Status: Open
Prompting is currently open. Prompting is open from 28 December 2024 to 19 January 2025.
About
"the poem begins not where the knife enters, but where the blade twists"
"beauty is terror"
"you'll just have to taste me, when he's kissing you"
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 a hit tweet.
🛑 HOLD UP
If this is your first time on 17hols please check out our About Page which has helpful information about dreamwidth and HTML. We are a prompting fest where all the action happens in the comment section.
Rules
- Sign up is not required.
- Fills have a minimum of 400 words for prose, haiku-length for poetry (3 lines), and 400px by 400px for art (memes are also art). Other mediums are fine too!
- There is no maximum cap.
- Tag and provide content warnings at your discretion, but a good guide are the Ao3 four (Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage) and this list of common CWs (cr: SportsFest).
- NSFW/Explicit content should be tagged
- NSFW art should not be visible, please provide a link and a warning. You may crop the artwork and embed a SFW preview.
How it works
Prompting
- Click on [Post a New Comment] at the bottom of this post;
- Change the subject;
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment and edit the sections. Feel free to add as much detail as you want!
Need ideas? Check out our 2021 and 2022 Quote rounds.
Filling
- Reply to the original prompt;
- You must change the subject to [FILL] - this is to help the mods track. Feel free to add a title
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment, edit the sections, and add your text.
You may also upload your fill to the AO3 Collection.
Remixing
- Post as a reply to the fill you are remixing, using the same HTML as above;
- Change the subject to [REMIX].
Art/media
- Upload your work to any platform (twitter, imgur, youtube, soundcloud, google maps, etc.)
- Using the same HTML code as above, copy the link into your fill or remix. That's it!
- Optionally, you can embed a picture into your comment. Please use the following code instead.
(To explain, the HTML resizes your picture to 400x400px so that it fits on most screens. Users can view the full size if they click on it. You can also add a link to your work on twitter so that others can share it, or to any other website you want)
On dreamwidth, you can't edit a comment once someone has replied to it.
|
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
miss u too
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: friend breakups in the 21st century
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
-Ode to my phone, who thinks all my friendships never end by Samantha Fain
+
i love you, it looks like rain by June Gehringer
[FILL] with sails unfurled
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: non-famous AU, childhood friends to strangers, jihan as int'l relations students, friendship breakup
Permission to remix: Please ask
***
A scuff on the knee. A basketball to the face. The sweltering heat of Seoul in summer, and how it made the court behind their house more rubbery than usual.
"You're so clumsy, Shuji." Jeonghan stretched a hand. Joshua's lying on the court and he's laughing. He took Jeonghan's hand and rose up to chase him again. At least he dribbled correctly. He passed to Jeonghan, who got them an easy three-point.
Trips down the neighborhood. Shapes made from clouds, drifting above the public garden that Joshua used to water every Sunday on his way back from church. Tongues stained red and blue with syrup and ice.
Jeonghan had been his first friend when he moved from Los Angeles to Seoul at the age of 12. For how little he cared about the English language, he cared a lot for Joshua. Mrs. Yoon made him do all his homeworks in exchange for more playtime at Joshua's place — a challenge he took on readily. He was the one who taught Joshua his way around the street market at the center of their district, how to trick his way to extra treats from the bungeoppang lady, which swear words work for which shitty occasion of the day.
By the second semester of 7th grade, they had been inseparable. Jeonghan and Joshua. Joshua and Jeonghan. Their friends are each other's friends, their routines each other's routines; a life so enmeshed, their homeroom teacher in 8th grade used to joke that they're one head in two bodies.
They did find ways to have their own lives: Jeonghan with basketball, and Joshua with the arts & crafts club. But Joshua came out in the afternoon with matching bead bracelets, and Jeonghan took Joshua out for noodles after winning a match against their neighboring school. They joined the choir together in high school, tripping over tricky passagios and laughing at each other in their silly, shiny robes.
A new start, an old friend. They never failed to save a seat for each other in college. Even amidst their different activities, with Joshua flourishing in campus events and Jeonghan with debate and Model UN and all the paper competitions he swept with ease, they still had lunch together, stayed in the same dorms, held onto each other in pursuit of their dreams: Jeonghan who saw the diplomat dream inching closer, and Joshua who reconciled his many interests into a single aspiration of being happy.
A slow decay. A gradual fade. The sweep of reality. Cold breeze from the sea that seeps into your bones.
Jeonghan goes to foreign service, the same dream Joshua celebrated him for at their last few semesters in university. Joshua is the sun that shines behind him, so he goes for humbler pursuits in a startup company. Jeonghan finds other ways to shine. Joshua doesn't question the chats left unreplied and the Instagram DMs left on read, despite knowing how much more active Jeonghan is on the internet compared to him.
He's busy. Jeonghan has always been the wanderer between them. There's no such thing as too much grace for a best friend. He's just busy.
New faces, new places, new routines. As Jeonghan fades away from sight, Joshua is embarrassingly slow to realize how he, too, have faded from Jeonghan's mind.
It was the first time staying away from his phone had worked against his favor, because he wouldn't have known things weren't fine had he not found his private Twitter account being short of one mutual.
Joshua doesn't want it to be the person his mind thought of.
Against his best interests, he checks the account.
It's locked.
He lingers on Jeonghan's contact in his Whatsapp. Should he say something? What's he supposed to say, hey I noticed you've removed me from your account and I did notice you haven't been responding to me lately and I was hoping you'd tell me why.
That would assume Jeonghan still thinks he's worth an explanation.
He tries, for science.
He throws his phone under the pillow. The next few days he goes out, he leaves it in his drawer. He archives the chat with Jeonghan and avoids it like the plague.
When he finally gets a notification, it's dread that fills him instead.
It's not you, I promise.
But what is it about Joshua that made Jeonghan decide to no longer include him in that 'closest friends' category?
Everything stops there. There's no more notification coming into his archive, not even when Joshua deletes the chat.
As if it couldn't be more humiliating, it took him months after muting Jeonghan on Instagram to find out that the other guy had stopped caring while he was still fumbling with his footing.
He only found out Jeonghan had unfollowed him when he decides to give himself closure with one last message on New Year's.
Joshua finds a reply after a week.
Ten years of memories, cast away as easy as leaves. Like they weren't one head in two bodies. Like their names hadn't coexisted in everyone's minds, their shadows passing the old hallways as one instead of two.
What's Joshua supposed to do when he lost someone who's still alive and breathing?
.
.
.
Months have passed since then. But whenever he passes the places he used to visit with Jeonghan, the shadows behind the glass turn into them. He looks away. He can't handle the questions if he comes there alone. Where's your best friend? You know, the one you often come here with. There's no answer he could give that wouldn't lead to more questions.
There's no Vogue articles on how to help someone go through friendship breakups or bereave a friendship that ended. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. A friendship breakup means someone fucked up, and that means Joshua is stuck with his broken self, because everyone would believe him more if he said he lost a boyfriend or a parent or even a pet. Not a friend. You're not supposed to lose a friend, apparently.
It keeps him curling on his mattress and screaming under the shower.
There's an inadvertent shame attached to losing a friend. It's something that society decides only happens because of a character flaw. A fatal stain. Not from circumstances, not from one party deciding it needs to end. There's no closure, and everyone thinks you're silly for wanting one, because when it goes down the drain it can only be your fault.
Childhood friends are supposed to be infallible. They're the home you return to after warring against adulthood. They're meant to withstand long distance and arguments and shifting interests and multiple breakups and bad jobs. Who doesn't have a friend to reminisce summer ice creams and snowball fights with? Whose problem is it if they don't have one, anymore?
That would make him an incredibly flawed, faulted, shameful excuse of a human being, Joshua concludes. An imaginary anger geysers from a pit beneath his chest, like the hole in a smoker's throat. Smoke. Sometimes Joshua wishes Jeonghan would choke over all his cigarettes. Maybe he'd always been too wimpy for that guy's daredevilry and that's why he's being left behind. The thousand reasons in his mind all boil down to you're not needed anymore.
The night has filled the windows when he comes out of the shower. Somewhere in the buildings, Jeonghan must be having a fancy gala dinner. Or maybe he's on the plane to his next diplomatic assignment, where his face would appear on international news channels with their old classmates praising him and make Joshua taste cough syrup in his mouth.
I hope you're happy, he would say. You didn't answer last time I asked you how you're doing, so I don't know if I want you to sleep well or if I want you to crash into the sea.
He sits in the living room with the memories that spilled from his guts, their noises loud as they roll onto the floor. They're pebbles to Jeonghan, but still boulders to Joshua. He doesn't know how to carry them alone. He has tried leaving them where they came from. They keep coming back.
No one has to know how Joshua's nightmares come narrated in Jeonghan's voice.