The Curse

Author's note:

Hi guyss..!

This is my first story, and although English is not my first language, I’m writing it with a lot of heart and effort. I may make a few mistakes, but I hope you’ll enjoy the story for what it is. This is a journey of love, fate, and curses, and I’m excited to share it with you all.Thank you for reading and supporting my first story.

Taehyung's pov

People have always looked at me like I am a puzzle they are desperate to solve.

I see it in their eyes ..that flicker of curiosity sharpening into something almost like pity. They watch me the way you’d watch a window that refuses to fog no matter how close you breathe against it. Waiting. Wondering. Walking away confused.I don’t blame them.

I confuse myself too.

My name is Kim Taehyung. I am seventeen years old. And I have never-not once in all seventeen years of my life felt my heart move for another person. Not a flutter. Not a pull. Not even the faintest warmth that people describe when they talk about love like it is the most natural thing in the world.

To me, it sounds like a language I was never taught.

They called it pickiness first.

“Taehyung is just too selective,”my aunt told my mother over tea when I was twelve, as if being unable to love was simply a matter of having unrealistic standards. As if somewhere out there existed a person extraordinary enough to finally unlock whatever was wrong with me.

Then they called it immaturity.“He’ll grow out of it.”

Then fear.“Something must have scared him.”

Then they stopped naming it and started fixing it.

My mother is a gentle woman with tired eyes and hands that are always slightly cold. She held those hands around mine the first time she took me to the psychiatrist, her grip tight in a way that saidplease, let this work.I sat across from a kind man with a soft voice and answered every question he asked with complete honesty. He nodded. He wrote things down. He looked at me the way everyone looks at me eventually -like I am something just slightly beyond his understanding.i dont want to be like this.I amlike this.

We did not go back after the fifth session.

The church came next. A priest with a warm laugh told me God’s love was the greatest love of all, and I nodded politely and felt nothing. Not resistance, not rejection..simply nothing. Like trying to pour water into a stone.

My father stopped trying after that. He loves me, I think, in the quiet and helpless way you love something you cannot reach. He watches football on Sunday evenings and sometimes puts his hand on my shoulder and doesn’t say anything. I think that is his way of telling me it’s okay.

It isn’t okay.It never was.

I know it isn’t. Not because I suffer...I don’t, not exactly. But because I watch people around me and I see something moving in them that is completely still in me. I see my classmates dizzy with crushes, eyes tracking someone across a classroom like they are the only fixed point in a spinning world. I see my mother look at my father sometimes with an expression so soft it barely belongs on a human face.

I feel none of it.is there something wrong with me..like they say?

I have never felt any of it with such completeness that I have started to wonder if I was simply born without that particular organ. The one that lets people fall in love.

The strange thing ..and I have never told anyone this..is that it doesn’t feel like absence.

It feels like a wall.

There is a difference. Absence is empty. A wall means something was built. And walls, even ones you cannot see over, even ones with no door and no window and no memory of when they were made ...walls mean there was once a reason.I dont know why but i feel heartbroken?betrayed?

I just don’t know what it is.

I have searched myself the way you’d search a dark room ...hands out, moving slowly, afraid of what you might touch. There is no heartbreak buried in me. No cruelty I received that I buried under stone. My parents never hurt me. Nobody betrayed me. Nobody left.Then why?

So why does my chest sometimes feel like a place where something already ended?or something that refuse to be ended?

Why do I sometimes wake from dreams I can’t remember with the feeling of having lost something enormous?

Why does the wordagainsometimes appear in my thoughts completely unprompted, attached to nothing -not again, never again -when there is nothing in my seventeen years that the word could possibly belong to?

I don’t know.

I have learned to stop asking.

It is a Tuesday in October when Park Jimin ,my desk neighbor, my closest thing to a friend, leans over during homeroom and says,“There’s a transfer student joining our class today.”

I look up from the window.

“Okay,”I say.

He looks at me with that expression I know well. The one that is not quite pity and not quite fondness but lives somewhere in between.“You could try being interested,”he says.“For once.”

“I am interested,”I tell him.“I’m looking up, aren’t I?”

He sighs in the way that means he has given up, but kindly.

The door opens.

Our homeroom teacher steps in and says something I don’t catch because the morning light has shifted through the window and landed on the empty desk two rows from mine, and for one strange, unanchored moment I feel something.And for a heart beat,it felt hard to breathe.i dont know why and i dont want to know it.i never feel..aren’t i?But it felt like a weak conviction to my own ears.

Not warmth. Not curiosity.

Something older than that. Something that has no name in the language I know.

It lasts less than a second. Then it is gone, and the room is just a room, and I am just Taehyung, the boy with the stone chest, staring at an empty desk.

“-will be joining us from today,”the teacher finishes.

I don’t hear the name.

I don’t think about the transfer student again for the rest of the day.

But that night, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I dream.

And in the dream, someone is crying.

And somewhere in the part of me that is all wall and no door..

something flinches.