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“Are you fucking kidding me?”
It was the only thing Seungkwan said after an impressive twenty minutes in complete silence during the “La La Land's” final scenes. Hansol turned off the television as the credits rolled up on the screen and glanced over him.
“You said we would be watching a musical today!”
Hansol twisted his neck. “Was that not enough music for you?”
“But I was hoping for a happy ending, fuck, musicals are supposed to be happy.”
“Since when? One of your favorite musicals is Moulin Rouge; they’re quite similar narratives.”
“Moulin Rouge’s has nothing similar to La La Land’s besides both being fucking tragic. Especially the ending.”
“It’s sad if you still wanted Mia and Sebastian to end up together, but it's not tragic. Satine died in front of everyone, while here Mia is alive and married.”
“Yeah, that’s why it's different! In Moulin Rouge, Satine was sick; she would die anyway. Still, she didn’t end up with the man who wanted to buy her. Meanwhile, Mia here married this random ass guy while Ryan Gosling's fine ass was right behind her!
“It’s really not about that, Seungkwan,” Hansol said with a peaceful tone. Not that Seungkwan was screaming angrily about the movie, but he was planning to get somewhere with his disappointment.
“I know, but… it makes no sense.”
“It actually makes total sense. She didn’t love him anymore.”
Seungkwan was indescribably astonished. “Of course, she did!”
“She didn’t, and even if she did, they wouldn’t last.”
“What do you mean, the end was literally what their life could’ve been if they got back together.”
“But it’s a fantasy about how their life could’ve been and if it had a happy ending. They could get divorced, but you don’t marry anyone already thinking about that.”
“But they could’ve tried!”
“The whole movie was about them trying to be together and ended showing that they couldn’t. That’s the whole point, dude. Did you even pay attention?”
“But...” Seungkwan was still gesturing with his right arm in the air, the left holding a pillow close to his chest, and his legs were tangled. “I still don’t understand why they didn’t end up together.”
Hansol sighed and stood up, heading to the kitchen. “Well, Kwanie, sometimes life is just like that. Not what we wanted and not necessarily what we needed, but what’s left for us. Sometimes I don’t get either.”
“So, you agree that Mia would be happier with Sebastian?” Seungkwan smiled and turned his body to Hansol, pointing his index finger at him, thinking he’d change his mind and agree. Hansol didn’t even glance at him; he was too busy looking inside the fridge, checking his drinking options.
“No, I’m just saying that the people you live your best moments with aren’t gonna stay in your life forever, by death or by disappointments. Sometimes you need to say goodbye and move on.”
Seungkwan threw his head back and hit his legs with the pillow. “Come on, don’t talk like that. You sound so depressed for someone whose parents are still together after twenty years of marriage.”
“Yeah, and so what? They’re lucky.” He stood in front of Seungkwan while drinking a bottle of water. “And, look, I’m not saying that they should separate, but we never know what’s coming in the future. Everything can happen.”
“Not everything, everything. Like, what’s the chance of a piano falling right now from the ninth floor?”
“Fifty percent.” Seungkwan looked at him, almost scared. “Fifty percent. Or it falls, or it does not fall.” Hansol showed a proud smile and winked.
“Fuck off, Hansol. You know that’s not what I’m talking about. Okay, real life sucks, but that doesn’t mean you need to give up on true love.”
“Seungkwan, thinking that La La Land is a good movie is not giving up on love. It’s a fact, and it’s just a movie with a bittersweet ending.” He drank more and started to walk in the direction of the couch, where Seungkwan was still seated. “It’s not even sad, actually. She got her career and her own family. He got the nightclub he wanted to open. The only thing that really sucked here is that it reminds me that I can bump into my exes at nightclubs at any time. Or anywhere. That’s real horror movie shit.”
“Oh, so that’s why you picked this movie for us? You wanted to remind me and be miserable with you?
Hansol shrugged. “I just wanted to rewatch. Only watched it once during the award season it premiered.
“So you made me go through this suffering on purpose? That was evil even for you.”
Hansol gave the last sip. “It’s a good movie.” He sat back where he was on the couch and placed the bottle on the little table that stood in front of the couch.
“Of course, it’s a good movie. I just still didn’t think that it had to end like this! Damn, just look at everything they went through! All the yearning for nothing?”
“But don’t you love when it happens?” Hansol said sarcastically and smirked.
“No! I mean, sometimes, but not now. Now I just feel drained.”
Hansol took his time before thinking of what to answer. “It wasn’t for nothing, Seungkwan. They all got what they wanted because their relationship failed.”
“But it shouldn’t be like this!”
“Dude, just get over it. Go email the director to complain about it, I’m sure he has an answer to all your questions.” Hansol stood again and took the bottle to throw it away properly.
Seungkwan stays quiet for a little bit. He was still outraged with the movie’s end, trying to find the correct words to explain his point to Hansol. Turned out that it was probably a simple “I just disagree with you” situation that they faced many times. Instead, he decided to ask a question.
“Do you think something similar happened to you?” Hansol threw away the bottle but stopped standing, confused, while facing Seungkwan. “Do you think you've already lived your biggest love story with someone?”
“Take a wild guess.” “You know everything about my love life,” Hansol answered, but diverted his gaze to the ground. “You know everything about my love life,”
“Yeah, but this is more personal.” Seungkwan still tried to pursue the question.
“Do you think you've already lived your love story?” Hansol asked back instead of answering straightforwardly.
“Maybe. I need to think more, you know, to be sure.”
Hansol lay on the couch with his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think I ever lived something worth being called a love story.” He said like he was confessing something stuck in the depths of his heart. “A love story has a lot of weight, you know? All those messed-up emotions are a lesson to be learned. Nothing has ever come close to me.”
“Really?” Seungkwan looked almost amazed. “But you and Chan…”
“That was pretty shitty and stuff, but ‘friends and benefits went wrong’ isn’t exactly a love story; it’s a college canon event.”
“A modern love story.” Seungkwan tried to argue.
“Then you agree that love stories can have terrible endings.”
“Not exactly. I’m talking from your perspective, not mine.”
“Well, from my perspective, none of my failed relationships were a true ‘anything’ story. Or true love in general.”
“So there’s still hope for you!” Seungkwan chanted, and Hansol shook his head.
“Dude, drop it. I don’t even know if I care about that anymore. You shouldn’t care about it either.”
Seungkwan gave a deep and disappointed sigh. He took this moment as an opportunity to finally ask what’s been stuck in his throat since the beginning of their conversation. “For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you today?”
“With me?”
“Yes, with you. Your depressed ass picked this even more depressing movie to watch again. Now you’re talking like a fifty-year-old lady who's going through her fourth divorce. I mean, who hurt you?
Hansol was indeed feeling a little bit off that day, but he wasn’t supposed to talk about that with Seungkwan.
“I already told you why. I was eighteen when I first watched, now I’m twenty-eight. Time flies.”
“Okay, so what changed?” Seungkwan put the pillow to the side, and his feet now touched the ground. He asked Hansol out of pure curiosity because the way he’s been acting lately has been bothering him for a while.
The truth is, neither Hansol liked the ending when he first watched. He hated it so much that he stopped watching anything that could be sad for a while. Therefore, he stopped watching dramas or romances in general and claimed they were his least favorite genre. Just like Seungkwan, he didn’t want to accept that romance doesn’t last forever; he preferred thinking it was something created for movies and books to be more interesting.
Hansol wanted to believe that real love was out there, “just around the corner”, waiting for him to finally find it. He had perfect examples of love lasting through the years in his family, and the friends who started dating their “high school sweethearts” started to send him wedding invitations. That means the same would happen to him soon, right? If everyone in his life had, even for once, found love, then there’s no reason for Hansol to be the one who had to wait. Right?
Lucky for him, he was right. He found the love he had dreamed of since he was a little kid. The “butterflies in the stomach love”, the “forgot how to speak properly” love, the “I need to kiss you so bad” love. Just like he was told his entire life, when the time’s ready, it will appear to him when he least expects it.
Not a long time ago, Hansol came to the conclusion that the most significant moments of his life all happened inside his head, and that was the reason he never thought he could be a full-grown adult with a decent life. He also thought maybe his real life was happening somewhere else, and he missed the only opportunity to get the one-way ticket.
Hansol just couldn’t believe he was real.
He felt dissociated from everyone else in his life, where everyone seemed to just know how to live life properly, and he was still the only one who wasn’t capable of finding out how to live. Maybe everyone was also blatantly lying to him. Maybe it was normal to live your days in a gray scale and be unable to see yourself in the next five, ten, or fifteen years of your life. Maybe the secret about living your life well was just pretending to know something.
Maybe he just had to pretend that he didn’t spend his whole life in love with Boo Seungkwan so he could feel normal for once in his lifetime.
“Almost everything changes in a span of ten years.”
“Obviously, but I’m being more specific.”
“I know what you mean.”
And now that he’s one hundred percent sure he found the person he spent his whole life looking for, he was forced to let him go.
“But I will answer you tomorrow. Good night, Seungkwan, see you in the morning.”
Seungkwan gestured, dissatisfied with Hansol’s terrible, poor excuse of an answer. Hansol walked straight away to his room. “What? No, come on, come back here. Sit here again, let’s talk.” With Seungkwan’s call, he lay against the doorway that connected the living room to the hallway.
“Are you still pissed off because of the ending?” Hansol asked, trying to be in his most nonchalant pose he could deliver at the moment.
“I’m pissed off because you seem more pissed off than me, but decided to pull Riddler today.”
“Well, that’s incorrect because I’m obviously Night Wing.”
Seungkwan sighed heavily. Hansol didn’t want to answer right away, but came back to Seungkwan’s side and dropped all his weight into the couch again. Suddenly, Hansol’s gaze went distant, facing the furniture in the living room and refusing to meet Seungkwan’s eyes.
“What I’m trying to say is that… the world is too sad right now. There’s so much sadness around already. We need to find our own love, or I don’t know what’s gonna rest for us.”
“Agree, Seungkwanie. I don’t like sad endings either. However, that’s just the way things are. We can’t control it, and we have to accept.” Their eyes still didn’t meet. “My ending is probably gonna be a sad one, and yours too. You should start getting used to it by now.”
“Nonie, don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
Seungkwan needed courage to say the next thing he wanted to.
“Because I don’t want to see you drowned by its sadness, too.” Seungkwan said, thinking that was the way to make Hansol look at him; however, it seems his words had the opposite reaction. Hansol ran his hands through his hair and pressed his strands a little.
“Seungkwan, I’m not ‘drowned by sadness’”, Hansol said calmly with a patience he didn’t know if he could give to Seungkwan right now, fearing they were about to enter into a matter that had the same effects as a rabbit hole. “I just…” Seungkwan opened his eyes a little bit more and nodded his head, giving Hansol the incentive to continue, “I don’t care about relationships anymore.”
“How come? You always write so beautifully about love.”
It felt like a bullet in his stomach, hearing the real inspirations behind all his never-published poems and the “eternal ongoing” novel he had liked to hear about how Hansol only loved him his whole life and never loved anyone else and probably never would.
This irritated Hansol, actually. How could Boo Seungkwan think he knew anything about Hansol and his love? How could he know anything about true love in any circumstance? He laughed. Hansol laughed cynically at Seungkwan’s face, turning his head around to still avoid the poor and confused gaze.
“You don’t know anything about the way I love.”
Seungkwan’s eyelids were wide open with the statement. Would they really need to get into this matter?
“What do you mean? Of course, I know the way you love, you are probably the person I’ve loved for the longest in my life! Besides my parents, of course.”
Hansol put his body forward and held his nose with his fingers. “Please, stop.” He whispered. Seungkwan might not have heard it because he continued rambling.
“Of course, sometimes you’re a little too melodramatic for me, but that’s just my personal preference. Not just me, but literally everyone compliments the way you describe yearning and wistfulness. It’s beautiful. Kind of inspiring too. You write like you’ve been in love during your whole life.”
As the last sentence was the final straw, Hansol decided he had had enough. He turned his head right away and looked into Seungkwan’s eyes, completely bland and somber. His hands were covering half of his face, just a few fingers pouting at the bridge of his nose.
At first, Hansol thought he would vomit. Instead, he asked a terrible question.
“Is that what you think?”
Seungkwan was far more than confused. “I mean, yeah. You always write like you’re talking about a specific person.”
“And you think I have a specific person in my mind every time I decide to write?”
“Maybe? Can’t see the issue here.” Seungkwan’s face was getting more confused as Hansol asked his questions.
“And who do you think it is?” He accidentally started to let his anger show.
“I don’t know, Hansol, that doesn’t matter who is! I just said you have a very special storytelling, and you do your best when you’re talking about feelings. It’s simple, but always very personal. That’s what I think your love is. Very simple to love as it should be, but no less meaningful. In my opinion, it’s the prettiest way to describe love. You’re my favorite writer for a reason.”
Hansol’s heart felt so heavy inside him that he thought he had lost the strength in his legs. He stayed seated silently, waiting for the moment his limbs would gain force again, and the tears decided not to show off that night in front of Seungkwan.
The way Hansol loved was everything but simple. He physically couldn’t be simple. Not when his love had always been directed to one person, and one only, for all his life, and had nothing he could do about it.
The way Hansol loves is wrenching. It’s consuming his meat and his soul. He considers it a torment, to be honest. It’s always been vehement, harrowing, and agonizing. Sometimes it was violent, most of the time it was also reliant.
The way Hansol loved was also always alone. He had always kept everything to himself, burying his feelings in a dark cage inside his rib cage, and expelling the rest he couldn’t get rid of.
All the violent, obsessive, passionate, excruciating love he had for Boo Seungkwan should never see the light of day.
Just like everything else in his life was, love was too much for him to handle. Being in love with Boo Seungkwan made every little damn thing fucking worse. One thing was being into guys, but a completely different thing was being fiercely in love with his best friend since childhood. It was too late when he realized that time wasn’t enough to simply erase his feelings from his heart, and now his insides were rotten and had a hideous smell only he could feel.
Hansol was getting sicker day by day.
Hansol faced the wooden ground again. “Thank you,” he said, “but you couldn’t be more wrong about the way I love.”
Seungkwan stood up. “How?”
“How what?” His voice was sharp.
“How can I be wrong about you, about anything about you?” Seungkwan felt his voice weakening, visibly and deeply hurt. “And how dare you say that?”
Hansol sank his face in his hands, his lungs were searching for air to breathe, but they quickly felt useless. His throat felt like it was starting to close up. He stood up and finally looked at Seungkwan since the beginning of their argument.
“You just don’t know me as much as you think you do.”
Usually, bruising Seungkwan’s feelings would awaken the worst feelings in Hansol. It turns out that at this very moment, he didn’t couldn’t really care. Not when his heart had been trampled by Seungkwan’s every day since they met.
Hansol wanted to do what he did best. He wanted to remain silent and walk away, so he tried until he felt Seungkwan’s hands pushing his wrist, so hard it hurt a little. He left a painful groan escaping his mouth, but Seungkwan only saw an annoyed yet indifferent Hansol.
“Hey, don’t fucking turn your back on me!” He pushed Hansol’s shoulder. “What the hell is with you? Are you gonna pretend I don’t have more years of my life with you than without? How do you think you are, treating me like a stranger?”
Seungkwan may have looked like he was angry, but whenever he came across something that deeply hurt him, he would always, without a doubt, be way more sad than angry. Right now, his emotions were coming out raw and unapologetic because he was extremely tired of Hansol’s stubbornness in always assuming things and being too blind to see what was underneath or beyond them.
Hansol put his hands inside his pockets, wetting his lips and facing everything but Seungkwan’s face again. He couldn’t do it to himself.
“You're just wrong about me, that’s all. No big deal.” The coldness in his voice was a strong indicator that it was indeed a very big deal, and Seungkwan was closer to the truth than he ever was. “You shouldn’t care about it the way you’re doing now.”
“Why not?” Seungkwan’s whole face frowned. “It is a big deal to me because the way you’re talking feels like I don’t know you at all.” His voice dropped a little, way more subtle but still very heavy. “It hurts, actually. I don’t find it funny at all. I don’t get what you’re trying to say. I’m your best friend, but the way you’re talking sounds as if I’m less than nothing.”
Hansol followed his timbre. “Is that what you think?”
“No.” He answered without hesitation. “But there’s definitely something you’re not telling me that you should.”
“If I didn’t tell you yet, why the fuck should I do it now?”
“Because you’re breaking my heart doing that!”
“I don’t give a shit if your heart is breaking now, you did it to mine first!”
It was like all the air in the atmosphere had vanished. The city’s background noise didn’t exist anymore. Just Hansol and Seungkwan lost in the whole universe, trapped inside the apartment they shared, bound with unsaid feelings and patched full of regrets.
Seungkwan had a lot to say, but he felt unable to think of anything that made sense right now. He went mute, his brain was blank, and the only things working on his body were his legs, which kept him standing, and his aching heart. Meanwhile, Hansol just waited, because he was already too far gone. He begged Seungkwan to finally understand and not make him humiliate himself more.
As Seungkwan’s breathing grew slower, Hansol thought of leaving. For his room or out of the house for the night, it didn’t matter. His body was begging for him to make a physical move. Instead, he just stood there facing an unbelieving Seungkwan. It tormented him more than he’d ever admit.
At first, the voice that came out of Seungkwan’s throat was barely audible, but he kept trying until he could make it. “Since… since when did…” Hansol accidentally didn’t let him finish.
“Since always.” It was somber, just like his eyes and his insides. Just like it always had been for him. “I can’t think of a moment in my life where I was fine with this.”
Seungkwan simply couldn’t digest it. His facial expressions said it all. “Why do you make yourself go through this?” Each word that came out was filled with the sincerity Seungkwan had never given to anyone before. It was insane the way Hansol treated himself. Absolutely insane.
“Why did you think this was better than talking to me?”
Hansol opened his mouth because he thought he could at least call out Seungkwan’s name. Nothing left.
“Is being loved by me that bad?” All the water present in Seungkwan’s throat had moved to his eyes, and he was already feeling the tears forming up. Hansol failed to search for fresh air.
“This is not about you.”
“No, it’s about you and me.” The courage that Hansol lacked in moments like this could always be found in Seungkwan. “It’s about how you don’t allow yourself to be happy and how you’re scared of anything that could give you what you deserve, as any normal person in the world. It’s also about how you can’t think I can feel the same way you feel about me, even though all the things we’ve been through together.” He needed to pause, searching in Hansol’s gaze if he truly understood what he meant. “More than anything else, it’s about how you don’t want to be loved back, Hansol. It’s about how at the end of every day you’re a fucking coward!”
Hansol shook his head, nodding negatively while the tears started to stream down his face. They didn’t care anymore. Boo Seungkwan would always know how to rip out Hansol’s entrails better than anyone.
“I don’t understand, Chwe Hansol. You said earlier you also didn’t like sad endings. I don’t understand why we can’t be together.”
Hansol’s hand had met his mouth again. Maybe he thought that would help him in holding back his tears and disguise his running nose, but it was completely useless since he had been more naked than he had ever been in front of someone. Hansol could feel every single one of his bones holding up his skeleton.
He looked at Seungkwan. Their eyes weren’t so different, except Seungkwan’s cared a sorrow he never thought he would experience. It was a synthesis of everything they had been through that night. Hansol took his time, admiring all that the man he had adored all his life.
It felt like heaven and hell at the same time.
Seungkwan couldn’t be more beautiful than he ever was. Hansol looked at him, and his conscience started to remind him that they had never been separated since they met. For all his life, Seungkwan had seen and listened to most of the ugly and unpleasing things about Hansol, and he did the same to Seungkwan. For so long, it had always been the two of them visiting each other’s most intimate parts, but that wasn’t enough for Hansol.
The name for what he needed hadn’t been invented yet.
“Boo Seungkwan, I don’t understand either.”
He left. He would come back. All of Hansol’s things were inside that apartment. All his work life and his belongings. All the love and bittersweetness he felt all his life could be found in one single place because he spent his life grinding every single grain of it, because being loved back by the man who was the love of his life was too much to ask.
Whenever Boo Seungkwan went, Hansol’s entire soul would always be tied to him.
In the meantime, trying to discover if it was worse to be something or nothing to Seungkwan, he found out he had always been nothing to him. Even if Seungkwan said no, it always feels, and for no,w it would always feel like it didn’t count at all.
So, he heard Seungkwan’s voice calling Hansol’s name again and again.
They were seated on the couch again, and time felt like it didn’t pass.
As a matter of fact, time didn’t pass at all.
Seungkwan was looking at Hansol with a funny face, waiting for Hansol to respond to his question, but Hansol didn’t remember.
“I asked if you think you already lived your big love story.”
It doesn’t matter. It would always be worse to be something to Boo Seungkwan.