#the number of verifications mentioning youngjoo is getting embarrassing now

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

↬ what scene will you be?

date: early 2017 / january 2020 / august 2020.

location: some random apartment / ash’s home studio.

word count: 1,875 words, not including lyrics.

summary: n/a.

triggers: passing mention of alcohol.

notes: creative claims verification. mentions of youngjoo 🥴 but in the least angsty context yet! some parts in the middle are repurposed from a defunct verification.

early 2017.

the concept of the song first comes to him early in his relationship with youngjoo. there’s something about the beginning of a new relationship that never fails to bring out inspiration for a flood of love songs from the depths of ash’s mind, and youngjoo is the perfect muse for his poetry in the midst of the fluttery, dreamy feeling of their honeymoon phase.

they’re watching a film, a surprise date night planned out by ash that had involved talking a senior friend into letting him have his apartment for a few hours that evening (which, he’d like to note, had been incredibly hard to do when he couldn’t explain why he needed it). he’d set up a projector in the living room and a film he knew she liked and he’d gotten an expert opinion on a good wine pairing for the dinner he’d made.

it’s strange, dating youngjoo, but it has nothing to do with discomfort in his feelings for her. she’s youngjoo. smart, successful, talented, kind, interesting in a way that keeps him captivated from the moment she walks into a room, and gorgeous in a way ash hadn’t been able to ignore even when friendship had been all there was between them. he could listen to her talk for hours about anything in the world, and he wishes he had the time to do just that. she’s every color in the world and ones that haven’t been discovered yet, and he watches her more than he watches the movie. 

every time a slight smile curves on her lips, his heart beats faster and he swears goosebumps raise little peaks on his skin.

the greatest film on earth couldn’t possibly compare to an evening spent in youngjoo’s presence. given the chance to own all of the greatest art in history, he’d reject it if he could spend evening upon evening with youngjoo by his side instead.

he loves her.

he hasn’t told her yet. it feels too early, but he knows he does. there’s no other way to describe the elation that fills him at the mere thought of seeing her or the fact that she’s his last thought every night before he tries to sleep.

he writes the chorus in his mind as he sneaks glances at her, and he puts it down onto paper that night after returning to knight’s dorm, a rare smile on his face and the feeling of their kiss goodbye lingering on his lips.

january 2020.

the song had been abandoned in ash’s files after he’d broken up with youngjoo, deemed unlikely to ever be dug out again.

he finds it again on an old hard drive he digs out from a box he still hasn’t unpacked after coming home from another meeting with bc about the singles he’d be releasing throughout the year.

these kinds of meetings with this frequency had only become common in the lead up to fatalism. he hadn’t had so many meetings for daydream, he’s sure, but then again, he’d put a halt to all of those when he’d injured his ankle that year. he can’t quite remember the frequency of meetings for i’m young, but that had been his first album and his first chance to prove himself. by now, bc and the other producers should have more faith in him than they seem to.

they’d talked again about image. sexy had been their plan for fatalism, but it hadn’t been the success they’d wanted and ash is known for his heartbreak ballads after the success of “untitled, 2014”, not to mention “d (half moon)” outcharting anything that could be considered sexy on his last album. it’d be terrible business practice to abandon that entirely for a new image that ash had been pulled into simply because sexy performance soloist is currently a less competitive market than acoustic love song ballad singer-songwriter. there are so many of those, but the performance soloist category is more dominated by female soloists these days, so by growing his image, they could assure ash is able to become a household name instead of just another disposable singer, they’d said. the company wants to bring in the kind of brand ambassador money that comes with standing out instead of blending in. with the way he works day and night at events that drain him of every last ounce of social energy to please brands, ash would think they’d be happy with his current status, but it’s a mistake to think a company can ever be satisfied in their greed. ash doesn’t want to care, but he can’t help but feel a little prideful that they’d apparently been wrong... if he ignores the success “troublemaker” and “now” had had last year.

it’s been a couple of months now since ash had had to fight for his own input for the album concept. some of the tension in the reins has been slackened in response to romanticism not being the smash hit they’d wanted. ash is still struggling to pull himself out of the mindset he’d had to live in for fatalism, though, and it’s rare something entirely fresh comes to him.

this isn’t fresh either, technically. it’s nearly three years old and based on feelings long past, but as he listens to the track, he’s struck with the feeling he’d been onto something and he saves it to the computer in his studio to come back to before checking that his schedule is clear for some time, so he can and hole himself up in his studio with some hope of being able to work uninterrupted. 

this isn’t going to be the song he’s supposed to be working on. maybe it could work for his spring single, but that seems far-off now.

he sets to work and the song soon expands its references to a lover as a film he can’t take his eyes off of. he hadn’t latched on to the initial metaphor too deeply when he’d first heard it since the memory that had inspired it is so far in the past now, but the feelings that start to crawl their way out of him so naturally keep the idea from going entirely neglected. more than the lyrics, he focuses on what to do with the instrumental. the original draft had been simple in melody, acoustic and sweet, like a lot of his music had been when he’d only been in the beginnings of creating anything good enough to win bc’s approval. (it’s bitterly funny how that’s a battle he’s still fighting in spite of his style changing so much since then.) now, a more refined composer and producer, ash switches up the style entirely to something more unconventional and syncopated and in a style he’s wanted to try but has never gotten the chance to up until now. 

it’s upbeat enough to be make bc happy with the possibility of a more choreographed stage (though, in ash’s opinion, it’d be a good song to stand and sing on stage with only a microphone stand and background projections), but in a way that’s not shoe-horned in for the sake of achieving what anyone else wants. he’s written so much heavy music lately, weighed down by angst or lust or anger or resentment, but this is pure. not pure in the way he would have thought to make it three years ago, but it’s love re-invented, taken from a confessional letter to a musical story of a man he doesn’t entirely identify with anymore.

it’s a project he spreads out over a few weeks, coming back to it whenever he wants to play around with something exciting instead of nailing himself down to another song that’s too much like something he’s made or heard before. as more work comes in with deadlines, at some point in the working process, he abandons it. be it fun to work on or not, he’s a seasoned professional now and it’s more critical to meet deadlines than finish some conceptual track that probably won’t even be used.

august 2020.

months later, ash is more focused on the creation of his next album than anything else. it’s been pushed back once already and every time he tries to make something new, it comes out the same: an alternative r&b track and heartbreak or longing. he’s getting nowhere, so, one day in his studio, he re-opens that “concept track” he’d left to the dust and spiderwebs months earlier. he already knows precisely what he needs from it.

he has a vision for the full song now. it should be the sound of a relationship that’s still passionate and hesitant like early love so often is. a movie that draws in the eye and the ear and the mind from the very beginning, but as it progresses, it turns inward.

if a lover feels like every great film every written, how long can it last before you’re left questioning how that’s something you deserve? if a lover is every color in the world, how do you ever know what their true colors toward you are?

when he’d first begun writing the lyrics, it’d been so hopeful, but he knows now where that hope had led him.

the song isn’t meant to be dark, so he keeps the wonderous tone, letting the worry set in only as the song leads itself out.

what scene will you be? some day, will our story be told by others? who will be the next lead? what if i’m just a cameo? should i just sit in my seat? 

all that the song really needs now is some additional production work from him and it could be submitted to be slotted into his new album. it’s different in tone from everything he’s submitted so far, but that could be exactly what the album needs that it’s evidently so direly missing to be truly complete. 

he sets to work recording final vocal tracks for the song, or what will be final unless it’s approved and bc sends him in for a cleaner take. he keeps his delivery light and entranced, like he’s whispering to himself out of fear of being overheard. the more he tries to connect to the song, the more he realizes how hard it is to do so without thinking of youngjoo. it’s so uniquely her. or rather, uniquely him when it comes to her. the feeling of someone entrancing him so completely, like someone he isn’t deserving of experiencing, is one that he’s never felt in the exact way the lyrics and music convey with anyone else.

so, he lets himself think of her, of their past and their present and how fleeting any moment in time has ever been between them, if only for the sake of getting a successful recording.

the ending of the song hits a little too strongly when he does that and his delivery becomes more rushed, barely keeping in time with the beat as the questions rush out of his mouth. he takes a break and stops himself from getting too deep into the insecurity he’s trapping himself into needing to access.

he considers changing the end of the song, but he can’t imagine it ending any other way. that’s the story that has to be told and he needs to tell it, even if it all hits closer to home even now than he’d like to admit.

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

↬ that’s right, i’m a coward.

date: march 2020, the morning after showing youngjoo woo ah.

location: ash’s apartment

word count: 1,825 words, not including lyrics.

summary: n/a.

triggers: self-hate and fleeting mentions of vomiting and alcohol as recollections, but that’s about it.

notes: creative claims verification. mentions of youngjoo.

he wakes somewhere in the void of time, throat burning and face damp from the spray of the still-running shower that has now turned icy, and the acidic taste of humiliation on his tongue.

(later, the sound of the running shower lingers in his mind until there’s no way out but to lay it into a track. it will be a peephole into his own psyche only he’ll truly understand. there’s no way he’ll be telling anyone how dark he’d gotten the night before, pushed over the edge by one too many cups of his most loyal friend.)

time ticks by as ash wallows on the stone cold coating on top of the rock bottom he’s hit before he finds the last ounce of power lingering in his muscles to sit up.

it’s ultra slow motion that ash crawls into the freezing waterfall of the shower and cleanses himself, but it happens, and by some miracle, he ends in his kitchen with fresh clothes and dark bags under his eyes to find that he’d abandoned his cellphone on the kitchen island the night before, an unsent text still hanging precariously unsent under the red-letter heading of ‘joo 🌹’:

you have no idea how much i care.

ash considers the words for a moment, anxiety building in his stomach as his finger hovers over that treacherous blue arrow.

sense floods him and he clears the message box, typing out a replacement instead: sorry about last night, before he deletes that too and leaves the conversation, only to find his inbox flooded with messages from his manager.

he was supposed to meet up with him this morning to go over his upcoming promotion schedules. it’s now a full hour after they were supposed to meet and ash is just surprised he hadn’t been woken up by the man banging down his door one minute past their designated meeting time. tolerance for wavering punctuality isn’t one of his manager’s more prominent traits, but it only really becomes a problem on mornings like this

rough night. i overslept. i’m sorry. can we do this tomorrow morning before i go in to rehearse with the dancers?

the reply comes almost instantaneously.

you need to stop with the rough nights. you said you were holding off on the drinking when you have schedules.

ash’s throat closes up and he has half a mind to try to send his phone down the garbage disposal like he’d seen in a movie once. it’s nothing short of embarrassing that he’s being called out as clear as day. has his decay become so predictable?

it’s not that!

the man doth protest too much.

i’ve got a song in the works. i’ll send a demo in tomorrow to prove it! this won’t happen again.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

he hadn’t been lying. not entirely.

call him a masochist, but he’d knows he needs to write as soon as he has enough distance from the hard, cold rock bottom he’d hit to reflect on it without his mind crumbling apart.

it’s a letter to her he never intends to send, but that he wishes he would so it could be the apology she deserves from him. writing it, he doesn’t know if he ever intends anyone else to hear it either. writing has become work now. work he enjoys, but work nonetheless, and the thought of writing something without the goal of it having worth in the form of a release is one his entire body rejects, so he doesn’t think about it. instead of thinking, he writes because thought only gets in the way.

he starts it out like a letter on notebook paper, her name at the top as if she’ll ever see it. it won’t add anything to the song. it won’t even make it into the lyrics, but it’s what he needs in the moment and he gifts himself the small indulgence of feeling like he’s writing something worth reading. it’s selfish catharsis to do so, and he doesn’t want to remind himself that he can’t ever name her so forwardly in his lyrics. lying by omission is the bread and butter of idoldom and that is a truth he’d long ago accepted, but he has been regressing lately. this is yet another way he’s moved backwards.

you have no idea how much i care.

the unsent words are the first he writes down after addressing the letter to her. the afterimage of the letters typed out on his phone screen are imprinted in his wrinkles of his brain and writing them down might be the only way to wipe away the stain.

i keep getting smaller and smaller compared to you who is getting bigger i want to hide somewhere when i see myself but i have to endure it so that you won’t know

he doesn’t know how to explain to her the weakness within himself that he’s so afraid of letting her see, but he tries, in this letter she’ll never read. in this confession he’ll never make.

i realized that it’s not the fact that my heart isn’t going the way i want it to...

despite what ash may have convinced himself when he’d let his stupid idealism peak through writing that stupid song, what he feels for her isn’t love. as much as love is a feeling, it’s also an act and they aren’t in the act of love. won’t be ever again. can’t be. he could love her again, the feeling, if he let himself. falling would be as easy as the first time if he was willing to take the first step off the cliff, but instead he’s tied knot after knot in the rope around his waist so that he can venture off the edge with the safety net of being able to come back where he started.

it hasn’t even crawled up his throat to his tongue, but the word love leaves a bittersweet taste in his mouth and he mourns the days love had been the most pure thing in his body.

...the fact that it never goes my way it’s difficult laughing it off like it’s nothing more and more

the act of love would be letting himself fall and he doesn’t know if he’ll ever give himself the freedom to feel the wind in his face again. it’s arrogance to take the dive when he knows it only ends with his face scarred from meeting the rough pavement at the bottom. he’s already felt the sting of what lies at the bottom of the ravine he and youngjoo’s peaks can create and there’d been no pleasure in the head injury such an impact caused.

so he wants nothing more than what they have.

so they are nothing more than what they have.

i softly bring my head down to hide from your expressions the shadow of you that i can slightly see secretly overlaps my shadow it won’t work out, it won’t work out

he’s a messy landfill of a man. he’d never wanted her to see him torn about and rummaged through by his own despair. there’s no path forward for them from where they stand. they’ve hit the end of the trail, as far as they can go, and it’s only man’s arrogance that makes him think he can pave forward through the thick trees ahead. it’s for her sake, he swears, not his own, that he keeps his distance even when he’s so close to bleeding out on the floor in front of her.

but it is for his sake and no amount of throwing his stomach up or drowning his sorrows in alcohol can make him less aware of that when the hangover sets in. his head pounds with the aftermath of the night before and the self-awareness of his own cowardice.

i’m fine, just watch me from far away even if you just look at me like that and your chest is overflowing don’t tell me anything like that

he doesn’t want to know if she feels the way he does, if mornings with her in his arms feel as right for her as for him. like comfort, like safety, like the dawn of so much time ahead of them instead of the months they’ve left behind. 

yeah, that’s right, i’m a coward i’m not thinking about how to enter your heart no, actually, i can’t do that

at the end of it all, what is he but a hopeless coward?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the track itself is simple.

he already has the guitar sample laid down with some effects on it. at the time, he’d abandoned it because the feeling hadn’t been right for anything he was writing despite how quickly he’d fallen for the shimmering chords, but now he hears a sadness to the notes he hadn’t heard before. he ponders the turn for dramatic irony he’s taken, to find renewed interest in a draft he’d once been so taken by but had left in the recesses of his files (his memory) because it hadn’t been right at the time. isn’t it funny, the artist being expressed no longer in his art, but, as if the universe is cruelly mocking him, in the creation of the art itself?

the only indication of the time passing is the four little numbers in the corner of his computer screen, but as day bleeds into night, he forgets the sting of how low he’d gotten last night. instead, he fixates on the moment right before he’d fallen off the cliff.

there’s no advice sought out from anyone as he works. three of his producer friends text him, but by the third time his phone lights up, he sets it to airplane mode and tosses it onto the couch on the other side of the studio.

the couch. it hits him again like a flashback, the hesitation he’d felt sitting on the couch before she’d arrived, wondering if it was wise to show her the song, if he could get away with saying he’d only been able to write it because of her, if she’d run the second he stepped over the invisible laser line between what they are and what they could be that he’s still aimlessly throwing sand in the direction of, simultaneously too eager and too afraid to find out where it is.

he bottles that feeling in his mind and heats and cools it until it reshapes into sliding synths and notes ascending up the keyboard on the right only to plunk back down on the right. it’s more about the atmosphere than it is about the musicality and ash doesn’t have to stop and remind himself that that’s okay because he can’t imagine it any other way. instead of a composition mapped out on the lines of a staff, it’s a soundscape in the form of a dark, wide horizon and each element is placed on a different plane of the expanse until constellations are formed.

recording it comes almost as thoughtlessly as writing it does. there’s no overthinking about delivery or new techniques to integrate and it only takes a few takes for him to nail down the demo vocals.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  

when he returns to the song in two months’ time to lay down the final vocals, he finds time has made it harder. how does one connect themselves in the same way to a moment they’d once been in that they now know they need to move on from?

he sings take after take into the microphone and it’s like there’s a fishing line tugging at the core of him, unable to bring its catch to the surface now that the bait’s been cast out. but the catch is still there, under the water, still an easy victim to that wriggling worm.

his cowardice isn’t gone, and the way the steady beat of the song syncs with the beating inside his chest reminds him of that.