kyungsoomd:

         _{There came the pushing.}

    _{Now starts the pulling.}

_{A chat box pops up right on time, with a young Kyungsoo slurping on his third bottle of milk flipping away all the readings assigned to him for his exam on Neurology tomorrow. The room was a mess. Papers were scattered everywhere like a tornado visited and left him as casualty, even leaving his hair a tousled mess every morning for no apparent reason at all. He just didn’t bother to comb properly anymore. Appearance was something he cared for the least anyway.}

_{He wasn’t always like this.}

_{For months, he would wait for a specific timeslot of the day. It was his routine. It was his time to take his mind off things. Screw all the exams, all the tasks assigned, and even all the food that was offered to him by his flatmate at the dorms. He avoids people, walks fast on the halls after every class, and diligently finishes his homework on time just to have those extra hours at night off for a special person he met only through Tinder.}

_{In Tinder it began and in Tinder it ends, he thought.}

_{But his expectations were surpassed when he began to unusually take notice of any detail about her. It wasn’t enough for him to know a person’s generic online profile; he wanted to know her likes and dislikes, her smile in real life and her ideal type. Their bond, from the little hi’s and hello’s, developed into a solid one deeply rooted in their similar aspirations in life. Everything felt perfect, despite having technology as the only line of communication between the two of them.}

_{A week ago, he suggested they meet halfway across the country and the cracks began to show. She avoided his sudden calls, she stopped replying when it got too personal. Anything he said took a back seat. He constantly tried to run the talk in circles, to keep her interested and lively until he forgets again. Until something slips off the Pandora’s box of his emotions and leave them into a silent mess again.}

_{One thing they would never do was disconnect. Log off and disconnect, or even delete the application altogether. So when he felt fed up, he tried to threaten her into giving a final say with their relationship– with whatever they had was called.}

_{With the blinking cursor giving him a mocking count of the minutes wasted staring at his laptop’s screen, he finally replies.}

_{GyeonggiDO93: I have this weird feeling you’re going to stay.}

_{Forget that she was getting the hang of the family feud video games and learning English even better from those because she’s opted to spend her time on a swiping application she first thought was lame and only done for the fun of it. She was immersed in it, beyond immersed. She made a friend that was unlike any in her reality and she’d spend days pondering just why this friend had to exist in a virtual world. She found it silly she gave her undivided attention to this person and everyday there’s a time equivalent to exclusive dates or hours talking on the phone, except there’s no voice she could hear. And it makes her anxiously curious to know what he sounded like.}

_{There were excuses left and right to back it up. The closer they had gotten, the more secrets she’d kept, the more exhausted she was day to day trying to juggle keeping in touch with friends in real life and the only one online that seemed to have swerved to the top of the pyramid of her hierarchy as much as she dodged the undeniable fact. Between them, it was something of an open secret. They were both aware of what consequences, if that’s what it’s called, and what exactly the community served for. It was a dating site, yet they had silently agreed on no labels.}

_{He comes to her with a proposition, honest to gosh, it overwhelms her and makes her panic. Somehow, all this time of laying trust upon a person that she was familiar to, though with undertones of ambiguity, she was hesitant on seeing what she had always been curious about. You can say it was fear. Was familiarity enough to go through something as drastic? Or was it drastic at all? If she treated it like meeting any stranger in person, it wouldn’t seem so.} 

_{It mattered, genuinely. This was probably the person she was most fond of and some of the fear comes from the expectation that he was this idea of perfect in her eyes and the disappointment that will come because she was almost sure this wasn’t really the case. Critical. Hard on herself, she knew these things were make believe. Partly, at least. A little bit of hope comes from the thought that there’s a chance she can be proven wrong. Ironically, she wished for that even when she despised being proven wrong. She’s wishing this could be one of those rare occasions she’ll be accepting it.}

_{rubyjane96: i am. i’m just not sure why.
rubyjane96: will you? help me figure it out.}

_{In the box meant for another reply, she types in ‘let me know how and why this is worth giving a shot’ and yet she backspaces the entire message, leaving it as it is. This was her contribution in the push and pull which made it harder on no more than herself.}