Seulgi sighed as she let her heavy bag fall to the floor. She stepped inside her room and undid her bun to let her hair fall loosely on her shoulders before closing the door behind her.

She made a mental note to clean her room before her mother would ask her to and sat down in front of her computer.

Seulgi glanced by the window where she could see the sun slowly setting into the tired city as people went home and busied themselves with their own affairs, looking down or reading the last slogan of an advertisement on the walls to avoid thinking of important things. The grey sky had coloured itself with a darker shade when Seulgi started typing. It was in those times she wondered how nature could be so paradoxal: depressing but so beautiful at the same time.

She started.

"Dear Sun,

Today I failed again.

I tried, I swear I did but maybe I am not made for this. I am a human incapable of interacting with other humans. Humans of my age.

I wanted to make my pen fall so someone could take it for me like you told me but since I am in the far back near the window, no one saw it fall. Not even my seat mate as he was busy snoring during calculus.

I also wanted to say hi to the girl I talked to you about last week but she was surrounded by her friends and you know how hard it is for me to talk in front of many people. I lost hope and my courage left me. I feel like a coward. Am I doing it wrong? Or maybe there is something wrong with me.

I am sorry for disappointing you again and thank you for the song last time, I really enjoyed it.

Yours truly,

Seulgi."

Seulgi bit her lips and looked back to the window after sending her daily email. It was fully dark now.

Today again, she failed. She didn't make any friends and she was still as social as she was yesterday. She hoped that the Sun she always asked for advice wouldn't lose interest in her and keep responding to her emails even if she made no progress since they started talking. Seulgi was still bad at human interactions and she couldn't grasp how people made friends so easily.

Gym class terrorized her at first because she had heard from her mother that they only played team sports during the second year of high school in this school. Back in Japan, the sports proposed by the school were more individual like track and field or swimming but here, Seulgi needed to talk. And it's not because she had forgotten her Korean or because transferring into a new school where everyone already knew each other was a challenge in itself, but Seulgi was just never really good at making the first step.

The first week, everyone was so nice with her, asking her where she lived in Japan and why she left in the first place. But when they got their answers and realized she wasn't as interesting or as friendly as she seemed, they started to lose interest. Seulgi didn't hold them accountable for it because she would also get tired of someone who couldn't keep up with a conversation without answering with really short answers or constantly stuttering out of nervousness.

Just like that, she lost her chance to make friends during the first month in her new Korean high school. Although she got used to it, it was pretty sad to eat lunch alone, spend self teaching hours actually studying because she had no one to talk to, do the stretching in gym class with the wall and worst of all: going home on her own. That's when she felt the loneliest.

It was only recently that Seulgi started to see her walk back home positively after meeting Sun and listening to his song recommendations every time. He (if she was indeed talking to a man because she still wasn't sure) had a really good music taste and somehow always found the right tune to make her days better. Sun didn't know her well nor had she told him her music taste (she couldn't find the strength to tell him that she never really listened to any music and could only recognize the few anime opening songs that passed early in the morning back in Japan) but he always found the perfect song. He was a genius, that she was sure of it. And she was thankful to have randomly found him on a weird anonymous forum for teens going through identity crisis. Generation Joy, that's what it was called if she remembered correctly.

It was a running joke on the site that nobody was going through any identity crisis and that most accounts were probably just old men lurking for young girls, but Seulgi had decided to trust the smiley sun icon on the "Arts and Outcasts" inter-talk last month even if her mom would have put a restriction on the Wifi and confiscated Seulgi's phone just for the possibility of this being true. Sun was a gold member who was allowed to start forums and he had created Arts and Outcasts for people like him who liked arts or who needed advices for trying to make friends. He was funny, he answered to everyone no matter how ridiculous their situation was and even took time to write a few poems for the forum when he felt inspired. He was indeed like a ray of sunshine in Seulgi's gloomy life. She thought that if she could get advices from him, then maybe she would enjoy her second year of high school.

So she sent him an email. It was pretty clumsy and she was scared to talk to him one-on-one, privately and without any way to escape, but she still did because she was tired of pretending to be okay. Seulgi wasn't and she was tired of sobbing because she had been the last chosen to enter the volleyball team again or because she couldn't stop stressing every time a teacher decided to do a team project instead of a test. It was bad to the point where she thought of telling her mom to stop asking her if she liked her new school and to stop pressuring her into talking about the (fictive) friends she made during lunch time. Those friends were just as real as the Easter bunny and Cinderella except that Seulgi could see these characters in the chocolate eggs for children she bought in the convenience store after school. While the friends, they only existed in her mind.

Thankfully her friend Sun was there for her everyday and even if she couldn't see him, she felt his presence through his words. He might be fake too but she didn't care. "Althought the Sun is far away from Earth, it still finds a way to give it warmth every day."

That's what he told her and she believed him.

Seulgi smiled at the thought of her virtual friend already busying himself with another song recommendation for her. He couldn't be fake.

As for now, her chemistry homework was very much real and she needed to get it done for tomorrow.

X Y Z

"Taeyong would you come down to help your brother set the table? Breakfast is almost ready."

"Yes Mom, two seconds," Taeyong answered back as he read over the email that he hadn't found the time to read last night. It was from Seulgi.

And she seemed pretty down as usual.

Taeyong, or Tae for the intimates, never really understood why she felt the need to apologize to him whenever she didn't succeed at applying his advices. Seulgi didn't need to apologize at all and the last person she should apologize to would be him but she still did every time. Taeyong never forced people to get out of their comfort zone or recommend them actions he didn't think they were able to do on their own so he never really thought further about it when the response wasn't so great. Usually he would shrug it off and propose another method to any outcast. But Seulgi was different: if she did something bad, she would get down pretty easily and she would constantly apologize. She would also blame herself and see the whole situation very negatively. Taeyong feared that she would give up at some point and settle for spending what were supposed to be the most beautiful years of her life alone. That's why he paid special attention to her.

Taeyong started.

"Dear Seulgi,

I am sorry for not responding yesterday as usual. My after school basketball practice took longer than expected because we have a