♥ 

FEBRUARY 17

some things are holding me back.

.

   Minho was honestly, whole-heartedly, painstakingly trying. The voice in his head was no longer allowed to control his life— assuming he could keep this up. Assuming he could keep out of the grasp of his artificial nature and conscience. 

   If it was really true, and not just another one of his delusions, that everything— the perpetual disgust, repulsion, discomfort, anxiety, misery, and most of all the crippling fear of weakness and the strange, skewed sense of right and wrong that no one else seemed to have— had come from an all-consuming childhood desire to be accepted and loved by his cold and distant family... if he really believed that, then there was absolutely no reason to go back to his old ways of always, faithfully and blindly listening to the voice in his head anymore. 

   He no longer wanted the love or acceptance of his family, so why hold onto the voice that told him exactly how to to chase it?

i swear. i'm going to learn to live the way i want now. freely.

 i only get one life to live and even if i feel like i don't deserve it, i want to be happy.

   Minho woke up this Saturday to the sunshine pouring in from his un-closed blinds (more like stabbing him directly in the eyes), softly sighing to himself in the quiet as he opened his eyes. He pushed the covers off of his chest and sat himself up, after probably ten or so minutes of lying there motionless, as if he was waiting for something.

   ...Where was the guilt? Where was the panicked screaming in his brain? Where was the 'i should've kept it to myself ' ? 

   Last night, he talked to Jisung, and yet?

   ...Nothing. Crickets. Stillness in his mind.

    Maybe this 'changing' thing wasn't gonna be just a phase, like he worried (but expected) it would be. Maybe 'home' and 'family' were actually achievable things, not just distant daydreams that would never come to fruition.

   But... It wasn't as if he could just walk into 2Chan's room and suddenly pretend that he was just like everyone else in there (was it?). Minho's way of distancing himself from everyone, and his hostility to anyone who challenged that or even brought it to attention made him unapproachable and somewhat intimidating. He'd probably have to do something about that...

   He turned his eyes to the empty bed on the other side of the room, a slight frown setting in.

    There were two people in the friend group in particular that Minho felt especially estranged from, so much so that he actually felt like... he wanted to do something about it.

my family was always all about pretending.

pretending everything was fine. like we were a normal, healthy family with normal, healthy relationships. not talking about issues. pretending we didn't even have them.

but i want to be a part of this family, which (thank goodness) doesn't do that.

some things are holding me back.

...and at this very moment, by that i mean a fairly new sense of guilt towards one person and long pent-up anger and frustration towards another are keeping me from trying to ease into this seemingly impossible-to-reach thing called family.

♥

   Yes, it did take Minho about ten hours to actually convince himself to go find the person he was looking for. But the point is that he did.

   The first thing he did was text Chan. And Chan told him to try looking in the cafe and the library, which is what he did, and by the time he'd searched both places, he was this close to giving up and retreating to his room because it was probably a bad idea in the first place. He'd been thinking (remembering) a little too much while walking, and it had him almost completely unconvinced that this was the right plan. 

『 ↳✧･ﾟ

i met hwang hyunjin in ninth grade. my first impression of him? 

what a little sadistic bitch.

...i actually almost liked him at first. he was almost as quiet as me at the start of school, but as freshman year went on, he started to liven up. he got friends— he became a popular kid pretty quick because he was quite the looker even back then. 

once he got popular, he got confident. and he took an interest in me, the boy who sat in the back whenever possible and tried to not talk whenever possible, because said boy wasn't sure his words were wanted, and was slowly getting too nervous to find out.

i thought he was actually nice at first, because he decided we were going to be friends, and he  paid attention to me. that was something i sure wasn't used to. and it wasn't something i would've expected a popular kid to do.

but he got a little too friendly for me. one day he was following me around, after declaring that i was gonna be his pet introvert or whatever, and we were walking outside after grabbing stuff from our lockers. he was going on and on about some stupid school event he wanted to attend that i wasn't even thinking about going to— when i shrugged and told him that i'd rather stay home, he laughed, called me boring, and slung his arm over my shoulder.

i jolted.

he turned his head to me sharply, nearly as startled as me (but nowhere near as bothered), and stared at my disgruntled face. and then he started to laugh again.

i was furious. i did a mix of clawing at his arm and shrugging abruptly to get it off of me— to stop the burning. 

"oh, loosen up, minho hyung," he urged, voice still light and airy with amusement.

"don't call me that!"  i snapped. i didn't particularly like anyone calling me that, but especially not someone who would touch me and then make fun of me for my panicked reaction. 

...

no one had made it a point to tease me about this before. 

i mean, my sisters confused me by making me feel like i was being dramatic again when they realized how i suddenly felt about being touched. but they just rolled their eyes and left me alone. 

hyunjin was actively seeking to antagonize me— he did it every time he saw me after that.

just the next day, when he saw me at school again, with a stupid, teasing grin plastered on his fourteen-year-old face, hyunjin reached his arms out and came toward me.

i backed away immediately and glared daggers at him. it'd been two years or so since i figured out that people touching me made me feel physically sick for whatever reason (i didn't question it as an almost-fifteen-year-old), and acquired a steady voice in my head telling me that hugs are bad and wanting or even allowing them is shameful. 

and what did he do?

he cackled and pointed at me like it was some kind of entertainment for him. 

and he did it every time he saw me, so i dreaded seeing him at school. sometimes he pretended to poke me to watch me flinch and giggle idiotically afterwards.

i hated him.

and it got me confused again, similar to how my sister's reactions confused me. my first thought was that i should probably try to conceal my reaction so hyunjin wouldn't think it was funny to tease me about it anymore... but then again, did i want people to think i was okay with them touching me?

no. not at all. 

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ 』

   So, maybe you can see why Minho was just about ready to give up the idea completely after walking through campus with these memories playing in his mind. Right before he did, though, he finally caught a glimpse of a little blond ponytail.

   Coffee in hand, Hyunjin was walking around with his earbuds in, and eyes his trained on his phone.

oh man. this is gonna be awkward. and so so soooo uncomfortable. like everything else that's happened to me this whole year...

"Hyun..." Minho started. (It wasn't as if he was suddenly being affectionate by using that nickname. Everyone called him that.)

   Hyunjin seemed to hear him, barely, through the earbuds, and looked up; glanced around himself, oblivious, until—

   Their eyes met, and Hyunjin's relaxed face turned to a panicked expression in 0.2 seconds. As if he figured Minho must be out to murder him.

   "...Can I like... talk to... you?" Minho squeezed the words out, no matter how much he didn't want to be saying them to this particular person.

hyunjin's not the devil just because he used to upset me. he's clearly changed. i don't hate him anymore; i only hate the way he used to treat me. i can get over it. 

    "Sure," Hyunjin answered, pulling out his earbuds, but he really did not sound sure. Plus, he looked to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown with how big his eyes were.

   Walking side-by-side with Hyunjin back to the cafe he'd just come from to find a quiet place to speak to each other was one of the weirdest things he'd ever done, and another one of the things he never thought he'd do.

   The only reason Minho was okay with having a conversation like this in a public space was that he wanted to make this entire thing brief, non-touchy-feely, and not very detailed. Still, he opted for the least populated corner, and took great relief from the fact that most of the people that were there were wearing headphones and studying, and not paying attention to the conversation that was about to start.

    Chairs pulled out, then scooted back in slightly when they'd both sat down, they shared a split-second of eye contact before each deciding it was too weird and settled for staring at their hands and half-filled coffee cup, respectively. All that was left was for Minho to actually... talk.

    "Look, Hyunjin..." he sighed, voice strained and uneasy. "I know we've never really gotten along... Not since... you know. High school." Minho cleared his throat, mostly to give a reason to pause; to block out an awkward silence. There would just be awkward noise instead. And the awkward noise continued when Minho continued to talk. "I guess what I'm saying is I want to start... trying to get along." (He resisted the urge to gag just then.) "If you're... um... okay with that."

   Hyunjin fiddled with the sleeve on his cup, still avoiding Minho's eyes, just like Minho was still avoiding his, while he replied. "I... I realize I've made you uncomfortable a lot, and when we were younger I didn't really care about that, so I thought you hated my guts at this point," Hyunjin admitted, voice painted with a light tone of regret. Almost unbelieving, he added (finally looking up at Minho— eyes still glued to his hands, Minho could see that through his peripheral vision), "...You don't?"

    "Not really. I don't hate you. ....Not anymore. I mean, yeah, I have kinda had a grudge against you since ninth grade but... yknow."

    Hyunjin cut in, "—And I'm sorry about that. How I acted back then. I thought it was too late to apologize for it since it's been years, and I figured bringing it up now would make you more upset since you didn't seem to want to talk to me, but I know I ignored the boundaries you were trying to set back then... just because I didn't understand and I thought it was funny at the time. I didn't realize it was a big deal. I'm sorry. You don't want to be touched and I get that now. I swear I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable anymore but things just keep happening—"

   To put and to that unnecessarily long, frazzled rant, Minho interrupted him with:  "It's whatever." He tried smiling a little, hoping it would relieve some of the tension; unsure if it worked. "Thanks for the apology. At this point it's more my fault than yours, I think... 'cause I'm just weird, I guess. I get... I get uncomfortable pretty easily."

what an understatement.

    At this point, Minho was tired of all these self-revealing conversations he'd been having lately. It was just too much all at once after all these years of hiding, and now he was exhausted. Besides, even though Minho honestly accepted the apology Hyunjin gave him, it didn't immediately fix the fact that he'd been in a state of prolonged annoyance and discomfort toward him since his freshman year of high school— being around Hyunjin was still going to be hard for him for a while, and talking to him about deeply personal things... that was out of the question for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday he would explain things to Hyunjin, but today was not the day. 

   Because of all that, to keep his poor, fragile sanity, he kept it all vague. "Things are... really complicated. But, I'm changing. I'm trying to change. That's why I'm here."

♥

   Minho felt unpleasantly vulnerable (not that vulnerability was ever pleasant) and very insecure about everything during his conversation with Hyunjin (though he hadn't revealed anything overly personal), and the feeling persisted after it was over, and he was heading back to his room. 

   It seemed like every conversation he had with anyone made him feel this way at this point. This was how he'd felt after each conversation with Chan and Jisung, but each time, there was something at the end of it that had made him feel better. That didn't happen with Hyunjin. They just nodded at each other after saying everything that was to be said (which was not much), and promptly parted ways.

   He wanted to go to Jisung. It was an impulse that suddenly popped up in his brain, because it seemed like... being with Jisung would make him feel better.

   Now he knew what he was after— comfort. 

   It should have been obvious, with the fact that after every intensely uncomfortable conversation, Minho secretly wanted to be held, that he was hoping for someone to make him feel comfortable. To comfort him. Like a child.

   ...And that went against all the things Minho was used to allowing for himself. Obediently, his body prepared to punish itself— his mind prepared to torment him— but, this time, Minho caught himself.

wait.

...there's nothing inherently wrong with being childish, is there?

obviously it feels so, so incredibly wrong. but... i refuse to live like this any longer.

even if it makes me feel like vomiting, deep in the back of my mind i think i know there's nothing actually wrong with looking childish. i think i might be able to accept that i want to be comforted.

   Minho took a breath and bit his lip and tried convincing himself that by knocking on this door, he was giving a figurative middle finger to that voice in his head. Because that was finally something that sat right with him.

   His heart thumped anxiously as he stepped inside Jisung's room, but he found himself slightly calmer when he saw that, this time, Jisung was alone in there. (There was no audience to watch whatever was to happen.)

   Well, it was great to know that going to Jisung, just because he wanted to be comforted— and there was something about Jisung's presence that kind of did that for Minho (now that he wasn't so afraid of him)— wasn't something that he needed to feel terrible and regretful about... But that didn't stop him from still being nervous and painfully awkward, not after all this time.

   Jisung sat at the desk that had been moved closer to the door when the furniture was rearranged, face buried in a textbook, hair splayed over it and signalling his defeat. Minho stared at him, both of them unmoving, for a second or so before he finally dragged his head away from the book and looked up, giving a worn-out grin.

   "Hi," Minho started, scratching the back of his head, hand clinging to the doorknob, wondering if he'd come at a bad time.

   "Hi. Just dying over chemistry right now. Don't mind me."

    "...If you're busy, I can go..."

   "No, no, I'm good. For real. I want a week-long break from this stupid chapter," he chuckled, scooting back from the desk and spinning in his chair with his head now leaned back against the seat, sighing heavily. "Anyway, come in. What can I do for you?"

   Throat too tight to say anything, Minho shrugged, and slowly made his way to the foot of the bed(s), shuffling his feet. He sat down. Felt weird. It all felt weird.

   "Just here to hang out?"

    He cleared his throat, and coughed out,  "Yeah, I guess so."

    With a yawn, Jisung hopped to his feet and left the desk chair, shuffling over in a similar way and flopping down on the mattress next to Minho, evidently because this was, in his understanding, the proper way to 'just hang out'.

   With Jisung there, only a few inches away, lying down and making himself cozy, Minho felt... well, uncomfortable, but not in the usual way. This was a different kind of 'uncomfortable' that only came from not being used to what he was experiencing, instead of from being intruded upon. A kind of uncomfortable that might possibly go away with time. A kind of uncomfortable that Minho hoped could maybe be something he could get used to.

   He hated to be awkward, but a combination of residual stress from the conversation with Hyunjin, and reflexive bad feelings about his current situation made him stiff. Awfully stiff. So while Jisung was there lounging and looking totally at peace, Minho was sitting up, back straight and rigid. He could nearly feel the warmth emanating from Jisung, and honestly he wanted to be closer, but at the same time, he didn't. He was busy thinking about that, and that's why he got so flustered when Jisung suddenly turned his head and looked over at him.

   "So, what have you been up to today?"

   Minho chewed his lower lip. Why did he have to be so nervous all the time... Why couldn't words just effortlessly, painlessly spew out of his mouth like they seemed to do for Jisung?

(That was a rhetorical question; he knew now.)

   "I talked to Hyunjin."

   "Really?" Jisung was genuinely surprised. "You finally stopped avoiding him, huh?"

    Oh. So Jisung noticed that. (Why was Minho still surprised about Jisung noticing everything?)

   Minho pressed his cheeks out in some sort of a combination of a grimace and a smile. "....Yeah."

    "I guess that's why you look so tense," Jisung chuckled. "I mean, you always do, but right now especially."

   He felt his ears heat up.

   "Your back probably hurts by now, doesn't it?"

   He hadn't even been paying attention. But yes, his back hurt, his neck hurt, his shoulders hurt. It all hurt.

should i tell him that?

    Slowly, Minho nodded, consciously choosing to go against his habit of brushing Jisung off... which felt... very weird. To willingly tell him he was in pain.

 "Would it be okay if I gave you a massage?"

   Something about that word— 'massage'— still gave Minho a very bad feeling, but that was probably okay. Honestly, that's what he wanted Jisung to do. He looked at himself— the way that, without realizing he was doing it, he'd leaned toward Jisung in the span of the two or so minutes that Jisung had been lying here, with his knees turned toward him now, and his weight all shifted towards him... his body was clearly saying something.

   Minho sighed. He could say it. He would.

    "Yes," he breathed.

    So Jisung rolled over onto his side and pushed himself to his knees to place himself behind Minho. The dip of the mattress and the rush of air behind him was still alarming and gave him a sense of peril, because it was always intensely uncomfortable to have someone at his back, but Minho tried not to dwell on that.

   ...It was only Jisung, anyway.

   Jisung ran a warm, gentle hand down Minho's back. He seemed to sense the tension gathered up in his aching muscles, because he started to rub right where it felt the worst. ...And maybe Minho melted into his hands.

    It was strange how happy Minho felt. The feeling of fingertips pressing into his back and folded legs resting at each side of him was actually soothing, and gave him a weird, foreign sense of being cared for... almost. It didn't feel anything like pity, which he was used to, and hated with a passion. It sort of... didn't necessarily make him feel weak. But if he thought about that too much, things still might go south, so he tried to block out all thoughts and instead focused only on the relief that was Jisung's thumbs rubbing his soreness away.

   "You should try stretching with Felix and me," Jisung eventually offered, waking Minho from a contented daze. Right. Jisung and Felix stretched together every day, he'd heard some time ago, and that's mostly what kept them from being in the pain that Minho was so used to by now from sleeping on the cheap dorm mattress.

    Minho hummed, the start of a frown forming as he looked down, not realizing that he was tensing up under Jisung's hands again. That was enough to tell Jisung he wasn't into the idea.

    "Don't want to?" Jisung's hands froze for a moment while he waited for Minho's answer.

i don't really know why i don't want to...

i guess, now that i'm thinking about it, stretching seems like something that's oddly intimate?  ugh, that word grosses me out.

ah, i'm kinda nervous but maybe i should try it... would it make jisung happy if i tried it?

   Maybe partly to get Jisung to keep going, he answered, "Um... I'll try it."

    "Good." Minho could hear Jisung's smile as he said it. "How's your neck, hm?" Jisung moved his hands to Minho's shoulders, gently feeling for the knot he'd found before, and it definitely took Minho a bit to adjust to the feeling, because his neck was always sensitive.

    "It's okay," Minho mumbled, but it was it really? It hurt a lot, and was uncomfortably stiff, but he knew he could deal with it. Did that mean it was okay?

    "Does it hurt if I press here?"

    "Yeah." That was obvious, because of the way Minho instinctively shrunk away when pain shot all the way up to his head, but it still felt wrong to say it aloud.

    Humming softly, Jisung got to work at lightly rubbing away the discomfort. It only took a few minutes for Minho's neck to get sensitive enough for even that to hurt, and when it did, Jisung wrapped his arms loosely around Minho, draping himself over his shoulder like a heating pad.

   And that was exactly the comfort that Minho had been looking for. 

     "You ready to go find Felix?" Jisung asked, softly, considering how close he was to Minho's ear. "I think he was studying with some of the guys."

     "Sure." Except that he wasn't. Honestly he wanted Jisung to stay there, pressed against his back, maybe for another hour.

♥

   As it turned out, Minho was right. Stretching with other people felt really, really weird, unsettling, and most of all, of course, uncomfortable.

   Especially because one of those other people ended up being Seungmin.

   Minho had followed Jisung out of his room, expecting to walk all around campus like he had earlier to find Hyunjin, but it turned out that Felix was just a couple steps down the hall, and on his way back to the room. With Seungmin in tow.

    "Oh, hey Seungmin," Jisung chirped.

   Minho and Seungmin stared at each other quizzically, and a little awkwardly. Felix was the type to accept anything without much questioning, but Seungmin looked like he was majorly surprised, confused, you name it— to see Minho hanging around, waiting to join one of the nightly Jilix-stretch-sessions, making Minho even more uneasy.

   No one addressed or questioned Seungmin's presence. He just walked into the room with them, so Minho assumed that he'd done this with them before. Somehow that made him feel a little less weird about it, but then again, it also didn't.

    Maybe part of the reason it felt so weird was that Jisung kept telling him to "just do what feels good right now", and something about that sounded dirty to Minho.

feels good.

it feels good to stretch the stiffness out of my back, yeah, but i can't get over the fact that those two words just feel wrong to me.

it shouldn't feel dirty right? it isn't really, right?

even that doesn't sound as bad to me as something else that i know is true: it feels good when you touch me, and i want you to do it more.

that's the dirtiest sounding thing i think i've ever felt.

i hate words.

   Minho was struggling to get his stiff body as deep into a pigeon pose (something he didn't know existed before tonight) as the rest of them (even Seungmin), and the harder he pushed, the more he had to bite his lips to keep from making pained noises.

   Jisung told him off for that, from his spot on the bed, where he was now stretching, since with four people, there wasn't really enough room on the floor for all of them. "Listen to your body. Don't try to go as far as you possibly can. It's okay if you're really stiff and need to take it easy. It's not about strength or pushing yourself to the limit—if it hurts, then stop. ...Your body gives you pain signals for a reason."

   It felt like Jisung wasn't just talking about stretching. Minho's ears were red-hot.

   "Let's do child's pose and then be done," Felix suggested.

    Following the other three in tucking his knees under his chest, Minho sighed quietly. It was a pretty nice stretch, even though he felt so awkward about all of this. At least they couldn't see him at this point, considering they all had their faces pressed into the floor.

    Maybe it was too nice, because he felt like he could fall asleep just like that.

   ...It was definitely too nice. Because he fell asleep like that.

꘎♥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♥꘎

anyone wanna kidnap me?

pls

not to be dramatic but i want out of here really really bad

...also i wonder if y'all can actually see the significance of the changes in the graphics/formatting(?) i use with minho's thoughts or if it just seems random lol i am putting a lot of thought into it