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In elementary school, Taeyong had found all the suicide spots there were. The roof was always locked because it was obvious, but there were ways to be creative.
His classroom was on the fifth floor, and the end of the corridor overlooked the small school garden. The ground was covered with ceramic pots containing seeds the green club were trying to germinate. The ones that lived would be transferred into their own small pots.
If he climbed over the ledge, he'd fall, and surely he'd land on the pots. Then they'd crack, and he didn't see how he would live.
He said this to his classmate Yuta, and Yuta agreed. They'd talk about it excitedly, and nothing would come of it. Of course nothing would. They had no problems to get away from.
Sometimes Taeyong would wander to the end of the corridor alone and spend minutes looking down, imagining himself climbing onto the ledge and hurtling himself down. Which would be the best way to fall? he'd wonder with childish curiosity. Could anyone fall and look at peace?
Then the bell would ring and he would return to class at ease, and most of the time, he'd forget that he was thinking about dying at all.
---
When Taeyong was fourteen, a car nearly ran him over. Catching his breath at the edge of the road with his heart racing and rivulets of warm blood running down the scrapes on him limbs while the driver called for an ambulance in a panic, he had an epiphany - that he wasn't ready to die, and that he would never be ready to die. He had a failed test script in his bag and his parents couldn't say two words to each other without exploding at home, but none of it mattered at all because he was alive.
For some time after that, he tried to stop imagining his death. Perhaps he'd jinxed himself by thinking about it so much?
But he hadn't, because when he wasn't pre-occupied with things to do his fantasies came back, and yet nothing so dangerous ever happened again.
Some days, he daydreamed about jumping out of a helicopter with the wind rushing in his face in his final moments, and a calm would settle over his troubled heart. Then he would wait at the traffic light on the way home because he liked to be safe.
---
He didn't always think about dying. When his mother slammed the door and drove the family car out of the house, he went to sit at his roof with a handful of marbles. He threw them off one by one and watched with fascination as they disappeared into the dimness of the night and landed without a sound. In his mind, he was strong enough to throw a cupboard full of porcelain off a cliff, and the doors would fly open. By physics, the porcelain wouldn't fall out. No, they'd all fall at the same pace, and they'd fall for a long time, and when he was ready they'd crash to the ground. The cupboard's doors would be ruined first, and porcelain would shatter into smithereens as it touched rough surface.
After this, he would feel strong enough to go back into the house to make his father a cup of warm tea that he no longer wanted to fling across the room, to leave an encouraging note for his mother under a flat marble, and return to his room in peace.
---
When he grew older, the thoughts that came unbidden changed a little. He'd wake up from his dreams with a noose around his neck and his boxers sticky, and his mind would be so troubled he'd be awake till morning.
---
Sometimes, whoever he dreamt of would cut love songs into his naked skin with a knife and he'd bleed until he died. He didn't like such an uneasy death. It was better when he dreamt of falling free.
---
He told Yuta about it once, late at night in the days between completing military service and beginning university.
They had both been pretending to be more drunk than they were. Taeyong didn't think the actual state of mindless inebriation suited either of them. Yuta was smoking, and Taeyong was not. He'd held out even in the army where everyone did. His parents didn't believe him, of course, because all his shirts came home with the unpleasant scent of second-hand smoke. He didn't care enough to correct them more than once.
"So you think about rough sex a lot," Yuta said, and for once the ever-present hint of mirth in his voice was not there. Taeyong was thankful.
"That's putting it lightly," Taeyong said, "but not a lot, only sometimes. It's just that I remember."
Yuta nodded thoughtfully, his face blessedly free of judgement. Taeyong didn't need him to say anything. He was glad to get the weight off his shoulders after years of hiding it.
Yuta prodded him with the unlit end of his cigarette. "If you're up for it, I'm curious."
Taeyong nodded curtly, mind adrift with anxiety and trepidation more than anything.
---
It turned out that he hated every moment of it. Yuta had fun. Taeyong did not. He had been through few things he enjoyed less in his life.
But after cutting their experiment short mid-way and getting back into his clothes, he forced his mind to think about stars falling from the sky and forests catching fire, and when he opened his eyes he was under his own control again. Trees exploded during forest fires, did you know that? All that oxygen combusting at the same time wouldn't soothe a hungry fire peacefully.
"So, not your thing huh?" Yuta commented, dressed in a fresh T-shirt and boxers, joining Taeyong where he stood at Yuta's window sill. Lights from the apartment block opposite glared into Taeyong's face. It was pleasant.
Taeyong rubbed lightly at his neck where Yuta had left bruises.
"No," he said, without a trace of doubt.
Yuta turned his back to the view, leaning the backs of his elbows against the sill. Taeyong continued to look outside.
"You used to think about dying too, didn't you?" Yuta commented.
Still do, Taeyong held back from saying.
"I want to live until I'm eighty and die of a heart attack in my sleep," he said instead, which was the whole truth.
It brought out a wave a pleasant, light laughter from Yuta. Taeyong's heart fluttered once. See, that was what he actually liked - kindness, and friends who tried to understand.
"You," Yuta said, "are a boring person with exciting thoughts."
Taeyong smiled faintly. It was nice to be described so plainly.
---
The other person in his dreams took Yuta's form once, then never again. He preferred it like that. A person who'd kick him and hurt him and call him names was best hypothetical and anonymous. But it was alright once he realised it was like the death thing. Both were things his mind liked to entertain thoughts of, but he'd never actually want. He handled them a lot better once he categorised them together.
It was always fun to think of chaos of most sorts. He allowed himself to explore his more carnal thoughts while he was awake now, so they didn't have to wait for him to be in his dreams to arrest him. It was a source of amusement. But his favourites were still the visions of death, solitary and beautiful. Of dying with his eyes closed with a smile on his face, and meeting his end as a whole body. Then to open his eyes and realise that he was a grain surrounded by a cosmos brimming with vitality, and that he was a living part of it. Death evoked peace in ways sex could not.
He thought in the quiet moments when he was free. Then whatever it was, he'd get back to life with vigour.
---
Doyoung was a man with a sharp tongue and a sharper mind, and soft hands and softer lips. He was abrasive with his words when he felt like it, but kind and gentle for the most part. He was delicate and sensitive. He took care of Taeyong as much as he had to be cared for. He challenged Taeyong's mind and kept him on his toes. Taeyong loved him, he was sure, with an intensity that he had never loved anyone else with before.
Doyoung could read his moods; could push his buttons to make him burst out in anger and then detour them back to the state where everything was funny and they couldn't remember why they fought.
Taeyong loved him. Loved him so much he never wanted to fall in love again.
In his happiest moments with him, there was wind beneath his wings. He'd soar above the clouds and love it too much to think of falling. Useless abstract things like that came to mind. Better still, he'd wander into quiet nights and buying a house and sitting on a plane side by side for hours. These thoughts brought no peace, only frantic jubilation.
New love was wonderful and exhausting.
---
It was exhausting.
There was something about sharing your space with another person that was difficult to manage. It things like waking up and seeing a pillow that wasn't yours next to yours, and opening your wardrobe to see the whole left side taken up by someone else's clothes, and having the scents of two people mingled in the threads of your blanket. He was inundated by a constant barrage of reminders that he was not alone. It was everything Taeyong wanted but it overwhelmed little by little. Remembering that there was someone who needed to understand him, to whom he needed demonstrate his sentiments with words and actions, took energy out of him. Nothing was implicit, and everything had to be expressed.
"Do you ever get tired of me?" he asked Doyoung one night while they did the dishes.
Doyoung clicked his tongue. "Is that one of those questions people break up with each other over?"
Taeyong put a wet dish on the rack to drip over their sink. "No," he said, "but sometimes I feel like I remember you exist more often than I remember I exist."
"You should have said this instead then: 'Doyoung, sometimes I get tired of you.'"
Taeyong laughed softly. "I do, but I don't mean it that way - most of the time. You know that, right?"
"I get tired of you too," Doyoung admitted.
They cleaned up in silence for a while. It wasn't a tense sort.
"Why did that feel romantic?" Doyoung mused out loud as he dried the last plate.
Taeyong shrugged. It was an odd thing to say, but not untrue. It might have been how honest they were with each other. "I don't know," he said.
---
There was a bit less pretence after that, and only then did they realise there had been pretence at all. They stopped asking each other if the other wanted to join them on supermarket runs when what they were really looking for was chance to be alone. Conversely, they stopped agreeing when they didn't feel like it. They were still together a lot, but that was good - that was what they wanted. They simply needed breathers in between.
They were similar in a sense. Both of them were a little solitary by nature, though they liked company. As long as it had taken them to realise it, they matched.
When Taeyong was free to sweep the floor at home, he let himself get lost in thought sometimes. Other times, he put on some music and did not think. Sometimes he put on the news.
He didn't ponder about his own death so much anymore, strangely. There wasn't a deep reason for it, he'd just grown out of it a little. On most days, thinking of lying on a hill and absorbing the sunshine like a plant did as much good to relax him as all the chaos his mind wandered into ever did.
When things went wrong, however, nothing was powerful as mentally throwing himself off a high surface with everything he owned while screaming himself hoarse and wrecking his throat for good, letting go enough agitation in his head to return home functional.
"How was it?" Doyoung might ask if he reached home first.
"They rejected my thesis proposal and I'm fucked for time, but it's nice to see you," he'd be able to say, and he'd mean it.
---
Taeyong liked thinking. He believed with great certainty that it was the constant little space in his head that kept him unchanged when the good and bad things in his life ebbed and flowed.
It was his space. His before he recognised it for what it was, his before he appreciated it, his before he met anyone else who mattered. He was free to do whatever he liked in there. Other people took up more of his mind as he grew up and learnt to care more, Doyoung most of all, but his space was still there, and it was important that he never let it disappear.
---
"What would you do if you could read my mind?" Taeyong asked, one day in a car showroom when they were pretending to be richer than they were. They were dressed nicely, and if nobody guessed they were broke students living on part-time wages they wouldn't kick them out as they helped themselves to free seats and drinks at the lounge while flipping through brochures.
"I'd figure out how to talk you out of liking black cars," Doyoung said. "My mum used to drive one of those and it's like getting into a furnace when you leave them outdoors in the Summer."
Taeyong sighed dramatically. "But they're cool. All sleek and shit."
"They're hot," Doyoung objected, and Taeyong couldn't help but scoff at the stupid pun. "They'll burn your ass even if you don't have one."
Taeyong sneered at him for that, then nudged him with the tip of his shoe.
"But seriously, answer my question."
Doyoung took a few moments to remember what it was. He gave Taeyong a puzzled look. "I'm hoping that I can assume you don't have a suspicious reason for asking?"
Taeyong hummed in agreement. "Yeah, just curious."
"Then I wouldn't want to read your mind," Doyoung said. "Because I don't have to, and thinking about you reading mine makes me lose it a bit."
Taeyong made a curious sound. Doyoung wrinkled his nose at him.
"What?"
Taeyong smiled and shook his head. "Just thinking...I agree." Then he smirked. "There's nothing in my mind that would let you talk me out of black cars anyway."
Doyoung tsk-ed. "I'll have my ways," he promised.
And nothing else was said on the topic.