heart past my head, on opposite ends

[cosmicna]

: commentary for my contribution to the jihyuck fic fest

now, i have so many thank yous i need to say to this fic fest. last fic fest i joined (it’s been two years since that!! 🥹) i mention how i was getting back into writing. now, that was true but it wasn’t exactly… fulfilled? i did write, i started a few more projects since then, but i unfortunately… did not finish them! this fest however, i challenged myself. after finally getting out of school and opening gdocs again, i wanted to find… rhythm. so at midnight, i opened my ooe document and wrote 800 words. it wasn’t much but it was more than i had written in a day in the past few weeks. the next day, also almost around midnight, i wrote 800 more. and that continued. totalling to six whole days. until i finally. finally finished the story of two boys on opposite ends.

on opposite ends

i strive to make my fic titles hold more meaning. on opposite ends, i believe, is a good example of that.

now, very obviously, on opposite ends is taken from how jisung and donghyuck are placed opposite of each other. jisung is on one end of the gallery, while donghyuck is on the other. clearly on opposite ends, and more literally. with them being placed like this, they are far away from each other, yet are the ones they see most clearly. and it’s ironic in that sense, and i love that.

on the other hand, they are also basically the sun and the moon personified. and just like jisung and donghyuck, the sun and the moon are on opposite ends. just now, on opposite ends of time. this title plays with how jisung and donghyuck seem to truly be fated to not be together. in so many different circumstances, they are opposing. from their placement in the gallery, to the time of day in their paintings, even the nature surrounding them—flowers for donghyuck and branches and twigs for jisung—, and especially in their painters’, mark and jeno’s, rivalry. and still, so impossibly still, they fell in love. they defied all the laws. and they truly fell in love.

the paintings

part of writing this fic also was drawing up how the paintings looked like.

this prompt truly did intrigue me but it only clicked to me when i started planning that i had no clue what a post-impressionist painting was. so i searched through different pieces, different articles, and different artists. and i am sorry if i was off or if i did not give post-impressionism justice… i can’t paint… i can’t even finish a paint-by-numbers activity…

but i tried!! my best!! and i came up with something i am proud of!

as i've already linked in the ao3 notes, here’s my inspo for jisung and donghyuck!

donghyuck was definitely easier for me to come up with because seriously, i only slightly struggled because of post-impressionism… however! i did also struggle a bit with describing jisung’s pose. from my few ballet years when i was younger, the only word i knew that kind of described jisung’s pose was arabesque. but his leg wasn’t lifted so it wasn’t. so i searched, and i quote, “pose of someone coming down from an arabesque.” that was when i found out that there were different types, i guess, of arabesques. after a lot of searching (and skepticism) i decided that, yeah, okay, arabesque à terre is right. and i hope it is.

but seriously i searched so much. below is my search history…

but that was not my only stuggle oh my god… image hosting annoys me so bad and i don’t know why??? i first used imgbb… but my photos wouldn’t load even if i used that site before… then i tried imgur but the link wasn’t loading… then i tried postimages and it worked!! but then i checked the link on my phone… and it had ads. like r18 ads. and i did not like that one bit. finally i then found bashify. and thank god for that.

the exhibit

after using magicplan for nahyuck fic fest, as well as for designing my own real-life bedroom, i couldn’t not use it for this jihyuck too.

now, keep in mind that other than not being a painter nor dancer, i am also not an architect. this floorplan was made with zero measurements in my head. like i’m pretty sure the place i made is really tiny. but everything is fake anyways… i also kind of used this image from google! just turn it around a little bit and you’ll kinda see what i mean…

and! there are no other paintings since i was too lazy to add them all… and it also looks really really empty LMAO

my favorites

this entry cannot continue on without me gushing over my own writing. so here we go!

He steps forward, taking a peek into the other paintings and sculptures next to them, and he points. To a winged fellow wrapping her wings around another. When Jisung looks back at him, he points to the boy and to himself, once more intertwining his hands and saying, “Us?” And his wings copy the motion, giving Jisung a hug through the distance.

this one!! now, the thing about jisung and donghyuck is that it’s hard for them to communicate and relay everything they want to say. jisung tries his best through dance and donghyuck with his wings. but to build a strong connection between the two requires more than just… that… so i wanted donghyuck to speak as well through the things around them, inside and outside their frames.

donghyuck comparing them to a sculpture of two people hugging as he points to jisung and intertwines his hands together, is his way of relaying what he wants to say to jisung—what he wants for them. and i really just love how his wings try to hug jisung, and specifically! the line, “giving Jisung a hug through the distance.” !! it really just sounds a whole lot of sweet to me!!

They’ve given each other all they had. Even if it wasn’t much. From their names to what makes them, and even up to the things that surround them. . . And all these things, that may seem so small in their little frames, will always be worth so much more to the two of them.

Because for the first time, Jisung feels so seen. Every part of him. So understood and appreciated. And it’s all thanks to Donghyuck. . . who is so near but so out of his reach.

again… since they have a limitation in their communication, and since they really, really do want to talk to each other, they resort to giving every single piece of them. because they aren’t just… acquaintances or friends… they want to know each other on a deeper level because they’re just so drawn into one another… so much so that they’ve given everything.

So Jisung steps forward. Closer to his frame than ever before. And his palm is flat against the varnish.

Donghyuck moves as he does, and they are the closest they have ever been.

Outside it is dark and cold, stars speckled across the sky. But inside, in the gallery and in the distance between two opposing frames, it is warm. It is warm and light with, according to Jisung, stars in Donghyuck’s eyes.

And though they don’t speak—they don’t hear, nor do they touch—, on the flip side of it, they know. They know more than they could ever convey with words.

when planning this fic, i actually thought of splitting it into two chapters. but… i am not a fan of short chapters in fics… so i scrapped that idea. however! if the two chapter thing actually happened, they would’ve been titled “oil-painted, moonkissed” (later on changed to sun-kissed instead of moon) and “against the varnish” and i knew that since the chapter titles wouldn't have seen the light of day, i made sure to integrate them into the fic itself.

so here we have jisung, palm flat against the varnish and it really… ahhhh… it really is a marking of how limited they are by their frames but jisung, who has always stayed within his frame, is pushing against it now. and donghyuck… is too.

this entire scene, this entire night in general, was such a pleasure to write and i really just love it so dearly. because at this point, they don’t need to talk to understand who feels what, because it just is… it’s just there and it’s so evident.

Now Love may not normally be defined as a force that brings an emotion of self-destruction just for a single touch, but Love is not always a singular feeling. For Love, despite restrictions, is the willingness of doing the impossible. The willingness to melt. The willingness to give up a part of yourself. For Love, is a moon and his sun, palms pressing against the surface, hearts pumping out of their capabilities.

Because for the first time, Jisung feels so seen. Every part of him. So understood and appreciated. And it’s all thanks to Donghyuck. . . who is so near but so out of his reach.

this… in full truth… is actually one of the first paragraphs i wrote for jisung and donghyuck. and really… i have nothing else to say about it other than to tell you to read it.

building the underpainting

and of course, this cannot end without me explaining the journey of writing this fic.

i honestly only have vague memory of the first month or so of participating in this fic fest. i spent that time planning basically the entire structure of the fic as well as writing a bit under 1k. but as school days pass and summer comes up, i stopped.

but i knew i wanted to write them and especially finish them before school started again. so i set up a goal. in the notion page i created for on opposite ends a couple months back, i added a new section—a tracking section. here, i planned that for the next five days or so, starting on the 30th of june, i would write at least 700 words a day—totalling to somewhere around 4-5k of words. because at this point, my projected word count of this fic was 5k. at most.

when i started writing on june 30, it was the first time in a long time that i made myself focus and truly dedicate myself to staring at my gdocs page. but i worked through it. after a long 2 hours… i found 826 new words on my screen.

i had a lot of mixed feelings about this. on one hand, i was glad to have met my word goal! it felt nice to finally dive into the art world again with mark, jeno, and most especially jisung. but it felt… like i took forever. 800 words in 2 hours is not… normal for me… as usually i’d be able to come up with a thousand in just 1 hour. but it was a start!! and i kept that in mind.

day 2 then came by, and very similarly… i had 864 words written in 2 hours.

now day 3… was different. in total, i had 1017 words written but the time i took is… uncertain. this is because half of it was written in my notebook while i was on the road, while the other half took a shocking 20 minutes for me to write. immediately, my motivation and morale was boosted…

which led me to write 1524 words on day 4. it sounds really crazy but… 612 words were written in 30 minutes with the remaining 912 words in 40. it must be kept in mind, though, that i wasn’t writing continuously on this day— i was watching a show and only wrote every ten minutes or so… (commercial breaks)... but after calculating (i noted the times i stopped and started writing)!! i managed to write 1.5k in 70 minutes!!!

this further boosted my mood!! but the worst was yet to come… because writing day 5 felt very scary… since i had to write jisung and donghyuck’s final night. somehow… i managed a whopping 1785 in an hour and 32 minutes. i really… although it was pretty hard for me to write (i’m getting to this point soon…) it still was a pleasure. that final night had my most most favorite lines…

but then there was day 6 of me writing… it was july 5 and i only had one scene left. mark, jeno, ten, johnny, and jihyuck out of their frames… ahhhh it was so so so bittersweet and actually the first time out of all the days of writing where i had written less than the day before. 704 words in 34 minutes.

the chart of my word counts which really helped me a lot through the whole process is here! and i’m really super duper proud of her <3

ultimately, this writing marathon, of sorts, ended up surpassing my projected word count of 5k, causing on opposite ends to be a whole 7k! it’s arguably the most consistently i’ve written… at least in the past year T___T

then i went through editing parts, adding a few stuff, and then… posting it!

now since the timeline’s over… let me talk about some of the biggest challenges i faced in planning and writing.

one of my biggest worries definitely lies in how the fic feels so fast-paced… jisung and donghyuck didn’t even have a week together. they had two nights. and… that isn’t very realistic is it… i don’t know if i wrote them well enough but i hope it didn’t feel too fast… i hope their connection with each other is evident because i really… i tried my best :’)

but another big challenge… was in the technicality of writing… in my sentence structures. i really just felt very self-conscious about the way i wrote because i feel like i just overuse my sentences. it always feels very subject-verb-object. very “He said,” “He saw his arm,” “He pointed outside,” and i hate it… like yeah, that’s normal sentence structure, but it felt so repetitive. and i wanted to do better. again… i don’t know if i did this well. but i hope that at least after reading on opposite ends you did not at all once think about the sentence structure…

if you asked me what was the hardest scene to write, i’d say, somehow, the final night. this is because, for the most part, i didn’t know if i’d be able to put their connection into words properly. i really, truly wanted to showcase just how much they mean to each other and i really… tried my best.

it was also hard to let them go, and so quickly at that. like… i wrote their meeting and their last night within like four days or less. but there were fun moments!! and ones i’m very proud of! the part of the last night where jisung suddenly manages to speak and donghyuck hears him for some unexplainable reason, was seriously made on the spot. i did not plan for them to hear each other, but it felt right!! and when i removed the italics to signify them actually speaking!?!? so so genius of me actually…

additionally, as i’ve shown, it was in the final night where i wrote my most favorite lines. so definitely, i’d say, it was my best writing session out of all the previous days.

now!! one very last tiny easter egg i added in, though i don’t know if it was obvious or not, was the order of which the rules of the art world were broken.

They feel this freedom when they can move, but will immediately freeze into their original positions once any eye is on them.

Though they can move, they still have their limits. All the artworks move in complete silence. No one has the ability to speak, neither to themselves nor to one another.

Additionally, paintings are limited by their frames. Sculptures, in turn, cannot move their legs or whatever is holding them in place on the ground.

first. when any eye looks at an artwork, everything, no matter where they were placed, immediately goes back to their place. so, when mark and jeno found the missing flower as well as the flower in donghyuck’s hand, this first rule was broken.

then, the rule of them not being able to speak. as i’ve previously mentioned, somehow, under some sort of magical circumstance, donghyuck and jisung speak. speak and hear each other. rule two broken.

and of course… the third rule, they are not allowed to move out of their frames. but at the end, jisung and donghyuck ultimately do. another rule broken.

so… as you see… it wasn’t just instantaneous that jisung and donghyuck were able to get out of their frames. it was the magic fading ever so slightly, or maybe fading in that certain way so that the two boys would break free, over time. it wasn’t just because they held their hands up against the varnish separating the air between them. it was a built connection that broke through what was their “normal.”

and i think, that’s really beautiful. because, again… Love, despite restrictions, is the willingness of doing the impossible. The willingness to melt. The willingness to give up a part of yourself. For Love, is a moon and his sun, palms pressing against the surface, hearts pumping out of their capabilities.

love… is on opposite ends.

huge huge huge!! thank you to the mods of this fest! this was my second ever fic fest and i'm really happy with how everything turned out :] thank you mods! thank you jihyuckers!! luv u all loads <3