"Ashtray,
Cigarettes and wine
A sharp pain
A wood bind twine.

It was tied, it was knot
It tore the the arms but not
The pride he held in his eyes
When his blade worked his way
Through her little life."

⊱ ───ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ─── ⊰

"Mai! Mai!" Seokjin hastened through the large stairwell, stumbling on every other step as his hands reached out to hold her.

"Hyung, stop. What happened?"

"Mai, Ahyun," Seokjin paused to catch his breath. His eyes looked into Mai, agony capsized in them. A weight of pulling an alive body wrecked him. When humans packed into cities and invaded beautiful jungles, the world erupted in an admonishing roar, the same roar built it's nest inside the man.

"Hyung, i understand how marrying off your 13 year old daughter has caused Ahyun to lock herself up but trust me, if you hurt yourself, how will she live? Tell me?" Mai gently held the man and sat him down on a chair, wiping his tears.

Aein, Seokjin's daughter, was found alive three weeks after they had started to believe that she was dead. But the state in which they discovered her tampered body along the bank of the faint stream, was as dead as the stream itself.

The local club head, Park Shin Ju, had met Seokjin that other day, suggesting that he marries her to someone by the time anyone finds out about how she had been deliberated. Seokjin couldn't bear the pain of seeing his only child, the one he earned after years of being diagnosed with chemotherapy induced infertility, to suffer the tarnished life of an outcast.

But how could he marry a child to someone? How could he be such a demon?

That day, Park Min Seong, Shin Ju's son, had stepped up to marry her.

"No, no. Mai, no. Ahyun hung herself. She killed herself." Seokjin's body shivered with every word. Ahyun was his bestfriend. He married her only to save her from a Japanese trade but he fell for her, harder and harder. She was still so young, in her early thirties.

"What?"

⊱ ───ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ─── ⊰

"And that's how you ended up being in the business?"

"Well, I was dumb, arrogant, idiot. My halmeom gave me everything, everything she could and yet I wanted to be like the cool kids. They'd always fit in. They'd have money and I didn't." Jimin had settled down on the corner of floor, his body clinging onto the sofa.

When the wind kissed the trees, the water licked the shores, animals burrowed into the dirt, and people gazed up at the compassionate stars, the world became a beckoning whisper. I had nothing to say to soothe his searing burns of melancholy.

"I worked there every Friday through Sunday. I danced on the floor and some rich magnate would pick me up and fuck me up till I was a boneless piece of meat." He hung his head down.

"How many?"

"How many?" His eyes peered into my soul. "12 per night when the crowd was minimum. 20 if the crowd was good."

I gasped. 12 was the minimum? I suppressed my bewilderment, stopping myself from screaming but my face well elucidated what I wanted to express. Jimin chuckled, a face now covered in full scars of time. Time heals everything, yes it does. But it doesn't conceal the scars and even if it does, they don't stop existing.

"I worked a 10 hours shift in general without any break. I could only take fifteen minutes off throughout those hours."

"How- how are you alive?"

"I don't know. I have tried taking my life a few times."

"Few times? What the fuck, man!"

"I'm counting the number of times I attempted suicide. Give me a minute." My mind went into a haste. A minute?

"Yeah, 17 times. I've attempted suicide 17 times."

"I'm astonished, Park Jimin. 17 times? You'd be behind the bars at this point!" My attempt to lighten the heavy air seemed to fail as Jimin scrunched his nose and looked at me with an expression full of defence.

"I don't understand why you'd arrest someone for trying to just die. I don't understand why the government thinks they have the right to disrupt that. I have my right to life under the constitution and I should get my right to die as well. My death will not cause a major traffic dispute, nor any conflict between the north and south of the peninsula. Not even will Russia suddenly become the size of Vatican City and the Vatican the size of India."

"I don't object your opinion. I have always wondered why they can arrest you for wanting peace."

"You believe it?" Jimin's sharp eyes dilated, peering back into my essence.

"Yeah? Yeah, yeah."

"I'm glad. All this time when I said it to my dumb therapist, he'd say that so that we fear hurting ourselves. I was hurting when I tried dying. How can I hurt myself more than legitimately getting consensually raped?"

"It'd not be legitimate because prostitution is illegal." I commented.

"Yes, I get that but do you realise how nobody obeys that law? Your own uncle didn't, did he?" By this time, Jimin had regained his usual self, the idiot I knew.

Picking up the trash from the floor, I hadn't even noticed up until then, he practiced his aim in throwing them in the dustbin. Jimin would usually do this and fail and again pick up and do it yet again and fail.

"I know. When Antonella finally revealed this to me, I don't know if I was upset about you or if I was mad with Uncle Lee or if I was mad with you, I don't even have a perfect phrase ready." I picked up his failed attempts and dropped it straight into the trash can.

"How'd you do that without even looking at it?" Jimin's mouth dropped.

"Heh! I spent my whole life in my room. I ought to learn something to amuse myself. Your life isn't pleasing but more exciting than mine. Now pull up your jaw." I laughed.

Jimin's fallen jaw shut and curled into his infamous smirk. "I'm pretty experienced at keeping it open." He laughed and punched my shoulder.

I was too stunned to speak. I wasn't prepared for his comeback.

"So, Antonella caught you with him?"

"Hmm. She saw him jamming me. Didn't see my face cause I'd started wearing a mask when I got into college. You know, couldn't let everyone know for sure."

"And then?"

"Then what? She yelled at him, screaming for sleeping with a guy her age, as young as his son. Uncle left the room in a frenzy and... Well she swirled a hard slap across my face. I couldn't see nicely with my mask on so I had removed it, to see the intruder. That turned out to be my misfortune... Maybe fortune too."

"Her slaps do hurt. I know it. She would always slap my bullies straight across their faces and those dumb guys feared her to death." Memories are like silent streams that flow by quicker than you know but appear to be just so calm and still.

"Yes, yes it hurt. She left a mark of her hand on my face for a week."

"How'd you become her friend then?"

"Well, I became her therapist. About the friend part, she became my friend. Someday, my only friend. Her blow was way strong for my already deliberated body that I ended up in the hospital." Jimin paused and stole a glance of my canvas. With him in my mind, I was painting a portrait of some King or Prince, maybe.

"They had asked her who I was to her and she'd answered by saying that I was her older brother. They'd ran some checks on me and found out that I had, had 20+ drinks on an empty stomach and that the gap between my legs was more than it should be in a man. They'd discovered the various traces of gropping and other fresh harassment scars on my body. Antonella sued that pub." Jimin laughed again.

"So you could have died that day?" I whispered in a frail voice.

"That was probably my last third attempt to suicide. I don't know if because of too much alcohol, they'd not realised how I had also overdosed on antidepressants to die that day. It would honestly be suicide but I went to work and some poor but heinous man would get accused of killing a nineteen years old boy."

"How'd you end up living again?"

"Antonella payed for my treatment, spent hours taking me to therapy and when that therapy failed, she relentlessly sat by my side and spoke to me. I couldn't tell her everything but I did tell her almost everything. I never liked having sex. A lot of my, you know, supposed friends, liked sleeping with random girls at the pub, from school or just any girl anywhere. They'd invited me once and that was my first time getting a blow job. I could get hard to sleep with her. They made fun of me."

"I don't know the feel. I'm a virgin."

"You'll always be."

"I wouldn't mind to be but eh?" I gave him a side eye.

"You're a Virgo." It took me a little longer to get exactly what caused him to fall back with an uproar of his weird laughter but I got it. And I'm offended. Criminal offense side eye!

I splashed my paint filled brush on his white hoodie. Jimin's face hardened and he looked me in the eye. Before I could compose myself, he dipped his hands in my paints, followed by their locomotion straight on my chest. Now I will always have his small handprint on my body if I wear this.

"What did you just-"

"Did you mind?" He bit his lips, looking apologetically.

"Yes, I did. Now take my revenge!" I put my handprint the same was him.

"Eeh, you're so cold, bruh!"

"Heh!"

We both ended up on the dinner table a few hours past with my plain yellow tee shirt having our hand prints and our signature, the same on his white hoodie. He was the one that cooked us teokbokkie and noodles for dinner but I was the one who has to go out and get the grocery in that yellow tee shirt. Oh, post script, some girls stopped by to compliment it but they thought Jimin's handprints to be my girlfriends. Jimin wasn't very happy hearing that, haha.

"Oi, hyung,"

"Yeh?"

"Was there anyone that you liked in your job?"

"Nobody. I hated everybody. I told you, I hate the idea of sex considering how much I've had. Plus, I never liked people."

"And that blow job?"

"Well, if it was enough to arouse me, I should have been able to sleep with her. It couldn't. I didn't like it either. Now, can we stop talking about this atleast while eating? Do you want to clean after my vomit?"

"No."

"Then shut up. And eat your capsicum."

"I don't like veggies!"

"You boy, better eat up. I've had Antonella's wrath on me. Do you want that on yourself?"

"I'd rather eat and die."

"Good decision."