Mingyu Shorts

Smoking And Dying

" Dying isn't what's scary. What's scary is to think that any conversation may be your last. Not as in death, but as in you'll never speak to that person ever again," Mingyu said, his hand bridging the gap between your bodies as he passed you the blunt.

You were both lying on the side of some road in the middle of some desert, smoking again. By this point, you couldn't even begin to try and count the amount of time the two of you had ended up in some random location, off the yammies, and having some deep conversation that would fog in your mind when you reached your normal sobriety.

Grabbing the rolled paper from his fingers, you bring it to your lips and haphazardly drag your thumb against the flint wheel of your lighter. As the flame illuminates the darkness around you and inevitably the blunt, you inhale long and deep. The burn runs down your throat, spreading through your chest. You think that if you think about the spreading feeling too much you can see the smoke becoming one with your lungs and hazing the cavern around your brain.

Without your remembering when you did it, the blunt and lighter are back in Mingyu's hands. You let your head lull to the side so that you can look at him, the ways his eyes are shut calmly, his lips pursed around the end of the paper, his calloused thumb expertly starting the lighter in one go, the little bit of stumble on his face that he decided not to shave that morning. Then his comment finally hit you. The worlds finally broke past the clouds in your mind and set home in your brain.

"Maybe that really isn't too different than dying after all," you respond, letting your head turn forward, closing your eyes and shivering at the cold wind brushing against your skin that you could feel encasing your bones, almost too tightly if you let your mind wander there.

"Then I guess death is pretty scary... I mean if there really are different ways to die and never speaking to someone you love is one of those ways, then yea. It's kinda terrifying," Mingyu spoke slowly like he was really thinking about it.

"Jennifer Niven once wrote, 'There are different ways to die. There's jumping off a roof and there's slowly poisoning yourself with the flesh of another every single day,' I think she is right."

"Yea, she might have been on to something," he mumbled, letting his hand cross the empty space between the two of you, and grab your own.

You really liked smoking with Mingyu, maybe you just liked smoking, or maybe you just liked Mingyu.