You ever feel like things have taken an uncontrollable turn? It felt like my life was slowly spiralling out of my hands and it was like trying to hold water between them, water always falling in between my fingers.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's back up a bit.

I was tutoring Jeongguk. Golden maknae. 

That was a thing.

I was friends with Taehyung and Jimin. Unlikely, I realize, but stay with me. 

I guess I forgot. Forgot what it meant to be friends with celebrities. You see the persona, and think of accessibility, think of something for the world to consume because that's how contract work. You sell the personality before the person, the brand before the music. 

They went on tour. They transferred out of school, because that's just how PR projects work isn't it? And life, because high school isn't forever. We grow up, we graduate and we try to move on and make sense of our lives.

I lost touch with BTS. I went to Seoul University for Math on scholarship. Kept in touch with Yoojung and Hyunmin, made new friends in college and just... lived. Any weird pranks or hijinks I had pulled in senior year seemed so far away now, these faraway memories I couldn't be sure if they were real, or just delusions tinted with nostalgie. It feels strange, to think of high school being so long ago. Jinsoo... I had forgotten about her now. Even that one kiss I shared with...

No, I had told myself I would move on. I would be better than this. 

That's the thing with assumptions. They make an out of u and me. 

Anything posted on the internet never dies. Someone made a rumor, caught a photo of me and golden-idol Jeon Jeongguk in the library together that an idiot classmate of mine had posted with #TBT, remember when BTS was at our school???????????? #wildtimes #missthis #wonderwhateveryonesuptonow. Once a spark catches wind, it turns into a blaze, turns into a wildfire and you can't catch peace again. Everyone was awash to try and find JEONGGUKS SECRET GIRLFRIEND!!!!!, never mind the fact that I hadn't talked to him in years. Not since that night. But there were articles and headlines and I couldn't escape it, only hope that they never found out it was me. 

Except they did, because the internet is full of creepy stalkers if nothing else. 

I'll spare you the details.

Sometimes I think about that afternoon on the rooftop with Yoongi. The first time I thought about the band as people, rather than separating the two as I tried to. Idol, person. It was a fascinating dichotonomy. 

I was only seventeen. BTS was on the rise, not yet dominant. Not yet broken apart. 

I'm older now. I'm standing in the crowd, and looking up at the stage.A boy stands there, his skin glitters. He’s glowing, come alive under the bright lights. I’m watching, lost in the crowd and clutching a ticket stub that came in the mail. I’m just a student (a girl, standing before a boy she might have once loved, might have could have should have would have) and he a singer but yet he seems otherworldly this artist and I don’t recognize that small high-school b oy he once was. 

(sometimes, I'll wonder if I ever truly knew him)

The arena is dark, lit up only by the waving of thousands of light sticks, the stage lights waiting for their stars. I’m not sure what I’m doing here, just a ticket in the mail that came and an overwhelming feeling of curiosity that made me want to see how things could turn out. The crowd is faceless, he wouldn’t recognize me—and it was all so long ago. I don’t know if it was really him that sent me that ticket, considering how we all ended up falling out of touch.

Of course, we tried, Skype calls and messages and the rare, occasional visit. But there was always this invisible barrier between us, this sense of us coming from two different worlds and barriers we couldn’t breach. Divisive differences we couldn’t overcome. Gradually our conversations stopped, I lost touch with the other members as I moved on to college and he moved on to the world.

Then that day in the rain the last time he and I thought maybe this could work maybe this could be something more—then us outside the tattoo parlours, almost dominating the news cycles for a solid week and we decided it wasn’t worth it for all our fighting (no matter how it sometimes felt like flying).

But I haven’t talked to him since then and things change the way people fall out of love if what you think of as like could maybe possibly fall under consideration as love and this is pointless to ramble on anyway just reminiscing over early morning spent in a classroom together, heads bent close together, or the afternoon sun slanting over his face as he slept on a pile of textbooks and maybe missing something that never was. 

So I took the ticket and I go to his first solo concert because I’m infatuated with curiosity after trying to stay out of the limelight for so long I’m wondering whether there’s anything newsworthy in his music still (our heads bent those early mornings, an earphone in each ear; his expression, scared and eager to show me something he wrote himself clumsy rough but so earnest we were so young I’m scared to forget).

After the third world tour, I stopped counting the days and I still hate myself for hoping. He never returned to school, he said he wouldn’t and I don’t know why I sometimes thought—but it was why he told me don’t wait and I didn’t even if I hoped I didn’t wait because the world wouldn’t wait for me the way it would for him watching and wanting more. Yet I know he’s got wings on his back half of one inked there the other half on the inside of my wrist him always ready to take off and over the world and somehow I’m still that girl sitting in the back of the classroom staring out the window and wondering how to soar.

He comes on stage. He’s grown so much. Bright under the lights he was always tall but now he’s grown into his height. Around me girls are screaming and fainting—nothing’s changed there, I think to myself wryly.

The girl standing next to me holds up a sign: Jeongguk Oppa, Fighting!!!!!! It reads. I smile softly, remembering my sister. She would have loved to be here. The set is bombastic and wild and electric, song after song and I remember why I loved his music so much. It’s all that earnestness wrapped up and developed and I think he’s come so far.

It winds down and he says he’s dedicating the next song to someone else.

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a/n. something a litte different this time. merry christmas!