C-beams

park junsu. but without the park, without the su.

he was called jun for the first time between abdomen-clenching peals of laughter, at the back of the schoolyard where he’d light up firecrackers with his classmates, in first grade.

jun, he’d repeat to himself throughout the long hour of detention that followed.

it felt right. more right than junsu, the name his parents had given him, the second syllable most of the times pronounced in a sigh. it was because of that sighed “su” that jun had gone through childhood feeling a strong sense of injustice. 

he could tell he lacked something everyone else had, and although, no, he was unable to actually tell, he knew what it was. it was his mother letting go of his hand when they’d cross the road, or the way she’d shake him by the shoulders when she’d beg him to smile. it was the contrast of his piano teacher’s cheerful singing and the cold temperature of the room he was left to practice in at home, too. “at home”, a term that would give him a funny sensation in his stomach, and not because he had been laughing with classmates.

he grew without love. he grew alone, as solitary as a lost cosmonaut in the nothingness of space. among the stars and hidden in the nebulas on the glossy covers of his favorite science magazines. his head was up there so often it could have become a ninth planet.

he dropped out of high school seeking freedom. taking on a series of odd jobs and following an ineluctable destiny of getting fired from each one of them. nights were for learning and making music; piano, guitar, drums, even saxophone, days were for sleeping. out of these nights a shitty indie band was born. the project was abandoned after a dozen of equally shitty demos. still passionate about space, and the science fiction movies he’d binge watch in between shifts, he eventually took interest in the other side of the mixing desk. lights, switches and buttons akin to spacecraft dashboards, his getaway, finally. if there is no sound in space, he’ll create it.