Mission Wall-E || Jakehoon

Nineteen: People Watching

When someone can't seem to 'connect' they begin to watch. They watch the people around them talking, laughing, crying, loving. They'll try to live through others or examine how people interact with each other so closely, so that they might be able to figure out how to talk, interact, cry, and love with others themselves.

The people-watching started at a young age for Sunghoon. He wasn't social. He didn't like what other kids did. He couldn't wrap his head around them and why all the kids his age could be close with each other so easily. And he didn't realize what he was doing at the time, but he began to stay quiet and observe, so maybe he could find the reason and slip into their mindsets. And he started with Soobin.

He was just in kindergarten, but his parents kept fighting and he couldn't focus at school because of it. Soobin was in the grade above, and he saw him at lunchtimes. He sat with a girl with short black hair. It was just the two of them. And of course, he can't remember it today, but when they got picked up together after school he'd ask Soobin what she was like, and he'd just shrug and say they both liked the same cartoon.

So then Sunghoon decided that he must have found the secret out. Find a common interest and you'll make friends. But that started to fail. No one in his class like the cartoons he liked. And he couldn't figure out how to even start the conversation to ask if they liked Harry Potter like he did.

So he asked Soobin again at their weekly sleepovers. "How did you get close?". That's when he realized he wasn't the only person who people watched. Cause his cousin shrugged and pulled at his pajama pants and mumbled something about how she just kept talking to him and he didn't really know why. And he said all these things about her that you could only notice if you really paid attention. So at age six. Sunghoon realized, he can't figure people out. But he still tries. He still watches.

He watched Soobin be his only friend for years. He watched when he started to cry every day after school because he didn't have friends either. After all, the girl moved away. And he listened from the shut door upstairs that his Aunt put him in when Soobin would yell and stomp his feet because he was frustrated. He'd sit with his feet tucked underneath his body, hands folded in his lap with his forehead pressed against the wooden door. That's when he watched the most. When Soobin was upset.

He never really knew why Soobin cried and got angry so often. But he knew that the things he was yelling out he couldn't word properly. And he knew his Aunt and Uncle weren't actually listening to what he was frustrated with, they were just getting mad at him for throwing a fit. And it stressed Sunghoon out because he just figured that Soobin needed someone who would try and understand how he didn't like the sound of the vacuum and the tv playing at the same time, and he needed someone to help him breathe when he got angry cause no one was doing that for him.

That's why Soobin was the first person Sunghoon really watched. Soobin was misunderstood, just like he was. Of course, he didn't have meltdowns every day as he did, but he never felt like he was being listened to when he talked with his parents either, and just needed some comforting because school was tiring and he wasn't learning anything interesting. He learned a lot of things while watching Soobin interact with people. He stuttered while talking, and ran away when he talked in front of big groups of strangers, and he sobbed with Sunghoon hugged him, and asked him if he was okay after he got sent to time-out after a meltdown. He even tried to talk to his Aunt and Uncle about it once, but they just said that he had anger management issues and that some kids his age were like that. But Sunghoon spent all his time with him so he knew it wasn't anger. It was frustration around not being able to articulate his feelings and not being heard when he did. It's whats he himself did. He realized that when he was ten. He got frustrated when he felt like he wasn't being heard too. He got angry when his parents were punishing and not comforting just like Soobin.