In which Chanyeol dreams of nothing more than stardom so he climbs to the top and looks down.
Bright eyes.
Sad lyrics.
Even on warm days, something in him seems a little cold, a little tired. He keeps harping about the insignificance of it all, how in this wide world he tries to run after what seems like the right thing, only to come up with nothing every time.
He wants to be.
He needs to be.
She cannot be his everything.
He says it all the time, because he doesn’t see things the way she does: “People are here one week, gone the next, and everything that happens in between, nobody gives a shit. The in-between only matters when people know your name..”
Park Chanyeol fails to realize he is magnanimous. He licks up the room like a fire burning out of control. He makes music that penetrates everything. Sound waves dampen his bedsheets. They invade his shoes and bleed through emptied pockets, searching for a home that extends as far as the four walls of his room.
She calls it “a room filled with useless things” and he shakes his head because she doesn’t understand. The remedy for an empty soul has always been too many people and too much stuff.
He climbs higher and she grows smaller in his eyes. She’s always been real, standing behind him like a shadow, but now he thinks she’s a dream. After all, giants can’t see what’s on the ground.
The building he once watched in dreams is blue and reaches for the heavens like the tower they built to find God. On each level he encounters new stars but they’re fading out. They smell like cigarettes and laugh when he looks at the money spilling out their ears. It’s all blood money. He doesn’t understand today, but soon he will, because the knife will change hands.
Up and up the ladder he climbs, straight for a moon hanging on silver strings. The stars around him look sick. They keep dying. But, look! He shines so bright up there, like no one else has ever shined before!
He’ll never die like the others!
Legends are immortal!
One year knocks on two’s door and then two goes knocking on ten, but Chanyeol’s memory serves him well. He’s still got the world under his feet. He’s still standing on the blue heaven building. Nowadays, when he plays the guitar, not a chord is missed, even though his eyes are shut. Like the boy who once stood in a cluttered room, he channels every breath into the music and spectators look on as the lifeless guitar in his hands surges to life.
The applause is deafening now. He doesn’t remember the sound of two hesitant hands in a room full of useless things, and even if he did, it would no longer fill his bowl. He’s grown too ravenous.
His old guitar sits untouched somewhere, collecting dust until he decides to auction it. Someone told him once that acoustic guitars are for dreamers and electric guitars are for rockstars.
Someday they’ll call it a relic and sell it for more money than he could’ve ever dreamed of holding.
If they haven’t already, one day everyone he left behind will hear what he’s really trying to say. He’s just another star-man wasting in the sky. He didn’t mean any harm. He forgot that home will always be on the ground.
One day that girl he trapped in a dream will come bursting out of him like a nebula because she doesn’t belong in his system. And then gravity will send him down, down to the place he once saw from way up high.
[ from a strange but vivid dream - 2020.10.24 ]
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