♫ tell me i’m the one but she feelin’ like two ♫ ft. @poisonlip
the church is never empty. it is a beacon for the wayward souls and the desperate hearts, graceless in the way they linger within these hallowed walls that hold, within them, the conditional promise of redemption. and in this godforsaken country, they make up the many. should you stumble in past its righteous gates, hands sullied with the red of your crimes—and you will, it is simply a matter of when—you will find that you are not the first to have your knees kiss the church’s sacred grounds, and you are most certainly not the last.
and perhaps, if you were to pay your penance in the heart of spring where all the pretty flowers would bloom, you will find our golden boy amongst the sinners. why, here he exists as a statue kneeling at the feet of god’s likeness, head bowing into the apex of his meeting palms whilst his incoherent prayers fall below raspy breath.
do you even hear yourself?
there are moments where even the most powerful, most untouchable men are brought to their knees. for life is a sadistic author who hands out a slew of tragedies like the overabundant, seemingly innocent god loves you! flyers that somehow finds its way into the bottom of your bag. in this way, life spares no one.
why, here is one of life’s piss off flyers now, deposited into jaehyun’s firm hold. a pity that our golden boy is the curious sort, for in his boredom, he reads its convincing words off its coloured pages, perhaps even calls the number, and it is in this way that he is swept up into the cult of one han bora, the woman with an angel’s smile painted on the devil’s lips. where others warn to beware, beware, beware of the devil’s playground, he pinches her chin like the stem of her cup, drinks in her indoctrination from the chalice of her lips, and he calls her saviour.
like all cults, it seems that way for a while. the beginnings are marked with the fondest memories, where adventure and excitement overflow and the world spins round and round and he’ll fall onto the pavement, but he welcomes the pain because it means this, all of this, is real. and he’ll laugh, he’ll hold her in his arms, and somewhere between gazing at her face of mirth he’ll find this maddening urge to kiss her. it all happens in a split second, the way his smile drops and he closes the distance.
one day, he doesn’t remember to pick it back up. the soreness in his elbow from where he broke his fall gets to him. the world continues to spin, but he’ll stay stubbornly put. he’ll drink to chase that dizziness once more, but it’ll never come. come spring, he’ll find himself back in church kneeling before her idol, and his conversations with god will sound a lot like talk to me and just tell me what’s wrong and i can fix this and i can fix me.
it’s all in your head.
jaehyun is spat out of her holy ground, bitter. before he leaves, she tells him it’s all in his head, and he’s just now starting to believe it. in fact, he sees it in perfect clarity. see, it was never the fighting, the cheating, and all the things that made up their end that was imagined. it was the beginning, the laughter, the warmth. because park jaehyun never truly saw han bora. he thought her the miracle, the prayer, when she had always been his reckoning.
but now, as he observes the way the moonlight kisses her alabaster skin, he sees her. and it grates his gears, the way his heart still remembers the tremors of sickening devotion.
“great speech, regent,” it leaves his lips honeyed, the title rolling off his tongue like the many terms of endearment once reserved for only her. this is how he meets her at the balcony, like the fever dream of a memory plucked from their past. the compliments are familiar, so they, too, roll effortlessly off his tongue, “perfect. all the way through.”
they say that couples tend to mirror each other’s movements, so it is in this way that he leans against the marble railing, adopting the stance that he once found her. here, he is a recent heretic who has yet to unlearn the habits of a believer. he bows his head, but stays his betraying palms in a tense grip atop the handrail.
“you know, it’d be a real fucking shame if someone were to see through your cracks,” again, like a desperate prayer falling below raspy breath. this time, his delivery is through gritted teeth, and because of this, he thinks it a job well done. he doesn’t realise it comes out unnatural, obviously overcompensated in its anger. it doesn’t last long, for a sigh is pushed from his throat, and with it, he sobers back into his famous, uncrackable countenance. his honeyed tone returns yet again, thinly veiled threat delivered from a polite smile as he finally turns to meet her gaze, “how’s changho?”