Travelling Boy

T A E H Y U N G

Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Morning

The pile of of clothes from last week is still there, and it looks dustier and more forlorn than it did a few days ago. I read somewhere that a train can rip clothes right off you when it hits. It's not that unusual, death by train. Two to three hundred a year, they say, so at least one every couple of days. I'm not sure how many of those are accidental. I look carefully, as the train rolls slowly past, for blood on the clothes, but I can't see any.

The train stops at the signal as usual. I can see Jin standing on the patio in front of the French doors. He's wearing a bright pink shirt, his feet are bare. He's looking over his shoulder, back into the house;he's probably talking to namjoon, who'll be burning breakfast. I keep my eyes fixed on Jin, on his home, as the train starts to inch forward. I don't want to see the other houses; I particularly don't want to see the one four doors down, the one which used to be mine.

I lived in number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I cant look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can't bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don't want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can't help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me. Even though I remember so clearly how it felt that time I looked up and noticed that the cream linen blind in the upstairs bedroom was gone, replaced by something in soft baby pink; even though I still remember the pain I felt when I saw  jimin watering the rose bushes near the fence, his t-shirt streached tight over his bulging belly, and I bit my lip so hard it bled.

I close my eyes tightly and count to ten, fifteen, twenty.

There, its gone now, nothing to see. We roll into Witney Station and out again, the train starting to pick up pace as suburbia melts into grimy North London, terraced houses replaced by tagged bridges and empty buildings with broken windows. The closer we get to Euston the more anxious I feel; pressure builds, how will today be? There's a filthy, low-slung concrete building on the right hand side of the track about five hundred meters before we get into Euston. On its side, someone has painted: LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH. I think about the bundle of clothes on the side of the track and I feel as though my throat is closing up. Life is not a paragraph and death is no parenthesis.

Evening

The train I take in the evening, the 17.56, is slightly slower than the morning one - it takes one hour and one minute, a full seven minutes longer than the morning train despite not stopping at any extra stations. I don't mind, because just as I'm in no great hurry to get into London in the morning, I'm in no hurry to get back to Ashbury in the evening either. Not because it's Ashbury, although the place itself is bad enough, a 1960s new town, spreading like a tumour over the heart of Buckinghamshire. No better or worse than a dozen other towns like it, a centre filled with cafés and mobile-phone shops and branches of JD sports, surrounded by a band of suburbia and beyond that realm of multiplex cinema and out-of-town tesco. I live in a smart(ish), new(ish) block situated at the point where the commercial heart of the place starts to bleed into the residential outskirts, but it is not my home. My home is the Victorian semi on the tracks, the one I part-owned. In Ashbury I am not a homeowner, not even a tenant--I'm a lodger, occupant of the small second bedroom in yoongis bland and inoffensive duplex, subject to his grace and flavour.

Yoongi and I were friends at university. Half-friends, really, we were never that close. He lived across the hall from me in my first year and we were doing the same course, so we were natural allies in those first few daunting weeks, before we met people with whom we had more in common. We didn't see much of each other after the first year and barely at all after college, expect for the occasional wedding. But in my hour of need he happened to have a spare room going and it made sense. I was so sure that it would only be for a couple of months, six at the most, and I didn't know what else to do. I'd never lived by myself, I'd gone from parents to flatmates to jungkook, I found the idea overwhelming, so I said yes. And that was nearly two years ago.

It's not awful. Yoongi is a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. He makes you notice his niceness. His niceness is writ large, it is his defining quality and he needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring. No, it's not Yoongi, it's not even Ashbury that bothers me most about my new situation (I still think of it as new, although it's been two years). It's the loss if control. In yoongis flat I always feel like a guest at the very outer limit of their welcome. I feel it in the kitchen, where we jostle for space when cooking our evening meals. I feel it when I sit beside him on the sofa, the remote control firmly within his grasp. The only space which feels like mine is my tiny bedroom, into which a double bed and a desk have been crammed, with barely enough space to walk between them. It's comfortable enough, but it isn't a place you want to be, so instead I linger in the the living room or at the kitchen table, Ill at ease and powerless. I have lost control over everything, even the the places in my head.