Title: Balance
Characters: Kyuhyun
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 720
Summary: Kyuhyun is near the end when he starts thinking about it all.
A/N: This story is .. incoherence at its top. It has no connection to itself. I don't know where it came from, what purpose it serves or what I want to convey with it, but it's here. It's disconnected, making no sense and having no plotline whatsoever. Feel free to think of it as rubbish, but even if it's disconnected, I still like it. (:
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At one point the heart will be done for and the body will decide it has had enough. Kyuhyun knows this. He knows that endings come even when unasked for and that all one can do is make sure the time they are given has not gone to waste. He has known this ever since the disease was discovered in his body and they told him they might prolong his life, but never keep him from dying because there was no cure for his illness.
He figures life is like taking a walk through the park; all the more enjoyable when you can walk alongside someone you love. Or maybe that perspective has been wrong from the start and all he really has to do is find the small reasons to laugh, even when the rain is pouring down heavily and drenches the flowers in the depressing pools of wet.
If anything, he knows his walk is coming to an end. He’s reaching the end of the path, walking up to the gate that will lead him away from the trimmed grass, the blooming flowers and the ancient trees. He’s balancing on the edge between being there and being gone, halfway disappearing from everyone’s view. The slightest unexpected movement can make him fall to the wrong side of the edge and end up in oblivion.
It’s a sad truth that he has to accept, now that his lungs can’t hold as much air as they used to anymore and his eyes can’t see as far as they did in the past. He has pondered about it often throughout life – how long it would be, what he would be able to do before it ended – but has never quite figured out the answer. Up till now.
He’s seventy-nine, has three children and some eight grandchildren, a dog, two cats, a fake hip and teeth made in China. Looking back on his life, he concludes that he’s had it all. He has been bullied, introvert, shy, talented, successful, exhausted, loved, hated, needed, unwanted, broke, lonely, engaged, married, divorced, remarried and he has even kissed a guy at some point in time. There’s nothing he can complain about, nothing he hasn’t experienced or has had to give up. He has been there and has done that. He has gone, seen and conquered.
Yet he knows that there are still things he would like to happen. Like the tears from his children’s eyes to stop running over their cheeks, or the pain in the expression of his beloved to subside. He hopes that one day they’ll be able to get up in the morning and smile, not just wanting to feel happy, but actually really feeling it as well. He hopes that his wife will be fine, that she’ll survive him and maybe even find someone new. Perhaps she’ll hook up with the guy who has been supporting her in the last couple of months. He hopes she will.
It’s a miracle that he’s still alive, the doctors say more often than not when they check up on him in the mornings. They never mention it to his beloved wife, but he knows it’s true. It’s a miracle that he’s still breathing on his own. He’s balancing on the edge, trying to stay upright for as long as he can, even though it doesn’t make a difference.
He has five chances out of five and a half that he’ll be dead by the next morning, but he figures it doesn’t matter that much, because even when it rains, the flowers next to his bed are still pretty. There’s a card there as well, saying ‘We hope you get better soon.’ He knows this, because they read it to him every day again.
It is two in the morning when he opens his eyes on a Saturday, pulling the needles out of his body and getting out of bed, because he figures that if he’s going to die anyway, he might as well actually live and enjoy his last few days instead of lying in a hospital bed like a lifeless plant. As he puts on some clothes and walks out into the hallway, passing by frantic nurses running to his room, he doesn’t notice how he leaves his body behind.
He’s finally lost balance.
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