Chapter 36: Each and every step I welcome readily

                                    

                                          
✨YUN✨
The alarm on my phone went off, its tune loud as usual due to how difficult it was for me to leave my dreamland every day. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was him. 
We were bound to disentangle ourselves during the night. Yet I woke up with my cheek pressed against his shoulder, my arms hugging his bicep like I would hug my pillow every night. Our hands were linked and resting on top of his chest, rising and falling with each deep breath he took.
When I looked up at him, his face was towards me, but his expression almost made me cry for the simple fact that there were no tension lines marking his face. He was completely relaxed, his lips a bit parted in a way where I could see his front teeth peeking behind them.
Sometimes, when I'd check on him during the night, I'd see him curled up under the covers, his expressions tight, breathing uneven. Always fighting against his nightmares. Once, when I'd tried to wake him up, he opened his eyes, but only sheer blackness stared back at me. Unfeeling, unyielding. Those were eyes that told me I would better go back to my own bed, or whatever was tormenting his dreams would come after me as well.
I wasn't proud of my cowardice. That was part of the reason I offered that he stay the night this time. I wanted to see if that darkness would emerge once I was beside him all the time. But once we had laid down together, we slept through. He barely moved on his side of the bed, he had only rolled to sleep on his back, and that was it. 
I moved as slowly as I could, freeing my fingers from his hold, hurrying to turn off my alarm, only to catch myself staring at him again, and I wondered how our lives would have turned out if we'd met under different circumstances. If I had worked up the courage to get up and talk to the boy playing the piano, or if I had simply written my phone number in one of those post-its I would stick under the fall board. 
We could have leaned on each other, been each other's saving grace, each other's shoulder to cry on. He would have told me about his demons. I would tell him he would make it, and that it was okay to feel the way he felt. 
I would have told him his father's death wasn't his fault. That he was scared, as anyone would be in that situation. He would have cried, and I would have hugged his pain away. 
But I just sat there, listening to his songs, feeling like some kind of invisible string was tying me down to my seat. As if I wasn't supposed to get up and talk to him. Like I was at the right place, at the right time, but he wasn't the right person. 
So I did nothing, and here we are.
He breathed in deeply, his chest going up and down in relaxed breaths, and all I wanted to do was crawl back into bed, and nest myself next to him to hear his heart beating. A heart that had stopped once.
I walked around the bed and sat silently on the edge of the mattress. My fingers brushed his hair away from his forehead. His dark roots were starting to appear under the bleached locks, like his old self peeking into his new life. 
Sometimes he would look at me with such sweetness that I could see behind his eyes in a very subtle gleam, a flash of the innocent boy he used to be. A boy that was buried under all the darkness and despair his life had become, but that still fought so hard to resurface.
I couldn't say I suffered the same kind of loss Yoongi did. My father, who I had loved so dearly, left one day never to return, but I had known things weren't going well between him and my mother, so in a way, his leaving was something I expected. It was still confusing the way it all happened, though. It was like the timeline in my head got messy when I thought about it, and when I asked my mom she would tell me a slightly different story every time.