Jay’s lying down. And then that’s when he realizes he’s laying down in bed. Then the bed shifts and moves and someone comes off. Jay almost jumps to the side until he realizes where he is.

It’s his old room back in the small house they had when he was in Dallas. He immediately swings himself up and follows the tiny figure that comes out. He walks through the narrow hallway and reaches out to him.

“Hey, you!” Jay yells, but he keeps going until he runs to the boy. “Stop!” The boy stops, but not because of Jay. Suddenly Jay is hyper-aware of the yelling going through the air.

“Two months!” he heard screaming. Male voice. His Dad. “Two months, you’ve been lying!”

“I was ashamed, Aspen!” he hears a female voice. Soyeon. Jay moves forward before seeing his mother. He’s almost stunned by how normal she looks. Her face is nice and ovular and her black hair is long and shiny.

“Being ashamed of not having a job doesn’t give you the excuse to gamble all of our savings away!” his dad yells back.

Jay analyzes the boy. In his robot pyjamas, hair cut short so it goes around her head in a perfect circle.

Jay and Young Jay turn their heads to see a holo-screen open. It shows a staggering amount of debt. Young Jay couldn’t count high enough to know how much trouble Soyeon got them into.

“I told them I would pay them back!” she cried.

“What are we going to do, Soyeon? You landed us thousands of dollars in debt from some shady underworld thugs. What will happen when they stop giving you grace if they even gave you grace in the first place?” his dad yells. “Think of me. Our son, for crying out loud. You could’ve bankrupted us. We would’ve been on the streets.”

“We can find a way together,” her mom cooed, before reaching up to touch his face. It’s what she does when she wants sympathy.

But his dad jerks his head away. “We aren’t immature teenagers anymore who only needed love. We’re grown adults now, and we have Jay. We can’t just be careless anymore. We just can’t, Soyeon, and I need you to understand.”

She simply waited for what seemed so long but short, before crumpling to the floor like she was shot and crying out the most painful sobs he had ever heard in his life. And then his dad simply walked away.

The image swirled again, and this time it was one of his dad at the dinner table. He stopped looking 31 and started looking 60, which meant people believed he was Jay’s dad instead of his much older brother. He guessed that’s what happens when your parents have you at 19.

The bags under his eyes could hold their groceries and were creased with purple. There were lines of silver woven into his raven black hair, and his brown eyes looked cold and lifeless.

This was right after Soyeon left. And this is when Jay started calling her Soyeon.

The landscape had changed. Instead of the small house, they moved into an even smaller apartment in the lowlife area of Dallas. The walls were moist and gray all the time, and it was shaped like a box.

Jay was picking at his measly food again. With his mom and their savings gone, Jay had grown accustomed to plain white rice and cream of mushroom soup pretty much all the time.

It was all normal until gunshots rang in the air, and a small bullet pierced the window.

His dad practically leaped to him and then tackled him to the floor and the gunshots rang out. Jay remembers how abnormally fast his heart was pounding against his dad’s, and the fear the paralyzed his body. He had long-buried this memory, but he had to face it once again.

The gunshots stopped, but that wasn’t all. A huge flying object landed right in front of Jay, so close it could’ve hit him. It was a rock, but on it was a symbol that was unknown to them.

Jay would eventually realize it was the symbol of a gang. One that his mom had been associating with while she gambled.

Jay eventually froze, feeling like he’d lost all connection to his limbs. Before the landscape swirled once again.

It was in a room of all black, and Jay was now standing there in front of someone.

His younger self.

Jay remembers it. He was awkwardly towering over everyone else, even when he got to high school. He had the same circular haircut and was wearing robot pyjamas.

It was himself the day his mom left.

Suddenly his younger self began running towards him before he eventually clobbered onto himself. Jay tried to get up, but he was being held down. His younger self got up and threw a punch, hitting him. Jay whimpered and held his fist. He’d never expect that it would hurt. It kept going on.

His younger self beating himself up.

It came to Jay that maybe that’s what was wrong. He simply got up and threw his younger self off of him. He landed before being consumed in a puddle of black.