He's my light VMIN

Chapter Fourteen

Jimin spent each day like he has always done, plastering a smile on his face, and going to work like every other day. He greeted his co-workers cheerfully each morning trying to avoid them tripping him, and ignoring the snide comments and laughter. He smiled as they left little notes on his keyboard telling him they were worried about him because he looked terrible and that he needed to sleep/diet/shower, knowing that they were insults couched in sweet words of concern.

And after work he went home to spend the nights hanging out with his flatmates, pumping up his hyper activity to distract them, like he always did.

But... it was harder to fake it this time.

He used to think that one day he would wake up, and his co-workers would realise what a nice guy he was, and they would invite him to lunch with them, and they would all be friends. It was such a small dream.... And he knew it was pathetic.

When he was around his flatmates, he had hope that they would one day see the real Jimin in his eyes, screaming for someone to notice that something was wrong, that he was trapped behind the cheesy jokes and irritating habits.

But his break down in front of his flatmates 3 weeks ago, along with his accidental confession, and Tae subsequently ignoring it, crushed the last of his unrealistic dreams, and the pretence was so much harder without any hope behind it.

As the days passed in their monotony, he noticed that most of the colour was leeching from his life. Everywhere he went, everything was black, white, beige or grey. He stumbled through a mono-tonal landscape, day after day, trudging through his life.

There were only two things that were still bright and colourful.

The first was the deep red of his blood as it dripped onto the white tiles of the bathroom each time he sliced into his skin, which happened more and more. It was like he was addicted to the pain. His arms were lined with little cuts; they looked like the marks a prisoner would make to count the days of his sentence on the wall. He was careful to cover them whenever he was with the others, but when he was alone he would pull his sleeves up and rub his fingertips over each cut, setting off ripples of stings across his skin. He found that the pain quieted the thoughts for a short time, and gave him something to focus on.

And in the end he knew he deserved to hurt.

The second colour in his life was the gold flame of Tae. In the shadows of his mind, thoughts of Tae were like fireworks, he was red, and yellow, and gold and blue, like a fire in the dark. Jimin didn't know how to deal with that so he just .... didn't. He put Tae in the back of his thoughts as he had always done and ignored the light and heat surrounding him.