pomegranitemilk | Recent Entries

1. i was trying to write something happy. something lighthearted. and warm. and bright. i was trying to write something orange.

2. the color of goldfish when you’re five. the color of honey and tangerine tears. the color of the sky before a downpour when you have no umbrella. the color of the pill bottles beneath my sink. the color of you and me.

3. two months into it and i’ve only learned that i don’t know enough about what it means to be happy and lighthearted and warm and bright. i don’t know enough to write an entire story about it.

4. but i do know orange

5. i think i’ve spent my entire life trying to love it more. it’s such a hard color to love. i would’ve told you about it, how i thought it was the saddest color before we met, how it is and isn’t at all. i would’ve told you.

6. i didn’t keep anything from you. maybe apart from this.

7. orange—i think it’s the last color i’ll see before i die.

8. to be honest, i don't think you were ever really interested in anything i had to say. at least, that's how it felt. i think the one time i had your attention was when i was crying and that's the one time i didn’t want it. you only cared when i talked about you. i think you only liked the way you looked through my eyes. and that breaks my heart because i really thought i loved you. and i thought i was in love. i guess it makes sense why you told me you liked me. i have no idea what love's supposed to feel like, but if it's meant to be like this i wish it wasn’t so easy to pronounce.

9. i can get so confident with love. i say it once and suddenly i feel like i can say it a hundred more times. i wish it wasn’t so easy to say.

10. and i wish they didn’t sell it as something red.

11. it’s orange.

12. it's bird beaks and fossilized flies in amber. traffic cones on the side of the road. egg yolks when they're running and rust at the bottom of the stove.

13. it's you and me.

14. but i don’t want to write about you. everything becomes real when it’s written. it’s no longer safe as a thought. it becomes yours just as much as it is mine. and it’s all a bit too predictable if i just wrote about you. like growing into shoes. i don’t believe in fate. and i don’t believe everything you said to me.

15. i want to write about orange.

16. do you know the feeling when you burn the side of you hand and you should run it under cold water but you don’t? and so it welts. and you brush your finger against it, again and again, and it aches but not like how any other injury aches. that’s what orange is to me.

17. i wouldn’t say i was ever in love with orange. my mother hated orange and she didn’t hate many things. maybe my interest in it, my desire to love it more, is an act of rebellion.

18. regardless, orange isn’t a color i collect. or find particular muse. or look for. but i think it thrives off that. off needing to be loved more.

19. i read criticism for writing like this. they write about trends of aestheticizing absurd, lonely, sad things and how it’s an epidemic of literature, leaving it as ruins. too much sorrow and not enough relief. i don’t think literature’s being ruined. epidemics kill off entire worlds and leave only rocks, and from them you have to build a new city. i don’t think it’s an epidemic to pick up these rocks. it’s not useless to be here like how so many of us are. i think it’s more useless to watch and wait and take up space in a city you were never built for.

20. one thing i do find admirable about the color orange is how hard it tries to be a happy color. it has all of the pieces, all of the intrinsic potential, but it falls short every single time. it’s the designated color of autumn—when everything dies but it looks beautiful enough to be poetic. i mean, here i am, trying to write about it. trying to make it something it’s not.

21. it’s you and me.

I got about half way through writing this story and realized, to my own horror, how much it had in common with Iain Reid’s “I’m Thinking About Ending Things” and the Roman/Greek myth of Galatea and Pygmalion. Since I’ve already written a Galatea and Pygmalion story and I can’t quite say I enjoyed “I’m Thinking About Ending Things,” you may be able to see why I almost didn’t finish.

From this first bit, I can already see that I’m writing too much, but I can’t bring myself to contain all this fallout so I will just type freely and see where it goes. If you’re reading this, then it must’ve gone somewhere nice and coherent enough to post.

1. What was the plot of naïve?

The heart of this story is less about what happens and more how it’s written, which I understand alone is hard to follow. But, to establish a plot: for whatever reason Yoongi creates Jungkook’s character and expresses him through literature. Yoongi writes and 'loves' Jungkook as a coping mechanism for his own life, which is often at the expense of Jungkook himself. Jungkook then comes alive as something bigger than what Yoongi writes him as. Jungkook doesn’t like the way he’s written and tries to rewrite himself. Whether he fails or succeeds in the end depends on perspective.

2. If it’s a matter of how it’s written, how exactly is it written?

The main obstacle of naïve is that major pieces of it are told from the perspective of Jungkook who does not exist presently. The fight between him and Yoongi is not written out in the plot. Rather, it’s written into the actual story, making each vignette a physical battlefield between the two of them. The ‘plot’ comes together when you start marking who is writing which parts of the story.

3. Who is writing which parts?

It’s revealed later into the fic that Yoongi teaches Jungkook to open his writing with questions because he “writes like he’s screaming at someone.” Thus, every part that begins with “how does it feel?” is him. Anything in parenthesis is also him. At one point there’s the sentence “those words, in increments of three, repeated over and over like someone who only had words to save them,” and I wanted it to indicate that any part of the fic where a phrase/words are repeated three times were Jungkook or in reference to him. The bolded interview parts and the italic subplot of Jungkook waiting at the cafe for ‘you’ (the reader) are written by an anonymous narrator (me). Everything else is written by Yoongi.

Here’s a snippet of naïve, but it’s coded with who’s writing what:

[JUNGKOOK]

how does it feel?

knowing the person you love wants absolutely nothing to do with you.

and your best is but a comma that should’ve ended a sentence.

you’re the pause that wasn’t long enough, that didn’t get to be complete.

a drop of ink starts running, undried, ruining itself forever.

how does it feel?

knowing you have to keep going.

on and on and on.

over and over and over.

and it’ll never change because you mean nothing to them.

and they don’t love you because they have never loved you.

and you realize this when it’s too late, when your mouth’s already swallowed all of the emotions that have no sound, no etymology, no room in everything you want to say.

how does it feel?

knowing you have to ask yourself these things on your own.

because every time they pronounce you it’s like you’re not even there

[YOONGI]

jungkook thinks he could happily live the rest of his life unhappy.

worded like that, it sounds contradictory.

but give him twenty minutes, give him a glass of lukewarm fountain soda and a sun drenched cafe window, where the tables have glass pressed over cloth the color of youth and excitement, give him that and a reassuring smile, and he could explain it to you.

…

[YOONGI]

he compares thinking about min yoongi to thinking of a childhood memory.

sliding screen doors, blue buckets of soap water, discolored popsicle sticks.

it traps him in a dream-like trance, because dreaming of the past is perhaps the easiest thing to do when you have nothing else to dream of.

…

[JUNGKOOK]

i love you. i love you. i love you.

[YOONGI]

“there’s a boy, jungkook. and he’s so homesick in the city he lives in. which is ironic because he wasn’t any better back in the four walls he used to call home. existing is the only thing he’s ever done, he’ll ever do. there’s a boy and he lives in a city he does not love, but he stays anyway. he stays and discovers the kind of person he isn’t in that city. and he falls in love. his lover only knows him as what’s missing, what’s wrong, not who he is. in the end he gets left behind, but he’ll be okay. he’ll be okay because the pieces of himself that are left behind, the pieces that become unloved again, they are the pieces he didn’t want anyway.”

[YOONGI]

sleeves the color of tea paper peek out from beneath his stitched shirt. hand sewn with abstract lines across the front, some broken strings hanging.

artsy, because yoongi used to love that about him.

tonight it’s the outfit he was wearing on their first date.

two toned colors that make him look broader, more put together, more like someone you could see a future with.

he wants yoongi to see him like that again.

…

[NARRATOR]

have you seen him recently?

we live together.

what about him bothers you?

he doesn’t look at me like he used to.

people change.

he’s the same person he was five years ago.

i wasn’t talking about him.

[NARRATOR]

you’re sitting across from him, and he’s stuttering.

he’s avoiding eye contact, palms sweating beneath the table, voice cracking into pause after pause after pause.

jungkook doesn’t know what he’s doing.

he never really does, without him.

tell him he’s doing well.

…

I could go through the entire story if anyone wants ;-;

Basically, a lot of Jungkook’s characterization is given to him by Yoongi to justify Yoongi’s own actions. He makes Jungkook happily unhappy, he writes him as someone who doesn’t love things the right way, he writes him content with his situation (jungkook tells himself it’s alright. he can imagine it on his own.), someone helplessly in love with Yoongi (even if yoongi set his edges on fire, jungkook would let him.). He writes him as this selfish evil person who thrives off Yoongi’s own misery (yoongi wants to get better, and jungkook prays he never does.), he writes him as someone recklessly in love in a way that’s out of his own control (he’s a victim, really. a victim of his own hands, yes, but a victim nonetheless.) Doing this justifies Yoongi's choice to try to get rid of him, to try to kill him (himself), etc. He reasons that he created Jungkook in the first place because he needed him.

In contrast, Jungkook writes himself in an opposite manner as someone in control, someone who consciously does the things he does (he knew what he was doing, and he knew what he wanted, and he knew how he was going to get it.) It’s undeniable, however, that Yoongi still has a major influence in how Jungkook rewrites himself. For instance, when he rewrites their first meeting it’s only when he asks a question that Yoongi cares enough to look up at him (“how does it feel to meet me?”). Arguably, Jungkook’s first words to the reader is the same kind of question (how does it feel? knowing the person you love wants absolutely nothing to do with you.) It’s the only way he knows how to get people to listen without, as Yoongi puts it, screaming at them.

Most of naïve is longing for someone who isn’t there or longing for someone who isn’t there the way they used to be. Yoongi tries to construct Jungkook as a character so vivid he ‘knows’ him, and Jungkook tries to understand Yoongi for it. I’ve found ‘getting to know someone’ is often interlocked with this idea of being close to them. The more you know the closer you are, which isn’t necessarily true, as Yoongi writes eventually. Toward the end there’s a vignette about never being able to get to know someone in their entirety, which is the most closure I could manage.

4. What is the role of the reader?

Throughout the entire story, there’s this question of: what’s real and what isn’t? I imagined it as the reader witnessing their relationship and answering that question for themself. That’s why at first it isn’t obvious that Jungkook isn’t there in a concrete, reliable way. If the reader thinks he’s there and trusts him, I call that him winning. I call that him killing Yoongi (or at least Yoongi’s perception of him). There’s the italicized subplot of the reader approaching Jungkook in a cafe, and that’s the reader’s opportunity to either save Yoongi and not believe in Jungkook or to believe in Jungkook and enable him to grow as something bigger than his character. If he exists to more than one person then he becomes more ‘real.’ (if you get enough people to believe in your unrealities you cease to be crazy.)

5. Anything else you want to add?

I’m not sure, but this is already a bit long. So I’ll just share these quotes:

“Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going.” [I’m Thinking About Ending Things, Iain Reid]

“Ars adeō latet arte suā. / and so his art concealed his art.” [Metamorphoses: Pygmalion and Galatea, Ovid]

“Words save our lives, sometimes.” [The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman]

“봄 여름 가을 겨울 항상 그 느낌 그대로 blue. 돌아가고 싶어 아무것도 모르던 그때로 blue / Spring, summer, fall, and winter, always in that same feeling, blue. I want to go back to those days when I didn’t know anything, blue." [Blue Side, j-hope]

somewhere else you and i were best friends.

we would’ve grown up in a part of town that had graffiti and gaming cafes and tree lined walkways to make the thursday night walk home less daunting. the roads would be uneven with potholes because the city didn’t want to pay for repaving, and the cars would all rock back and forth as if unsure of where they were going. we would watch them tip and lean while sitting on the sidewalk, sipping on artificially peach flavored drinks and watching the butcher hang duck and chicken in the windows of their shops with hooks and wires. the people, in their cars and bikes, would rattle in front of us, all attending to lives busier than ours, and we would feel like kids caught on hooks, like the birds, waiting to grow up, waiting to fly away.

there's a bridge in that town. a bridge that’s like waking up, as if once that bridge is crossed the dream is stuck as a dream.

i live in hypotheticals—because between the words ‘what’ and ‘if’ is a small space where reality blends with imagination. it’s just my way of entertaining the different way i could’ve come about, the way i almost came about. reality tends to stray away from what we dream and the alternative universes we believe in, though.

in reality, i grew up in a part of town swallowed by trees and mosquitoes in a small house away from civilization with only phantoms of people i wish i could open the window and talk to at night. new england towns are on the other side of the world where i almost grew up. instead of graffiti and gaming cafes, there’s town commons and churches and stone walls separating your home from mine. on thursday nights the people drive home from work because just your feet aren’t enough to get you anywhere here. a mess of misconstrued grids, the roads are all dirt. nobody cares enough this far out in the woods. grandmothers hang flower pots of chrysanthemums and bleeding hearts on little wire hooks during the spring because they grow well. sometimes the people sit on their porches and think about whether they will too.

there are no bridges in the neighborhood i grew up in, as if it’s a promise that it isn’t a dream and that there’s no need to bring your head down from the clouds.

when i was younger i used to daydream of what could have been as i stared at photographs of a town i almost grew up in, a town with graffiti and gaming cafes and you. it’s not awful, this new england town. the leaves turn orange and red before they turn brown and you can see the little dipper at night. it’s a town good for daydreaming and wondering about alternative universes. it’s a town people can see themselves growing old in.

it’s nice—the neighborhood i grew up in. it is. it’s just that a neighborhood with you would’ve been nicer.

you are dead leaves that won't fall from the branches. i'd like to think it's because you always live in spring and know nothing of the frost and ice. but we're living in a frozen home and everything is a little too blue, a little too cold. yet, every time you cross my mind, i catch myself imagining a place that's warmer. i am so lucky to have met you. you hold onto spring similar to how i hold onto winter. a little too tightly. i spend a lot of time doing things i'd rather not be doing because i've convinced myself that it's better than doing the nothing i'm accustomed to. you interrupt my every thought. in the next life, i hope you come back as an evergreen tree. maybe then you'd find joy in every season. everyone dances around dressed in flowers, but no one really believes in them. you do, though. you believe in spring. and one day i want to, too. you believe in spring, and, really, that shouldn't mean anything, but it means everything. you are dead leaves that won't fall from the branches, but i'm sure there are far worse things to be.

(Questions based on one's I've received)

1. Why is Jungkook in Seoul?

I picture it goes like this: Jungkook has bad memories in Busan and thus moves to Seoul to go to university. He studies art but then drops out because he fixates on being a singer. This kind of thing happens three times in the story, first when he’s a singer (drops university), then when he dresses up for Namjoon (drops singing), and then when he meets Yoongi (drops Namjoon). However, Jungkook doesn’t tell anyone why he’s in Seoul because he wants those that meet him to project what they want to see onto him, ultimately making him more interesting and dynamic.

2. What is Jungkook’s past?

This is the one thing I’m hesitant to explain—his character is so reliant on this air of mystery. However, if you must know, you are open to dm me and I will gladly send you his whole biography. As for the little things with his childhood, when he was a kid he used to turn to anger & physical violence because it was the only way to get the attention he craved. This anger peaks when he’s 9 years old, but then it turns into singing and entertaining. Hopefully this explains why he acts/has violent thoughts whenever he feels cornered (bathroom scene, Namjoon dropping him scene).

3. Can you explain the other members and their roles?

Can I? Yes, of course, these characters have been consuming me for three months.

Yoongi — He grew up under a rich family and found it really lonely. So, when he was young, he’d dream about a future where he had a lover who'd ‘complete’ his image, his fairytale-happy-ending image where he's successful and settled and loved. He wants Jungkook to be that lover.

Hoseok — Basically, he’s the only person that Jungkook can’t manipulate, or even touch for that matter. He’s the dancer who sings guides for Yoongi before Jungkook comes into the picture, and because of this he’s a part of Yoongi Jungkook will never get to ‘claim as his own’ or control. Jungkook never really interacts with Hoseok, he’s always just hearing about him, and it drives him crazy. Hoseok’s only words to Jungkook are “Busan’s a really beautiful city” and it’s just a cluster-fuck of everything Jungkook hates.

Taehyung — (I feel like I could write an entire separate fic about him) He knew Jungkook since they were kids, and he’s one of the only characters, along with Jimin, who genuinely wants what’s best for Jungkook. You could say the only time Jungkook’s not ‘acting’ is in his scenes with Taehyung & Jimin. They see him as a person, not a character, not a body. (that's why what they say to him holds a different weight) There’s some play with accents and light to hint at this. Taehyung speaks in his Daegu accent to Jungkook and when they’re together the lights are usually off (the absence of the spotlight). Taehyung wants to support Jungkook in whatever Jungkook wants, and he views Yoongi as someone who’s just using Jungkook and preventing him from singing, which makes him mad. It gets worse when Jungkook practically tells him to fuck off during the “you don’t need to support me anymore” scene. In Taehyung’s last scene he tells Jungkook to write something that isn’t a song, but he says it in a perfect Seoul accent, implying that he still cares about Jungkook but doesn’t see them as close anymore. I’m already saying too much, but, yeah. Jungkook never really needs Yoongi at any point in this story, but he needs Taehyung. I view Taehyung as the person Jungkook could've been if he chose a different path and had better coping mechanisms. Taehyung's pretty brutal when he wants to be, but he handles it well. Jungkook's just brutal all of the time.

Jimin — He’s a less severe version of Taehyung. Like Tae, he cares about Jungkook, but he sees Jungkook as that hurt kid from back when they first met. He’s more gentle and less blunt (cuts Jungkook’s hair for him, never accuses JK of anything unlike Taehyung who upfront asks whether Jungkook’s scamming Yoongi)

Seokjin — He's Yoongi's friend and sees Jungkook as a leech. Also, he is an award winning actor and singer. The world kisses his feet. (a bad bitch I love him)

Namjoon — I feel like his character is the most transparent so I really have nothing to add.

4. Is Jungkook in a better place mentally by the end of the story?

I do think he's mentally better at the end of the fic. He goes to look at himself in the mirror and doesn't recognize the reflection, which is a contrast to before. He finally realizes that the person, the body, in the reflection is just a reflection and not him. When he was a kid he'd always see himself in the mirror,and he thought he really was a monster (how the outside world saw him). He couldn't grasp that he had autonomy beyond what other people saw him as. This is Lacan's mirror theory, which interprets looking in the mirror as seeing yourself from an outside perspective. You have to realize that the reflection isn't actually You, just you from others' perspectives. At the end, Jungkook finally sees that. What that entails, however, is up to the reader.

5. Do they really love each other?

The question of all questions. It really depends upon how the reader interprets love. From my perspective, both of them are incapable of loving each other for who they truly are. That love is just a mirage. Jungkook loves Yoongi like how he loves a good performance, and Yoongi loves Jungkook as a character who fills a missing role in his life. They are both content with lying to themselves in order to get what they want, in order to love. Is that real?

6. Anything else you want to add?

Hm, I already feel like I've said too much. But, if you want to do different readings of Entertainer, consider things like lighting, days of the week, clothing/hair, accents, money/alcohol, crossing out and rewriting songs, 1+1=2 & 1+1=1.