SHITTYHUN

AU where CY goes to the doctor one day complaining about headaches and a bleeding nose and they tell him that he has ossymous amnaemia. Ofc CY drops his jaw at the two biggest words he has prob seen in his life and says “ok, but some apsirin will be fine right?”

No, it’s not fine. Ossymous amnaemia is the self-destruction of all the blood vessels in the brain at the speed of Seoul’s bullet train until the entire unit shuts down from power failure.

ossymous amnaemia by random is one in seven million. And CY hasn’t even won the local lottery before, which apparently, everyone does at some point so he;s really never been that guy. But as fate would have it, sick and twisted as it always is, CY is the first case of ossymous amnaemia in the city.

The white coats say  he has to stay for the day for further examination.

They are good liars, CY thinks because he ends up in the hospital bed for a month and then more months, with the stench of sanitised disease assaulting his nostrils. They send him for more tests. And he hates it because hospital are all plastic plants, blank ceiling and a punishing pastel motif that in his opinion, sucks the life out of patients faster than their terminal illnesses.

The doctors say that in two month he prob won’t remember his phone number or the way back home or what he is trying to get when goes to the vending machine, a coin already deposited into the slot.

Which CY doesn’t mind that part really, he has lousy memory to begin with and even those situations are not that novel. On normal days, he misplaces his house keys and loses his phone more often than he count. That’s why he has his trusty sidekick slash bff baekhyun on speed dial; for the emergency of crashing for the night or week before the door people come to replace the lock. Or just to annoy him, either way.

But what scares the shit out of him isn’t forgetting the trivialities. It’s waking up from a slumber one day to find that everything he has ever known stripped of their identity. His friends who will be reduced to just labels tagged onto inert bodies; Chen-ssi looks nice and brought fruits, Kyungsoo-ssi looks unfriendly and why is the guy in the beanie always so sad.

Or that his house that he could effortlessly navigate every corner and edge while simultaneously drunk and blindfolded would just turn into a ceiling and a floor and fixtures awkwardly put together as a show set to tell a story of a sad lonely busker who couldn’t made ends meet collecting loose change by the subway.

But he wasn’t that. And he wouldn;t know.

PCY is the all as hell happy motherfucker who more like exhorted the worker bees and highschool students in morning rush with his loud boisterous rapping until they yielded and surrendered their lunch money. This PCY is the crazy motherfucker blazing up and down the corridor pouring inner soul into a mic that doesn;t even work.

“It’s not all bad” Baekhyun says as he sits on a stool by the bed in a blue beanie and red bomber jacket, perpetually cutting fruits. The window is open by the bed even though its not suppose to because it lets the air conditioning out. Baekhyun said it’ll do him good.

Then he crinkles his eyes and smiles the way CY remembers and adds “At least i’ll let you win fights with the anaemia card.”

CY doesn’t look convinced. And BH falls silent for a moment as if considering smth impt. Then he continues pensively with a dark shade of melancholy- no more than that. Borderline accusatory.

“Plus, you can’t really feel loss if you won’t remember anyone can you.”

The next day, CY instructs the whole ward to ban the guy with the beanie forever and then yells at the nurses “just don;t let anyone in” when they suggest that he might not always be wearing a beanie.

They are wrong. They are all fucking wrong.

Baekhyun always wears a beanie and even if he’s already forgotten how the strings of the guitar works anymore, which notes goes together or what songs he liked to play most, he can feel loss god dammit. And pain. And right now it feels like the lung-collapsing, heart-gripping feeling of helpless shrieking, begging for it to stop, while the world around him get torn down by this own hands. CY snatches the toothpick of his hospital happy meal to carve it into his forearms. Over and over again even after it draws blood.

Remember BBH. Loss. Pain. This is loss.

Without memory and increasingly, the disability to play guitar or remember what instruments are, it;s not that doesn’t know loss. It’s just that it morphs into pain. Meaningless pain. A clench of the heart when he sees the carved initials on his forearm but despite the customary squeeze of his heart, he is always outside a room of locked memories clawing at the doors.

Meaningless pain. It’s the pills that punishes his bones and make his throat so dry they can’t make a sound even when he is crying. It’s the wet shore between coma and consciousness that he drifts endlessly in. Which actually is just his damp pillow. Damp because even if he shuts his eyes the tightest he can, the tears still somehow escape.

Its the fear of vacant spaces. The spot where he used to stand in the underground interlink serenading the crowd or the empty slate in the head that he keeps knocking against the side table compulsively on days where he just can’t recall what BBH stands for until the nurse comes begging him to stop. It’s the empty chair beside his bed knowing that someone is missing but not knowing who to miss.

But it is BBH who is right eventually, as he is most of time. Anger at BBH for never turning up again after the first week of being refused a visit, to the uncontrollable tug in his heart when he looks beside him to the vague imprint of his name in his head, they all fade. Romantic fatality expires. The scientific fact is that melodrama doesn’t hold without memories. Summer comes and summer passes in Seoul, children grow up and the world continues.

PCY forgets anything about the guy he used to be friends with and the scar in his forearms fades. The day comes when he stops staring at the empty seat like he expects someone to be there.

And BBH remembers all of it. As well as the days of stopping PCY from cracking his skull open because he can’t remember what the initials in his forearms stand for, or finding a suicidal PCY in the toilet after a 5 hour search with a penknife in his hand ready to split his veins because the pills are doing it in slow-mo anyway.

And then when PCY’s mental age regresses so alarmingly quick to adolescence, throwing tantrums for not getting his fried fix for the week or trying to jerk off under the covers to Ariana Grande. Then another day comes where PCY can’t make coherent sentences anymore and needs to have his diaper changed every other hour.

Half a year of befriendling PCY again in Ward 3A as the new nurse “Park byun” later, the world ultimately forgets PCY on a Sunday, at 5.30pm where rush hour starts filling up Seoul’s metro line. BBH only quietly pulls the white blanket over PCY’s soft sleeping features. That day, all PCY, Park Byun, and BBH died.

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