Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
"How inconvenient to be made of desire."
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem its me."
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy WeVerse drama.
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[FILL] lost in the forest
Major Tags: self-esteem issues, allusions to depression, ambiguous ending
Additional Tags: love is lonely
Permission to remix: please ask
***
Love is not easy, Seokmin has come to realize. For all that he is full to the brim with it.
It looks soft. Like shy smiles over a smoky bar, and the press of a hot mouth against the neck while pinned against the wall in the alleyway outside. Hands moving syrupy slow over the aching expanse of the chest.
But it’s not soft. Love sinks sharp, wicked hooks through the tenderest parts of a person. Digs deep until the feelings become fused to the bone, liquid through veins. The vapor of breath. Inextricable. Unable to be exorcised. Even when it starts to hurt.
Especially when it starts to hurt.
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“I can’t do this anymore,” he says, face exhausted. “Seokmin, I love you, I do, but you keep acting like I’m one step out the door. Sometimes I think you’re chasing me out.”
He touches your cheek. There are tears brimming in his eyes, spilling over, and you feel that familiar mix of drowning love and helpless confusion as you wipe them away. The urge to comfort and the frustration of not knowing how.
You don’t know where things went wrong. Even now, even after all this time, being in a partnership — being with someone else who wants you as much as you want them, who is able to take the endless pour of your affection and return it— is foreign. Something you have had to learn, like a bird just starting to fly. Even if it means hurting yourself.
Have you fallen out of the nest altogether already? Is your neck broken, wing bent? You’re not sure; you just know you want him, and you want him to want to stay.
“What will it take for you to understand I’m not looking for ways to leave you?” he asks, and gathers you close. “What will it take for you to love me back enough to trust me with that?”
You wish you had an answer.
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Mingyu was never supposed to last. Seokmin remembers that much.
It was a night like any other, haunting the local bar. Seokmin was too exhausted to do much more than nurse a beer, but he stood at a ratty tabletop and watched as strangers pressed together in the small space, patterned lights playing over faces ducked together, cheeks flushed with alcohol and anticipation. He stood there and watched life move on around him, little stories unfolding in everyone’s lives, as his own stayed still.
Work, broken appointments with distant friends, alcohol. Rinse, repeat. Seokmin was not new to loneliness, but on nights like this, he was exhausted of it. He wanted to know when it was his turn to be story, watched by someone else living a frozen life.
And then: a man.
Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a simple tshirt and jeans, a chain around his neck and a jacket over his shoulders. He was handsome — almost distractingly so — but Seokmin worked in the arts. He wasn’t swayed by looks.
There…was an expression on this man’s face. Under the pleasant, polite friendliness. Something searching, something bored. Something tired and uncertain.
Something lonely, too.
Their eyes caught, and Seokmin felt the absurd urge to smile, so full-bodied he could feel his body lean into it. It felt like being drugged, the tilt of his world on its axis, the dizzying sense of being thrown into something new. A sickness in his stomach, even as his breath caught.
Instead of looking at him like he was crazy, the man smiled back.
They ended up talking, and Seokmin learned the man’s name was Kim Mingyu, that they were the same age and had mutual friends, and enough similar interests to have interesting conversations. Seokmin was so unused to the novelty of laughing honestly with strangers. Being seen by them, and seeing them back. He learned that Mingyu liked to be liked, too, just like Seokmin, but that he didn’t seem to have to work half as hard at it. Warm smiles, an endearing lisp. The drowning dark of his eyes, the curiosity and interest in them. Seokmin felt scalded by the heat there. Flattered.
Enough to take Mingyu’s hand and lead him to the alleyway and ask to kiss him.
Mingyu laughed, and before Seokmin could feel hurt break through the strange boldness that had taken hold, there was a hand cradling the back of his head and a pair of lips slanted over his own.
Mingyu kissed very well, with a single-minded focus and a genuine enjoyment. He made little sounds that prickled sweat at Seokmin’s temples, and his hands slipped in Seokmin’s back pockets to tug their hips closer, a move that felt fairly suave for someone who’d ten minutes ago knocked the entire tabletop over.
More than that, Mingyu kissed like Seokmin never even had to ask. Like this was how everything was going to end up the moment they locked eyes. It wasn’t like the few times in Seokmin’s life that he’d hooked up with others, desperation and sadness warring in his chest waiting for the inevitable goodbye or rejection once the physical part was over.
It didn’t feel — like playing a part.
It felt real.
They kissed some more, till Seokmin’s lips were swollen and his head was swimming. Still seized by that courage that came from feeling he was in a liminal space, Seokmin asked if Mingyu wanted to come over and spend the night. Mingyu gave a small, half-smile and said, “Next time.”
Mingyu asked him to write his phone number down on the back of the bar receipt and dragged his knuckles along to the side of Seokmin’s face, a gentle gesture that tightened Seokmin’s chest, before he promised to call.
Seokmin didn’t really expect him to, but it was a nice sentiment. A sweet moment. Something that would make a perfectly good memory, next time at the next bar, alone again and wondering if it was worth wanting to be anything other than that anyway.
Mingyu did call, though.
And he kept calling. Enough for Seokmin to forget himself, and the patterns he’d learned to see like augury.
Enough for him to follow Mingyu where he was leading, into a collection of trees that reached towards the sky, thick with leaves and dappled with sun, redolent and alive. A new world, hushed and quiet, just Mingyu’s voice, his hands, the way he made Seokmin feel.
What happens is this.
Eventually, that green space, the hole Seokmin had begun to dig like a fox for its den, is all that’s left.
And Seokmin is stuck there with no way out.
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“You’re so funny,” he says. His eyes are lit from within. He giggles with you, leans into your body with an ease you envy. His laughter is less loud maybe, but not restrained. He doesn’t look at you like you’re an idiot, or a joke.
Sometimes it’s that easy, you think, staring at the sunset melt over his face, feeling the grounding weight of his hand in yours.
Sometimes it’s that easy to fall in love.
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A lesson—
Just because something is where you are, where you live, doesn’t mean it’s home.
When home is a person, and that person is gone, well.
What then?
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You get a note, in the end.
I love you, it reads. I think we need some time. I’ll be back. I promise.
Days bleed into weeks. You keep reading the words, and thinking about that promise.
More than anything else, you’re mad that a small part of you still believes.
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Sometimes, love is hate.
It’s the resentment that burns so easily under Seokmin’s easy smiles when friends ask if he’s okay.
It’s the anger whenever he looks at old pictures, old texts. The lingering little 1 next to his last message to Mingyu, a plaintive Why did you ever fucking ask for my number in the first place?
It’s the way his heart beats so fast, so loud in his ears and his hands and feet, when he tries to sleep in the bed where he and Mingyu tangled up together, bodies moving together like a song and a fight, beautiful but just shy of violent.
It’s the corrosive way the memories live in Seokmin now, eating away at everything he knows to be true, the sense of self it took years to build and only twelve months to disintegrate under the force of Mingyu’s tongue in Seokmin’s mouth.
Love is being unmade, over and over, cell by cell by cell.
And all the while, he smiles like there’s not blood on his teeth.
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“This kind of thing is hard for me,” you admit one night, the moonlight streaming in through an open window. The summer breeze is lush, and his skin is hot under your hands. “Letting things be. Being in love.”
“What are you talking about,” he asks, voice gentle. “Loving comes easier to you than anyone I know.”
You want to tell him that’s not true. That you give all these pieces of yourself, but underneath every grace, every kindness, every funny comment, is a mind teeming with questions. With second guesses. With wants that you’re not sure how to articulate.
“Not really,” you say instead, and laugh because that’s just what you do.
His fingers trace the lines of your smile, and he frowns, troubled. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll work on it.”
It strikes you:
You’ve never been on a team before.
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Perhaps the worst thing is that Seokmin never had to hide the cruelest parts of himself with Mingyu. He couldn’t. Mingyu was a mirror as much as he was a window, reflecting all the same petty hurts and that shameful gut-wrenching desire for love, sharing the insecurities and the ennui, meeting Seokmin sly comment for sly comment, pushing him to be honest, even when honesty felt ugly.
And he showed Seokmin possibilities.
A life where someone as handsome as Mingyu did not settle for someone like Seokmin, awkward and lean, eyes oddly alive and nose overly long, a study in too much and not enough, so much as he ushered a new Seokmin into existence. In some ways, Seokmin was Pygmalion’s statue, recrafted into something even his own anxious self-flagellation could not endanger.
Someone beautiful, because Mingyu liked beautiful things, and liking Seokmin meant Seokmin was beautiful.
Someone who didn’t want to stand on the fringes of some dank bar anymore, even if the potential of wading through the crowd was so embarrassing it sometimes took Seokmin’s breath away. Because if Mingyu was there to be embarrassed beside him, then it couldn’t be so bad.
Someone who didn’t drown himself in trying to care for others, because for the first time, he was being taken care of, too.
So, yes. This is the worst part: Mingyu came into his life, reframed the very axis of his world, and then…
He left.
And leaving is one thing. People leave. They do. They have.
But does the Seokmin that Mingyu loved into life still exist, without him? And if that Seokmin doesn’t exist anymore, who is it now, heart ripped in his chest, throat scraped raw with unshed tears, that throws away a pile of sweaters and an old pair of Prada sunglasses?
Who is it?
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“You were good with him,” is what your noona says, when she comes to visit. “But you weren’t good because of him. There’s a difference, Seokminnie. I hope you see it.”
You’re trying. You’re trying.
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Mingyu might not answer his texts, but he’s still a trail that Seokmin follows, unable to stop.
Maybe this, too, is love: something that continues whether it’s convenient or not. A land a person can get lost in, if they let themselves. Going in circles with no clear destination except the past.
Mingyu posts pictures on his SNS, old black and white photos of Seokmin like letters without words. There are no captions, but the pictures show up without fail, regardless of comments and likes.
Seokmin looks at these updates, and each one feels like Mingyu’s kimchi stew made fresh after a long day at work, or the pleasure of coming back to find a household repair.
Acts of service. Small ways for Mingyu to take care of him from afar.
Maybe Seokmin is delusional. He scrolls anyway.
In one, Seokmin sees the familiar angles of his profile, framed by a halo of light. He’s sitting next to the bedroom window, staring out at the Seoul morning skyline. His hair is messy, and he’s wearing one of Mingyu’s sweatshirts. He thinks he might be crying — a particularly poignant newspaper article or something equally stupid, but Mingyu’s captured the glimmer of sticky tears in a loving play of shadows. It’s not voyeuristic so much as reverent. Seokmin’s cheeks gleam, and his collarbones look delicate, and his eyes are luminous.
This picture feels like stepping into a dreamscape. Another life, where he can see himself, in fits and starts, through Mingyu’s eyes.
Seokmin sinks into the picture, into that dreamscape. Into whatever Mingyu is trying to show him, tell him.
Even if that’s just — himself, shining back.
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The doorbell buzzes.
You know what’s on the other side of the door, but at the same time, you don’t.
You open it anyway.
Re: [FILL] lost in the forest
But does the Seokmin that Mingyu loved into life still exist, without him? And if that Seokmin doesn’t exist anymore, who is it now, heart ripped in his chest, throat scraped raw with unshed tears, that throws away a pile of sweaters and an old pair of Prada sunglasses?
this is soooo good like the idea that someone has made you better or different, but then what happens when they leave, who is the 'you' that is left behind ahhh I adore this thank you for the fill!!
Re: [FILL] lost in the forest