Imagination - Taegi

Prologue

Yoongi winced in surprise when the unpleasant noise of an ambulance's siren woke him up. The large digital numbers of his alarm clock told him it was Sunday the 18th December two o'clock in the afternoon. He felt like shit. Insomnia had been eating up every bit of his limited energy for weeks now, one hour of sleeping straight being the best he could get. This was slowly tearing him apart.

It took him ten minutes and all his willpower to just sit up.

Eventually, he found his way to the bathroom and propped himself up on the dirty sink, letting out a sigh. With an empty gaze, he stared down his reflection in the mirror, admiring the dark circles that underlined his drowsy eyes. They contrasted well with his more gray than white skin and his pitch-black hair.

"What beauty," he rasped and laughed bitterly. He did not even know why he still looked into the mirror. The picture that greeted him got worse with every new morning, and he knew it, so why check on it? Well, he knew the answer to this question, but he would never admit it to himself. No one would admit to himself that he liked how broken he looked, because then you would have to open your eyes to the fact that you are in deep shit.

Grabbing the box of cigarettes placed on the sink and lighting one up, he went back to his small room. The landlord had stopped jelling at him for smoking in the apartment years ago. He would most likely make him pay for the renovation after moving out, but Yoongi did not care. Had the windowsills been a little wider, he would have sat at the window to smoke. But they were not and he would not run down eight flights of stairs just to have a cig. Even the thought of it made him cringe.

After throwing on a much too large, gray sweater with some sweatpants, he stumbled into his small kitchen, to light up his shitty mood with some black coffee. He really enjoyed the soft dribbling sound of the coffee machine and the dark fragrance that spread through his little apartment. It made the smell of the cold cigarette smoke bearable, enjoyable even. Watching the smoke bubble up to the ceiling, he leaned against the kitchen front and waited, facing the headlight. No matter how often he saw it, the way the smoke turned from a grayish blue in front of the headlight's dark lampshade to an ugly brown in front of the white wall always amazed him. Something beautiful turns into something ugly. Just like humans when they take off their social masks, baring the dark secrets hidden behind the bright front. He always had rejected to pretend. Pretending to be interested, pretending to be nice, pretending to care. It had made him feel sick.

His thoughts kept circling even after the coffee machine was finished. For Yoongi, time was not precious. He loved wasting it for moments like this, just staring and listening, thoughts without thinking. Getting amused by the things you normally ignore. He was not particularly lazy, he just did not like to rush. Rushing meant overseeing things.

After dipping out the cig in an abandoned, half-filled glass of water, he took the coffee can with him and shambled back to his room to sit down in front of the small, old table. Worms had left their trails in the timeworn wood and his pencil had embossed the shape of some notes into the surface from when he was too eager while working on a song. He took off the can's lid and drowned half of the blackish brown liquid. The cups on the kitchen shelf were dusty because they lacked use, but why bother to take a cup when you know you will drink a can.

Placing the coffee next to his pen holder, he opened the small drawer of his desk and pulled out some sheets of music paper. The professor had given them an assignment for composing, which had to be finished by Wednesday. Yoongi was in third semester of his master at Seoul University of Arts, wanting to become a producer. It had been his dream since his teen years. Back then, he had started to rap and write songs in every minute of his spare time and even had participated in rap battles (of course without his parents' approval). A crooked smile lifted one corner of his mouth when he thought of the amazing feeling he had had when the words would just flood out of his mind and roll over his tongue. After he had been beaten humiliatingly several times, he had eventually found his way of rapping. From that moment on, no one had been able to get to him anymore.