Status: Prompting Closed
This round is now closed to further prompts but remain open for fills and remixes (forever!).
About
"Enter any body of water and you give yourself up to be swallowed. Even the stones know that."
"beauty is terror"
"Would you fall in love with me again, if you knew all I've done? The things I can't undo. "
Calling all lovers of poetry and prose, rhyme and reason, screen and stage. Welcome to the Quotes Round, where every prompt must cradle a quotation (or two, or three). Mix the media and let the synergy birth a new order, or keep it short and let the subtext speak its secrets to the right writer.
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graduation vigil
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: (US-based) grad school AU; a little sad because it is a grad school AU
Permission to remix: Yes
***
By evening Minghao has packed up his entire apartment. The sum total of the past five years whittled down to two large suitcases, a carry-on, and a backpack: exactly the amount specified on his ticket, down to the kilogram. Two boxes should already be en route to China and he imagines them, floating on a barge that has to slice through the floating island of plastic that Vernon says he read isn't actually an island at all. It's mostly microplastics, Vernon had claimed, with the vague expression that suggested he was remembering something verbatim. Vernon told him once that he remembered what he read exactly as the page he read it on, and when trying to recall something, he imagined himself scrolling through the PDF, looking for the right-shaped paragraph in a specific spot on the page. Well, Minghao has often wondered what that is like. Did it make grad school easier, or life harder? Vernon seems to live in his own head most of the time. Then again, Minghao can relate to that.
He never intended to still be standing here, in this apartment, in November, but his advisor hadn't let him defend until the fall. Junhui claimed it was because his advisor wanted to squeeze another semester of TA work out of him, but Junhui is always looking for flaws in a system inherently built to break them. Standing at the end of it, Minghao is just glad that he wasn't crushed, even if it means he's departing when his neighbors have started hanging Christmas lights.
"Look at my hands! Look at what you've done."
Minghao turns to find Jeonghan standing in his doorway, palms up, pitifully red. He's arranged his face into an artful pout, too, calculated to make Minghao laugh. And he does: because the situation is absurd or because he is too tired not to? Doesn't matter. Jeonghan grins wide like an angler fish, though if he's working an angle, Minghao has no idea what it is. He's planning to sleep on the couch, and take the bus to the airport at 4:45AM. Jeonghan doesn't have enough time to lure him into a scheme.
Jeonghan enters the room and turns in a small circle. The house, according to Jihoon, was built sometime around 1950. And, Minghao supposes, seldom updated since. The wood floors are scuffed by successive occupants; the walls, pockmarked with nail holes. The window unit seldom worked. Jeonghan often teased him are you not an engineering student? Can't you figure this out? But it's not like Jeonghan ever did, either.
Jeonghan started the program a year ahead of him but isn't slated to defend until the spring. He has dark circles under his eyes and the wan look of someone who hasn't slept much lately. When Minghao first moved in they'd stay up late at the kitchen table, socks catching on the peeling linoleum beneath their feet, to work on their coursework late into the night. Jeonghan could never stick with a task in a straightforward way. He always wanted to find a trick, an elegant cheat, preferably one no one had thought of yet. It was annoying but it was what made him a good engineer. Minghao preferred elegance without the cheats: clean solutions that worked efficiently and precisely. They more or less reached the same solutions, and by three in the morning, Jeonghan would be elated and a little delirious as the answers unfolded before them.
"It looks smaller than I thought it was," Jeonghan comments. He sighs. "No one ever decorated as much as you, you know. I wish you'd left up the paintings."
Last night Minghao burned those paintings in the backyard, over a bonfire he'd made Mingyu start for him. Mingyu had frowned while Minghao carefully fed each large piece of paper to the flames, but he hadn't stopped him. Maybe he understood. Minghao doesn't want to take any paper home except his diploma, but the school will mail that to China anyway.
"I'm not sure the next guy would like them so much," Minghao says.
Jeonghan makes a face. "How could we let someone else live in your room? That's so sad."
Minghao grins. "I could have found someone to sublease."
"I don't want someone weird coming in here for a semester. I already have to live with Mingyu, ugh."
Jeonghan often seems serious to the people who don't know him well. Minghao hadn't understood at first, either, confused and annoyed every time Jeonghan barged into his room and demanded he go grocery shopping or out to eat or to the library or whatever else with him. The one time Minghao had complained can't you just go with Seokmin instead? he'd gotten his first look at what Jeonghan really looked like when serious, his glib teasing exchanged for an icy neutrality. When Minghao apologized after they crossed paths on the (literally icy) sidewalk one morning, he saw Jeonghan look sheepish for the first and last time. They've never had a problem since.
"Mingyu's fine," Minghao says. "It's Seungcheol I won't miss. I won't miss his stuff everywhere."
"You won't miss walking into the living room and seeing all his damp laundry hanging everywhere?" Jeonghan says, sounding shocked.
Minghao rolls his eyes. Seungcheol refuses to use the dryer, claiming that it will shrink all his Supreme clothes, and in the winter, dries his clothes on two drying racks and the back of every single kitchen table chair. Jeonghan swears up and down that the dripping underwear is why Joshua broke his lease and moved out, but Minghao kind of thinks it was because he shared a wall with Wonwoo, who never sleeps. Anyway, Joshua only moved two blocks away, though to hear Jeonghan tell it, he moved all the way back to LA.
Next year, Seungcheol will have graduated. He and Jihoon have lived in this house the longest of any of them and soon it will be filled with strangers, like none of them were ever here.
Five years. Minghao was often too anxious to string an English sentence together when he started, couldn't have imagined presenting at a conference. Now he can't seem to remember who he was before. It scares him, knowing that in a day's time he'll be back at home, trying to fit himself into the spaces that he'd once flourished in.
"I'm really proud of you," Jeonghan says softly, not looking at him. "You know."
A strange feeling settles in Minghao's chest. When he first arrived he imagined himself staying in the US indefinitely, caught up in a version of his life he'd dreamed up by watching television and his friends' social media posts. The reality was more grueling, no matter how often he reminded himself that gratitude was a practice calibrated in his own mind. He'd wanted something more substantial, and instead he'd gotten years of uncertainty.
When he defended and his committee shook his hand, he'd always imagined he'd feel happy, or some sort of satisfaction. Instead, all he felt was relief.
"Thank you," he says honestly. Jeonghan looks away, a hint of a smile curling at his lips.
"Don't leave early," Jeonghan sighs. "Stay here until the rest of us are finished too. You can be our live-in cook. You could totally get OPT for that!"
Minghao rolls his eyes. "That sounds terrible."
Jeonghan surprisingly has no counter to that, probably because it does sound terrible. He shifts his balance, pursing his lips as he says, "It just seems sad that you're leaving now."
Minghao has been chasing graduation since the day he started. It's the carrot dangled to keep them all going, the fear of failure being the stick. Now he has the carrot and no fear of the stick, but he still feels oddly at a loss for what to do next.
"For so long I just wanted to be done," Minghao says. "Now that I am… I don't know. I feel like I'm going to miss it here."
When he first moved in, Soonyoung showed him around. It's like, cool if you want to do your own thing and all, but we like to chill down here so you should join! This is the fridge and there's one in the garage out back too. Oh, shit, sorry, that's Seungcheol-hyung's vodka so like, don't touch that. I'm just kidding. Well, I'm not but he'll share. He's cool. Everyone's cool! You might want to label your food though. That's about it! Minghao had then had to ask him where the laundry room was, and after another detour into the basement, he'd finally walked up to this room and stood right in the center, looking at the tree outside his window drooping in the August heat. In the backyard, Mingyu and Seungkwan were playing basketball. His room had been quiet.
He'd started the paintings around the time his first advisor started harrassing him, before he'd figured out what to do. Traditional landscape paintings, every scene a depiction of this house. He'd painted the house on a mountainside, by the sea, in the clouds. He'd painted himself alone, he'd painted everyone but him. He'd painted them all together, too, haunting the windows like little ghosts trapped behind glass.
The last one he'd painted, before he burned them all, was the most realistic. Just this house on a street of other old houses with overgrown lawns. Nothing more.
He blinks and looks at Jeonghan. "It's weird. This will all be gone soon."
Even if he comes back to this house someday, it won't matter. It won't be the place he lived. Even if he goes to visit his friends, or they come to visit him, it won't be the same either. Their lives will have moved forward, slipping through time the way one steps into a river and finds the current strong enough to pull you downstream, if you only let yourself float.
"That's true," Jeonghan muses, a glimmer in his eye as he cracks a smile. "But we'll remember too."
Memories fade. Paintings can be burned. Diplomas don't signify five difficult years.
Minghao looks at the tree outside his window, spindly and dry in the autumn cold. What will it remember, come winter? He doesn't yet know.
Re: graduation vigil
Last night Minghao burned those paintings in the backyard, over a bonfire he'd made Mingyu start for him. help I've been stabbed thirty-seven times (I did this after graduation too)
Minghao looks at the tree outside his window, spindly and dry in the autumn cold. What will it remember, come winter? He doesn't yet know. BEAUTIFUL ;____; what a line, my god. wondering if a home will remember you once you leave it. knowing once you leave it, it isn't home. MAN I just moved back to the city I went to grad school in so this hit someplace real deep inside me, thank you so much and also OUCH!! <3
Re: graduation vigil