am i missing?
( txt >> pcy. ) why didn’t you tell me sooner?
the only thing that byun baekhyun carries close to his heart is his cell phone. he’s never placed much faith in objects before, never really cared about leaving things behind but his phone is the last memory he has of seoul, the last memory he has of park chanyeol and everything that made the city home. he misses the way jiho used to write him notes on sticky paper, going to work at the library and going home in the early evening.
he misses the way he’d curl into chanyeol’s side at night and feel comforted by the way his arm rested on his hips, the way they’d get closer in the middle of the night. and god he misses puck and usher, the way they’d wrap themselves at his feet when they’re hungry and the way puck would crawl into his lap when chanyeol was watching just to make him annoyed. but most of all, he misses the way park chanyeol is like his favourite book he couldn’t take on the plane.
sometimes, baekhyun wonders why he still thinks about chanyeol as much as he does, but then again, falling in love ( or out of it ) is never easy. a part of him thinks that he’ll never be over this. that’s what really falling in love means.
so he keeps his phone as a constant reminder. text messages that he can’t answer, a selca that chanyeol forced him to take with an arm wrapped around his shoulder -- baekhyun’s treasured memories of the one place that gave him the feeling of safety. even though he doesn’t have the will to respond to these texts, these calls from people in a country far away, sometimes he lays in bed at night and scrolls through them, wondering where he is and why he left and byun baekhyun, i miss you.
text messages from chanyeol are the worst.
he reads those with tears in his eyes, their relationship from beginning to end and even what he gets as a post script to once upon a time. because chanyeol still leaves him messages that baekhyun can’t respond to, no matter how much his fingers are itching to spell out words like “ i love you” and “ i wish you were here”. he’ll never be able to say those things. baekhyun hates himself for that almost as much as he hates himself for leaving.
and so he realizes that he’s changed a lot more than he expected in a mere few months. then he remembers that falling in love will really do that to you. he doesn’t know why he couldn’t change enough for park chanyeol, why he put that book back on its shelf and walked away without the shiny copy. park chanyeol is byun baekhyun’s regret and the sadness in his smiles when he jumps from seoul to the city of versailles, seeing different places and different people but none of it feels right. because he always has to keep looking over his shoulder and instead of a man with a too -wide smile, he only sees fear and trepidation behind him. there is no more safety.
his phone buzzes.
( txt >> pcy. ) i’ll wait for you to get back.
and that’s when baekhyun realizes that he can’t take the running anymore.