#jongin reader

Last night I told you everything.

Last night, I blurted it out, suddenly careless and reckless with my tongue, because you were smiling. It was the kind of smile that feels warm from every angle, like suddenly being kissed by sunlight or touching candle wax after the flame has been extinguished. It was the kind of smile that made my heart feel too full, the swell of it pushing things out of me without my permission. When you smile, it’s always like this, but lately, I’ve been losing control over myself around you. I’m surrendering to you. I do not want to stop.

The words fell out of my mouth, fast and gleeful and desperate to touch your air, your skin, your lips. They fell out of my mouth, messy and disorganized - a lot like me, really - and so fast that I didn’t even know I was hurting you until I saw your eyes, crestfallen behind your grin as you collapsed into confusion. I know I should feel remorse for this, for all of it. For the words and the feeling and your anguish, and I do but only for part of the reason.

Hurting you, however small or large, feels like slitting my throat, a fast tear at the jugular that makes it hard to breathe or see past the horror. Like this, I bleed out until I am barren, a husk that has emptied itself for you, angry at itself and wishing for things to be fixed. Hurting you feels like tearing fissures in the terrain of your skin, making grooves and valleys where there should be none, and watching the pain quake you into something not have to be. Hurting you feels like destruction, like an unintentional oblivion, and I can’t forgive myself for any of it. Can’t but, mostly, don’t want to.

It’s hurting you that I hate, but I’m not sorry for saying the words. The thing is that they are the truth, and the thing is that they are so ingrained in my love for you that simply saying I love you feels like a lie if you don’t know the whole of it. This kind of love has been living a life, always, before I even knew it existed. This kind of love has been sitting in the back of my throat for centuries because it’s been growing. We’ve done this a hundred times, and we will do it again - I will do it again.

Here is what I said: The best part about time travel is that I always find you and get to love you.

What I meant to say is: I’ve been loving you since the dawn of time.

You have to remember that time is a human construct, it doesn’t actually exist unless someone is counting it. You have to remember that time is conceptual, always happening, always moving, always waiting to be touched. You have to remember that time only starts the moment you can perceive it - anything before doesn’t really exist unless you ruminate on it, unless you choose to let it.

What you have to remember is that time, for me, only started the moment I saw you.

1953 / 301 AD

I was born in 1936. Back then, the world was not quiet and we as people could no longer pretend that it was. That was standard, you know, ignoring the reality of things in favor of the pictures, the radio dramas, the neighbors and their new car. Back then, we couldn’t pretend things were okay, not anymore. The Depression was real, even as a child I could feel it in the way my mother opened the canned food, could feel it in the way the cake never tasted right. Did you know that was how boxed cakes came to fruition? Condensing ingredients to save women money and so the kids could at least say they had something remotely sweet. They’ve gotten better, I’ve found. You can’t taste the salt as much.

By the time I turned seventeen, the world was completely different - not just in the map, but in the mood. Things were different, but still there was pretense. Everywhere, people were trying to pretend the world wasn’t on the brink of death. We had an economy and we had surplus, but still we had fear. I guess that’s why I stopped thinking on time altogether, because no matter what we survived nothing, not even our way of life, would change.

Things were tense, I was tense. At that age, I’d already suffered through the terror, the trauma, and the horror of war. I was close to draft age, thought maybe the end of my life was coming. Admittedly, the precipice of it felt anticlimactic. I wasn’t mad that I hadn’t truly lived, just bitter in my acceptance of this reality. It seemed fitting, in a way.

But then, in the middle of an April heatwave, I felt myself start to fade.

It wasn’t the mental kind of fade, the rebellious teenage detachment or the withdrawn emotional recoil from the news and the papers. I mean the kind of fade that says you exist everywhere, everywhere and all at once. I was suddenly spread into little more than a veil, something easily passed through or ignored, an invisible being made of atoms and light and nothing else. My body was gone, as if I never had one, as if my bones were figments of my wasted imagination. For the first time, I was little more than a conscious, lost and screaming.

The world moved around me, slipped and fell apart in spirals around my fingers and I could hold on to nothing because there was nothing. I thought an atom bomb had gone off. I thought the world was ending.

When things reformed - I say things because how do you describe the act of being given a body? How can I explain the way the pavement became grassy plains filled with wild flowers? Intangible, imaginary things became a vivid reality and I didn't know how to react. All I could do was bend over and vomit, soiling this new Earth with things I didn't remember eating.

When things reformed, I saw you. Not this you, but the first one - my first one.

The first time I saw you, the world was small. Not the size of it but the scope of it, the perspective of it. To be fair, back then the world was probably bigger than it had ever been, vast, empty, and mostly uncharted. I guess in a way it was life that felt small, brief and volatile and aching to be lived into extremes.

To this day, I still am not quite sure what you were doing, but your toes were in the river water and you were laughing. There was no one else around but you were laughing and wet, and the simplicity of this moment suddenly made me feel like I was human. For the first time in my brief life, I felt like I was alive and living.

I stayed like that for a long while, a hundred feet away and aching to be close to you. I hated the space but I didn’t want to scare you. My clothes were alarming, I was sure. I didn’t know what had happened or why, but I knew the when was different from the where. You were in robes. They were white. I thought that was meant to be the colour of mourning, but then, maybe you just wanted to remake history with your bravery. You’ve done that a lot, you know, even though you don’t remember doing it.

Regardless, the point is that I had found you and I wanted to stay.

The point is that you were there.

The point is that I saw you.

The point is that you saw me, too.

I got pulled back to my time the second our eyes met and, in the middle of my lawn, I cried. I mean, really openly cried, let the tears fall freely because I knew I’d lost you. Something about you felt important. Something about you felt like you were mine, and without you there, smiling and laughing, the world felt like a void.

For two years, I tried to pull myself back to you. I thought about your face and your eyes and that river so often I even dreamed about them, over and over and over, until all I had to do was think about it before I fell asleep in order to be back in technicolour memory. You were lush and you were lucid, but you were lost.

Until, one day, you weren’t.

Until, one day, I found you.

1741 AD

The perfume smelled different on you, not really bad or good, just different - beyond beauty. Truthfully, it didn’t smell like clove, which is what I think the parfumier told you it was meant to be, or even like the roses you were handing out. You kept those in a basket tucked in the crook of your arm, away from your wrist and neck, as if they were trying to hide. Rather, it smelled like euphoria - or maybe that was me.

I think I got ahead of myself. Let me explain.

When I found you again, it was in the market square of Paris. Dirty, filthy, awful, truly, but wondrous in the way it bustled with activity. Like before, the first thing I saw when I was whole again was you, and again you were smiling. This time, you were wearing red. You had this red traveling cape that made you look like a fairy tale, and I couldn’t even say as much because I didn’t know if it had been written or published yet. Instead, I pretended I invented for you, that the story was mine, or ours, and the world had spent centuries telling the tale about how I, the wolf, found you and loved you into tiny pieces.

You said I looked strange, but you showed no fear. The way you looked at me felt like you were getting close, under my skin and into my marrow, learning my DNA so that you too could copy it. I let you in, let you stay there, swore to myself that you would never leave even if I faded away.

The parfumier thought I had money - laughable, really, because I had just come from a lecture and was emptying myself of all things necessary when I faded. He asked if you wanted to try the clove, said it would match your whim, and you let him spread it over your skin like butter. I was envious, then, of how he got to touch you so freely.

That day, I realized two things:

The first, is that colour is a brute force that means and implies too many intense things. Red is passion, red is fury, red is ownership. It demands something, demands love and demands devotion. You wore that shade all over your person like you were compelling me to submit, to kneel, and to beg. I wanted to. I didn’t care that the cobblestones were covered in piss, I just wanted you to feel proud.

The second, and I think this is most important - because it lasts throughout time - is that odor is persuasive beyond logic, language, and will. You take it in, you hold it, and you taste it. You feel it on your tongue with every movement of your lungs, and it overtakes your blood vessels. It arrests you, totally. You can’t deny it, you can’t eradicate it, you just let it.

You arrested me, totally. You have not stopped.

1252 AD

The third time I saw you, I had finally learned to do it on purpose. All I had to do was think of you, and there you were, but this time it was different.

The third time I saw you, I got stuck. I don’t know when I arrived but I know that by the time I left it had been a year. I haven’t forgiven myself for leaving. Just know, always, it was against my will.

The third time I saw you, we had to hide. That’s what I mean when I say it was different. This time, we couldn’t smile or pretend or say that I was odd. This time, I was a heretic. This time, we had to run.

In our current life, you ask why I wake up screaming, sometimes. It’s not because I’m dreaming, it’s not fucking sleep apnea, it’s because I’m remembering. A lot of me, the soft me, was lost during that year. Months in, I got used to running with blood under my fingernails, got used to seeing you with Godless eyes. Faith was leaving you, reminding you that loving me meant giving up paradise, or, at least, forcing yourself to redefine it. What I remember the most is the sound of swords and the sound of women crying or men dying. Honestly, they all sound the same, in the end.

When we found the hut on the outside bank of the woods, you started to cry. We hadn’t really slept for days, the floor of the forest hard and uncomfortable, animals refusing to be silent. Really, I think we told ourselves this was the problem. Really, it was the open space and the knowledge we would burn if we were found that kept us awake. It was easier to say it was the forest, more pleasant even if it wasn’t honest.

When we found the shack, you started to cry, the stress and the agony falling in hot streaks down your cheeks. I saw the whole of time in those tears, all the problems of the past and future spilling out and over to your skin and my fingers as I wiped them away. That night, I made love to you, felt like the only way we could stay together was by holding on to the flesh and bone of our bodies, loving each other raw until not even God could deny we were destiny. You cried when we found the shack and I cried after we came, hard and long into the crook of your shoulder while my shoulders shook with the thought of disappearing.

I’d been feeling the pull for days and didn’t know how to tell you. It seemed cruel and unfair, at the time, but looking back, all I did was leave you unprepared.

In a year, the worst year of my life, I built something beautiful with you, something I got to call mine. You loved me like a habit, without questions - I mean, really fucking loved me. You never asked questions or forced me to tell you anything, you just loved me with all of you like it was the only thing you knew how to do. How could I tell you I spent years doing the same, not just with all of you but, with every version of you?

I love every version of you because you love me the same way, with open arms and an open heart, making room for me whenever you are because you recognize me as yours, too.

When I faded back, I didn’t go back to my time, I arrived in 2014, lost and sobbing, and knowing that you were probably dead. They’d found us, wrapped in each other’s arms, wholly impossible, wholly in love, and wholly illegal. The found us and I disappeared.

I could not take you with me.

But, like always, you found me. You bought me a coffee. It took me another year to love this new you, and not the one who skinned rabbits to keep herself alive. It took you a year to love me into something less like an animal and more like a man. It took you a year to love me back into someone soft, someone who could say he loved you without filling with regret.

2017 AD

I was born in 1936 and you were not there, or maybe you were and instead I had to find the rest of you first. At seventeen, I discovered this gift or maybe I developed it, maybe it’s my genetic code or maybe there are others like me. I don’t know. I don’t really even care. The point is that I was seventeen the first time I saw you and now I don’t know how old I am, only that time moved the moment I saw your face. I know how I look, young and handsome and fittingly yours, but I know where I’ve been. No, that isn’t right. I know when I’ve been, and this means age is meaningless.

I know I’ve been loving you through, around, and within time. I love you in both a past and present tense, even a future tense, where language bends to make room for the shape of my affection. I have been loving every single version of you, every piece, because it is you and all of you loves me too. Again, that isn’t right. It’s not just all of you, it’s every you. Every me, every you, we fall in love as fast as breathing because it’s natural.

I think of us less as a linear progression of love and more as a circle. It doesn’t really matter where we end or we begin, we are an ouroboros of fervent ardor, consuming one another until I fade and we start again.

Last night, I told you everything.

Last night, you asked me to show you.

I’m telling you that I can, but I am also saying I won’t. Leaving means fading, and I’ve only just started to feel whole. Leaving means leaving you, and I can’t promise I’ll make it back.