The first thing you learned about love was that it lived in other people’s houses. In the way mothers kissed foreheads before school. In the way fathers showed up to things. In the way a family could sit at a dinner table without the silence feeling like a threat.
So you built your own version of it. Borrowed. Secondhand. In the crease of a paperback spine, where the hero always stayed. In the movies you watched with the volume low so no one would ask why you were crying. In your head, mostly—where you could rearrange the ending however you wanted.
You told yourself it was fine. Better, even. Love was a distraction. Love was what kept people stuck, tangled up in someone else’s chaos when they should have been saving themselves. So you didn’t chase it. You ran the other way. You built a career with your bare hands, a life that was yours, a front door you could lock from the inside.
The right person will come along, you said. The right person will feel like home.
You didn’t know that home could be a person until Jeongguk.
And Jeongguk—god. Jeongguk arrived like a loophole. Like every fantasy you’d ever pressed between your ribs decided to grow legs and walk into your actual real life. Boyish smile. Knuckles inked with stories you wanted to read with your fingertips. A way of looking at you like you were the answer to a question he’d been asking since before he could talk.
He unraveled you slowly. Not like picking apart a mistake. Like unwrapping something precious. Inch by inch. He made you feel found. Like all those years of being overlooked, of shrinking yourself down to fit into rooms that never wanted you—none of it mattered, because he saw you. Quiet parts. Loud parts. Parts you forgot you had.
And it was easy. Terrifyingly easy. Like breathing after drowning. Like slipping into a dream and realizing you don’t want to wake up.
He loves you like it’s the only language he remembers. He loves you like you are the center of every room he’ll ever walk into. He loves you with the kind of devotion you only ever underlined in romance novels and thought, no one actually gets this.
But here’s what those novels never tell you.
No one warns you that being seen like that—really seen, completely seen—can start to feel like a pair of eyes on the back of your neck even when you’re alone. No one tells you that devotion, when it’s heavy enough, starts to feel like a debt you never agreed to owe. No one warns you that love, the kind that sweeps you off your feet, also has a bad habit of keeping you there. Suspended. Floating so high you forget where the ground is.
You start to wonder if euphoria and suffocation are just two sides of the same coin. If obsession is just love that forgot how to blink.
So how does a love so pure, a devotion so unconditional, turn into a cage?
⋆ . · i write to make sense of things. sometimes that means love stories. sometimes it means character studies. sometimes it means dropping fictional people into emotionally questionable situations and watching what survives. either way, i like stories that leave fingerprints.
a few things to know, should you choose to stay:
· i am twenty-two and have the life management skills of a concussed goldfish. therefore, there is no (strict, anyway) update schedule. executive dysfunction runs this place.
. my characters are just that—fictional. inspired, maybe. representative? never. the fourth wall is intact and staying that way.
· this blog contains mature themes intended for an adult audience. if you're not, don't linger.
· i do not take requests. i’m already arguing with my own ideas half the time. exceptions may be made for ideas that haunt me immediately.
. cas and the weeknd on loop. jungkook just gets written into things. i do love all of them, for the record. my brain just has favourites on rotation.
coco: director's commentary —
✶ bisexual
✶ neurodivergent (the lore deepens)
✶ psychology graduate currently wandering around asking too many questions about people
✶ fascinated by attachment, obsession, grief, longing, self-sabotage, and all the strange things people do in the name of love
✶ winter enthusiast. summer critic
✶ if there's a psychological explanation, i want it
[ favourites ] ✶ weather — rain against the window ✶ colour palette — black, oxblood, buttercream, charcoal grey, ancient gold, olive green ✶ flower — orchid, lily, hibiscus ✶ time of day — when everyone else is asleep ✶ movies — the more “what the fuck?” the better
