i was seventeen and convinced it would always feel like this

by michilted

Summary:

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.
— Heidi Priebe

 

There is a specific kind of grief for the person you were at seventeen — the one who felt everything at full volume, who hadn't learned yet to turn it down.

Jeongguk was fifteen when he debuted, seventeen when he understood what Taehyung meant to him, and twenty-two when he decided he would simply never act on it, that this was fine, that people carried things like this and lived full lives anyway. The story alternates between past and present: the boy who felt it first and the man who learns, slowly and painfully, that burying something doesn't kill it. It just means one day you're thirty and it comes back up from the ground, and you have to decide what to do with it now that you've grown.

Chapter 1: prologue

seoul | 2024

 

 

The photograph is unremarkable by any standard.

It was taken by someone who no longer remembered taking it, at a time none of them thought to memorialize because they didn't know yet that there was anything to memorialize. It is slightly overexposed, the background blown out to a white that might be a practice room wall or a hotel corridor or the inside of any anonymous fluorescent place. There are two figures in the frame. One is mid-laugh, caught between expressions, face half-collapsed into something open and unguarded. The other is looking at the first.

Just that. Looking.

Jeon Jeongguk, thirty-one years old, standing in his own apartment on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon with a cardboard box open at his feet and this photograph in his hands, knows exactly when it was taken. He knows what the look means. He has known for a long time.

That is the thing he is still getting used to.

∗ ∗ ∗

The box came from his mother, who had been clearing the storage unit where things had accumulated over the years — trophies, old tour passes, photographs from debut era, and apparently also a single Post-it note that reads, in teenage Jeongguk's handwriting: do NOT let Taehyung hyung borrow your conditioner again he uses THE WHOLE BOTTLE.

He finds this Post-it at the very top of the box.

He stands in his apartment and looks at it for a long time.

Then he puts it on his refrigerator.

Then, three minutes later, he takes a photo of it and sends it to Taehyung with no context.

Taehyung's response arrives in forty seconds: a single crying-laughing emoji followed by: in my defense your conditioner smelled really good and I had no way of knowing you had some kind of ration system.

Jeongguk types back: it wasn't a ration system it was a NORMAL AMOUNT OF CONDITIONER FOR ONE PERSON.

Taehyung sends: agree to disagree

Jeongguk puts his phone down and continues unpacking the box and does not think about the fact that Taehyung responded in forty seconds, which means Taehyung had his phone in his hand, which means Taehyung was probably thinking about him, which means—
He finds the photograph at the bottom of the box.
He stops thinking about the forty seconds.
He starts thinking about something much older.