Pathways

Cantata di scirocco

"I am a figure in this landscape of emptiness" Luca Guadagnino

"Why does it smell like it rained?" Taehyung asked himself, his shoes stepping over thirsty pavement. Fragments of dreams weaved themselves into the uncaring pebbles of the blackest asphalt. The chills that the wind offered, together with an embrace, were ticklishly making their way through his unbuttoned coat while he pretended that he was too mature to care about them.

He pretended a lot. He pretended so much that the act of ignoring had become an unknown game that the masses had no clue how to play. Extraordinarily, he was the only one cheering from the stands at a shadow of his former self performing what mediocrely skilled prophets deemed as his life purpose. The movement of his body was quasi-mathematical, depleted of any intense emotion except for the spikes of fear which, as he got accustomed to, became the foundation he stood upon. If others wore thorns for redemption, he wore them as penitence since life as a sinner imposed heavy taxes on the stale breadcrumbs he had no choice but to call his soul.

There was hedonism in being immoral and even if his vice wasn't unique, his choice of suffering for it was unmatched. Not even Narcissus managed to agonize properly, turn every tear into a bitter syrup to drink daily as part of an unholy morning routine when he saw himself in the mirror.

The smell of rainwater on his path could have come from mythological rivers, Taehyung thought. Fantasy waters - the perfect cocktail of animism mixed with humanity's need for storytelling - reeked of a familiar flavor and perhaps he didn't smell water at all but the abandonment?

Circumstantially, he wasn't alone in his abyss since Jungkook walked beside him with his hands hidden in the poofy black jacket that had replaced the leather one in an involuntary explanation of the passing of time.

Once in awhile, Taehyung would steal glances at him, then reminded of snowy hilltops, he would turn away. The fraternity with snow unabled the older man to contemplate at the maknae for too long without an impending feeling of warmth and doom destined to bring forward the destruction of calmness. Therefore, he more often chose to look at Jungkook's bulky boots instead. It would have been a perfectly safe plan if said boots weren't attached to black as night denim jeans which went around ridiculously well-proportioned legs in a symphony that mocked everything Taehyung had ever found beautiful.

He needn't ask himself if he liked Jungkook since unanswered questions about inexistent rain were far more relevant. He knew he liked Jungkook since the moment when he caught himself looking at him from afar. Porta Garibaldi was posing shamelessly, as it always did throughout the centuries, so that a small waisted, tall, young Korean boy with a face too soft not to marvel at grandeur, struggled to capture the breath of Milano on his professional camera.

There were hundreds of people passing by him but Taehyung sat on the edge of the raised marble of the garden bed, watching the boy on the other side of the narrow street that was creating his art by capturing frames of the doric architecture.

With a caramel coffee in his left hand and his cigarette in the other, Tae observed until he got lost in the fascination of Jungkook's moves and stills. When the boy returned with a big smile on his lips tenderly telling Taehyung how the light was too harsh in the midday sun, he felt like he needed to close the blinds on his own being because it wasn't the literal Sun the one which was shining too brightly, it was him, Taehyun, overflowing into the world, causing the picture burns of unsettling whiteness.

That man that he had watched smile on the other side of the globe was now quietly walking by his side as clocks probably chimed midnight or even worse - the witching hour. It was the time of the moon to tell its lullabies of loss and longing, forcing him to listen closely after all the breaths and paces that were not his. Every now and again, he would hear a muted question circling above him as a crown.