"You made it look like there were thirteen people."

This is something I always hear at the back of mind every time everything seems to get a little better. When I step in my digital weighing scale and notice that I've again lost a pound or two in a week. When I hear everyone at work compliment how good I look with the style I've chosen. When some people refer me to modeling agencies and try multiple times to convince me I should give it a shot. When I hear my mom say I look good and that I must have gotten most of the genes from her.. At times when I feel just a tad bit confident about myself...

“There’re only ten people in this photo, but because of Han JinHae , it looks like there are thirteen people.”

I hear it.

It's been 3, 117 days but I can still remember each and every word of that comment. The comment that ended the person who I was.

I was fifteen then, young and in love. Only child but always had to beg for attention and love. Always on top of the class, achiever, but had the least number of friends. Generous, soft-hearted, simple, but ordinary to most people's eyes. I barely get the love I had always longed for, but as cliche as it sounds, I felt it from food.. So I ended up gaining weight almost every week. But I always thought that these skills and virtues that I possessed were a great reason to chin up for. That's why I did, I had. Even when I get bashed on for weighing twice a normal teenager of my age, even when I wasn’t as rich as the people in my school, even when I had never heard anyone say I looked beautiful, not even from my own mom… I hadn’t let any of those affect me the worst pay possible. I smiled a lot. Because I thought there was always something to smile about everyday.

It was Lee Taeyong… probably the most handsome creature to ever dwell in this universe. Everyone thought he looked like a manga character who got out of the books and became an actual person. He was well-known for such looks and having to come from a rich family, the whole school thought he was an eyecandy. We were from  the same school. We belonged to the same class. And I’ve had a crush on him since that day he thanked me for saying yes to doing him a project for him because he had a lot of more important things to accomplish like completing a photoshoot for a clothing line.

I was one of the girls who fancied him, except I kept everything hidden. When he walked passed anywhere I was, others would audibly squeal almost in his face. While I just looked down and pretended to stare at anything, but never did I miss to mentally wish he would remember me and say hi. Others stuck pictures of him practically everywhere, on and in their lockers, on their desks, on their phones. While my locker was full of textbooks and school supplies... but when you take them all out, only then would you see a picture of him, which was one of the selcas he had uploaded in his sns, mounted on the innermost side. Most of them have told Taeyong they liked him face to face, some of them even did those cheesy proposals, (and I must say they all felt really wrong to me considering they're girls confessing to a guy). But I  have never told anyone about my feelings but my bestfriend, Eunhee. And my diary, where I sometimes write my daydreams about one day getting to slip my fingers between his, feeling the softness of his lips against my cheek, getting chosen over his popularity and his family.. and ending up as his wife.

I was a wishful thinker.. Sometimes, I swore I saw him look my way and smile. I thought I saw him a lot of times in the library even if he wasn't really the type of student who studied religously, because he's there to see me. I thought he wore his favorite blue furry coat over his uniform during winter because he knew I liked the color blue a lot. And I thought I saw him stare at me during several occasions and look away whispering to the nearest friend from him, saying how he thought I'd look a lot prettier had I been conscious about my diet.

All these became my everyday drive. At home, my parents' work were always more important than me. It was so hard for them to spend time with their only daughter, as if an hour or so would cost a million dollar less their salary. In school, I was never appreciated enough by classmates and schoolmates despite always being on top of the class and bringing the school a lot of pride for winning numerous competitions. Although the world was often cruel, I never stopped hoping for its gentleness. Every morning I woke up for the chance to see him again. Every night, I went to sleep to kill time until I can meet him again the next day. Amidst the sadness from getting a very little amount of love from everybody even when I've tried everything I could to improve it, I held on to life for that one thing that gave me happiness even if I was just admiring him from a far.. To see Lee Taeyong. To hear him say "Present" when our teacher calls him for attendance. To watch him laugh by his locker with his hands in his pockets with some of his friends. To stare at him in the library reading while he did pen tricks with one hand that always made me wonder whether anything he's reading gets inside his head while doing so. He was my world, and I was a moon orbiting around him.

Until we were in our last year in middle school, and a friend posted online our pictures from a school trip. And a name suddenly came out of the comments. It was the last name I thought I'd see there. And the comment was the last thing I wished to read there.

I could still remember vividly how my heart thumped uncontrollably when I received that comment notification, thinking it could be the day he'll finally recognize me, and the favour I did for him a year or two back. And it turned out it was.. He recognized me.. But not the favor. But my size... He recognized it like anybody else.

I have heard people talk about my obesity a lot of times, behind my back or right in front of me. I heard it everyday. But it felt so diffirent having to hear it from the only person who gave you a reason to eat so you won't starve, so you can breath, so you can live.. And see him once again. It was the most heartbreaking thing.

So the thumping of my heart turned out to be the prerequisite of it breaking. The whole world stopped for awhile after I read the comment, everything was immobile, except for my heart shattering into pieces and my tears rolling down from my eyes. Did I really not deserve not an ounce of happiness?

I was supposedly on social media to forget about something. But to add insult to injury, just about an hour before I've read it, I found out the answer to the question I had in my mind since I was little which was.. Why wasn't I ever loved by my own parents? Say they did, but they showed it in some other ways because they're more of an "action speaks louder than words" type of people, but why did they never love me the same way all other parents loved their children? It was because I wasn't their child to begin with. I am the daughter of her illegitimate sister who died in an accident with her husband while I was at home with a babysitter, just a few months after I was born. And they didn't have other options but to raise me.

Could you believe it? Could my life get any more dramatic?

And the idiom "burst the bubble" might be applied to the situation, but it wasn't just a bubble, it was a ball. It wasn't like a bubble that's very easy to pop. But it was a ball of hope that got bigger and bigger everyday just because of a boy I went to school with. A boy I fell in love with. But it's so depressing to know it was the same boy who deflated it.

And Han JinHae was never the same. I endured the remaining months of the school year until I graduated. And left everything behind. And by everything I meant everything including my "parents", but my bestfriend EunHee. I moved to her place since she only lived with her mother who raised her solo. And since then, it was my home. Eunhee was my sister, her mom was my mom.

But what little self-esteem I used to carry, were included in the list of things I let go. So I became more quiet, less confident, more craven and.. Less heavy. Because after that, my new drive became vengeance.

I started to control what I was eating. I used all my knowledge of nutrition to get rid of all the extra weight that I thought was the reason why I was always unhappy. And with every time I was hungry when it wasn't meal time yet, every time I wanted to eat just one slice of my favorite cake, one scoop of my favorite ice cream, one meal with fried protein, one more cup of rice, which was probably all the time because I used to always eat, I thought of his comment. I thought of revenge. One day I'd show up to him, a different me he wouldn't even recognize I was the one whose life he ruined. He would fall in love with me, and I would dump him..

And then I received news he was actually training to become an idol under the biggest entertainment company in the country. Oh, this just got even more exciting! An unexplainable motivation grew in me after hearing that news.

But of course those were the plans of the fifteen-year-old me. Those layed-out schemes just give me low laughs now everytime I go back to that memory. I hadn't yet matured enough to know getting back was a waste of time. That revenge was for kids and moving forward was for adults. Those were the times I was young and I had let a boy greatly affect me at a stupidly young age.

Six years after, I am still alive. But in those years it was so difficult to carry on. Not when there were a lot of things making your life hard, not when you don't have parents, not when what used to be your everyday happiness was now your everyday sadness. I live with depression, and high-functioning anxiety.

I still hear those words that broke me, verbatim, at the back of my mind from time to time. I eventually came back to my old smiling self, but the smile is a mask I wear to conceal what I am battling with everyday. And there are times when I feel I'm losing the fight. When I think maybe it isn't worth it anymore. That maybe, just maybe, I'd be happier if I find my family, the real one, in the after life.

But also, I'd always realize that I do have a family here on earth. This sadness won't be gone if I surrendered living, it will just be passed on to them. And I didn't want that to happen.

Right now I'm a 100-pound twenty-year-old staring at her laptop screen blankly... Because a few weeks ago, I have read his group will be having a fansigning event in a venue just a walking distance from my place. And I just thought of signing up for it, for fun. What are the odds I'll be picked out of a thousand other people who did it because they were actual fans?

But my heart is starting to thump uncontrallably, this feels familiar. Because number 37 in the list is my name. I'm going to meet him for the first time in six years...