Chapter Text
My name is Kim Seokjin and I died on August 23rd in the morning when my car drove off an embankment.
But I guess you already knew that.
--
It’s not so bad, being where I am.
At first, of course, it was terrible. I thought there’d been a mistake. You know how it is - one moment you’re winding down the window, feeling the wind on your face, trying to remember all the things on your shopping list because you left it pinned by a magnet to the fridge (again), and then the next moment you’re just dead.
You think you’d get some warning before it happens. Like in movies. That’s one thing they should really improve down here, the transition process. It needs a bit of work.
When I first got here I thought I was in the hospital. Everything was so white. It’s kind-of embarrassing admitting this in retrospect because you think you’d just know, wouldn’t you, that you didn’t have a body any more, that you didn’t exist, that you were gone. But the fact is at the start I did still have a body. I had hands. I had all ten of my fingers. I had my legs, I had the bracket of my hips. I had a spine that I could bend.
It’s misleading but apparently that’s just what happens sometimes, when you haven’t quite crossed over.
When you’ve gone and left pieces of yourself behind.
--
I met Namjoon some five odd years ago when he came up to me in a park and offered me weed.
I thought he was crazy. Most people do, meeting Namjoon for the first time. He was wearing an oversized sweatshirt and a greasy-looking cap and he was holding a bunch of textbooks, actual high-school chemistry textbooks, tucked underneath one arm.
“’s good stuff,” he told me, shoving it into my face. “Promise. C’mon. Give it a go.”
I actually did. Back then I wasn’t the type who knew how to say no to people.
We sat in the park on a rickety bench and watched all the normal people going about their day: the trim suburban housewives with their buggies, the wailing children, the occasional elderly couple practising tai chi. Twice in the day kids escaped from school and rolled their skateboards up and down the place, looking over their shoulders periodically, a little daring, a little sheepish. The sun crested in the sky, came down again. I wanted to leave but I didn’t know how to approach the subject.
Finally, Namjoon himself stood up. “Man. ‘s been great, but I gotta go.”
“Yeah,” I said, fumbling as I stood up as well. “Yeah, me too.”
“My name’s Namjoon.”
“Er,” I said. “Right.”
He smiled at me. Namjoon’s always had a lovely smile. “See you ‘round.”
I watched him go. I remember having a sense that if I didn’t watch him, he’d somehow turn around and come back. I’d heard of feral dogs that did that sometimes.
I wish I could say that he interested me, that I knew it just looking at him, all of that. But I didn’t.
It was my first time trying weed; I went straight home and threw up into the toilet.
--
I suppose I should count myself as lucky, because as bad as it was at least there wasn’t any pain.
I didn’t feel the car going off the road. I must’ve still been either mid-seizure or at least post-ictal, in that heavy in-between state when I’m coming to but not exactly there yet. It was my own fault, I had meds for this kind of thing. I hadn’t been taking them. When you have to take a thing for years and years there comes a point when you just get sick of it.
Stupid, I know.
Still, sometimes I try imagining it. It must’ve been a spectacular thing to watch. Asphalt, and then air. Soaring for that split second. And the impact too, the violence of the splash, the churning water.
It turns my stomach when I think about all the other ways you can go. Like fire. How could you honestly bear that? To smell the fuel of yourself just before you die? To hear the snap of your hair, your marrow? To see your blood as it sizzles and steams? To wake up screaming in your death and not know why?
Yoongi’s always been braver than me, I know that. But still.
Sometimes I feel robbed. You want your death to belong to you, to be yours. And I dreamed my way right through it.
--
I had a job once, before that job became full-time babysitting for the gang of misfits Namjoon collected.
I used to work in a coffeeshop. Awkwardly enough, I was bad at making coffee. I could bake though, passably, though really this meant I specialised in maybe two or three things and tended to burn the rest.
Cupcakes. I knew how to make cupcakes.
Still do, but there aren’t many opportunities to cook down here.
Jungkook actually came into the coffeeshop once while I was on a shift. I didn’t know him then, of course. And I wouldn’t remember it as him. I would remember a boy, maybe fifteen, skinny in a way that said that he was still growing, eyes seeming very large in the planes of his face, a cut lip and bruising across his neck.
He had a hoodie that he was trying to hide beneath. Hurting, and didn’t want to show it.
He came and pilfered two of our muffins, right from the display. Did it quick, lightning-sure. Like he’d done it heaps of times. He picked rush hour too, when the lines were thick and everybody was distracted.
Jungkook’s always been clever like that.
I remember being mad but not in any definite kind of way. Mad because they took it out of my paycheck. Mad because I should’ve seen it coming. Boys like that will steal anything, will break anything. They’re hurt so they need to hurt. And I didn’t have the capacity to imagine that hurt, not at that point, not yet, so it was all very alien and very annoying.
Jungkook didn’t come back, and I was glad. He’d already learned by then never to hit the same place twice.
--
The thing about dying is that in one sudden moment you know everything.
Sometimes what you learn is useful. Tomorrow’s weather, for example. The winner of the next presidential election. Every little word you ever had stuck on the tip of your tongue.
Sometimes what you learn is less useful; sometimes it’s something you never wanted to know. Once I accidentally came across myself as I was growing inside my mother’s uterus and it was traumatic, I tell you, I spent hours erasing that one. And sometimes you just don’t really care about the minutiae of this particular congregation meeting of Viennese horticulturalists in 1922. Sometimes it just simply isn’t your thing.
Sometimes, though, death surprises you.
You learn the colour of a phrase. You learn the path that lightning will strike. You learn the pattern of every snowflake that ever existed, everywhere, and all at once.
You learn what that girl in second grade would have said to you if the bell hadn’t rung just in time, and that’s the easiest way to get lost down here - because you know what would have happened if you’d said yes, if you’d held her hand, if you’d sat next to her for the next ten years in class. An endless telescoping of if’s. All those possibilities opening before you like unlocked doors.
The first time I met Kim Namjoon I didn’t fall in love, but Namjoon did.
Sometimes what you learn can break your heart.
--
For me it wasn’t so much falling in love with anybody in particular; I fell in love with them all.
People say I do that quite a lot. And actually because they all trickled in at their own pace, first Yoongi and then Hoseok and then the three kids, I had time. I loved them all in turn. I didn’t mean to be methodical about it, it just turned out that way.
Namjoon brought Yoongi home one morning, just dumped him in the living room like he was a stray dog.
“I got somethin’ to do,” Namjoon said. Already on the way out. “Beer’s in the fridge, Yoongi-hyung.”
Yoongi and I just stared at each other.
It was like staring at a snake. Yoongi was terrifying back then. You had the sense that he saw you and didn’t see you at the same time.
“’scuse me,” Yoongi said finally, and made for the kitchen.
Namjoon never told me how they knew each other. Of course I know now. But all I understood at the time was that wherever Yoongi went a chill descended, an arctic silence that froze like pack-ice around him, physically stopped you from getting too close. I avoided him at first, which seemed to suit him fine; I restocked the fridge over and over. Yoongi drank like a horse and could hold it too.
I won’t hide it - Yoongi took the longest time to crack. It wasn’t until the kids came that he softened.
But I caught him in the dawn once in those early months, standing there, thin shirt and bare arms in the wind, face tipped up towards the sky. A sliver of marble against the blue. Waiting for something.
I wonder if it ever came.
--
I’m telling this narrative all out of order but in the first year that we were all together, I managed to ruin it by getting myself hit by a car.
I’ve always had bad timing.
I was on the surgical ward for a week and a half, two at the most. It was nothing really, not in the grand scheme of things. When you have what I have you just resign yourself to it, you expect that every time you wake up you’ll be somewhere and it won’t always be where you think you went to sleep.
Namjoon hung around at all hours. The nurses would boot him out but he’d sneak back in, he’d buy them things. Biscuits. Cakes. He’d charm them. Namjoon knew how to charm when he wanted to.
“Go away,” I snapped at him, over and over. “I’m tired. Go away.”
But he didn’t go away.
I wasn’t tired. I was scared mostly, because Namjoon was smart and he didn’t know how to let things go. Whenever he latched onto something he stuck by it. I knew that if he stayed around too much he would clue in to me, would start putting the pieces together, and then it would all be over: him, me, us. Everything. I should’ve just told them all but I couldn’t. Every time I tried, and I did try, the words just bottled up inside me like pebbles.
Don’t ask me to explain it now. I can’t. I’m so ashamed. It’s not a thing you can find an excuse for; it’s not a thing that should even need an excuse to begin with.
Isn’t that what love is, though? Being afraid?
If that’s an excuse, then it’s the only one I have.