SINKING
It’s the tipping point of the night. A suspension in time that feels sharper, more pointed, than a knife’s edge: to give up to the oncoming sobriety or press onward to no return. Safe or sorry. Doesn’t feel like she gives herself much of a choice, really, what with the drink still in her hand, a cheap-hotel-wine taste lingering in the back of her throat. Nobody’s judging — they’re all nursing bottles of their own.
There’s an uneasiness in the air that follows her movements. It’s hard to say why, exactly: here she is, at a party surrounded by friends, catching up and winding down from the schedules that keep them absorbed nearly all the time. At a comfortable, hazy kind of drunk that suits the mood — save for the fact that the ‘mood’ hasn’t really been there at all, vanishing in the foreboding that drags her shoulders downwards.
Because there is a boy, and he is all kinds of trouble. And she’s always been aware of it, up to the neck in it, a steady light in his turbulence. Even in the bustle of the party, she’s keenly aware of his brewing storm. Jiyong’s unique like that — someone that carries a hurricane in his heart, and she can only sit and get caught in it, in him. It’s less of a surprise than it is just another part of the cycle for her to receive a message from him. Short, decidedly not sweet, but wholeheartedly Jiyong in its contents, its meaning: self-destruction. She reads it and thinks: thank god for the hotel mini-bar. He’ll need it.
She finds him in the coat room, head in his hands and a hole in his heart. It never gets easier seeing him like this — always twists her chest and hollows out her stomach, makes her want to hide them both away from a world that spins too fast for the both of them. So many things she bites down on with her teeth, words she wishes she could say: that it would be easier, maybe, if it was just us two.
But they hadn’t wanted easier — she hadn’t wanted easier.
So here they are.
An offering: a half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio and the company of an old friend. She sits besides him, stretches her legs out and leans against him, feels his warmth. “So,” she says, unreasonably bright in the face of his pity-party, “you fucked up. Shit happens. What else did you think was going to come out of what you’ve been doing for the past month?” Mona softens then, pressing her cheek into his shoulder, a poor form of consolation, but the only thing to do. “You’ve got to stop shooting yourself in the foot like this. Don’t you think you deserve to be happy? For once?”
Chile ‘19 — @idjiyong