many things of his own to focus on, he wasn't sitting around for Seunghyun.
He picks up the remote and switches the television off.
But Seunghyun has chosen now, apparently. Or perhaps he has just allowed himself to be chosen. And Jiyong is confronted with the embarrassing possibility that he has actually been waiting all this time and that he was the only one waiting. An overwhelming sense of unease fills him when he thinks about it, and then follows guilt at pushing the blame on Seunghyun.
“Are you sick?” Youngbae questions.
“No–”
“Then why didn’t you answer your phone?” He cuts Jiyong off before he can completely finish, as if he already knew the answer.
Jiyong turns the television off and flips the remote over in his hands. There are plenty of answers he could give. He could say he was tired, which is true, or he could say he had a headache. He could even tell him that nothing in particular had happened, that he had woken up in the morning and found himself unwilling to participate in the day, that the feeling had only grown more difficult to explain the longer he sat with it.
None of these answers would be a lie. None of them would be the truth, either. But he isn’t inattentive enough to think Youngbae would believe any of it as an excuse for missing a day of work or for being off his phone. He would come to work with an arm freshly sawed off if he could, with his phone in the other hand.
“I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.” He replies and braces himself for the inevitable lecture, some gentler variation of I don’t think that’s true. He has heard enough of those in his lifetime to recognise one before it begins, many from Youngbae himself. The apartment is cold and he thinks of making a warm cup of coffee right now and he knows what people expect from him when he admits to being unhappy: a reason, preferably a sensible one, and some indication that he intends to do something about it. The same, half-hearted excuse leaves him every time. It's fine. I'll be fine.
But Youngbae only says, “Okay.”
It catches him off guard. “Okay?”
Youngbae raises an eyebrow. “What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing.” Jiyong looks away again, suddenly uncomfortable with the fact that Youngbae has given him exactly what he asked for. He isn't as confident in the face of shock and his cheeks burn from embarrassment.“I don’t know.”
Youngbae sits down beside him. He doesn’t ask another question, and Jiyong is grateful for it the same way he is fairly disappointed because this means he doesn't have the chance to brush Youngbae off with words. There is nothing to argue against, or defend himself against. He'd be inclined to turn this into some type of debt he has to repay later, but he knows that isn't possible with Youngbae.
“Have you eaten?” Youngbae asks.
Jiyong looks up again, startled by the change of topic. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
Youngbae tries to keep his face neutral, but the corners of his mouth bend downwards ever so slightly. “Because you look like you haven’t. Eat something.” He slides his phone out of his pockets and starts looking for somewhere to order from. Jiyong watches him, too tired to object. It is Youngbae’s old habit, this insistence on making something tangible out of a problem that has no obvious solution.
If only life were that simple, Jiyong thinks. But unfortunately, his longing is not as temporary as hunger, he cannot satisfy it and move on. There is no cure to the type of loneliness in which surrounding yourself with people doesn't help. He is afraid that maybe he will spend the entire rest of his life feeling this way and that despite knowing this, he will keep pushing forward, only to find out that it was not worth it after all.
“What are you looking at?” He asks, trying to distract himself from that train of thought before Youngbae notices.
“Food,” Youngbae replies.
Jiyong snorts. “Very informative.”
Youngbae gives him a look, and Jiyong lets out another laugh, it comes easily enough. He has always been good at making a bad night seem unconsequential. Enough of his life has been doing exactly this that it comes as second nature to him, and sometimes he finds that it does actually help him, even if only for a little while. Fake it till you make it, or whatever they say.
The thought reminds him of Seunghyun. Irritatingly enough, everything reminds him of Seunghyun nowadays, even things that have no business to do with him. Like English aphorisms or his own talent in avoiding susceptibility.
He wonders whether Seunghyun ever feels the same way he does, or if he is happy. Perhaps he is. Perhaps Jiyong is the only one stuck in limbo. He hates to admit it, and he hates himself even more for it, but a part of him silently hopes he isn’t the only one. With this comes a sick apprehension of what it says about the kind of person he might be.
He remembers something he had said years ago. If he had been a girl, he would have fallen for Seunghyun on the spot. He remembers everyone laughing when he said it and at some point it occured to him that he had never really been talking about himself falling for Seunghyun, that part had always been easy. He had been talking about the kind of person he had to have been for Seunghyun to love him without having to make a descision about what that love would cost him.
Now Seunghyun has a girlfriend, and Jiyong finds himself thinking about how little explanation a love like that requires. Maybe Seunghyun will go on walks with his girlfriend and he'll hold her hand and kiss her on the cheek or maybe even on the mouth and the ground will not crumble beneath them. And maybe he'll do this again and again and Jiyong will have to live with the reminder of something he could never even dream of having. He thinks he has the right to be mad, not at Seunghyun and not at his girlfriend, but maybe at the rest of the world.
Youngbae turns his phone around to show Jiyong the menu, and they spend several minutes arguing about what to order and It is so ordinary that Jiyong almost feels ashamed of how grateful he is for it. Youngbae doesn’t know that Jiyong has spent the last few minutes imagining a life he was never promised and grieving what was never really his, he only knows his friend had a bad day and needs to eat something, and Jiyong thinks this could be enough for tonight.
After the food arrives, they eat and talk about rehearsal. Youngbae complains about something Daesung did, and Jiyong laughs in all the right places. For a little while, he manages to be present. He is still himself, but every so often he reminds himself: Diplomacy Is King. Ask questions and smile and make jokes and don't think about Seunghyun. He watches as the worry on Youngbae's face subsides almost entirely, and, figuratively, pats himself on the back.
When Youngbae finally gets up to leave, he pauses by the door and studies Jiyong for a moment, as if he wants to say something important. In the end, he only tells him to get some sleep. Jiyong promises him that he will and watches him leave.
The apartment is quiet in Youngbae's absence. It isn't that Jiyong wanted him to stay longer. He knows he has someone waiting for him at home, which is exactly the issue. It seems everyone has somewhere else they belong now.
He cleans up the containers, puts the remote back on the table, and switches the television on. The documentary has moved on to something new. He scrolls back until he finds the seahorses and watches them drift through the water and thinks about how easy it must be to have someone.
He suddenly remembers God again and he thinks about Youngbae showing up at his door, about the food they shared and the things they talked about and he finds himself wondering whether he has been searching for the wrong kind of answer. It doesn’t change anything, of course. Seunghyun is still somewhere else, living a life that Jiyong has minimal place in. There is no grand plan waiting to reveal itself and no promise that the things he has lost will be returned to him in another form.
He has people who love him, he knows this, and he has never been so ungrateful as to mistake his life for one entirely without affection.
Yet there remains a strange sort of distance between being loved and being known. Everyone around him knows a version of himself that's entirely real, but no one knows all of him. He supposes that is the inevitable consequence of his bad living. There are things he had learned to never let anyone see, so he doesn't.
He turns the television off again. As a child, he used to think he would like a life that was entirely his own. This is, in most respects, exactly what he asked for.
Tomorrow, he will go to rehearsal. He will answer his phone. He will text Seunghyun, ask him how he is doing and listen to the other without letting himself look for something that isn’t there, maybe as some kind of apology for his thoughts. He thinks of congratulating Seunghyun on going public with his relationship. He presumes that too could be an apology in its own way.
Tomorrow, he will, once again, return to his life as though nothing has happened, as one usually does.