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fmdtaeyongarchive · 5 years

Text

↬ if i were to go, where would i go?

date: early/mid 2016 and early/mid 2018

location: unspecified

word count: 1,431 words

notes: creative claims verification. trigger warnings for depression and suicidal thoughts. really, right off the bat, this talks about ash in the past in a pretty unhealthy/suicidal head space and a little on ash’s remaining struggles with it, so though the final product of the song he ends up writing is not focused on that and neither is the majority of the self-para technically, there’s the underlying tones of that throughout, so please don’t read this if you’re triggered by any exploration of a suicidal head space just to be safe. or don’t read this at all regardless of who you are tbh. thx. also my computer died in the middle of proofreading this and i said fuck it we publish our self-paras unedited like men.

he doesn’t want to end his life; he just wants to stop living the kind of life he’s trapped in.

it’s a conclusion ash remembers coming to back when he’d still seen a therapist. it didn’t feel true, but he’d gone along with it so that they could change the subject and move on to something easier to stomach. he hated whenever the topic came up — if he’d ever thought about ending it all. of course he had. everyone must have at some point. it was part of being alive, knowing that living was a condition he had to exist with only as long as he allowed himself to. it wasn’t something he was very happy carrying the burden of most of the time, but only in 2016, when every search of his name brought up hate and venom, and everyone looked at him with eyes of pity or disappointment, and there was no other way out, did the scales start to tip in the favor of no longer living simply because it was something that was expected of him.

days back then had been one of two extremes. there were the more common days that have long since faded into blurs of self-inflicted numbness spent staring at his bottles of pills, knowing from his own research the amount he would have to take in one go to not open his eyes the next morning without enduring any more pain. then, there were the less frequent days where all he wanted to do was scream and hope the sound would rip him apart for good. on the rare occasion he could be bothered to drag himself out of bed without help, he’d go down to one of the studios at bc with soundproof walls and he would scream. it never helped much though. neither did writing, but he did it anyway, as faithfully as an addict to the illusion of pain relief.

now, he’s almost scared of reading his writing from that time out of fear he’ll still see too much of himself in them.

so when ash finds an old piece of paper carelessly crumpled and crushed in the back of an old songwriting notebook two years on from when he first wrote on it, he looks at the words with both an understanding and a distance from the person he’d been when he’d written it. he doesn’t know if it’s funny or sad that that version of him had been the one that had seen a therapist regularly, while the one that doesn’t sees the words with an altered outlook.

it’s too hard for him to revisit everything written on the paper completely. as much as he likes to pretend he’s better, he knows he’s only teetering on the precarious edge from falling back down into that dark place at any given time. so instead, the lost ash of 2018 finds a handful of lines written by the lost ash of 2016 that still speak to him and in the course of a few hours, he reworks them.

if i were gone tomorrow would they wonder how i am?

it’s a different kind of escapism now, and he doesn’t know if the lyrics he’s writing are actually more truthful to how he feels now that years have passed or if he‘s been so brainwashed to sanitize his writing by bc that making it more palatable regardless of the truth comes more easily than honesty to him.

nowadays, his mind is more set on running away than ceasing to exist. or that’s the conceit of the song, he decides as he tries to overwrite the darker implications of the original. what would happen if he left everything behind and flew to some remote island where bc couldn’t find him? where no one could find him? his yearning to travel had grown impossible to ignore since he debuted. he’s always been interested in the great big world and what it has out there for him, but now it’s like the only thing he has to hold on to. it’s a distant if, but he grasps it tightly between his callused fingers like it’s the only thing keeping him alive. and maybe it is.

running away. it's not as scary to think about, but it still makes ash fearful. he won’t ever do it. he can’t; he’s too bound by expectations and by the opinions of others to ever just leave. god knows it would be impossible anyway with how closely he’s watched and how recognizable his face has become from being plastered on advertisements all over korea.

but ash has had an active imagination his whole life, so he lets himself consider it as his fingers find their way over the familiar strings of his reliable acoustic guitar. the melody ends up coming to him before all of the words do, and some of the words start to find their place within the song once the tune has pieced itself together. he writes the melody based off the feeling this time instead of carefully measured structure. he’s not sure it’s complete with only the guitar, but he gets a good draft out of it. he wants something open and airy, reminiscent of the sort of freedom he longs for. he wants something that sounds like he can only imagine his soul will feel once his contract no longer holds him — free, soft, but with an unshakeable sadness even in its most hopeful moments, because even if he could disappear, he would only be shifting his burden onto others. if they bothered to care that he was gone at all.

ash loves silence. as a musician and as a person, it’s something he believes to be incredibly underappreciated. he’d been taught early on in his music education that silence isn’t a mere break in the music — absence of sound is just as much a part of the music as the sound itself, and properly executed rests could take a composition from good to great. that feels apropos for how his mind constructs this piece. it isn’t a symphony or even anything in the more complex half of pieces he’s composed, but the mood he wants to convey is so specific that he labors in thought for hours writing and rewriting the way he wants the notes to weave together.

it’s about solace of looking over the earth from atop a high altitude or being far enough away from the blinding lights of a big city to actually see the stars. and beyond that, it’s about experiencing the beauty of life after finally escaping from a slow trudge toward death, removing the heavy load from his shoulders and irresponsibly vanishing from his own set-course life and the lives of everyone else he knows.

he wants it to sound the opposite of the noises of his current life. he has early morning alarms, the hushed but insistent whispering of managers in the middle of an enclosing and suffocating crowd shouting and grabbing greedily, and constant phone calls and texts (some from the many, many people who have been handed over the rights to demand things from him and more from insistent sasaengs with too much to say and no personal boundaries). how quickly would any of them move on if he were no longer around as a toy to entertain them? a couple of weeks? days? a few hours?

it’s all a little too self-indulgent and he knows it. as he writes it, he doubts it’s something that will ever make it through bc entertainment’s harsh final cuts to be released, but that filter for public consumption still combs his brain, just as bc would want it to.

no one wants to hear about how desperate a rich idol is to escape it all. no one wants to hear how unsure a celebrity is that anyone would care if they were no longer there. but ash makes himself forget all of that as he records everything into his phone for later and layers melodies and harmonies to build the end of the song, a chorus of notes growing as his anxieties at his overflowing thoughts do, before silence.

again, nothing but a desperate, shaking voice with the questions that eats away in equal part at his mind and his guilty conscience each day.

a lone voice crying for peace in a life of figurative violence and literal commotion, and mourning at the thought that maybe, no matter how much he aches for it, he doesn’t really matter to anyone at all.

#fmdverification #&& when you're screaming but they only hear you whisper | self para #&& bring color to my skies | character development #depression tw #suicidal thoughts tw #suicidal ideation tw #suicide tw #one down..... five thousand to go.....#i wrote this a week ago... and i hate it now but i can't rewrite it when i have so many other verification paras i have to finish this week #my anxiety: don't do it bitch don't publish any of these solos just scrap the whole album #&& queued

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