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LIGHTS
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Yi-Seo

The taxis that we take reach our destination, Taehyung’s following mine, and he climbs out quickly, taking long strides towards his home. I climb out of my taxi too, crossing my arms under my chest as I wait at a distance behind him while watching him search for the key card to unlock his house by swiping his hands over the non-existent pockets of his button-down shirt.

“If I remember well, you weren’t in your senses to lock the door before you went away to take a jolly stroll into the emergency room,” my words make him whip around in my direction, and his mouth snaps shut when I roll my eyes and walk up to him.

“Here, I got it verified for you at the entrance booth now,” I hold out his key card, and he takes it from my hand without bothering to even lift his eyes to look at me.

Taehyung turns around and proceeds to open his door, once again not even trying to express his gratitude for my help.

Just how worse can this night get?

I lose it when he carelessly tries to step inside his home, avoiding my presence like I’m invisible to him, and like he’s entitled to receive help from me. My hand reaches out to hold his wrist firmly, and I’m sure he rolled his eyes in frustration before turning his head around in my direction.

His gaze falls on my hand that’s holding his wrist, and then he raises an eyebrow in a questioning manner as his eyes slowly travel up to meet mine that’s blazing with anger and disappointment. I turn his palm facing upwards and shove his hospital papers into his hand before releasing my hold on his wrist.

“You’ve been instructed not to consume any alcohol for the next forty-eight hours at least, and never to combine alcohol and morphine, ever again, unless you have a wish to die,” I relay the nurse’s instructions to him in a robotic manner, but my words have no effect on him, and Taehyung doesn’t utter a single word as he stands there still like a statue. It makes me even more mad, almost making me want to land a strong punch on his poker face.

Clenching my jaw, I glower at him as I stomp my way past him, ignoring the toxic smell assaulting my nostrils, heading straight to the coffee table to pick up the boxes of food that I brought for him earlier.

I turn around and wait for him to say something, anything, but only our gazes remain locked, as does his mouth which refuses to spill out a single word. However, I should have known better than to expect something as simple as even a thank you from such an arrogant oddball. Shaking my head in disbelief, I sprint out of his home, feeling stupid, annoyed and used-up.

I skipped a nice homemade meal, missed taking a much-needed relaxing shower and sabotaged my sparing sleep for an asshole who wouldn’t even thank me for my help, which I didn’t even owe him to begin with.

Never, and I mean, never again will I bother to spare him a second glance, and in the morning, I am going to cover up that darned window with the thickest curtains that I can lay my hands on.

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

“Why the hell do I even own these? Yuck!” I toss to trash the ancient tattered hoodie that I have owned since forever.

I couldn’t fall asleep after returning home from the hospital, and even after taking a nice and long shower and getting dressed in my favorite pajamas, I couldn’t sleep because I’m one of those rare insomniac species who feels terribly sleepy one moment, but if I don’t go to bed right away, then I can never fall asleep again. And after all the ridiculous events that happened with Taehyung last night, I wasn’t in the proper headspace to even watch a movie with full concentration.

So, after restlessly tossing and turning in bed for a few hours, I finally decided to unpack some of the boxes that were lined up in a corner of my living room. It has been over two hours now, and I’ve successfully finished organizing all my clothes into the cupboards and drawers, and my shoes are all neatly arranged too.

It’s relieving to see that there are only two more small cardboard boxes which hold my certificates and other important documents and some bitter memories that I’m yet to unpack. I move those boxes to the bedroom and push them under the cot where they would probably remain for another couple of weeks or more until I feel like organizing my stuff once again or feel like taking a sad walk down the lane of my tragic past.

Checking the time on my phone, I head over to the kitchen to make something to eat. On my way there, my eyes get uncontrollably drawn to the window next door, and I notice that the lights are all turned off, which probably means that he is sleeping, maybe?

But why would I bother?

I school my mind to focus on making some food instead, and that is when I find the soup and rice that’s still resting on my kitchen counter beside the boxes of food that I brought back from my neighbor’s home. I open the boxes and sniff the food, and, luckily, it seems to be good.

I eat a small portion of the rice and soup and stow away the remains into the fridge before I head back to the living room and sprawl out on the couch. My fingers keep locking and unlocking my phone, as if waiting for the messages which are never going to arrive. In reality, I’m just watching the seconds tick by while fighting my eyes from flitting between the phone’s screen and Taehyung’s window.

The store wouldn’t open up until at least 10 am, which is four hours away, and only after that can I buy the curtains. I could just lie here and stare emptily at the ceiling until my brain decides to fall asleep, but I don’t want to let that happen. So, after weighing my limited options at the moment, I finally open up my notes and try to pick up my writing from where I stopped it earlier.

Funnily, the story is a light-hearted romance about a hopeless romantic girl with lots of dreams and her handsome neighbor, and how things progress between them.

My living room is bathed in the darkness of dawn with just the faint and distant rays of morning light seeping in through the dense foliage behind my home that is very lightly illuminating the space that I’m lying in.

The setting suddenly inspires me, painting a scene in my mind, and out of nowhere, my brain instantly comes up with a string of words which I begin to type out with full enthusiasm.

‘Charlie, the unbelievably handsome boy with his disheveled bed head and his crinkled night clothes, pushes open the windows, allowing the crisp morning air to kiss his skin and greet him a ‘good morning’. Selena, who has her nose in the book that she is reading, looks up at him, and she would be lying if she said that her heart didn’t skip a few beats seeing him-’ and just then the bright lights in Taehyung’s living room turn on, harshly attacking my eyes and truncating the flow of my words.

Pulling my phone away, I keep my narrowed eyes trained on his window, watching him as he pushes open one window and breathes in the fresh morning air.

After the way he treated me last night, I shouldn’t be looking at him, and if I remember well, I even made a mental resolve to never give him a second glance ever again. But that seems nearly impossible now.

Taehyung is shirtless, flaunting his frail body, his hair is fluttering softly with the breeze, and though his face is devoid of any expressions, his facial features are all soft, and he looks like a Renaissance painting because people in those paintings always had these stoic, mysterious and neutral expressions, and he definitely looks like one. He could be any artist’s muse. In fact, he could easily be the muse for anyone—a photographer, painter, poet, writer…

Wait, what?
Taehyung as a muse for a writer?

I almost cackle at that thought, but my smile fades quickly when my thoughts fly back to all the horrendous, scandalous news articles that I read about him on the internet. There are definitely a lot of stories surrounding him, a lot of mysteries that are yet to be unraveled, and probably the deepest, well-hidden, and forgotten secret truths that the world needs to hear at some point.

My eyes go back to him, observing how he is standing so lifelessly, staring at the thirsty patch of grass that’s there between our homes. I shouldn’t be feeling this way after he acted so cold and indifferent to me, but there is a small prick within my chest whenever I look at him.

As far as I know, he has lost a lot in his life—fame, fans, money, reputation, honor, and dignity. But there could also be a lot of other things that he has lost that I could have absolutely no idea about, and my mind suddenly feels as if it wants to know more about him—the mystery surrounding this man, the reason behind his habits, the reason why he has become who he is today, the cause for his downfall, just about everything.

I had a hard time finding my focus and inspiration, but, right now, I could feel the fog lifting upon one thing, and it is that my undivided focus is on learning more about my mysterious neighbor. Maybe, for once, my instincts are right. I probably wasn’t ever meant to be a fiction writer. Biography could be my forte.

I want to write about him, and I will write about him—a biography about the rise and fall of Kim Taehyung.

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Every character that I write has a part of me in them. With Yi-Seo, it is Taehyung being her muse for writing.
😍🥰

Published on : 01/04/2023