June 30th

Something the way the sun sets in a canvas of pinks and purples gradient makes me a little delighted on the inside. People were too distracted by bigger things nowadays that they wouldn’t sit back and just appreciate the presence of nature or the simpler details.

I set down my coffee by the bedside table and watched as the sun decreased its appearance and the sky grew darker through my window. I let my surroundings washed away my troubles and summoned me in its beauty.

Then I started to forget.

I hadn’t realized how much time passed by me until I woke up from my daze and returned my eyes to the digital clock on my wall. The red beamed through the room, being my only source of light.

It was a quarter until nine.

It always came randomly, when I least expected it. Panic started pouring inside me again as I remembered that I recently turned twenty-one and I already had bills to pay, had school to worry about, and all the things that a normal college students did not have to face with. The anxiety bottled up and formed a hard lump in my throat that I couldn’t be able to swallow. I could hate my parents for disowning me after I told them I didn’t like girls like an average boy would. Or hate my other friends and families for not supporting me the way I am and shunned me out of their lives.

But when you were too upset and had reached the lowest point in your life. You didn’t hate anyone as much as you hated yourself.

Why I was born this way?

Why was I even born?

What if I wasn’t like this?

Would my life be easier?

I asked myself a million questions every night, when everything appeared quiet and the insecure thoughts attacked my mind. I wondered and I grieved and I questioned. The build-up frustrations about my life resulted my shoulders to shake tremendously and my body quivered and the sobs escaped so loud that my breaths came out ragged and uneven.

Unexpected soft knocks allowed me to compose myself and I wiped away tears with my tank top. I had no relations with anyone to have company over, so I assumed that it was one of those pranksters—around the age of young and young enough to knock on strangers doors just to run away seconds later. I opened the door, expecting to yell and vent my anger on those kids. But instead, Taemin from next door stood on the other side of my apartment.

He was a twenty-one year old student.