It had been 6 years since then and you were now living by yourself in an apartment in Busan. You worked as an artist for local galleries and owned your own studio where you could lose yourself in your work. Your life was quiet and peaceful, although there were times where you felt a little alone. You had good friends but it’s not like you worked in an environment where you could see co-workers/friends on a daily basis. Your life as an artist was lonely. The only time you got to hang out with people was on weekends when you weren’t working on projects for the galleries, and even then you were always thinking of new designs and ideas to put down in the canvas. It’s not like you had a choice though. You needed to make sure that all of your work was unique enough for people to buy it. Even though there wasn’t much competition in your area when it came to art, the buyers were still picky and you knew they had other connections. And that meant that you would lose out on business.

One evening you had attended a big art showroom and one of the workers at the gallery had offered to take you out dinner. You turned the man down and made up an excuse that you had a terrible headache and needed to go home. You acted to the best of your abilities and in the end he offered to take you home and refused to take no for an answer. You felt bad about lying to him and agreed for him to take you. It’s not that you didn’t like him, in fact he was actually one of your friends at the gallery, it’s just that you weren’t looking for anyone at the moment. You blamed this logic for your loneliness, but at the back of your mind you felt like life had something better planned for you. You knew that you sounded like a fairytale, but you really did believe that there was someone out there who was going to lift your feet off of the ground. And the creepy thing about the feeling was that you felt like you had already met that person.

Once home, you plopped yourself onto your couch in front of the TV. Even though it was a long day for you, you had the sudden urge to play a video game. You knew that you were an adult now, and playing video games was something you tried to grow out of, but you were feeling nostalgic and wanted to play anyway. You searched for your old game controller and hooked it up to the large screen along with the game console. Once everything was set up you logged onto to your old account. You were surprised that you still remembered your old username and password. The TV made a familiar sound which indicated that you were completely set up and ready to play, the only thing left was deciding on which game to play. You went through all of your old games, and there were a lot. You had almost every popular game on file from Mario Smash Bros to the whole collection of Final Fantasy games. Seeing all of the games you used to play made you realize that you had changed a lot in the past couple of years, it was almost as if those years were a completely blur. You had even forgotten why you purposely left all of those memories behind. All you recalled was that they were a big part of your life growing up. And right now you wanted to bring that little tomboy back.

You decided to play Assassin’s Creed since there was still a lot for you to complete in the game. You played for about an hour before you began to grow bored of the game. It wasn’t as interesting as it was when you were a teenager. You put the controller down and sighed. You wanted a challenging game that could bring back that excitement that you used to get. Suddenly you remembered about online battles and how much satisfaction you used to get whenever you would win against someone from across the globe. You figured that the best game for online battles was Star Craft. So you quickly got out your laptop and pulled out the login page for Star Craft. You had completely forgotten your old username and password and cursed yourself for having different passwords for almost every account when you were younger. After the 11^th try you gave up and just made a new account.

Username: Smalllove

Password: **********

After you were all set up you skipped all of the instructions and went straight on to the game. You thought that since it had been a while, you should play the actual game to give yourself a tutorial before you jumped into the online battles. After about 10 minutes, you realized that you remembered more than you thought, so you saved your game and then went back to the main menu to click on online battles. You waited for the computer to match you up with a random opponent. It took a while since your connection was slow, but after about 5 minutes you were finally matched up with another user. The user was from Korea and you wondered what person would be logged onto the game that late at night. But then you remembered that you were no one to talk because not only were you on at such a late time, but you were also a grown woman playing an online game designed for teenage boys.

Deciding not to judge the other player, you were about to click on the accept button when something else had caught your attention. For some reason, you eyes went straight to the username. You were shocked and had to rub your eyes to make sure you weren’t seeing things due to your lack of sleep. But sure enough, it said “GamerKyu”. You became tense as you felt like something had just crashed in your chest with the weight of a thousand bricks. You never thought you would come across that name in years and suddenly you remembered the last time you had seen that boy. You remembered why you let go of all the things you did as a child, and you remembered why you wanted to let of the friendship that you once held so close to your heart. You weren’t sure if you were ready to let all of that back into your life. You weren’t sure if you wanted to go back to living in sweet memories. You were scared that all of those memories would make you want to go back, and then you would end up longing for something that was already gone. And all of this came to you because of that one username.

But then you told yourself that it was just one harmless game. You told yourself that it was just another elf that happened to be a fan of that man and used that as their username. You also told yourself that even if it was him, he wouldn’t even know it was you because you had a different name. You figured that there was no way he would come back into your life and that one little game online wouldn’t change your life. So you clicked the accept button and played the game.