"Hello. Min Suga here. So today… today is the anniversary. It has been exactly two years since it happened…" I breathed deeply and trailed off without realizing, not really bothering to look at the camera lens anymore.
Reality was, I didn't even want to do this in the first place, but the psychologist said that it would be a good idea so I could vent my thoughts out. After all, what I have gone through apparently is a certain cause for trauma. In other circumstances I would have thought it was stupid, but this time I admitted I had to agree.
It had all happened so suddenly. Like it was bottling up and at some point it just exploded. I went from being on the top of the world, to become a pathetic excuse of a human being suffering alone as a consequence of my stupid decisions. And it had all been in just two years, in two fucking years. Like the most horrible, twisted and sadistic version of a Domino Effect. And it all started with me.
They say every story always has two sides to it, two versions, the good and the bad. Like the fairytales, for which there are the Disney versions and the ones of the Grimm brothers. The original, and then the one embellished with flowers and animals and every color in the fucking rainbow. It's always that way; it's always meant to be that way.
Just not with us.
We were… cursed, to say the least. So goddamned cursed that no matter how much we'd try to turn it around, we would always end up with the bad side of the story, the version with all the tragedy in it.
And the worst part was, no one fucking told us being an idol was just another way of saying: "hey, let's see how much pressure I can put on myself, how much stress I can handle until it becomes too much and I just explode." And we did. Or rather he did, which is something that to this day I find hard to believe, because I always thought that if one of us was going to succumb to the pressure it was going to be me. Not him.
Definitely not Jiminie.
If I hadn't been so busy making music, spending countless hours and even days locked up in my studio drowning away the pain and stress in cheap take away food and editing programs, I wouldn't have let things go that far. Now Jimin was, to everyone's eyes, the perfect idol: always happy and energetic, amazingly talented and with an immense love for his fans. But to us he was an open book. One day he just started focusing too much on the things that went wrong, on every fucking negative aspect of our lives, no matter how little. It wasn't long before I started to notice a pattern. He practiced way too much, skipped meals, and went days without sleeping. Sometimes he would go out in the middle of the night just to return a few hours later, not bothering to answer where he went. I knew it was dangerous so I talked to Jin and we tried to help him, to get him out of that hole. But he didn't listen.
Words of advice were nothing to him, warning him about something was like talking to a wall. Jimin strived for perfection, clutching onto his idea of it like there was nothing else in this world to hold on to. And perhaps he was right, perhaps there wasn't, but that didn't stop exhaustion from finally taking its toll.
It had been one of our best concerts since we debuted, with thirty or thirty five thousand people in that arena. And in the middle of a performance, in front of all those people, Jimin suddenly collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital, and BigHit Entertainment built one of the best fucking façades I've ever seen to keep rumors to the minimum and reporters weren't even allowed near the hospital. However, it didn't work well for them in the end. A month later an official statement was released and Namjoon played the leader role he was born to do by reading it in front of hundreds of reporters in a press conference BTS suddenly organized after laying low for so long.
"I believe people don't realize what the cost of being famous really is. Everything about you, positive or negative, gets magnified a thousand-fold. You keep focusing on the negative for too long… and suddenly you can't seem to find a way out." Namjoon's voice melted with mine as the memory vanished I unconsciously started to mumble the words I would never forget. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could clearly see the piece of paper with the black words written in it, laying on the empty coffee table of the hotel room. I could almost feel like I was traveling back to that day, reading over and over again the message I saw… when I found him that morning.
And the worst part is, it just happened. One day he was there and the other, he was gone. His death was like being run over by a truck, but surviving. Like being stranded on a desert without a single drop of water, but unable to die from dehydration. It was hell. For all of us.
We had no fucking idea what to do next, and knowing we were right under the public's eyes we felt as if we were being asked to be able to tell where to go while completely blindfolded. Next thing that happened, and without even meeting with the company to talk about it, we took a break as a band. And if there was one good thing that came out of that period of time was that Jin and I became very close, probably simply because we would spend together every night pathetically drinking ourselves to an almost state of unconsciousness.
The habit continued for months, and even on the morning of the 18th of March of 2017, I drank a few extra shots of whiskey just to make sure I was going to be numb enough for the day. After all, it was the first time we were going to have a practice as a six-member group.
I had expected to be the first one to arrive, but Jungkook was already there when I stepped into the studio. And of course as fate would have it, five minutes hadn't even passed before we got into a big fight, possibly the biggest we'd ever had. Apparently he had come with the shitty idea of replacing Jimin for the old performances, the ones he was a part of. And I just fucking lost it. I remember getting so angry at him and just screaming terrible things, and throwing a chair. There were some blank spaces in which I had no idea what happened, but Kookie was very angry and when he came close enough to smell my breath, he snapped. He just punched me right in the face, grabbed his things and left.
We couldn't find him anywhere, and I couldn't help but blame myself for saying things I knew I didn't mean; I was drunk after all. After hours of looking everywhere in town, Namjoon said we perhaps just had to give the kid some space, however, when he didn't come home later that night for dinner, I could've sworn I had never seen our leader so worried.
And it also turns out Jin was much better at hiding his drunken status than me, so we were in the kitchen counter discussing what to do next when he just suddenly picked his car keys and went out the door, telling us that he would not come back until he found Jungkook, no matter what it took. Nobody stopped him.
It was one o'clock in the morning when we received a call from the hospital. Jungkook had been hit by a car just a street away from our studio and according to what he said to the police, by an unknown driver. Namjoon had to give us the news, as he had been the one who picked up the phone. J-hope and I immediately jumped off the couch we had moved to since Jin left and rushed to the door, determined to go see Jungkook at the precise moment. It took us a couple of seconds to realize that Taehyung wasn't following us; he had stayed still in the chair he was sitting on and his hands were clutched so tight around his head I was sure at any moment he would pull his hair out. Hoseok tried to talk to him and tell him to come with us, but the only thing he seemed capable of doing at the moment was breathe. In the end we decided to leave him alone, and even after we closed the door and heard a devastating scream coming from inside, we didn't say a word.
When the three of us arrived at the hospital, I immediately received a call on my phone. It was Jin, but when I picked up a female voice was the one that rose. The person told me she had found Jin crying in a car that was left in front of her house. When she went to see who was parked there she noticed that the car was damaged, as if it had hit something. She opened the door as soon as she saw Jin, and when she tried to stop him from stabbing himself with the car keys, he just pushed her away. She told me her name, but it was so hard for me to concentrate that my brain never registered it properly. I made sure neither Hoseok nor Namjoon noticed that I left the hospital as I kept listening to the person on other side of the line explain that she took his phone and just called the first contact she saw. I didn't even have to ask, but I knew that the first thing she had noticed was that he was driving under the influence. One could draw their own conclusions.
Jin made me promise that I would never say anything to anyone about the truth of what had happened, so the only thing I could do was wince every time I saw him grab a razor blade and cut his skin open like a fucking ham because of the guilt he was feeling. One day I caught him sprawled on the floor with a half empty bottle of vodka in his hand. When he saw me he just laughed weakly and poured what was left of the bottle directly into the open skin of his wrists and arms. That was when I decided it was enough and called his parents. They immediately put him in a private care facility in fear that one day he would just cut too deep and make an irreversible mistake. However, by the point they were able to intern him he already had so many scars all over his arms and face that his mother couldn't bear to look at him when they came to the dorms to pick him up.
Some days later, when Namjoon and I were drunk and talking late into the night, we commented that at least it was a good thing (if anything could be called good) that Jin's family was rich, really fucking rich. That's why, on top of putting their son in one of the most expensive clinics in Seoul, they also anonymously donated copious amounts of money to Kookie's treatment. I was so glad their son was already doped up with pills and practically in confinement when the doctors told us that no matter what they did or all the efforts made, Jungkook would never be able to walk again. I didn't even want to imagine what would have happened had that not been the case. I just knew he wouldn't be able to handle it and to be fair, I don't even know how I did so myself.
Eventually Jin recovered, but the first thing he was told when he came out of the care facility was that he would have to wear long sleeves for the rest of his life. But the scars in his face... that was something not even make up could cover. When we said we feared what he could do to himself if he ever figured out what happened to Jungkook we never imagined that outcome. And when we asked him why the face, why he chose to do that to himself, he just said that if Kookie lost the thing he loved the most because of him, then so should he. He then decided it was better for him to live alone, so his family accommodated him in an apartment faster than I could ask myself what was going on. A few days later, when I was just in the verge of exploding, I threw my dignity out the window and went to his place. He hadn't even invited me in when I inevitably broke down in front of him crying. All those tragedies in such a short amount of time had forced me to do some thinking, and that thinking was just me realizing that it was always other people who took the bullet instead of me. First Jimin and now Jungkook, whom I couldn't even bring myself to look in the eye. I asked him why was it that I was always the one left to suffer the loss, why couldn't I just die right then and there and make things much easier and less painful for me and everyone else. Ten minutes was enough for me to realize that therapy had worked wonders for Jin, because he was able to calm me down before my mind went to an even darker place than it already was. It was that day when I was first presented to the idea of a psychologist, and I just laughed right in his face asking if a therapist could really fix something so fucking broken. He told me that it was possible because it worked for him. And if he could be fixed then so could I.
By that time only four of us were still living in the dorms: Namjoon, Hoseok, Taehyung, and I. Although most of the time Taehyung only came to sleep at three o'clock in the morning and left as soon as the sun rose, and I barely came out of my room to go to the bathroom. At some point Tae told me that only two of us were actually living in the dorms, the other two were just… existing. He obviously didn't need to clarify whom he was talking about.
And that was the last proper conversation I had with him.
A few days later he started taking his nighttime habits to daylight, and again reality hit us like a truck. Taehyung had fallen into a downward spiral and it didn't even seem as if he was trying to get out. It wasn't long before we realized it was because of Kookie's accident, which had been the last drop to spill the glass. It was as if something had just snapped in him; he suddenly became very aggressive and sworn that he would kill the driver responsible for Jungkook's misery. When we all asked him to let it go, he just stormed out of the hospital claiming that justice was going to be brought, even if he had to do it himself. One day Namjoon followed him around town and discovered that his way of finding the driver wasn't doing anything in particular, but just asking for trouble. We all knew he would get it sooner or later, and it wasn't going to be pretty.
When he came home that night at three am like usual, I tried to confront him but he just roughly pushed me aside and I fell, dropping my glass to the floor. It was J-hope who had to pick up the broken pieces and mop the vodka off the floor, while I stared at him deciding I wasn't going to ridicule myself anymore than that.
That was when we realized nothing we could do would make him stop. Namjoon said that the only thing left was to offer him help no matter what happened. To be completely honest, I didn't find myself capable of such thing but our leader was so determined I didn't have the heart to say a word. And once again, our version of the story proved that it was not the Disney one, because the one time Taehyung called for help, it was already too late. Turns out the day I finally decided to get out of the dorm with Namjoon and Hoseok, it was just so I could watch Taehyung being arrested by the police for having stabbed a guy in the stomach. He was sent to provisional prison, his trial scheduled for March 2018. With the way things were going, I can't say we were too surprised.
But that was enough for Hoseok. One day he just came up to us and told us that he was moving out of the dorm. There wasn't a fight or discussion of any kind, he just got the two of us together and calmly told us the decision he had made. I thought it was only fair, seeing as he deserved it for the countless times he had helped us keep ourselves together, and kept telling us that he was going to get us all through this, somehow. And I knew that in order to do that he had to keep his sanity as much as possible, thus, he moved out. He would remain in Seoul, though he didn't say where exactly, or why. I couldn't blame him.
And unsurprisingly enough, he kept his promise; he didn't abandon us. Even though he wasn't in the dorm anymore, he came to our studio almost every day to practice and stayed extra hours to help Jungkook make adjustment to the choreographies, given that now he had a wheelchair to work with. Then, in September 18 of 2017, we had our first comeback as a five-member group.
It was the fastest we had ever agreed on a concept, as if we all knew what we had to do. The title was "Love Yourself" and it was a true piece of art. A fucking beautiful concept about how no matter how dark, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. And we were the living prove of that, or at least according to J-hope. Naturally the trailer that we filmed was very significant to all of us and we cried for what could have been hours when we saw the final outcome.
The comeback itself was spectacularly received, and it became one of our most popular ones. That was, until a few radical fans decided to cut their faces in support of Jin and the trailer was banned for promotion of self harm. What a fucking joke. ARMYs built a campaign so the music programs wouldn't shut down our entire project, but they didn't even bulge. We told them that we couldn't care less, because the concept made us even closer as a band and we hoped that it could make them feel the same way too. And that was perhaps the only piece of truth we had given the public in a long while; we actually didn't give a single fuck.
We got a call from prison a couple of days later. Apparently Taehyung had seen the trailer and it made him realize that there were actually long term consequences to what he had done. He asked to speak to Hoseok, though he refused to tell us why. We told him that he had moved out and gave him the number of his new apartment. Then he quickly thanked us and ended the call. That was the last time we talked to him in a long while.
When we went to the studio the next week to practice, we met J-hope and finally decided to ask him about Tae. After quite the amount of insistence from Jungkook he finally told us that Taehyung had called him to ask him a favor. Seeing that now he couldn't do it himself anymore, he practically begged Hoseok to look after his sister, something that was quite the big favor to ask given the fact that Tae's sister was a junkie. Because his substantial amount of income due to his idol status had disappeared, he could no longer give her money and she had returned to stealing like she did when she was younger so she could pay for her habits. Apparently she had found drugs to be a way of escaping their abusive father a long time ago. We knew Tae's father was alcoholic and beat them up when they were children, so her defense mechanism was a little more than expected. We even discussed that maybe that was the reason for Taehyung's own aggressive tendencies. However, we had never dealt with something like that, so we felt a little more than bad when we told J-hope that we couldn't help him with it. He just dismissed it saying that he would find a way, like he always did.
He wasn't lying; a few weeks later he came up to us genuinely excited, more so than I had seen him in a long while. When he finally was face to face with us he just smiled saying that he had found Eon, Tae's sister, and that he had been able to keep his promise to his friend like he said he would. I didn't know if I wanted to break down crying in front of him or yell at him for being the goddamned best thing that had happened to us, so I just stayed silent.
Eon became more and more a part of our conversations the closer they got. It occurred quicker than we expected, and I assume it was because J-hope was the only male apart from her brother that didn't have ulterior motives towards her. It didn't take Hoseok too much thinking to figure out how to help her, he just used the thing he did the best: dancing. As a drug replacement he offered her dance lessons, and from there everything started to go smoothly for both of them. It didn't surprise us too much when we figured out that not long after that, he had already fallen head over heels for her. We tried to stay out of the way as much as possible, seeing as J-hope just wanted to live a normal life to the best of his ability and we were not going to interrupt that.
On March 2nd of 2018 he proposed to her in one of our performances. I could have sworn I saw the ten thousand people present in that arena cry tears of happiness for him. It took a lot of effort from us to not do so too. I was genuinely glad for J-hope, glad that he had finally found happiness. It was a real shame that that happiness only lasted a week.
According to what he told us, one day he went to pick her up at her place and after knocking for a few minutes, no one answered. When she didn't pick up the phone, he decided to take action. He knocked down the door and ran inside, worried that something bad had happened. And unfortunately, he was right. Hoseok found her unconscious on the bathroom floor with an empty bottle of pills next to her. He immediately called an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital. However, when the doctors treated her they discovered that the drugs had been in her system for over six hours and that unfortunately had caused her body to suffer from lack of oxygen. Naturally the part most affected was the brain, so even after she woke up she wouldn't have the cognitive ability to tell them why she overdosed. There was no way they could know. But we did.
Earlier that day Taehyung had had his trial and he was found guilty, sentenced to sixteen years in prison without parole. I guess Eon just couldn't take it, so she found the only route of escape she knew would work: drugs. Only this time she didn't measure her limits and inevitably, she overdosed. And even though doctors told him the damage was irreversible, J-hope had already made a decision: he was going to marry the woman he had fallen in love with, brain damage or not.
Meanwhile, Namjoon, Jin and I decided to show up for Tae's trial in form of support. Even though it was something that came up at last minute for me, Jin told me that our leader had been preparing for the event for months. On top of doing the difficult interviews, announcements and public appearances, he barely slept for the weeks prior to the trial due to studying civil laws to be able to help Taehyung. He built a case on long term physical abuse from the paternal figure, trying to justify Tae's actions and present them as association and provocation defense. In the end he managed to reduce his sentence, but not by much.
Now, Hoseok and him were the ones that to that day hadn't broken down, hadn't faltered. But I guess everyone has their own limits, and this was Namjoon's. After the trial ended he didn't stay to answer the public's questions or make an appearance of any kind; he just took his car and left without telling anybody.
To say that the dorm was a mess when I arrived later that day would be an understatement. To begin with, the door had been punched repeatedly from the inside and the marks were more than slightly visible. All the chairs of the kitchen counter were knocked down, the TV in front of the couches in the living room was barely recognizable and it was difficult to tell which pieces of glass on the floor belonged to the screen and which were parts of the counter of what at some point was the coffee table. I didn't even have the energy to make an inappropriate joke about Namjoon truly being the God of Destruction, so I just walked right into the kitchen and reached for the little storage closet besides the fridge, taking a green bottle of the cheapest fucking Soju I had grown to be familiar with. When I turned around, I saw a single glass standing in the kitchen counter amidst all the chaos, like the one last survivor.
But was it really a good thing to be the last one standing when it just means that you're the only one left behind?
And if it wasn't ridiculous enough for me to be pondering about glasses and stupid shit, I threw the last amount of dignity I had for the day and grabbed the damned thing plopping down on the couch three seconds later. As I opened the bottle, my eyes were helplessly glued to what was left of the TV screen, like there was something just so captivating in its broken status that I couldn't stop watching. The glass made a sharp noise when it flew from my hand and crashed against the wall and scattered into pieces on the floor, and I crunched my nose as if I hadn't expected it to happen. Because I never do.
Since there were only two of us left in the dorms we only needed a pair of plates, cups and cutlery, so the incident that took out most of our tableware didn't pose too much of a problem. It was also Namjoon the one who insisted in having three meals a day, I just stuck to the routine I had which consisted in alternating between sleeping, drinking and throwing up.
Naturally, he was the one who did all the cleaning and bought the groceries, with the money he got from the job I was never too sober to recall. To some extent I could pretend that it was almost like the times the two of us were roommates, the times before BTS. But then he finally decided he had had enough with my behavior when I managed to fall down the stairs after my third bottle of Soju. When I regained enough consciousness to have a proper conversation with him, he started yelling at me that what was it that I was thinking, drinking myself into an early grave like this. I told him that I could drink as much as I fucking wanted.
It was not like the cancer cells in my liver could get alcohol poisoning.
Now every alcoholic has their own story as to why they started drinking. Mine is quite simple: I started because of the sorrow from losing Jimin and continued doing it to cover up the symptoms. Turns out chemotherapy is as much of a bitch as everybody claims it to be.
We stayed in silence for what seemed to me like at least half an hour before Namjoon finally spoke up. He had apparently done some thinking in that time, because said that he understood, and that he knew drinking was a very common thing to do when people lost someone special to them. And the way he say it prompted the next question:
"Were you and Jimin more than friends?"
A few minutes before I had confessed to my friend that I had terminal cancer, so I decided to send it all to hell and tell him everything else too. To this day I render that as one of the most memorable conversations I've ever had with someone, seeing that even after months had passed, I could still remember the expression he had when he sat back in the couch ready to listen to everything I had to say.
So I let it all out. I told him everything from the very beginning, when all just went to fucking hell. I started saying that media could be a bitch, and he stared at me long enough to show me that I was going to have to do a better job at explaining than that. But it was true; media was a bitch because it could make a whole fucking drama with plot, setting and main characters from a person accidentally stepping on an ant. But they fed on what you gave them, and we made sure to feed them well.
From day one until today people were thoroughly convinced of two things: that my hair was falling because of the hair dye I religiously changed every few weeks, and that the reason Jimin had committed suicide was the pressure of being famous. And that was alright, because that's what we wanted them to think. It just wasn't the truth.
Jimin had always been one to care a lot, sometimes way too much. He was the most selfless person I've ever known. The most beautiful one too. But too much shit kept piling up and then came a point in which we just couldn't get rid of it no matter how much we tried, and there was no way to run away. Not with a past hunting him down like that.
Jimin was unfortunate enough to have seen what cancer does first hand when he was a child. After all, he spent months by his mother side until she took her last breath. And I cannot imagine how devastating that must have been for him and his father, I just knew that after that Jiminie never really talked about her, but did visit her in the graveyard as often as possible. And his father turned to the church; he had always been very religious and believed that his wife's pain was God's way of punishing them for their sins. I never talked to the man too much, just met him once or twice and scurried away seconds after in fear that he would somehow notice the way I looked at his son and decided he needed punishment too.
All Jimin ever wanted was to make other people happy. To be the perfect idol; the perfect son; the perfect partner. But none of that was possible, not without sacrificing one thing for the other. I guess life is just fucking unfair like that.
So when people say Jimin's tragedy was the start of our sickly twisted Domino Effect I say they're wrong. Because it was not him.
It was me.
I should have done something when I found out I was sick. It was exactly two years ago that I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and not one day has passed since then that I hadn't loathed the fucking world for doing something like this to Jimin. Not to me, I couldn't care less what happened to me, but knowing that I was causing him so much pain just made me want to stick a bullet to my head so I could just end it all much faster. But I couldn't do that to him either.
Now his father and I never got along too well, after all he was an extremely religious man and I a firm atheist, who was also his son's lover. He just didn't know that part. But he was going to. About two months after Jimin's death I finally built enough courage to go to his church and talk to him. I told him that I loved his son.
I was genuinely surprised when he didn't throw the bible at me like I had expected him to do. He just hugged me and cried for solid ten minutes. We didn't have much of a conversation after that, but there was one thing we definitely agreed on: having to stay for so long after Jimin had died seemed like a fitting punishment for all the stupid decisions I knew I had made.
Before I left he told me that it had been so hard for Jimin being there first hand for his mother's death and then having to deal with his partner having cancer too. I answered that I knew, and that I was sorry. So very fucking sorry.
"You know I can't watch you die too."
"Who are you talking to, Yoongi?" It was the female voice I had learned to grow familiar with that interrupted all my thoughts. The palliative care nurse Namjoon had once told me was very hot when he came to visit me some time ago. I told him that I supposed, that I wasn't really able to tell.
Her presence here however, meant that my time to record my memoir or whatever it was that my psychologist called it was done. Great thing that it was a good twenty minutes of me just staring at the wall lost in thought like a crazy person. Seemed appropriate.
"Nothing, just remembering things." I shortly answered. I sighed deeply and then breathed in hard taking as much oxygen as possible.
"I see." She smiled and took out a syringe from her lab coat's pocket. "Well, it's four o'clock Yoongi, time for the painkiller." Any other day I would have laughed at her like I had done many times before whenever she said that same phrase. On those days I had told her that the damn thing would only be able to take some of the pain away, not all. It took a good week of her repeating me that it was the most effective painkiller that they had for patients before she finally understood what I meant.
It hadn't been until I saw the object in her hand, however, that I realized how tired I actually was, so I was not in the mood for bitter jokes. As she approached me I laid down taking another big breath. She looked at me for a second and then resumed her activity of connecting the syringe to the catheter. I assumed it was because she had already gotten used to it, seeing as I had picked up on the habit a few days ago. I myself didn't even know why I did it, I guess my lungs just felt like it.
"You know, I loved him a lot." I said tiredly looking at the white ceiling. I was expecting her to sarcastically say something about how the medicine hadn't even started to take effect and I already was talking nonsense, but it never happened.
"I know you did." She smiled at me disposing of the syringe in a bag and starting to walk straight to the little desk where I had set up the camera. "And he loved you a lot too." She took the device in her hands and pressed the 'stop' button, looking up to my eyes seconds after that. "I'll tell the psychologist you didn't have time to record your thoughts like he asked, maybe another day." She hurriedly walked to the door taking the camera with her. By that point I was already starting to feel my eyelids heavy.
"Take a nice rest, Yoongi." And before her small frame disappeared from the room she said: "oh, and keep taking those big breaths. Nice to know your lungs are working well."
And then I was left alone again, like so many days before this one. Ready to succumb into sleep I slowly closed my eyes, the words she said replaying in my mind.
"I know he did." I murmured softly.
Before letting myself fall into unconsciousness I recalled what the psychologist said to me yesterday when he noticed my newfound habit. He said that my brain was "taking all the survival activities to the extreme" because it knew that my body could no longer support itself. Hence my breathing of more oxygen that I actually needed. And yeah, I absolutely hated the guy, but he was right.
So I decided to listen to the nurse and take a big breath just one last time, because you never know.
And I never did.