Work Text:
“Minho’s back.”
Seungmin pauses, hand resting on the handle of the fridge.
“I bumped into his mom at the store,” Seungmin’s mom continues from the table, eyes fixed on a crossword. There’s no direction to the conversation; it's just something to fill the empty quiet of the kitchen late at night.
“That’s neat,” Seungmin replies lamely, now met with the chilly air of the fridge and shelves full of nothing he really wants.
“Did you know he was?”
“No.” Seungmin shrugs to no one. “He didn’t say anything.” Minho never says anything anymore, but his parents don’t know that. They still think the two of them are peas in a pod and because their parents are friends, it’s too hard to tell them otherwise. Minho is like sand, slipping through Seungmin’s fingers no matter how hard he tries to hold on. Seungmin wonders who it was that broke the hourglass of their time together.
Is it Minho’s fault?
Is it his?
Seungmin’s fingers hover over their conversation, every interaction shorter than the last and always initiated by Seungmin. The last message is from July —a simple lol from Minho. It’s December now, the holidays creeping up on them all too quickly and slowly all at once.
Heard you’re home, want to meet up? He types out hesitantly, then erases it.
Are you back? We should hang out sometime. No, not that either.
When are your finals over? Erased.
Miss you, hyung. Seungmin has typed this out too many times to count. Hope you’re okay.
Erased, unsent. The conversation remains as dead as it has since the summer and Seungmin closes the app, tossing his phone onto his bed in an effort to try and focus on his last bit of work before break. He glances over as it buzzes with a notification, but it’s just Hyunjin asking if Seungmin wants to come to his Christmas-New Year’s-Belated-Suneung-Winter party. Work be damned, Seungmin lets himself be caught up in Hyunjin’s chatter about it and forgets about Minho.
It’s weird to see Minho graduate. Seungmin remembers when he ate dirt and cried because it didn’t taste good, remembers when the two of them had tried sledding down the stairs together only to be caught by Minho’s mom and her superhuman reflexes. It’s hard to imagine that he’s looking at the same Minho, heading off to university in a few short weeks. Seungmin feels almost out of place as he claps robotically for every student, wedged between his mom and someone’s little sister. He and Minho have barely talked this year as Minho had grown increasingly busy and stressed with his final year and Seungmin had remained the same as he always has.
(Minho hadn’t even told Seungmin when he’d been accepted to university, or when he’d committed. Seungmin only found out later because he’d overheard someone in Minho’s year mention it.)
“You want me to come to graduation?” Seungmin hangs upside-down on Minho’s bed, staring at a pile of unread novels stacked on the floor. Most of the day has been quiet; Minho working on an essay and Seungmin on a history project until he finished it an hour ago.
“I mean, if you want to.” Minho shrugs, cracking his neck. “It’s not a big deal if you don’t; I get it. It’s long and boring.”
“I never said I didn’t.” Seungmin slides gracelessly onto the floor. “Just surprised me, that’s all.”
“Oh.” A frown. “Why?”
I don’t know where we stand anymore. Seungmin doesn’t say that. Of course he doesn’t. Minho leans forward to peer at Seungmin, blocking out the old glow in the dark stars on his ceiling. Seungmin remembers putting them there. He’s surprised Minho hasn’t peeled them off.
“Well”—Seungmin shrugs, kicking Minho’s chair to push him back—"you know. Just did.”
It takes a while to get down from the seats as everyone pushes and shoves to try and see their child first. Minho’s parents are fast, and Seungmin can see them standing with him already, hugging him and talking to him with shiny eyes, a bouquet of flowers pressed into his arms.
“I’ll go start the car,” Seungmin’s mom tells him when they finally make it to the floor of the gym. “You know where we parked; just come when you’re done.” He pushes through the crowd of mingling parents and relatives, trying to find Minho somewhere in the sea of unfamiliar faces with little luck. Eventually, Seungmin finds himself at the edge and digs his phone out of his pocket.
To: Minho-hyung
I can’t find you :(
The response is almost immediate.
From: Minho-hyung
I already left sorry seungminie i wasn’t thinking :(
It’s been a long day and i’m too tired to be much fun rn
To: Minho-hyung
Oh
Seungmin’s fingers are slow to cooperate with him as he tries to ignore the muddled hurt in his chest. It’s not like Minho owes it to him to see him or anything. He adjusts the camera strap around his neck. There are a couple pictures from when Minho had been on stage, but the angle had been weird. Mostly, Seungmin had wanted a picture of the two of them. Maybe it is “just” high school, but it’s still important, still a big step in Minho’s life.
In Seungmin’s.
From: Minho-hyung
I really am sorry :(
He bites his lip in regret, an anxious, unwritten “are you mad?” bleeding through the screen.
To: Minho-hyung
No it’s okay hyung! Don’t be sorry!
I get being tired dw i would be too ^^
They know each other well in this regard, ride the same wavelength in this way more than most. Sometimes Seungmin thinks it’s what drew them so close as kids. Seungmin in his more quiet steadiness and Minho is his almost overdone exuberance, near opposites, have always surprisingly good at implicitly knowing when the other is running out of energy. For all their love of being around others, their social batteries are distinctly finite. Seungmin is used to seeing Minho after school —leaving his dance club when Seungmin leaves photography— with smiles that pull at tired eyes and hang too heavily, antsy as he talks and laughs with his friends. He only ever watches from afar though, collecting books from his locker and playing a game on his phone until his dad tells him he’s here to pick him up. When he passes by Minho’s locker on the way out of school, he hears a relieved sigh. Minho always does this, like he holds his breath as he wears thinner and thinner.
Seungmin wonders if he realizes that he does it.
To: Minho-hyung
We should celebrate soon
Go out to eat or something
From: Minho-hyung
Yeah that’d be fun
Lmk when you want
I’m proud of you , Seungmin nearly types out, an odd sadness in his chest. His fingers sting with cold as he walks through the parking lot and he wipes at similarly stinging eyes, blaming the sudden tears when he blinks on the chilly air. He shouldn’t be sad; it doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t say it to Minho. That’s not how it is with them. They bicker and tease loudly for the world to hear, but the softer, more sentimental things are rarely ever said unless something is really wrong. And they get that, read the silence and gestures instead of each other’s lips.
“How’s Minho?” Seungmin’s mom asks him cheerfully when he finds the car, sunset all too stark and blinding as they pull out of the parking spot.
“Well, you know,” Seungmin says vaguely, “he’s good. Happy to be done.”
“Did you get pictures?”
Seungmin’s fingers press against his phone case, just a little. “Ah, I didn’t take any. He cried, and you know how ugly hyung gets when he cries.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Eh, it’s whatever.” Seungmin shrugs a little. “There’ll be other chances.”
To: Minho-hyung
Will do hyung
Maybe he never texts Minho. Maybe Minho never responds. Seungmin doesn’t see Minho until the snow begins to melt and March begins a few weeks later, when he texts Minho “when are you leaving,” and Minho, two hours after he reads the messages, tells him “today.”
Behind closed doors, Seungmin cries when Minho leaves.
“Seungmin!” Hyunjin throws open the door, and immediately straightens up when he sees Seungmin’s parents behind him. He speaks much more deliberately this time. “Please, come in. Food’s in the kitchen, my parents and the others are in the living room.” He takes the cake Seungmin’s mom offers as the three of them remove their shoes and leads them to the dining room, where a bunch of other dishes have been laid out. Then he grabs Seungmin by the wrist and leads him upstairs. “Haven’t heard from you all year; how’ve you been?”
Seungmin swallows hard guilt. He hadn’t meant to fall off the face of the earth, but then messages had just piled up and piled up and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to answer them. After the first month, lying had become exhausting, but how is he meant to tell the truth?
“Good.” It’s easier like this —to lie through his teeth rather than his fingers. Seungmin has never known why. “You?”
“Same,” Hyunjin tells him brightly. “How’d your first year treat you?”
It’s not that his friends don’t care. In fact, Seungmin’s sure they do. But he’s sure they’re busy too, and tired. That they have their own shit to deal with and that it isn’t fair for Seungmin to unload on them just because he’s losing the person that he once was and because saying that he’s happy, that he’s enjoying himself, that university is fun, is too hard.
“It was great,” Seungmin hears himself say. He feels distant, not quite in his own body as Hyunjin tugs him into what had once been the playroom. It’s been redone into something more like a second living room and Hyunjin’s dog mingles around the coffee table, just too short to be able to reach anything on it, but desperately trying to nonetheless. A couple people are already there, sprawling on the couch and in chairs, and fighting over a bag of chips. He recognizes some from school —either former classmates or Hyunjin and Jisung’s friends in other classes: Hwang Yeji, Lee Donghyuck, Choi Soobin, Choi Jisu (no relation), Na Jaemin, Lee Daehwi, Kim Sunwoo. There's some former upperclassmen as well, and a few people Seungmin has never seen before. In the corner of the room, one foot in a conversation as he nods and laughs, and the other out as Seungmin recognizes the bored glaze in his eyes, is Minho.
It doesn’t shock him, unlike last year. But then, Seungmin feels far more numb this year, more like his head is somewhere distant. The music and conversation is fuzzy and far away, a booming laugh from downstairs more clear than anything anyone is saying in here. Why are there so many more people this year? Why does the room buzz with a sort of impermanence?
Jisung is pulling him down onto the couch with a wide smile, surprisingly less stressed than Seungmin might expect him to be. But then Seungmin sees the mild flush in his cheeks and hears the slight slur in his words, and he gets it. Jisung’s mouth is moving, Seungmin hears the words, but he feels slow, delayed as he struggles to figure out what he’s being told.
“What?” He asks following a long pause after Jisung finishes speaking.
“I said we’re going to my place soon, if you’re down. My parents aren’t home so it’s all chill.”
“Oh.” Seungmin fiddles with his fingers. He isn’t really down. Not at all. He doesn’t really know anyone here other than Hyunjin and Jisung and… can he even count Minho? It’s too much, too much. Fear swirls in his throat, prickles at the back of his neck and lodges in his throat. But Jisung smiles so brightly, and he and Hyunjin talk so happily about their plans and the prospect of drinking games, and the Seungmin they know is confident and sociable, so it’s too hard to say no. He presses tears down with a hard swallow, but they don’t really leave, swimming in his chest and threatening to come up at every moment. “Yeah, sure. Sounds fun.” He smiles, but it falls the moment Jisung turns his attention to someone else.
It wasn’t like this before. It’s like he’s surrounded by completely different people.
“Last round for food before we go!” Hyunjin leads them downstairs like a bunch of ducklings until they huddle around the counter and grab finger foods. Seungmin finds himself sipping on lukewarm tap water, one hand holding tightly onto the cold granite while someone pulls up instagram and gossips about a former classmate of theirs getting married.
“Jaehyun-hyung is having a party,” someone says above the chatter. “Looks pretty packed.”
A chorus of “we should go”s and agreement. Seungmin says nothing, and no one looks at him. He wanders behind everyone else without really knowing where they’re going until they end up back upstairs, organizing cars and rides.
Since when are Jisung and Hyunjin so into parties and drinking? Sure the three of them have snuck beers before, but it had always been for stupid fun, like watching romcoms while tipsy and yelling terrible advice to the characters. Jisung hated parties in high school, and Hyunjin only went to one the president of the dance club had thrown last spring.
Seungmin thought he had only fallen out of their orbit; now he thinks they’re on utterly different planets.
To: #1 Jisung
You should go without me
I don’t want to be a buzzkill
From: #1 Jisung
Nooooo :((
We want you to go! You won’t be a buzzkill!
Jisung doesn’t get it.
“I don’t know if I want to,” he eventually mutters to Hyunjin as the last few of them are left in the room. It hurts to admit, hurts so bad that Seungmin wants to curl up and die.
“It’ll be fun!” Hyunjin gives him an encouraging smile.
“I can just go home.” Seungmin's mouth feels desperately dry even as he tries to smile and pretend that it all means nothing to him. It’s too much. Everything is too much. “I don’t want to be a wet blanket.”
“You won’t be,” Hyunjin assures him.
“I don’t know these people, Hyunjin.” He can feel himself shaking, bites his lip against tears. It doesn’t work this time.
“So?” Hyunjin looks confused. He must still see the old Seungmin from high school. God, it hasn’t even been a year since then. Where has he gone? Who is Seungmin now? If he doesn’t even know, how can anyone else?
“What if…” Seungmin’s voice breaks and his face goes hot with tears. “What if they don’t like me?”
“Hey, hey,” Hyunjin immediately sounds concerned and alarmed. Of course; he’s never seen Seungmin cry. Seungmin wishes the ground would swallow him whole, shame burning his whole body. “Of course they’ll like you, Seungmin.”
“I’m scared,” Seungmin cries. I’ve changed, he wants to sob, you’ve changed. We’ve all changed. I don’t know anyone anymore.
“They’ll like you, Seungminie.” Minho crouches in front of him, taking his hands and rubbing his knuckles with his fingers gently.
“I… I… I can’t,” Seungmin gasps. “They won’t. Why would they?” He’s too much, a burden on every conversation he’s ever tried to enter. He’s watched them die too many times this semester. Because of him, because he tried. His routine is gone —the safety net of friendships that followed the same path day in and day out.
“You’re funny,” Minho tells him soothingly.
“That’s why I wanted to be friends with you,” Hyunjin pipes up, his voice considerably more gentle than before. "Everyone always tells me how great you seem to be around."
“You’re friendly. You’re nice. You are . People are drawn to you.” They’re not, Seungmin knows that. He isn’t like that anymore. Something broke. It broke and he can’t fix it. “People will like you for you, Seungmin.” Minho’s voice is painfully tight.
Seungmin doesn’t even like Seungmin for Seungmin.
It’s too hard, so hard. Weight only grows on his heart.
He wants to shake his head and go home.
Instead he nods.
“You invited Minho-hyung?”
Seungmin’s brows pinch as Minho enters the room unsurely, another boy from his year —some member of the dance club, he thinks— a few steps ahead, already greeting someone with a boisterous yell.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?” Hyunjin waves at them. Seungmin had almost forgotten they were friends, bound first through Seungmin and then through their shared love of dance. “Didn’t know he was coming until earlier though. I thought he was going to ignore my text forever.”
Minho looks different, tired in the sort of way that speaks of more than just a lack of sleep. In the dim purple and blue of the mood lighting Hyunjin has set, his face looks thinner than before, the baby fat that some of the noonas on the dance team had loved to poke and call cute nowhere to be found. The exuberance Seungmin is so used to —the way Minho overcompensates for his well hidden shyness— runs flat as Minho stands there, glancing around the room without really seeing anyone for a second.
“Minho.” His friend —Juyeon, Seungmin finally remembers— waves him over to someone Seungmin would assume he knows. Minho’s face changes, suddenly smiling and almost too friendly as he walks over.
Where is the Minho Seungmin knows?
“You’re not going to say hi?” Hyunjin asks through a mouthful of macaron. Seungmin makes a face.
“God, cover your mouth. That looks nasty.” Hyunjin purposefully chews with his mouth open. “He seems busy.”
“You probably saw him more than me anyway,” Hyunjin sighs. “Since you’re besties and all. I wish he would respond to me.”
“Not really,” Seungmin shrugs. “Guess he wanted to relax.” It doesn’t explain the radio silence, the fact that Seungmin hadn’t even gotten an “I’m back in town.” Minho had promised when he’d left.
“Did you guys have a falling out?” Jisung asks from Hyunjin’s other side, fiddling with the batteries of a Wii controller.
“No.” You can’t have a falling out if you just stop talking. There was no fight, no angry words. Sometimes Seungmin had considered it. He’d typed out an entire paragraph asking Minho if he’s somehow pissed him off and explaining that he doesn’t think he deserves to be ignored for so long, no matter how angry Minho is.
But then he’d seen that Minho was online, and he just couldn’t. Because he isn’t angry at Minho. He’s hurt and confused, but he’s never been angry.
“Where’s your bathroom, Hyunjinie?” Minho’s soft voice floats above Seungmin’s ruminations. He tilts his head against the back of the couch to look up at him. Minho’s smile has run thin and he runs the thumb of his left hand along the rim of a solo cup. He doesn’t look at Seungmin except by accident and immediately makes a hard swallow and looks away, blinking rapidly.
Seungmin focuses on kicking Hyunjin and Jisung’s asses at Mario Party for the next 15 minutes, until he finally loses and trades with Juyeon so that he can stretch his legs and take a bathroom break.
When he knocks on the door, there’s a panicked “just a minute!” from inside and the water runs for what feels like eternity before Minho opens the door and the two of them stare at each other for a long minute. Minho’s cheeks and hair are damp, as though he’s splashed them with water to wake himself up. But Minho’s eyes are red and his lips bitten just a little too much, and he rubs his face with his sleeve in a way too rough to be pleasant.
“You okay, hyung?” Seungmin ventures.
“Never better.” Minho taps his foot impatiently. “Felt like shit all day; I’ve probably got a stomach bug or something.” Without thinking, Seungmin takes a step back and Minho pushes past like he’s escaping from him.
When he gets back to the room, a mournful Jisung, watching the others play what looks to be Wii Sports Resort now, tells him that Minho has already left.
It’s graduation all over again.
Seungmin feels Minho slip even further away, the grains of sand picked up by the wind.
It isn’t fair.
“You know”—Minho pokes at their steaming food, raising a brow as Seungmin makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat and bats his hand away—“I don’t take you out to eat just so you can take pictures.”
“Just wait until I become a food blogger.” Seungmin sets down his camera, sticking his tongue out at Minho. “When I have a million instagram followers and a book deal, you’ll eat your words.”
“I’d rather eat the carbonara, honestly,” Minho laughs and Seungmin gives him a flat unimpressed look. “Come on, that was funny.”
“A comedian you are not.”
“Oh, please. You wish you had my sense of humour.”
“No one wishes that, hyung.”
“I pay for your lunch and this is how you treat me?” Minho puts a hand over his heart.
“If you use your mom’s card, are you really the one paying?” Seungmin counters. He shrugs off his coat, already sweating only a few bites into the meal. It’s hot in the restaurant, far more than crisp March outside. This is supposed to be some sort of celebration for Minho entering senior year, or something like that. Honestly, Seungmin’s not really sure; the reasoning had been weak and ambiguous, but Minho always insists on their outings having a reason. “Thanks, anyway,” he says a moment later.
Minho waves him off. “Anything for my favorite dongsaeng.”
“Funny,” Seungmin blows on his pasta. “Jisung said he was your favorite dongsaeng. Are you two timing me, hyung?”
“You can both be my favorites.” Minho glances at his phone as it goes off, a tiny flicker of stress flashing across his face before he looks back up at Seungmin without even a crease in his brows. “It’s like asking me to pick between my babies. I can’t and won’t.”
“I am your favorite though?”
“Maybe it’s Hyunjin,” Minho teases, waggling his brows at Seungmin.
“See, I have a picture of you making the ugliest face known to man that says otherwise,” Seungmin says casually.
“Not The Picture…” Minho gasps dramatically.
“Oh, yes. The Picture.” Seungmin grins.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
“Fine, fine.” Minho waves his hand dismissively. “You’re my favorite.”
“Of course I am.” Seungmin turns triumphant, though he’s known all along. There’s a certain comfort in the almost 15 years that they’ve known each other, a knowledge that they’re so connected that they don’t need to say things for them to be understood. When Minho’s phone goes off again and he begrudgingly goes to answer the message, Seungmin sneaks a picture of him staring at his screen, features furrowed in thought as he types.
“Come on,” Minho huffs without looking up. He turns as Seungmin tries again. “Seungminie, don’t.”
“You’d make a good subject if you weren’t so unwilling,” Seungmin sighs. He flicks between the two pictures he’s got. “You look good, hyung. I’ll send them to you.”
“I don’t do artsy pictures,” Minho complains as he finally pockets his phone. “I like my aesthetic.”
“Snow filters are not an aesthetic.” Seungmin rolls his eyes.
“They’re mine.” Minho frowns. “I like the message they send.”
“That you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about you?”
“Exactly.”
“Well”—Seungmin grimaces as he burns his tongue on a piece of bacon—“you don’t have to post them. It’s whatever. Do what you want, hyung.”
When he opens Instagram later, he finds that Minho has posted the pictures, as well as some of Seungmin that he hadn’t even known were taken.
call this favorite dongsaeng privilege, the caption reads.
It’s the last thing Minho posts. Seungmin doesn’t see a silly picture or a cat video the entirety of Minho’s senior year. By the time they stop talking, he realizes that the account is gone.
Jisung’s kitchen spins even though Seungmin is barely even tipsy. Too loud chatter and music goes right over his head and he feels himself telescope in and out of his own awareness. The rest of them are crowded around the table, enthralled over a game of beer pong. Yeji and Soobin watch dejectedly from the sidelines, chosen to drive everyone to Jaehyun’s. Seungmin doesn’t drink really, doesn’t even like it that much. It had been fun when he’d done it with Hyunjin and Jisung, but that had been because he’d done it with Hyunjin and Jisung.
This? This is not fun.
He feels the way Hyunjin looks at him weirdly every so often, and feels the pressure of more tears in his throat and chest. If he cries here, with all these people, he’ll die for sure.
“Do you want to go home?” Minho, who Seungmin is just now realizing hasn’t been playing with the rest of them, taps his arm gently. Understanding. Understanding. Why does Seungmin feel like he barely even knows Minho anymore when Minho sees him just as well as before?
“I…” Seungmin barely trusts his own voice. Tears well up his eyes again and he swallows hard to rein them in. “Yeah,” he says softly. Minho nods.
“One second.”
Next thing he knows, Seungmin is in a car. It’s Minho’s dad’s, he thinks. Minho downs whatever is left in the cup he’s been holding and Seungmin gives him a very dubious look.
“It’s water,” Minho assures him, tipping it towards Seungmin to sniff. “I’m not stupid.”
“You’re not drunk,” Seungmin mumbles, stating the painfully obvious.
“I’m not,” Minho agrees.
“How come?” Seungmin asks as the car rumbles to life. Minho is quiet for a long time as he pulls out of the driveway.
“I don’t really drink anymore,” he says eventually. “Figured out it makes me sad.”
“Everything makes me sad,” Seungmin slurs into his sweatshirt, past the point of caring if he cries again. You make me sad, he almost says. Somehow, even his uninhibited mouth can’t bring itself to. Why is it impossible to admit the distance between them?
Alcohol is supposed to make you warm, but all it does is make him colder than before.
“Yeah.” Minho sighs and the car falls into brittle, thin silence. Outside, the road is empty and dark, and a stark, dead field flashes past Seungmin’s window. There isn’t even any ice or snow to make it pretty; just dead grass, once green with life. Fog curls and dances around them like smoke, weak in the 1am air.
“You can drive.” Seungmin tries to skate over the quiet, as if he won’t break it if he just tries hard enough.
“I drove you to Jisung’s.” He doesn’t remember that really. He knows someone had.
“Didn’t know you had your license.”
“Couple years now.” Seungmin glances over at Minho, profile dimly lit by his headlights. His eyes are fixed on the road, one hand on the wheel, but he doesn’t have the anxious, wide eyed stare that Jisung has, nor does he have Hyunjin’s terrifying, too relaxed approach to driving. It’s steady and quietly confident, assured in a way Minho used to always be. “You?”
“Yeah.” Seungmin leans his head against the cold window, fingers knitting and unknitting themselves. His mugshot worthy license picture burns a hole in his wallet, begging to be shown. He’d wanted to. As soon as he’d gotten it, his first thought had been to send it to Minho. But Minho still hadn’t texted him since July, and so Seungmin had sent it to Jisung instead. “Don’t drive much though.”
“Cool.” Why is it so hard now? Words that were once easy to find are impossible. Silences that were once comfortable ache with painful awkwardness. How did they let it get this bad?
Is it Seungmin’s fault?
Is it Minho’s?
Seungmin stares blankly ahead and lets his head thunk against the window as they hit a pothole. How long has it been now? Months swim in his head; he lost count after nine. It must be almost a year and a half.
Time can’t heal all wounds when it is the cause of this one.
When Seungmin drags himself from the loneliness he’s imposed on himself at home (the shame of texting Hyunjin and apologizing, of explaining himself, the way it makes his soul shrivel and haunts him until he hides under his covers and away from his friends) back to the loneliness of a new year at school he curls into his own little space once more. He tries to throw himself into studying instead of thinking about it, rather than think about his friends or the eyes he feels are always on him in class, at the cafeteria, in the library.
It doesn’t always work.
Most of the time he ends up scrolling through Instagram and looking at Hyunjin’s almost daily collections of pictures of his dog, videos of him dancing, pictures with friends. There’s other kids from high school; pretty pictures with fake deep captions or those that try to be so casually funny it comes across as trying too hard. Yeji spent the rest of her break in Jeju with her sister, Soobin dyed his hair, Jisu’s been painting, Donghyuck singing, Jisung (once in a blue moon) posts short snippets of tracks he’s working on and links to his Soundcloud.
They all seem to have blossomed while he has withered.
Seungmin hasn’t posted anything in ages. He hated every picture he took and the idea of posting some falsely happy caption, easy as it should have been, sat on his chest and made it hard to breathe. So he’d stopped a few months into freshman year. It’s not even like he’s done anything special over break, much less taken a picture, so even if he wanted to, there’s nothing worth sharing.
Today, under a bitterly determined bright sky, Seungmin sits on a bench on campus and just stares up at the cloudless blue. It’s still cold enough that his breath comes out it white puffs. Cold bleeds into his fingers when he pulls out his phone and takes a picture, opening Instagram and refreshing his feed. The first thing that pops up is an old video of Hyunjin and two other people dancing in high school and then a video of the same dance, now without one of the original dancers, and a selfie with someone hiding their face with a hat. Hyunjin has captioned it something about improvement and tags Juyeon in the selfie. Seungmin likes it absentmindedly and flicks his thumb to scroll down. He scrolls up against almost immediately, head falling forward so he can see his screen better.
juyeonaa_: the good ol days @leemiknow1025 miss this!
Seungmin knows that’s Minho; it’s his birthday and the sort of jokey username he would use. When he watches the video again, he realizes that Minho is the missing dancer. But Minho goes to school here, and so does Juyeon, which means that Hyunjin is on campus.
Minho could easily join them.
Without thinking much of it, he clicks the username, only to find that it’s private. Now his finger hovers over request to follow, unsure. Compared to the hundreds of followers Minho had had in high school, gathered over the course of six years and consisting mostly of under and upperclassmen he didn’t even know, this account has less than 100. None of their mutual friends follow him and the bio is just his name. Does Seungmin have the right to follow it? Is that too much? Will it cross a boundary that he once wouldn’t have even considered the existence of?
He hits request before he can back away. It’s just Instagram; Minho won’t hate him for him. It wouldn’t make sense.
Later in the day, after Seungmin has stared at the to-do list on his desk that keeps piling up and decides to tackle it tomorrow, too drained from his two classes, he sees that Minho has accepted the request. It’s definitely him (the account mostly hosts a bunch of pictures of Minho’s cats), but there isn’t a single picture with a filter. There’s nothing wrong with that, but…
It’s not Minho.
“Everyone else looks so happy,” Seungmin says quietly as the two of them stare out towards his house, the car parked in the driveway. “Like everyone is doing fine except me.”
“It’s fake,” Minho responds just as softly. “Social media is just acting and playing pretend for everyone else. It’s performative happiness. Everyone’s so convinced that everyone else is having fun that they want people to think that they are too.”
He doesn’t really caption his pictures aside from emojis and hashtags that ride the fine line of could be ironic and could be serious. Minho doesn’t do fake deep, or even real deep. He used to tease Seungmin for how sincere his captions were. But the pictures all feel sort of off, like they belong to someone other than Minho. They’re nice pictures, with some clear attention paid to composition, and aside from his cats, Minho’s pictures are mostly nature or faceless black and white candid looking shots other people have taken of him. It’s not devoid of personality, but lacks some of Minho’s honesty.
It’s an Instagram for other people rather than for him.
Or at least, not for the Minho from before. Seungmin has to remind himself that for all the random, useless things he still knows about Minho (the best moment of his life was getting his first cat, he used to be afraid of street sweepers, he likes the smell of Febreeze), he doesn’t know Minho anymore.
The last picture Minho posted is from early January, a #tbt from middle school of himself and Seungmin at an amusement park, heads stuck through a photo stand-in and caught in a laugh. Seungmin’s heart squeezes painfully in his chest as he lets his screen fall asleep while he looks at the picture. It grows blurry as he blinks and Seungmin’s phone falls onto his chest. He looks up at the ceiling in his dark room and the weight on the world settles in his lungs
“You remember how to get to my house,” Seungmin mumbles as Minho turns down the street even Hyunjin and Jisung miss sometimes.
“Well, yeah. Of course I do.” Seungmin thinks of Minho every time he passes the street his house is on. He wonders how he is, if they can go back to how they were. He thinks of playdates they’d had as kids, of the time he’d fallen off Minho’s bed and had narrowly avoided stitches when he’d hit the corner of his desk. He thinks of the times they’d done homework together, Seungmin complaining about teachers Minho had had the year before and Minho letting him look at old tests. He thinks of Minho’s mom, driving them to get ice cream or to the movies.
It had never occurred to him that maybe Minho remembers too. That maybe Minho thinks of him too.
It’s odd to remember that Seungmin exists to others, just as they exist to him.
Minho pulls into the driveway and cuts the engine and they sit there in the dark silence for a long time. Seungmin should get out of the car, should go home, but he doesn’t, just stares at the outline of his house ahead of them.
Minho doesn’t kick him out. Instead, he looks up through the sunroof at the stars —sparse in the vast winter sky— and sighs.
“Do you think there’s a point?” Seungmin asks.
“I don’t know.” Minho exhales, long and heavy. He doesn’t ask Seungmin to clarify; as if he knows, as if he’s asked the same question before. “Maybe just living is enough.”
“Doesn’t feel like it.” Seungmin burrows further into his hoodie. Has he ever just lived? He throws himself into school and books under the unspoken expectations of his parents and peers and never comes up for air. It never feels like enough anymore. Is anything enough? There must be something that he’s working towards, some tiny corner of life carved out just for him.
“No,” Minho agrees, voice gentle as the fog, “it doesn’t.” He sighs again, sinking in a bottomless ocean. “Maybe there is no point. Maybe there is no answer for us. But there’s nothing wrong with running the race just to see how it all ends up, right? It can’t be all bad.” There’s no response Seungmin can give him that won’t involve him dissolving into tears again. “I know it’s hard, Seungminie. Being lonely, feeling like you’ve let everyone down, not knowing what there is for you.” Minho’s fingers curl around the wheel.
“Does it get better?” Seungmin whispers, eyes fixed firmly on his lap, at his fingers weaving together.
“I should say yes.” Minho is quiet for a moment. “In all honesty, I don’t know. But it gets easier.” Another beat of silence. “Yeah,” he says more softly, “it gets easier.”
Minho comes to graduation.
Seungmin didn’t ask him. He didn’t tell Seungmin.
When Seungmin finds him in the crowd, they make eye contact, staring at each other like they’ve seen a ghost.
What is he doing here?
Seungmin’s brows furrow, his lips parting in confusion and unexpected sadness.
He waves, just once.
And Minho waves back hesitantly, his phone clutched tightly in his other hand. He looks at Seungmin so desperately, as though searching for something he’s lost. Like Seungmin is a lighthouse in a stormy sea of people.
Minho has drifted too far away, Seungmin thinks. All that’s left of him is the shards of the hourglass and whatever grains of sand Seungmin has been able to hold onto even as the wind blows and tears him away.
Come back, Seungmin wants to tell him, it’s not too late to come back.
But Minho leaves before Seungmin can find him, just like last year. This time, he doesn’t text him. Instead, he throws himself into celebrating with Hyunjin and Jisung over tteokbokki and laughing until his stomach hurts.
“Is Minho injured?” Seungmin visits for the weekend, utterly worn out from four consecutive midterms and wanting nothing more than to cry into some of his mom’s dakgalbi. He and his dad are putting groceries in the car, and Seungmin does his to remember that as much as the harsh fluorescent lights in the parking garage remind him of winter, it shouldn’t be dark yet outside. He hopes they’ll catch the sunset; maybe he can get a good picture.
“I don’t know.” Seungmin shrugs, because he doesn’t. Back in highschool, Minho had had some ankle issues, but sprains are pretty par for the course, he should think. It was never anything serious. Not back then anyway.
“His dad said he stopped dancing.” Seungmin actually knows that. After a long few weeks of psyching himself up and convincing himself that Hyunjin doesn’t hate him for the party, they’d met up for lunch and he’d asked why Minho hadn’t been in the video.
“I asked.” Hyunjin shrugs. “He read it but never replied. Juyeon-hyung said he was in the club, but quit a couple weeks into freshman year for some reason. Minho-hyung never really said. You didn’t know?”
Seungmin shakes his head.
“I feel kind of bad.” Hyunjin takes a sip of his coffee. “I’ve been sending him dance videos for ages. But how am I supposed to know if he doesn’t tell me.”
“Yeah,” Seungmin says. “He didn’t tell me why, though. I don’t think he’s injured.”
“What are you supposed to tell people when you don’t live up to their expectations for you?” Minho’s hands fall into his lap and he stares out ahead towards Seungmin’s garage. “Especially when you don’t know why you can’t bring yourself to do it, you just can’t because it hurts. What do you say when the things that make you happy feel like chores?”
If it is an injury, it isn’t a physical one.
If it’s anything like this, Seungmin thinks that’s worse.
When the June sun starts to turn the campus gold, Seungmin reunites with Jisu, literally running into her while he’s looking at his phone and she’s trying to take a picture of a puppy running across the grass.
“You did photography in high school, didn’t you?” She asks him with a huge smile.
“Um.” Seungmin blinks, surprised she remembers. Jisu had done choir, always humming something in class. For a long time, Seungmin thought it annoyed him to hear the constant noise in the seat just behind him. Then Jisu had gotten sick and been out for a few days and he realized that he’d gotten so used to it that he missed it. “Yeah.”
“Help me get a good shot?” Jisu jerks her head towards the puppy. “I’m no good with film.”
Seungmin nods and finds that talking to Jisu isn’t as scary as he always thinks talking to people from school will be. For the ten minutes that he spends giving her advice on film cameras, he feels real again, feels like he had in high school when he had felt alive and golden as the late afternoon.
“How come you’re not in the club?” Jisu asks him when she finally runs out of shots.
“I don’t know anyone,” Seungmin mumbles sheepishly. It sounds stupid when he says it outloud and isn’t at all in line with the personality he had had when Jisu knew him. He’d spent a year convincing himself that he doesn’t like photography anymore —he hated every picture he took anyway— all because he’d been too afraid to join the club. But as April bled into May and as Seungmin had scrolled through he old pictures, he realizes that he does like photography, that he still feels the same way he had when he had taken them.
He figured it was too late to join the club now anyway. What would people think of him?
“You know me!” Jisu roots through her backpack for a pen and grabs Seungmin’s hand before he can say anything. “It’s really fun and we could always use more people, especially people with experience.” She grins at Seungmin as she releases his hand, now labelled with when and where the club meets. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” she adds quickly, “you just looked happy talking about it. Think about it, okay?”
“Yeah.” Seungmin stares at the words on his hand and then at Jisu, so bubbly and bright. It almost chokes him up; a hand reaching out to pull him to shore. “Yeah, I definitely will.”
It does get easier.
Seungmin starts to take pictures again, to post sunsets and flowers and pictures of his lunch on instagram again. It feels a little less torturous when he texts Jisung, a little less like lying when he talks to Hyunjin.
Sometimes Minho will post a picture of the dance studio. Sometimes they walk by each other on campus. Sometimes Seungmin sees the old, familiar tired look in Minho’s eyes, but he laughs and jokes with a small group, and Seungmin knows that things are easier for him too.
He’s glad.
Today, he and Minho see each other as Seungmin is on his way to the building Minho is walking away from. Minho has tilted his phone up to the sky, suddenly looking down at the same time as Seungmin looks up from his and both of them freeze, looking at each other like ships in the night. Minho has one earbud in, the hand not holding his phone wrapped around one of his backpack straps. He stares at Seungmin for a long minute, and Seungmin stares at him just the same.
Then Minho gives him a small smile and nods, and Seungmin does the same, and they both look back down at their phones and continue on their ways.
Seungmin’s phone buzzes with an Instagram notification.
leemiknow1025: #Today_TheSkyIs_SoPretty
Seungmin looks at the picture, then looks up to find the same fluffy cloud above him and he closes his eyes in the warm sunlight. Something in him eases and Seungmin lets out a deep breath. He opens the messaging app as he continues his walk.
To: Minho-hyung
Do you want to get coffee sometime, hyung?
Maybe he’ll never get an answer.
Maybe this is just how it is now.
And maybe that’s okay.