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“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
It all starts with the end.
It starts with the breaking of mirrors, the faint, red glimpse of a sinking sundown, the pills, the water – so much water. It starts with pain, and suffering, and loss – so much loss. It starts with the end, where everything begins, where death is memory and reality all at once. That’s how their story starts.
They met years ago. Forever ago – it seems so, at least. Jungkook’s earliest memories include boys with purple bruises on their eyes and bleeding, broken noses, running under the crisscrossed electricity wires of a rundown city colored like soot.
(They truly met at the end of a bridge that was never finished, dark water flowing beneath it, the cement dirty, their shoes unlaced. Screams filled out the air as Seokjin stepped into the nothingness. The water had been cold, colder than Jungkook ever felt, and they dragged a numb Seokjin out, back from under, from death’s bony, ever prying fingers, spilling his pills all over the dirt under the bridge. Taehyung hit him, and Seokjin’s nose bled. A promise was made, but no words were spoken. They would never part again. They’d never leave. We’ll never part, we’ll never leave (you, Seokjin).)
The seven of them never do part after that, it never happens.
It never happens, it never happens, it never happens, it never –
“Do you want to say anything?”
Jungkook sucks the air in, his eyes still closed. He doesn’t want to say anything. He can hear the river, its deepness, he can hear the cars driving behind them, Yoongi clicking his lighter on and off in what seems like an eternal, sickening loop, Seokjin’s wingless flight, the water filling up his lungs until there was no more room to breathe. He opens his eyes, his nose feels cold. It’s always so cold.
“Where did you go?” Taehyung yells to the river, body dangerously close to the railing. His screams turn into a pitiful cry, as he violently kicks the rail, over and over, over and over, stopping only when strength leaves him. No one stops him from hurting himself. They’re all hurting, anyway.
(Seokjin was sick, and there was nothing none of them could do.)
(Nothing, nothing, nothing at all –)
The sunset turns everything red around Jungkook, his skin, his eyes, Yoongi’s pale hair, the river, their memories, Seokjin. He accepts the half-empty bottle of cheap vodka they’ve been passing around, nestling against their bodies like something precious. You’re too young for that, Yoongi would have said before, but not anymore. He drinks, the bitterness consuming him.
Their youth has been stripped away, anyway.
This time, when they part, they do part.
(It never happens, it never happens, it never –)
Loneliness, he decided, was what brought them together at first.
They only fit together because none of them was entirely whole. Seven boys made of broken porcelain, some stained, some only barely scratched, some so broken it was impossible to pick up the shards without bleeding (“You’re not alone, Seokjin.”). So when Seokjin vanishes (dies, he wants to say, but can’t, not yet), taken away by the river, loneliness swallows them all. For three months, Jungkook almost entirely forgets Before. He can only see After, the emptiness, the streets, the pain, the smoke, the blood, the fights, the nothingness lurking inside his chest.
It’s the seventy-ninth day on the After, and his phone rings.
The number is unknown – Seokjin. It isn’t, of course it isn’t.
“Something happened,” Yoongi’s voice sounds unfamiliar now.
(Jungkook can hear his heart clench, he thinks.)
“What do you mean?”
“Fuck, Jungkook, just – just come over, alright? Fast.”
Yoongi opens the door on his first knock. His apartment – paid by whatever money Yoongi can take from his parents – is trashed and dirty. Every surface seems to be loaded with fast food wrapping paper, cigarettes, beer cans, burnt paper, burnt objects, and that’s him, that’s Yoongi, who likes to burn things. Jungkook hears voices, and they’re not in his head.
“He killed his father.”
He, Jungkook knows before Yoongi can tell him, is Taehyung. The boy with the never fading purple eye, who sometimes slept on vandalized empty buildings instead of home, who would often talk in his sleep about all the things, the horrible things, his father has done. Had. Dead. Dread pours down on Jungkook all at once, and he feels like his knees could buckle.
We can’t lose another person, he wants to say.
We can’t lose ourselves – each other, we can’t lose each other.
Yoongi closes the door behind him as Jungkook sees the faces of his friends for the first time in the After, and the After is a gruesome, revolting reality. They all look pale, sick, tired. Taehyung has blood all over his hands, on his clothes, on his face, staining and staining, filthy, red like their last sunset.
“I hated him so much, so much –“ Taehyung repeats to no one in particular, and Namjoon holds onto him, and they all say words, empty words, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’ll keep you safe, we’ll keep you safe.
(They had said those words before.)
(It didn’t work the first time.)
“Here,” Yoongi offers him a plastic cup with tea. The warmth burns his hands through the plastic, but he pretends it doesn’t hurt, that he’s somehow immune to heat. Burning things is what Yoongi does best. “He’ll stay here, for now. Police won’t go looking.”
“We don’t know that,” Jungkook has to force the words out, because it feels out of place to be sitting there, besides Yoongi, on his bed, seventy-nine days After. “What if –“
What if we can’t save him, too?
What if we can’t –
What if –
But Jungkook lets Yoongi whisper in his ear that there aren’t what ifs, that they should just go back to being them, being six, not seven, because they couldn’t be seven anymore, and that was okay. He believes him – only for a second, half a day, the time it takes to blink, to light a fire, to kiss someone like you don’t mean it (except you do, you really do).
Jungkook, out of the seven (six), has always been the hopeful one.
(And so they slowly go back into fitting together, six pieces, pretending not to see the blunt missing corners, the ragged edges around their souls, the foul pitch dripping out of their broken hearts, spilling black oil everywhere. They were lonely, after all. They were always so, so lonely.)
“Did you see that? Jesus, fuck, I’m on a freaking roll here – ”
They all laugh, because breaking things, shattering windows, vandalizing cars parked on dark streets, it’s all good fun, alright. Hoseok swirls the baseball bat over his head, screaming all sorts of obscenities he can think of, and Jungkook laughs, and laughs, while Hoseok smashes another car window. His pockets make that rattling noise as he moves, full of pills to make him happy. Hoseok is also sick, Jungkook thinks (knows), but he doesn’t allow those thoughts to cloud his mind anymore. They’re alright, they’re together, they’re young, young, young.
They’ll live forever (won’t they?).
Hoseok breaks something else, and the doubts dissipate in Jungkook’s head. “Let’s grab something to eat,” Namjoon ushers them forward, and they follow, and Taehyung falls a few steps behind them, and they all pretend it’s okay.
Yoongi shoulders Jungkook’s arm, playfully, a smile on his lips, and it feels real.
They get grease stains on their fingers, and Jimin makes French fries fly around the table, and they’re still laughing, they all fit, they’re not broken. Jungkook holds onto those thoughts so fiercely, his heart hurts. And he thinks – and maybe he’s crazy, but maybe he isn’t – that Seokjin is there, too. He feels it, he sees him with the corner of his eyes (when he dares to look, it’s like his vision goes red, and there’s never nothing there – never, ever, there won’t be).
Jungkook stops eating abruptly, Yoongi notices.
Taehyung never eats anything.
They pretend it’s okay.
Grief is like a maze.
A very hard one to get out of – even though the walls are barely there. The walls are flimsy, delicate metal, metal made of their worst memories and fears, metal made of things they’d much rather forget (but can’t, because you can’t obliterate the past like that).
Jungkook walks the maze every day, when he sleeps.
He walks alongside six other boys, and while physically together, there are many walls separating them now, in the After. He sees the others through them – ghosts of what they were. He sees Yoongi, his lighter, how he goes on burning what’s on his path, he sees Hoseok and the pills that make him happy (sick), he sees Jimin, and there’s always so much water, dark and revolting, and Namjoon, who’s never looking back, like he is. Jungkook doesn’t see Taehyung in the maze. Taehyung might be too far behind to be saved from grief.
When he wakes up, he’s always suffocating.
Yoongi is there, awake, because Yoongi doesn’t seem to sleep anymore.
(Maybe they’re all dead, he thinks, darkly.)
“Nightmare,” he says, just because he feels like saying something, to prove that he’s alive, not dead, not dead, not dead. Yoongi touches his arm lightly, and he’s alive, he knows. Jungkook can hear the other boys breathing, talking in their sleep, and it’s a cacophony of sounds, a symphony, he thinks, of life. They’re alive, alive, alive.
“Seokjin?”
“No,” Jungkook shakes his head. He doesn’t dream of the vanishing boy. Seokjin doesn’t exist in the After – just the perpetuated idea of him. “You. All of you. Us.”
“Hoseok has pills –“
“I don’t want pills.”
Yoongi sighs, and brings Jungkook closer.
“Sleep, I’ll keep you company,” he says, lighting a cigarette, and Jungkook pretends he’s sleeping, but he’s watching Yoongi in the dark, how smoke spirals around him, the darkness in his eyes, how it consumes him entirely. He clicks the lighter on and off, on and off, on and off. It’s horrifying.
Hoseok is the first to try to go. Then Jimin. None of them succeed.
(They fall back into routine like it never happened. Like murder and suicide are words unknown in their vocabulary. As if grief and depression and addiction and the possible vicissitudes of life are concepts too far-fetched to touch them. We’re young, that’s what young people do, they repeat, and repeat, and destroy, and destroy.)
Yoongi ravages his apartment, lighting up a fire he couldn’t (wouldn’t) put it out. He stood there, screaming and screaming, until Namjoon showed up and dragged him out, and the whole place became a black hole, erasing whatever Yoongi was Before.
(They fall back into destruction like it never happened.)
(Jungkook knows they’ll destroy themselves.)
(Grief is like a monster.)
Yoongi’s apartment is empty. It smells of burnt rubber, even weeks later.
“We need to stop,” Jungkook finally says, and his voice comes out very slow, very careful, because Yoongi is a goddamn landmine. “We need to stop running. We’re not okay. You’re –”
“Don’t be such a pussy, Jungkook.”
He watches painfully as Yoongi drunk walks around what was a living room. He’s holding a bottle of the cheapest alcohol, one that would burn fast and sure if he decided to light it up. Yoongi drinks and drinks and laughs and laughs. It’s like watching a violent car crash – he can’t take his eyes off of him.
“We have to let it go, hyung. We have to let Seokjin go.”
At this, Yoongi stops.
Jungkook has seen destructive Yoongi before, his mood swings, his hunger for ashes and coal. Like a furnace, eating up all the smoke, made entirely of cinders, burning and burning, until there’s nothing left to burn, until cinders became fragments, and crud became dust. But that was Before.
“Let’s just – let’s just move on, hyung.”
“He’s dead.”
It’s the first time any of them has say it out loud.
It doesn’t hurt as much as Jungkook thought it would. It just bleeds, constantly, oil and pitch, sadness, grief, sticky, rotten.
“Yes, he is.”
“He killed himself. That fucker –“
“He was sick,” Jungkook steps in closer, closer to the fire. Yoongi’s body is feverish, hot. He struggles when Jungkook wraps his arms around him, and he feels Yoongi’s heart beating against his ribcage, faster and faster, ticking away like a bomb. “There was nothing we could have done.”
“He left us to this,” Yoongi cries, and motions around to the darkened, ugly walls around them. Jungkook sees the maze instead. “He left us, Jungkook. He should have stayed, we – we made a promise, fuck –“
Yoongi shoves him away and throws the bottle on the wall, shattering the glass all over, the smell of alcohol appalling. They’re silent after that, exhaling and inhaling for what it feels the whole of eternity, but what is barely a few seconds. Yoongi turns to leave. Jungkook reaches out and holds his arm, and, Before, Yoongi would have stopped. In the After, nothing is like what it was.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” Yoongi pushes him again, and Jungkook stumbles into a wall, but he doesn’t let go, and they clash into the concrete together. “Just don’t –“
“I can’t, hyung, I can’t let you –“
(I can’t let you go.)
Fighting was never Jungkook’s strongest skill – so when Yoongi hits him, it hurts, and it breaks his nose, and it breaks his heart, and it breaks, and it breaks. For a second, he’s sure Yoongi will kill him, because there’s nothing in his eyes but despair and violent tears, and for a second, he’s scared. This is After, this is what they’ve become.
But Yoongi stops.
He stops, and he cries, for a long time.
Jungkook, bloody all over, holds him for the whole of eternity.
They decide to jump together.
The wind is harsh at the end of the unfinished bridge, and cold, because it’s always cold in the After, Jungkook thinks. He stands between Yoongi and Hoseok. The first threw away all his lighters, the second hasn’t taken a pill in three weeks. They both shake violently.
(Jungkook holds onto Yoongi’s hand.)
They decide to jump for Seokjin.
Like the promise they made, it was a wordlessly decision. At some point, they all converge there, and stand, side by side, like they’re supposed to be, like they used to be (like they will always be).
Together, together, together –
They decide to jump to save themselves.
Like a ritual, how the end of everything started, all those years ago, when six boys jumped into the icy water, together, and came out seven, together. They saved Seokjin that day, even though he was, mostly, beyond saving. They’ve accepted that.
(Yoongi holds his hand tight.)
(When they jump, Jungkook wonders if the small glimpse of elation was what Seokjin felt before he died. His body fills with euphoria, with ecstasy that tastes saccharine in his mouth. He briefly thinks he can even fly, for a second, maybe, a glance, or for the time it takes for someone to draw their last breath.)
They come out of the water together.
It is still After, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
They take off running, the wet clothes clinging to their bodies.
And maybe is the light – maybe, or maybe is real – but when Jungkook looks back, Seokjin is running right behind them.
It all ends with the beginning.
It ends with greasy food in parking lots, with laughter, it ends with careless hand holding when no one is looking, it ends with an unfinished bridge full of blue flowers in the summer, it ends with a maze they no longer fear. It ends with falling (in love, in place), with flying, with losing, with dying, with living, with learning and running, running – so much running. It ends with the start, where death is memory and reality all at once, but it doesn’t hurt any longer. That’s how their story ends.
(Death, youth, strangely, both end where hope begins.)