Anterograde Tomorrow quotes

Some quotes from a REAL GOOD exo fanfic.

1. Kyungsoo is stuck in the hours while Jongin begs the seconds, because time stops for someone who can't remember and runs from someone who can't miss the last train home.

2. My name’s Kim Jongin. I call you hyung.
Yesterday you loved me. Today you’ll love me again.

3. Jongin explains that they’re for a book he’s writing. A romance about a man who erases himself at the end of each day.
Kyungsoo questions the romance in that. Jongin says no worries, writers are certified bullshitters;
just kill someone and it’ll end up romantic.

4. You’re caught in time but time moves on. You can’t remember people coming or leaving.
The world diminishes around you while you’re stuck in the center.
All of your old friends leave or die and you can’t make new ones.
You can’t love. You can’t hate.

5. It’s funny because my life is full of this:
you think you’re escaping, until you run into yourself.
Twenty-three years later it turns out that the longest way round is the shortest way home,
and I’ve been running in circles since the get-go.
What a riot, huh?

6. “Grab a toy from work. Leave it by the apartment next-door. (19 July 2012)”

7. “Pity’s pretty fucking expensive from someone who can’t care.”

8. Jongin’s eyes are red. His lips are white. The silence is black.

9. Jongin doesn’t speak for a long time, and when he does, he doesn’t look up from his notebook anymore,
“So if you can retain memories of how to do something, do you also retain feelings? If you fell in love with a woman today, would you still love her tomorrow?”

10. It was kind of funny, like watching a hamster run itself to death in a wheel,
for an exit that didn’t exist.

11. Their shoulders touch a little, but neither of them moves away.

12. You don’t need to know. I’m one of those pages that’s going to be abandoned one day.
It won’t even be a pretty page. It’ll be blood and tears over pulp and paper and, honestly, it’s better not to have a page of me at all.

13. The man on the last page of his scrapbook is Jongin on certain days, a writer on others, and a stranger during brief elevator rides.
On good days he has a smooth olive complexion; on bad days he wears jaundice over his flesh like a punishment.
Sometimes he is a boy sitting on the neighboring balcony, legs dangling off the ledge and cigarette hanging on parched lips, arms poking out from behind rusted fences. Sometimes he is the tired man leaning against the wall, drowning in the rain with hair damp and back hunched. Sometimes they share a quiet second in the corridors, others countless hours speaking with lidded eyes, over thick divides of indigo smoke and ringlets of blues.
Occasionally it hurts to see him, makes Kyungsoo’s chest throb with something heavier than pity, but most of the time seeing the man makes Kyungsoo’s head light and dizzy.

14. It’s like being killed. Wiped out and deleted against your will.

15. “Real fireflies,” Jongin grins, “Light people up from the inside out.”

16. At the mention of ‘hyung’, Kyungsoo immediately thinks of the last page in his scrapbook,
the one without a photo, about a man who is really a boy, a writer who is really a dancer, a neighbor who is really much more. Kim Jongin.
The page had a note on the side that said to pretend to have never read it,
because Kim Jongin doesn’t want to be remembered.

17. “You knew, didn’t you, that I have a page about you in my book?”

18. Sleep takes Kyungsoo away, anyway.

19. And then night swarms in and paints everything blank.

20. “Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
“Well, it dies. The thought dies.”
“Don’t let me die, hyung. Promise me you’ll remember me.”

21. “My name is Jongin. I’m the writer who lives next door. See you tomorrow, hyung. Don’t forget!”

22. There are times that the truth hurts more than the lie, and times when the lie itself is painful enough to rip Kyungsoo apart.

23. “Do you?” The stranger frowns, and it resounds much more of a plea than a request.

24. And we’re never going to have a relationship. You get it, don’t you? You can keep trying but you’re never going to remember me. That’s just the way it is.

25. No, you don’t, because you don’t actually love me. Without all my notes, there is nothing. There is actually, exactly, really nothing. I’m really just a stranger to you, and this relationship is all just a play.
It’s just another novel. Fabrication. Everything.
I’m not even writing a fucking novel, fuck, I’m living it.”

26. Because that’s what time does. It takes the little pieces.
The insignificant ones first, and then it sneaks the significant ones…
But then by the time you do realize it, they’ll be gone, and you won’t know what’s missing until—

27. My head is bad but my heart... My heart is good. I’ll remember you there.
I can’t remember anything about you, but when you hurt, my heart hurt. When you laugh, my heart laughs.
I can love you even without memories so just hang on.

28. Don’t you see it, hyung? Our ending is so clear.
It’s all been drafted from the very beginning, before we ever met.”

29. And when that day comes, hyung, promise me you’ll let me go.
You’ll go home, take away the daisies—”
“Because, listen, hyung. You don’t deserve to…see daisies wither…"

30. You can remember tomorrow. I’ll remember all of our yesterdays

31. “So I wanted to play a hero. Let myself be forgotten, to save you from all the yesterdays and leave you with all the tomorrows but… then I heard that I had pneumonia. It wasn’t six months. I had four weeks.
Maybe three. And I cracked. Being stuck with the yesterdays while you moved on without me suddenly wasn’t all that appealing anymore and—really, I’m sorry.
I lied. I’m not a hero. Just a coward.”

32. That there’s no rush, that it’ll be fine, because he’s going to go home and write all of this down—
Kim Jongin, west wing, room two-twenty, Seoul Hospital, take the taxi to the southern entrance,
we’re not finished yet—
so that he can come back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after…

33. "I’m on borrowed time... How much do you think the interest is?"

34. He doesn’t need to know anything, not of their past or their future or their virtues and vices. All he wants is just a name. Any little piece of Kim Jongin.

35. “remember Jongin; our birthday tomorrow (13th January 2014).”