[dropped] freudian au (onew/taemin)
Working Title: Freudian AU
Pairing: Taemin/Onew
Rating: R
~3800 w. written in september 2010 and inspired by younha’s “기억” featuring tablo.
since most of it remains unexplained, the context is as follows: onew and taemin are in a committed relationship for some time before onew dies in an accident. taemin, completely distraught, consents to participate in an experiment conducted by key and minho, psychology students, to wipe his memories. the experiment is mostly successful, but taemin’s subconscious mind keeps haunting him with dreams of onew. the dreams become progressively darker and harder for him to process until, with the help of jonghyun, onew’s close friend, taemin remembers both his relationship with onew and the fact that he watched onew die. the ending hadn’t been decided, but it was likely that taemin would have committed suicide at the end of the story after intense psychological trauma. or there would've been some weird inception-esque ending. anyway, most of that is not in this wip, so it’s just mostly confusing, uncomfortable, and dark.
my eyes, my ears, my hands, my feet, my lips, my heart, my soul
remembers you.
윤하 - 기억 (ft. 타블로)
Younha - Memory (ft. Tablo)
To Taemin, it feels a little like déjà vu.
He’s walking down a busy street in Apgujeong, past street vendors advertising with loud, scratchy voices; gaggles of schoolgirls laughing with their hands covering their mouths; and kids crouched down in circles, hands pointed at each other in accusatory games of rock-paper-scissors. His backpack hangs off one shoulder, his hands dangle at his sides, and when he passes this man on the street, for a moment it’s just another inconsequential, chance encounter with a stranger. A second later, his body and mind freeze, caught in a loop, as he looks over his shoulder trying to figure out where he’s seen this man before. It feels as if he passes a million people every day, bumping shoulders with strangers he’ll never see again, but this man, this someone, Taemin swears he’s seen.
It’s déjà vu, only it’s not, really, because even though it feels like it, he is absolutely sure he’s never seen this man.
He remembers reading in his psychology class that scientists think déjà vu is a split-second lapse in cognition-a neuron double-fires, one eye processes faster than the other, short-term and long-term memory clash in an epic battle of will-that causes a feeling of recurrence. But déjà vu doesn’t quite describe how Taemin looks at this man and knows-rather than just feeling-that they’ve met before, only they haven’t, and Taemin knows it, and it’s all very confusing.
Especially when, as Taemin stands, dumbfounded, in the crowd staring at this man, the man clenches his fists and turns around to stare back at Taemin.
The situation is all kinds of surreal. In fact, to Taemin it feels like a drama where the long-parted lovers reunite in the middle of a sea of people. But then a nagging voice in the back of his head tells him that this is a stranger, so why are they still staring at each other?
The man steps forward, hesitates, looks down. His hands wring the strap of his messenger bag like a wet towel. And then he looks back up at Taemin, their eyes meeting, and, with care, mouths what Taemin reads as “I miss you.”
Before Taemin can figure out what he means, the man turns around and melds into the crowd, just another stranger again, and Taemin is buffeted by the force of the waves.
-
Taemin opens his eyes. The ceiling, a luminescent white, stares back at him. He looks down and finds an IV feeding into his elbow. At his side, there is a vase of flowers and a “Get Well” card resting on a table. The room is silent, cold, and smells like bleach.
The first thing he thinks is, Why am I here? and his immediate answer is I’m sick. But what is he ill with? Why is he in the hospital? Is it bad? Is he dying? And then where are his parents, family, friends?
He’s pretty sure he wants them there, but he’s not quite sure why. In fact, when he tries, he finds he can’t form their faces in his memory anyway, which is troubling because he’s pretty sure he should remember things like what his parents’ and best friends’ faces look like.
But then he realizes he’s got bigger problems when he finds that after probing the recesses of his memory all he can remember is the careful prick of a needle at his elbow and the smell of formaldehyde. There are other memories, but they flash by like a broken slideshow where the slides are cracked around the edges, and faces blur out when you look too close, even when you squint and tilt your head to the side.
He sits up and groans in reply to his screaming muscles. When he flexes his fingers, his arms tremble.
“What-?”
The door slides open with a swoosh, and two tall men walk in. One wears a guilty expression as he clutches a stacks of papers to his chest, and the other stands lanky with his hands in his pockets.
“You’re awake!” the first man says.
Taemin stares back at them, confused. “Um. Yeah.”
They stand at the door, the stretch of what seems like miles between them and Taemin. “How do you feel?”
“Okay?” He really doesn’t know. Nothing really hurts on him, but he has no idea what happened to him, and he can’t remember anyone’s name or face. But how does he know if that’s a good or bad thing when he doesn’t know what memories he’s missing out on? He doesn’t even know who they are, and trying to remember makes his head start to pound.
“Sorry,” he says, “but who are you?”
Their faces fall. Taemin sees them share a glance before the first man approaches his bed and says, “I’m Kibum. That’s Minho. We’re your friends.”
“Oh.” Taemin looks down at his hands. They’re his friends, but he doesn’t know them at all. What kind of person does that make him? “I can’t remember you.”
Kibum looks away for a second. “I can tell,” he says, and then, swallowing, forces out: “The doctors said this might happen.”
Taemin waits for them to explain.
Kibum seems to struggle with himself for a moment before Minho approaches, sets a hand on Kibum’s shoulder, and says in a deep voice, “You were in an accident. A terrible accident. And you hit your head pretty bad, so we were afraid you’d lose your memory.”
Taemin lifts his hand to his head and finds his head is not bandaged, but rather that several portions of the hair on his nape and the side of his head are shaved off. Which is weird and doesn’t make much sense.
Kibum and Minho share another look, panicked, before Minho says quickly, “You’ve been out for a while. We didn’t even know if you’d wake up.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re awake!” Kibum exclaims, his face pinched. “And that’s good. We can get you out of here and back on your feet in no time.”
“But...” Taemin folds the hem of his blanket. “But how do I get better if I don’t know anything?”
“We’ll help you,” Kibum says quickly. “Of course we will. We’re-we’re your friends.”
Something crawling inside his stomach tells him that they’re not, but how does he know any better? He has nothing except for them-he hardly even has himself.
“I’ll fix it,” Kibum tells him. “Promise.”
And Taemin believes him.
-
Taemin sits on a bench by the Han River. He watches the murky teal water roll downstream, guided and restrained by walls of stone. He imagines fish jumping out of the water to see the sun, their scaly backsides gleaming, shimmering, in the moonlight. The water is mesmerizing today, more so than the day before, when Taemin had set up camp under the Cheongdam bridge and peered over the railing into the river, or the day before that when he’d taken off his shoes and socks and let his toes scrape the surface of water.
Night tints the sky a dark blue. For a long time, he’s been watching the currents of the river, but nothing seems to change. He’s waiting for an epiphany, but he’s not quite sure what it is. Maybe he’s hoping the meaning of life will somehow be found in the stories the light tells on the surface or that some giant underwater monster will come up from his home and tell Taemin that he’s living one big dream, and that he needs to wake up.
The water’s silence echoes.
Taemin lets his shoulders slump a little as he turns his cell phone over in his hand. Is he waiting for a call that will never come?
“Hey there,” a voice says from his left, and when Taemin turns to look, there is a man sitting there, his smile tentative beneath the wavy locks of his fringe.
“You’re here,” Taemin says, clenching his fist.
“I’m here.” The man turns his gaze to the water. “You asked me to come.”
Taemin frowns at his phone, then stands up and chucks it into the water. “You weren’t going to call me anyway, right?”
“I can’t,” the man tells him. “You know that.”
“I hoped-” Taemin sits back down. He picks his legs up and wraps his arms around them before leaning his head down to rest on his knees. “I wanted you to.”
“I’m sorry.”
They sit in silence for several minutes, Taemin with his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against the crease of his jeans as he basks in the presence of the other man.
“I miss you,” Taemin says, but he doesn’t know why.
“I know.”
This isn’t the man Taemin knows, is it? Taemin bites his lip, breathes deeply, and asks, “Are you real?”
“What a terrible thing to ask someone.”
Taemin lifts his head to look out at the water. “Sorry. This just-You feel like a dream.”
The man turns to look at him, his face solemn. No, that’s not right, Taemin thinks, Why isn’t he smiling? “Maybe I’m real, and you’re the dream. Maybe you’re just imagining things.”
“Stop speaking in riddles,” Taemin says.
The man smiles, and for a moment it feels normal again. It feels real. “I have to go. Call me sometime, Taemin.”
Taemin looks out at the water and wonders how.
-
When Kibum helps him home, the first thing Taemin notices about his apartment is that it feels so empty. His bed is perfectly made, and the bathroom is sparkling clean. The kitchen smells like bleach and disinfectant. In the living room, he finds a bookshelf filled with books arranged alphabetically and pictures of people he thinks he used to know. The glass table in front of the TV holds up a stack of magazines sitting next to two remotes. There is not a single smudge on the glass despite the feeling Taemin has that tells him there should be coffee rings. In fact, he’s never been clean before, so this unprecedented sanitation feels wrong and, somehow, dirty.
“I cleaned it,” Kibum says when Taemin asks about it. “You practically lived in a dumpster.”
“This feels weird,” Taemin tells him. “Wrong.”
“I’m sure you’re just adjusting to the memories.”
“Something’s missing,” Taemin says, but to be honest, he’s not sure what. “What is it?”
Something in Kibum’s face looks troubled. “There’s nothing missing, Taemin. Nothing that wasn’t gone already.”
But Taemin can’t quite shake off the feeling of emptiness that chases him for the next few weeks. He’s positive he has too much closet space, and that the bed is far too big for him alone. The products in his bathroom are unfamiliar, and the food in his kitchen is not what he enjoys to eat. If he didn’t remember coming back to this apartment every day after class, he would’ve thought it belonged to someone else.
The empty feeling pervades throughout the apartment until Taemin is choking on it, until it seeps through his skin and invades his body. When he leaves the apartment, all he can think of is the feeling of loneliness inside, a feeling that persists even when surrounded by people who tell him they’re his friends. But Taemin doesn’t know them, and the memories they may have had together are gone. With no memory of interaction, he feels like they’re all lies.
His life lies in fragments. As hard as he tries, faces and names elude him.
Last week, he met a girl in his Behavioral Psychology class that claimed they were dating, but Kibum quickly shot her down with a snapping expletive and told her to stop taking advantage of people. Several days ago, his mother called him, and he couldn’t picture her face.
What’s worse is the gap of missing memories right before his accident. Aside from his parents’ faces, he can remember events of his childhood with clarity. When he was eight, he climbed into a tree to save a stray cat and ended up falling and breaking his ankle, and his mother had blamed the cat, but Taemin insisted they take it in anyway. The first time his father took him to the Han River, he was five and easily excitable, and his father let him ride on his shoulders and then carried Taemin home when he fell asleep watching the boats. He can remember his first day of secondary school and the churning feeling in his stomach and how he met his best friend, who was just as nervous as him, and they shared their box lunches (Taemin traded some of his fried eggs for kimbap; his best friend gave Taemin all his kkakdugi), and then the feeling of loss and betrayal when his best friend told him he was going to exchange school in America. The first time he kissed a girl was quick and messy, with his fingers trembling along her arm, and then afterward he regretted it when she shoved him away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. When he graduated, his mother had cried, and his father had held him proudly and told Taemin he loved him, then declared to everyone he met that day that he had the greatest son anyone could have (Taemin later cried into his pillow).
But then Taemin tries to think of his entire freshmen and sophomore years of university, and all he can remember are fragments. He remembers registering for classes, and sometimes going to class, but then he can’t remember what the library looks like despite knowing he spent most of his first semester living there, and he knows he was part of a study group, but not quite when or where it took place or who was in it. He doesn’t know how he came to live in this apartment, but he knows that he’s been living in it for eight months (he double-checked the lease).
At its worst, the memories of his first three months living in his apartment are completely gone even though Taemin can remember fragments of his life after that up until his accident.
His Psychology professor tells him that a common trait of retrograde amnesia is losing memories of the most recent events, but when Taemin asks about selectivity, his professor can’t give him an answer.
“We still don’t know that much about it, really. It changes depending on the person and the severity of the trauma.”
He spends hours in the library poring over thick tomes on psychology and memory and the brain, but they all tell him the same thing: there is no cure for amnesia; there is only event-triggering to jog the memory. But when Taemin doesn’t know what’s missing, and his friends won’t remind him what it is, how is he supposed to figure it out?
He tells himself as he’s lying in bed-on the left side because somehow the right had felt too weird-that he’s going to visit his parents and try to fill in the answers. His parents have to know what’s missing.
-
The bathroom is smaller than usual. Taemin lies in the tub, his hair soaking wet and hanging in his face. The water only fills it halfway, but it freezes Taemin until he’s shivering, his arms wrapped around his legs in a feeble attempt to stay warm. For some reason, it’s very important that he stays in the bathtub, though he’s not entirely sure why.
The ticking of a clock seems to emanate from the walls. It matches the slow thudding against his temples and the pounding rush of blood pumping through his arteries and veins, which somehow makes him colder than it does warmer.
“The water’s going to get cold, Taemin.”
Taemin turns his head to find the man sitting on the lowered toilet seat, his legs pulled up and crossed. His hair is longer than it was the last time they saw each other, but his gentle smile is still the same.
“You’re not real,” Taemin says. His chin trembles against his knees.
“Don’t I feel real?” he replies, smiling all the while.
Taemin shivers, his teeth chattering, and says, “I see you but I don’t. You’re not here.”
“I’m here, but you’re not.” He slides his legs off the seat and curls his fingers over the edge, gripping it as if to tear it away. “Aren’t you the one missing something?”
Taemin shakes his head and tries to ignore the pinpricks of cold stabbing at his legs. “Not something.”
With a smile, the man stands up and climbs into the tub, clothes and all, opposite of Taemin. He puts his hands on Taemin’s knees, and Taemin feels warmth diffuse back into his skin. Taemin lets his arms relax as the water begins to warm.
“Do you miss me?” the man asks.
Taemin curls his hands over the man’s and says, “I think so.” His hair drips water into his eyes. “Yes.”
“It’s time to move on.” He slides his hands to tickle the back of Taemin’s knees, and something about it nags at the recesses of Taemin’s memory. Hadn’t they done this before, curled up in a mass of blankets and pillows?
“I don’t want to,” Taemin says. But why? Who is he anyway?
The man smiles, leaning forward to plant a kiss on the soppy locks dangling over Taemin’s forehead. “Sometimes you have to if you want to make things better. Maybe I’m not real, and you’re just making this up in your head.”
Taemin hangs his head. “It has to be real. You feel real. You’re here.”
The man’s lip quirks. “It’s okay if I’m not, I promise.”
Taemin can’t quite find his voice to say, “It’s not. It’s really, really not.” Instead, he lets his head fall forward to rest on his knees and tries not to cry at the soft press of lips against his forehead.
-
His mother is a sobbing mess when she sees Taemin. She clings to the lapels of his jacket and presses her tears into his chest, her cries unrestrained. His father stands behind her, his mouth thin, with his arms folded across his chest. The door to their apartment is still half-open behind them.
“Why are you here?” his father asks.
Taemin lifts his arms to embrace his mother and says, “I had an accident.” His mother wails and clings to him, blubbering about her baby. “Don’t cry,” he says, quiet. “Mom, I’m okay. Why are you crying?”
She stops sobbing long enough to pull away and ask, “Did he hurt you? Are you sick? Did he give you something?”
“Who are you talking about?” he asks. Something about this situation feels wrong. There is something very important missing, and he thinks it’s probably what is missing from every other part of his life.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” his mother says, muffled by his shirt, just as his father tells him, “I told you not to come back.”
“I don’t understand,” Taemin says, taking care to enunciate his words. “I had an accident. I can’t remember.”
“Don’t lie to me,” his father snapped. “Your excuses won’t work on me. We don’t want you here.”
It feels sort of like the time Taemin was a kid, and his parents had taken him to Apgujeong for the first time. His mother had warned him to stay close to her side, but Taemin had wandered away and couldn’t find his way back to them. He’d curled up in a niche between two street vendors, tears streaming down his face, until a man found him and led him back to his mom, whose cries had been lost on the crowd.
This time, it’s all the sense of confusion and none of the liberation of finding home.
His mom wipes her tears and pulls back from him. “I still love you,” she tells him, her face wet. Cupping Taemin’s face in her hands, she pulls his head down and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Someday, your father will understand,” she breathes. “You can come back then.”
He stands there, lost, as his mother releases him, turns around and approaches her husband. She gives him a long look before stepping back inside their apartment.
“Don’t come back.” His father curls his hand into a fist, bites his lip, and turns his head away. “Don’t come back until you’re normal again.”
It’s less like being lost, and more like being left behind.
-
This time, Taemin’s alone.
He’s lying on a bed he thinks might be his, but the sheets are cold, and the pillows have no imprints. The light next to his bed is turned on, but the bulb flickers every other minute. The furniture casts long, devilish shadows on the walls and ceilings, and with every flicker of the light, they twist and crawl along the plaster. The walls shudder around him, creaking and groaning in ways that Taemin is sure walls should not. The silence echoes in his ears, ringing in the back of his head like a lingering scream.
Taemin is alone.
There is a heavy weight pressing down on his chest, suffocating him. He wants to get up and leave because there has to be something outside of the overwhelming, drowning emptiness. The shadows laugh at him cruelly, their twisted faces mocking his inability to move.
There are shadows laughing at him, and the walls are moving, and Taemin is alone.
He musters the effort to roll on his side, curl his hands into fists under his pillow, and squeeze his eyes shut. It’s like he pretended as a kid: if he can’t see them, they don’t exist. He tells himself that, but even their laughter echoes in his ears, taunting him.
He’s alone, and this side of the bed is sunken in, worn, but he knows the other side is fine, impeccable even, because Taemin is alone, and there’s no one to sleep on that side anyway.
Slowly, as if the shadows will leap on him if he moves too fast, he covers his ears with the palms of his hands. If he can’t hear them, they don’t exist. They can’t mock him because they don’t exist.
But the laughter resonates in his ears, echoing until it’s all he knows.
Someone is missing.
--UNFINISHED--
Pairing: Taemin/Onew
Rating: R
~3800 w. written in september 2010 and inspired by younha’s “기억” featuring tablo.
since most of it remains unexplained, the context is as follows: onew and taemin are in a committed relationship for some time before onew dies in an accident. taemin, completely distraught, consents to participate in an experiment conducted by key and minho, psychology students, to wipe his memories. the experiment is mostly successful, but taemin’s subconscious mind keeps haunting him with dreams of onew. the dreams become progressively darker and harder for him to process until, with the help of jonghyun, onew’s close friend, taemin remembers both his relationship with onew and the fact that he watched onew die. the ending hadn’t been decided, but it was likely that taemin would have committed suicide at the end of the story after intense psychological trauma. or there would've been some weird inception-esque ending. anyway, most of that is not in this wip, so it’s just mostly confusing, uncomfortable, and dark.
my eyes, my ears, my hands, my feet, my lips, my heart, my soul
remembers you.
윤하 - 기억 (ft. 타블로)
Younha - Memory (ft. Tablo)
To Taemin, it feels a little like déjà vu.
He’s walking down a busy street in Apgujeong, past street vendors advertising with loud, scratchy voices; gaggles of schoolgirls laughing with their hands covering their mouths; and kids crouched down in circles, hands pointed at each other in accusatory games of rock-paper-scissors. His backpack hangs off one shoulder, his hands dangle at his sides, and when he passes this man on the street, for a moment it’s just another inconsequential, chance encounter with a stranger. A second later, his body and mind freeze, caught in a loop, as he looks over his shoulder trying to figure out where he’s seen this man before. It feels as if he passes a million people every day, bumping shoulders with strangers he’ll never see again, but this man, this someone, Taemin swears he’s seen.
It’s déjà vu, only it’s not, really, because even though it feels like it, he is absolutely sure he’s never seen this man.
He remembers reading in his psychology class that scientists think déjà vu is a split-second lapse in cognition-a neuron double-fires, one eye processes faster than the other, short-term and long-term memory clash in an epic battle of will-that causes a feeling of recurrence. But déjà vu doesn’t quite describe how Taemin looks at this man and knows-rather than just feeling-that they’ve met before, only they haven’t, and Taemin knows it, and it’s all very confusing.
Especially when, as Taemin stands, dumbfounded, in the crowd staring at this man, the man clenches his fists and turns around to stare back at Taemin.
The situation is all kinds of surreal. In fact, to Taemin it feels like a drama where the long-parted lovers reunite in the middle of a sea of people. But then a nagging voice in the back of his head tells him that this is a stranger, so why are they still staring at each other?
The man steps forward, hesitates, looks down. His hands wring the strap of his messenger bag like a wet towel. And then he looks back up at Taemin, their eyes meeting, and, with care, mouths what Taemin reads as “I miss you.”
Before Taemin can figure out what he means, the man turns around and melds into the crowd, just another stranger again, and Taemin is buffeted by the force of the waves.
-
Taemin opens his eyes. The ceiling, a luminescent white, stares back at him. He looks down and finds an IV feeding into his elbow. At his side, there is a vase of flowers and a “Get Well” card resting on a table. The room is silent, cold, and smells like bleach.
The first thing he thinks is, Why am I here? and his immediate answer is I’m sick. But what is he ill with? Why is he in the hospital? Is it bad? Is he dying? And then where are his parents, family, friends?
He’s pretty sure he wants them there, but he’s not quite sure why. In fact, when he tries, he finds he can’t form their faces in his memory anyway, which is troubling because he’s pretty sure he should remember things like what his parents’ and best friends’ faces look like.
But then he realizes he’s got bigger problems when he finds that after probing the recesses of his memory all he can remember is the careful prick of a needle at his elbow and the smell of formaldehyde. There are other memories, but they flash by like a broken slideshow where the slides are cracked around the edges, and faces blur out when you look too close, even when you squint and tilt your head to the side.
He sits up and groans in reply to his screaming muscles. When he flexes his fingers, his arms tremble.
“What-?”
The door slides open with a swoosh, and two tall men walk in. One wears a guilty expression as he clutches a stacks of papers to his chest, and the other stands lanky with his hands in his pockets.
“You’re awake!” the first man says.
Taemin stares back at them, confused. “Um. Yeah.”
They stand at the door, the stretch of what seems like miles between them and Taemin. “How do you feel?”
“Okay?” He really doesn’t know. Nothing really hurts on him, but he has no idea what happened to him, and he can’t remember anyone’s name or face. But how does he know if that’s a good or bad thing when he doesn’t know what memories he’s missing out on? He doesn’t even know who they are, and trying to remember makes his head start to pound.
“Sorry,” he says, “but who are you?”
Their faces fall. Taemin sees them share a glance before the first man approaches his bed and says, “I’m Kibum. That’s Minho. We’re your friends.”
“Oh.” Taemin looks down at his hands. They’re his friends, but he doesn’t know them at all. What kind of person does that make him? “I can’t remember you.”
Kibum looks away for a second. “I can tell,” he says, and then, swallowing, forces out: “The doctors said this might happen.”
Taemin waits for them to explain.
Kibum seems to struggle with himself for a moment before Minho approaches, sets a hand on Kibum’s shoulder, and says in a deep voice, “You were in an accident. A terrible accident. And you hit your head pretty bad, so we were afraid you’d lose your memory.”
Taemin lifts his hand to his head and finds his head is not bandaged, but rather that several portions of the hair on his nape and the side of his head are shaved off. Which is weird and doesn’t make much sense.
Kibum and Minho share another look, panicked, before Minho says quickly, “You’ve been out for a while. We didn’t even know if you’d wake up.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re awake!” Kibum exclaims, his face pinched. “And that’s good. We can get you out of here and back on your feet in no time.”
“But...” Taemin folds the hem of his blanket. “But how do I get better if I don’t know anything?”
“We’ll help you,” Kibum says quickly. “Of course we will. We’re-we’re your friends.”
Something crawling inside his stomach tells him that they’re not, but how does he know any better? He has nothing except for them-he hardly even has himself.
“I’ll fix it,” Kibum tells him. “Promise.”
And Taemin believes him.
-
Taemin sits on a bench by the Han River. He watches the murky teal water roll downstream, guided and restrained by walls of stone. He imagines fish jumping out of the water to see the sun, their scaly backsides gleaming, shimmering, in the moonlight. The water is mesmerizing today, more so than the day before, when Taemin had set up camp under the Cheongdam bridge and peered over the railing into the river, or the day before that when he’d taken off his shoes and socks and let his toes scrape the surface of water.
Night tints the sky a dark blue. For a long time, he’s been watching the currents of the river, but nothing seems to change. He’s waiting for an epiphany, but he’s not quite sure what it is. Maybe he’s hoping the meaning of life will somehow be found in the stories the light tells on the surface or that some giant underwater monster will come up from his home and tell Taemin that he’s living one big dream, and that he needs to wake up.
The water’s silence echoes.
Taemin lets his shoulders slump a little as he turns his cell phone over in his hand. Is he waiting for a call that will never come?
“Hey there,” a voice says from his left, and when Taemin turns to look, there is a man sitting there, his smile tentative beneath the wavy locks of his fringe.
“You’re here,” Taemin says, clenching his fist.
“I’m here.” The man turns his gaze to the water. “You asked me to come.”
Taemin frowns at his phone, then stands up and chucks it into the water. “You weren’t going to call me anyway, right?”
“I can’t,” the man tells him. “You know that.”
“I hoped-” Taemin sits back down. He picks his legs up and wraps his arms around them before leaning his head down to rest on his knees. “I wanted you to.”
“I’m sorry.”
They sit in silence for several minutes, Taemin with his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against the crease of his jeans as he basks in the presence of the other man.
“I miss you,” Taemin says, but he doesn’t know why.
“I know.”
This isn’t the man Taemin knows, is it? Taemin bites his lip, breathes deeply, and asks, “Are you real?”
“What a terrible thing to ask someone.”
Taemin lifts his head to look out at the water. “Sorry. This just-You feel like a dream.”
The man turns to look at him, his face solemn. No, that’s not right, Taemin thinks, Why isn’t he smiling? “Maybe I’m real, and you’re the dream. Maybe you’re just imagining things.”
“Stop speaking in riddles,” Taemin says.
The man smiles, and for a moment it feels normal again. It feels real. “I have to go. Call me sometime, Taemin.”
Taemin looks out at the water and wonders how.
-
When Kibum helps him home, the first thing Taemin notices about his apartment is that it feels so empty. His bed is perfectly made, and the bathroom is sparkling clean. The kitchen smells like bleach and disinfectant. In the living room, he finds a bookshelf filled with books arranged alphabetically and pictures of people he thinks he used to know. The glass table in front of the TV holds up a stack of magazines sitting next to two remotes. There is not a single smudge on the glass despite the feeling Taemin has that tells him there should be coffee rings. In fact, he’s never been clean before, so this unprecedented sanitation feels wrong and, somehow, dirty.
“I cleaned it,” Kibum says when Taemin asks about it. “You practically lived in a dumpster.”
“This feels weird,” Taemin tells him. “Wrong.”
“I’m sure you’re just adjusting to the memories.”
“Something’s missing,” Taemin says, but to be honest, he’s not sure what. “What is it?”
Something in Kibum’s face looks troubled. “There’s nothing missing, Taemin. Nothing that wasn’t gone already.”
But Taemin can’t quite shake off the feeling of emptiness that chases him for the next few weeks. He’s positive he has too much closet space, and that the bed is far too big for him alone. The products in his bathroom are unfamiliar, and the food in his kitchen is not what he enjoys to eat. If he didn’t remember coming back to this apartment every day after class, he would’ve thought it belonged to someone else.
The empty feeling pervades throughout the apartment until Taemin is choking on it, until it seeps through his skin and invades his body. When he leaves the apartment, all he can think of is the feeling of loneliness inside, a feeling that persists even when surrounded by people who tell him they’re his friends. But Taemin doesn’t know them, and the memories they may have had together are gone. With no memory of interaction, he feels like they’re all lies.
His life lies in fragments. As hard as he tries, faces and names elude him.
Last week, he met a girl in his Behavioral Psychology class that claimed they were dating, but Kibum quickly shot her down with a snapping expletive and told her to stop taking advantage of people. Several days ago, his mother called him, and he couldn’t picture her face.
What’s worse is the gap of missing memories right before his accident. Aside from his parents’ faces, he can remember events of his childhood with clarity. When he was eight, he climbed into a tree to save a stray cat and ended up falling and breaking his ankle, and his mother had blamed the cat, but Taemin insisted they take it in anyway. The first time his father took him to the Han River, he was five and easily excitable, and his father let him ride on his shoulders and then carried Taemin home when he fell asleep watching the boats. He can remember his first day of secondary school and the churning feeling in his stomach and how he met his best friend, who was just as nervous as him, and they shared their box lunches (Taemin traded some of his fried eggs for kimbap; his best friend gave Taemin all his kkakdugi), and then the feeling of loss and betrayal when his best friend told him he was going to exchange school in America. The first time he kissed a girl was quick and messy, with his fingers trembling along her arm, and then afterward he regretted it when she shoved him away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. When he graduated, his mother had cried, and his father had held him proudly and told Taemin he loved him, then declared to everyone he met that day that he had the greatest son anyone could have (Taemin later cried into his pillow).
But then Taemin tries to think of his entire freshmen and sophomore years of university, and all he can remember are fragments. He remembers registering for classes, and sometimes going to class, but then he can’t remember what the library looks like despite knowing he spent most of his first semester living there, and he knows he was part of a study group, but not quite when or where it took place or who was in it. He doesn’t know how he came to live in this apartment, but he knows that he’s been living in it for eight months (he double-checked the lease).
At its worst, the memories of his first three months living in his apartment are completely gone even though Taemin can remember fragments of his life after that up until his accident.
His Psychology professor tells him that a common trait of retrograde amnesia is losing memories of the most recent events, but when Taemin asks about selectivity, his professor can’t give him an answer.
“We still don’t know that much about it, really. It changes depending on the person and the severity of the trauma.”
He spends hours in the library poring over thick tomes on psychology and memory and the brain, but they all tell him the same thing: there is no cure for amnesia; there is only event-triggering to jog the memory. But when Taemin doesn’t know what’s missing, and his friends won’t remind him what it is, how is he supposed to figure it out?
He tells himself as he’s lying in bed-on the left side because somehow the right had felt too weird-that he’s going to visit his parents and try to fill in the answers. His parents have to know what’s missing.
-
The bathroom is smaller than usual. Taemin lies in the tub, his hair soaking wet and hanging in his face. The water only fills it halfway, but it freezes Taemin until he’s shivering, his arms wrapped around his legs in a feeble attempt to stay warm. For some reason, it’s very important that he stays in the bathtub, though he’s not entirely sure why.
The ticking of a clock seems to emanate from the walls. It matches the slow thudding against his temples and the pounding rush of blood pumping through his arteries and veins, which somehow makes him colder than it does warmer.
“The water’s going to get cold, Taemin.”
Taemin turns his head to find the man sitting on the lowered toilet seat, his legs pulled up and crossed. His hair is longer than it was the last time they saw each other, but his gentle smile is still the same.
“You’re not real,” Taemin says. His chin trembles against his knees.
“Don’t I feel real?” he replies, smiling all the while.
Taemin shivers, his teeth chattering, and says, “I see you but I don’t. You’re not here.”
“I’m here, but you’re not.” He slides his legs off the seat and curls his fingers over the edge, gripping it as if to tear it away. “Aren’t you the one missing something?”
Taemin shakes his head and tries to ignore the pinpricks of cold stabbing at his legs. “Not something.”
With a smile, the man stands up and climbs into the tub, clothes and all, opposite of Taemin. He puts his hands on Taemin’s knees, and Taemin feels warmth diffuse back into his skin. Taemin lets his arms relax as the water begins to warm.
“Do you miss me?” the man asks.
Taemin curls his hands over the man’s and says, “I think so.” His hair drips water into his eyes. “Yes.”
“It’s time to move on.” He slides his hands to tickle the back of Taemin’s knees, and something about it nags at the recesses of Taemin’s memory. Hadn’t they done this before, curled up in a mass of blankets and pillows?
“I don’t want to,” Taemin says. But why? Who is he anyway?
The man smiles, leaning forward to plant a kiss on the soppy locks dangling over Taemin’s forehead. “Sometimes you have to if you want to make things better. Maybe I’m not real, and you’re just making this up in your head.”
Taemin hangs his head. “It has to be real. You feel real. You’re here.”
The man’s lip quirks. “It’s okay if I’m not, I promise.”
Taemin can’t quite find his voice to say, “It’s not. It’s really, really not.” Instead, he lets his head fall forward to rest on his knees and tries not to cry at the soft press of lips against his forehead.
-
His mother is a sobbing mess when she sees Taemin. She clings to the lapels of his jacket and presses her tears into his chest, her cries unrestrained. His father stands behind her, his mouth thin, with his arms folded across his chest. The door to their apartment is still half-open behind them.
“Why are you here?” his father asks.
Taemin lifts his arms to embrace his mother and says, “I had an accident.” His mother wails and clings to him, blubbering about her baby. “Don’t cry,” he says, quiet. “Mom, I’m okay. Why are you crying?”
She stops sobbing long enough to pull away and ask, “Did he hurt you? Are you sick? Did he give you something?”
“Who are you talking about?” he asks. Something about this situation feels wrong. There is something very important missing, and he thinks it’s probably what is missing from every other part of his life.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” his mother says, muffled by his shirt, just as his father tells him, “I told you not to come back.”
“I don’t understand,” Taemin says, taking care to enunciate his words. “I had an accident. I can’t remember.”
“Don’t lie to me,” his father snapped. “Your excuses won’t work on me. We don’t want you here.”
It feels sort of like the time Taemin was a kid, and his parents had taken him to Apgujeong for the first time. His mother had warned him to stay close to her side, but Taemin had wandered away and couldn’t find his way back to them. He’d curled up in a niche between two street vendors, tears streaming down his face, until a man found him and led him back to his mom, whose cries had been lost on the crowd.
This time, it’s all the sense of confusion and none of the liberation of finding home.
His mom wipes her tears and pulls back from him. “I still love you,” she tells him, her face wet. Cupping Taemin’s face in her hands, she pulls his head down and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Someday, your father will understand,” she breathes. “You can come back then.”
He stands there, lost, as his mother releases him, turns around and approaches her husband. She gives him a long look before stepping back inside their apartment.
“Don’t come back.” His father curls his hand into a fist, bites his lip, and turns his head away. “Don’t come back until you’re normal again.”
It’s less like being lost, and more like being left behind.
-
This time, Taemin’s alone.
He’s lying on a bed he thinks might be his, but the sheets are cold, and the pillows have no imprints. The light next to his bed is turned on, but the bulb flickers every other minute. The furniture casts long, devilish shadows on the walls and ceilings, and with every flicker of the light, they twist and crawl along the plaster. The walls shudder around him, creaking and groaning in ways that Taemin is sure walls should not. The silence echoes in his ears, ringing in the back of his head like a lingering scream.
Taemin is alone.
There is a heavy weight pressing down on his chest, suffocating him. He wants to get up and leave because there has to be something outside of the overwhelming, drowning emptiness. The shadows laugh at him cruelly, their twisted faces mocking his inability to move.
There are shadows laughing at him, and the walls are moving, and Taemin is alone.
He musters the effort to roll on his side, curl his hands into fists under his pillow, and squeeze his eyes shut. It’s like he pretended as a kid: if he can’t see them, they don’t exist. He tells himself that, but even their laughter echoes in his ears, taunting him.
He’s alone, and this side of the bed is sunken in, worn, but he knows the other side is fine, impeccable even, because Taemin is alone, and there’s no one to sleep on that side anyway.
Slowly, as if the shadows will leap on him if he moves too fast, he covers his ears with the palms of his hands. If he can’t hear them, they don’t exist. They can’t mock him because they don’t exist.
But the laughter resonates in his ears, echoing until it’s all he knows.
Someone is missing.
--UNFINISHED--