"concrete jungle," i say, voice straining against its ties to sleep. "who are you?" it bursts through its bindings on the last word, shattering the silence and alerting no one to the fact that i am awake.

"i'm jeongguk," i say. "i'm picasso. i'm thomas edison. but i'm not ernest hemingway."

i continue to ramble until i've made breakfast and i'm too awake to justify these words pouring out of me. 

"i'm not ernest hemingway," i say one last time to my quiet room. then i go outside, walk the five minutes to my little studio and flip the sign so that my sacred space may fill with sinners. 

i mix my thoughts with the paint, staining my fingers with the lie that my thoughts are beautiful - but in my studio, they are. 

then i get customers. they only look at my paintings for a second - they like to blame their little fast-paced world for their short attention spans, but the truth is that none of them care enough. none of them realize that beauty occurs when you slow down and stop and just breathe. just stare at something until you can see its lines and read between them.

so they buy my paintings and bring them home where they will gather dust. they aren't meant to hold anything besides the pieces of my mind that get away from me, but at these other houses, they will hold short glances. short glances and moments that their buyers wish to hide. 

art has eyes, and humanity's mistakes beg to be seen.

i sell art and i sell redemption. i sell my thoughts so that i can be rid of them - where my paintings end up, there are no thoughts.

my first customer of the day comes in with a nasally voice and a bad attitude. she surveys my formless people and the juxtaposition of detail and no detail.

"do you have anything...happy?" she asks, smacking her lips.

"that's up for you to interpret," i say. she doesn't recognize the statement for what it is - a challenge. will she be able to put her mind to use? can she see the lines? can she read the spaces between them?

she ends up selecting a painting a drawn-out eternity later, beaming.

"this one is happy," she says. i ring her up and she hands over the money and leaves with her new treasure, the thing that reminds her of happiness.

the painting was an abstract image of a boy standing atop a cliff. the colors around him were bright, but the lines making up his body were heavy and sloped down, pointing to the rocks below the cliff. he was about to jump.

i hope that one day, she looks at the painting when she's so drunk she can't see and realize that she was an idiot. 

and so it goes.

the day is gray, and i stare up at the clouds, content with the nothingness they make me feel. usually i feel too much - i am a tightly wound ball of string, and each string is a different emotion - bitterness, sadness, anger, jealousy, spite. at the heart is naivety, wonder, and hope, but the ball is so tangled that they're more like memories now. and looking at the pearly clouds make me forget.

the rain is even better. 

the rain almost makes me believe that i am someone else - someone whose eyes see the right reality, someone whose brain works the right way. and the rain almost makes me believe that i can be that person.

but most of all, the rain reminds me that i am jeon jeongguk. i am me and everyone else is themselves and if i squint, we all look the same. 

as if the clouds are privy to my thoughts, they open up with a torrent that is only achingly gentle to me; rain pounding the ground but caressing the air as it falls. and the sound. god, i love the sound of rain.

it's the perfect soundtrack to my thoughts as they grind to a stop. 

the rain streaks my windows, the world beyond the warped streams dark and inviting. i flip my sign to closed and push the door open with trembling fingers. 

then i am being embraced.

the rain washes over me as i stand on the deserted sidewalk. the gray sky is more of a ceiling than the roof of my apartment.

"i am picasso," i laugh, and outstretch my arms. the ball of string is untangling and joy is at the center; responding to the rain like a flower to the sun. but i am not a flower and i do not need the sun. the drops against my face are so soothing; each one against my skin whispers wordless reassurances that i hunger for in the daylight.

i wish i could bottle the rain's emotion.

it's more human than any of us. it's living, a dancing curtain of wonder and tears and paint of the palest hues. 

i cup my hands, imagining the swirls of color. periwinkle and the lightest yellow. 

i hold my arms out and spin, allowing myself to laugh because i don't need to speak - the rain does it for me.

i love how the street is deserted. i love how the world is a charcoal sketch; shadows collecting on the pavement and between the buildings like smudges of inky black. i love how the sound of the rain mutes the ugliness of my eyes. i love how the world becomes a maze of fog and gray and rediscovering the things we take for granted.

"if i'm picasso," i shout to the sky, "then you're debussy!"

"who's debussy?" the sky answers. i stop dead. if the sky is debussy, why is it asking me who that is? i cock my head, ignoring how i have to keep blinking because of my upturned face.

"i'm here," the sky says, and i look down, to my left.

it wasn't the sky. it was a boy. a boy with dyed dirty blonde hair. his eyes are deep. so is his voice - it makes me think of rich brown and dark green. he doesn't have transparent eyelids and his eyes are dark and bright.

his lips hang open, awaiting my response. i stare at him and the space and time between us stretches out. the words between the lines read if this street is a canvas then we are painters and we must paint.

"the rain," i say. "debussy is the rain."

"how so?" he asks. he doesn't turn around and leave me behind. he doesn't mark me as crazy or mentally inhibited. 

"can't you hear the symphonies?" i cry. he perks his ears, trying to hear. 

i study him.

realize that he looks awful.

his eyes that i thought were so deep are actually just haunted, set back into dark shadows, like whoever drew this street drew him too. his face looks gray, and it might be the rain, but the color looks natural on his face, like maybe he's been gray for so long that it stained his skin. 

"how are you?" i ask. i meant to say who are you, but the first question fits him like a second skin. one that's not gray.

he looks taken aback; listening to me now instead of the rain. 

"why do you ask?" he wonders aloud, narrowing his eyes. 

because the lines of your body are like the painting that woman bought earlier.

because your eyes are sad.

because you listen to me.

i say, "i just want to know." i shrug like it's nothing, like my words don't matter - they don't.

"i'm fine," he says. 

i have to turn my face away and hope the rain erases my expression because he's not. his voice broke in a snap of maroon and the words were dull, so dull. disappearing in the rain because they are insubstantial and if they weren't i would believe him.

but i don't.

"i should go home now," he says. "goodbye, picasso."

"goodbye," i say. "sky."

a/n: whoops i lowkey made you guys wait a really long time for this i'm soRRY

anyway,, monsta x is having a comeback on the 21st?? im so hype i cannot believe. my boys are boutta save the kpop industry once again