tick, tock
The Fates – all three of them, past, present and future, were right. Life… it’s like a thread. One little tug, and everything could snap, beads falling to the floor never to be recovered again. One little tug – that’s all we’re good for, isn’t it? Just one… little… disruption… Sometimes Baekhyun wonders why he is the centre of it all. Why – and how, he is the knot that’s tied too tight, that no-one can open; or the clasp that clings desperately onto sanity with every passing moment. One could call it the balance, keeping everything steady in the present moment. He ponders this in fleeting moments when time permits him solitude with his thoughts, when the past and the future equalize themselves into the present that is himself. But the equilibrium never does last for long, one extreme trying desperately to win over the middle ground between itself and the other. So as the present, as the man in the middle, the ones whose actions impact both past and future, he finds himself letting go of his thoughts and letting the actions of time lead him where it may. The past. It holds all the secrets that are a part of one, but one wants no part of; all the regret. There’s really never any tribulation in the past, for one soon realizes that it never is to occur again, so celebration of it is futile. Isn’t it? Nothing in the past is ever worth a revisit… is it? There was Kai. And they both were naïve, falling into something they thought was love, a tangled mess of stolen kisses out of public view and staggered breathing at night shielded by disbelieving taboo. Baekhyun doesn’t know whether the relationship – was it ever public enough to be deemed that – was a regret or a celebration. Yes, it made him feel something he had never felt before, and yes, when he heard those three words from Kai it made him realize that there was someplace in which the present was wanted, and not waited on to move and make way for the future. But there were the broken bottles, the arguments, the insecurity. The moments when the present would try to cling desperately onto the past, the past that told him that they were equals. But the present is all but that today, where the Jongin that was the past remains there, with the Kai today shining and letting his limbs carry him to the music, both arts met with unparalleled adulation – maybe the dancer slightly more. There’s always a part of him that will remember Jongin, the past that was them. But there’s always a part that has to let go of the driftwood and let the currents sweep him dangerously down to wherever they please. The only question is if the currents will sweep the driftwood down with him as well. And then the future. A platitude, yes – but no-one knows what it holds. Apprehension, perhaps, is to be felt at whether it will be a reflection of the past in exacerbated agony, or the counterpart to it, the antonym and the conclusion to a happily ever after? Baekhyun does not know if he’s met Chanyeol yet. Physically, yes, the future and him have been acquainted – shared a smile, a laugh, a cup of coffee together. He finds himself longing for the future – on desperate, lonely nights where the tall man is physically close but not close enough, when their arms brush and then there’s cold air where there should be a continuous, mutual warmth. No, Baekhyun hasn’t met the future yet, not in the way he wants to. The present is stuck, frozen there, when it wants to move on with the past hindering its path. Which is exactly what happens when Chanyeol (re)introduces Kai to him as his ‘boyfriend’ – the word was always a little too strange for Baekhyun’s liking, but perhaps he’ll come to terms with it someday – and it’s impossible to miss the connection that crackles between them, two people who’ve never been closer together, where every sideways glance tells a story (even when this concerns the always incomprehensible Chanyeol). He looks at them both, two people he’s knotted in the midst of – the haphazard, disorganized, organic freedom that is Jongin (er… Kai) and the unknown waiting to be tapped into that is Chanyeol. Between them both is a part of him; one, a part that he wants to have forgotten about and amended. That part lies in the parted lips, smoldering gaze and glossy dark hair. But then there’s also a part that he wants to never leave him: that six-foot-two combination of fiery hair and goofy humor, with a dash of realism. That part, is (regrettably) bonded to the rotting wound which never was covered. They say the only way to embrace the future is to accept the past, but when Baekhyun brings himself to look at them together, the past has invaded the future as well and surrounds him. He can’t help but think that Jongin – he’s given up on acclimatizing to Kai – has invaded everything he wants and needs and cherishes, and in those moments alone wonders if Jongin is actually what he wants and needs and cherishes, because hell, he’s fucking everywhere. So when Chanyeol calls him up one night three months later with his low voice even lower and cracking slightly to tell him that (his beloved) Kai and him are no more, Baekhyun can’t help but feel a small dash of relief that the past has finally fallen away. It doesn’t last for long, though, as Jongin rings his doorbell, quiet (surprising, really) and downcast (even more so) and apologises for the ‘total fucking idiot’ he’s been to Baekhyun and that he wants a chance at rewriting it over. And Baekhyun can’t say no, with not the dancing wonder in his hands, but the boy he fell in love with and he was lucky felt the same. Where the past is his future for the present. As for Chanyeol? Baekhyun doesn’t call him back. Realizes that it’s safer in the past, where he knows what’s going to happen in the future. But then Baekhyun’s life lapses into a total repetition of what it was before; the insecurity he can’t help himself feeling, the way Jongin only comes home on the very brink of when the sun’s tipping over the night sky. He stays silent, not wanting it to repeat itself over minute for minute, breath for breath. Their nights are numbered, though. He knows it all too well. So when Jongin doesn’t come home one night, or the night after that, Baekhyun knows he’s not the only one that knows it, and spends the night downtown in Chanyeol’s arms. There is no uncertainty this time, and the warmth – it stays. It stays until Baekhyun finds Chanyeol’s phone on the carpet – full of loving texts to the man he now knows as Kai. It’s funny – when you braid three string together, each strand has to cross over each of the other two at least once. It’s like love – where nothing is onesided, where what one sees is never the truth. Love is deception, a tangled braid of the strand of human longing, and it won’t be too long before it unravels itself, beads of memory clattering to the floor. One little introduction, one little catalyst – it’s funny what one little thing can do… one little feeling. One person. Just one, and you have to start from zero… working from the past, present, into the future until the process rebraids itself again…