soft - woosan

chapter 26

san wooyoung

a million emotions sprinted through his mind, propelled by his actions and crushing and drowning him.

guilt, anger, confusion...

he felt terrible for doing what he did to san. but at the same time... his thoughts were so jumbled. he was so confused.

regret. self-loathing... his usual logbook on a thursday morning.

wooyoung couldn't remember what had happened after the other left him. he just remembered how elated he had felt to be relieved of the stress of trying to maintain the perfectly tailored unapproachable image he had spent his life creating as a defence to getting close to anyone - and then that feeling being snatched away.

the elation that came from being with san, the relief of being himself. but the drugs his boyfriend so desperately despised were part of him, too. wooyoung hated that, but he couldn't change it. he couldn't change something about himself so quickly, something that had shaped him since, well, longer than he could remember.

he needed time. so did san. but wooyoung didn't want time. life was too short to request breaks in the concept of time. too short to waste time spending it away from someone because you think time might heal or change something.

'time heals' was the biggest load of crap wooyoung had ever heard. perhaps time lessened the severity of the wound, yes, but never truly erased it. the memory remained, and the longer away from someone you... liked, the more painful it was to bare.

as soon as he was out of sight from san and in the range of mingling students, he slowed his pace and walked more lazily, as if someone hit the 'refresh' button and gave the coding of his machinery a reprogramming.

reprogram complete, 'fake ass society image' has been activated, would you like to accept? wooyoung snorted aloud.

what a joke. but still, he accepted it. he always had.

and when he sat himself down with his friends, he smirked and laughed pretending he hadn't just made what may have been one of the biggest mistakes of his life, pasting on yet another mask for them to believe.

and though he pretended to be wholly inattentive, wooyoung unintentionally raised his eyes whenever someone walked into the cafeteria, silently praying, wishing, hoping, expecting it to be san.

but, it never was.

so eventually he stopped looking.

wooyoung got through the day as if filming a scripted show, not allowed to say anything real or be anyone real.

the toll it took on him to keep this facade up was increasingly draining, and he couldn't help but turn back to the comfort of artificial happiness every once in a short while to relieve himself.

one thing he did notice was his inability to feel anything for anyone else besides san in terms of a very different form of relief. wooyoung couldn't bring himself to pretend to like being with anyone besides the boy he missed so much, so surprisingly he found himself not even trying to look for that distraction.

there was only so much of the all too frequent act he could take, and no matter how out of mind, high or disoriented he got, he wouldn't cheat on san. that was one thing every version of himself concluded to agree on.

finally free of the suffocating
prison hallways some called a school and wooyoung a stage, he released a breath into the cool air, stretching his neck and fingers twitching to retrieve a cigarette from the top of his jeans' pocket so his cancer stick and he could share the good weather together while it still lasted.