The first step of my bare feet on the wooden floor was met by a chord. What kind of chord that was, I couldn’t say; I had never busied myself with harmonics.
But I was sure that – no matter what kind of notes were faintly ringing through the dorm – there shouldn’t in fact be anything audible besides some light snoring and rustling of sheets at that moment. Because it was 3:28 AM and I thought I was the only one awake at this hour.
Originally I had wanted to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen to sooth my sore throat and wash some tiredness into my brain. But after getting up from my bed the notes and intervals had set in, and the chord progression had made me change the direction I was walking in.

I was curious.

So I shuffled to the very back of the dorm, where the piano was located in a small room with bad acoustic. Standing before the door, I waited for some time with my ear pressed against the wood. The song flowed along gradually, while the accompaniment was steady beneath the melody. Then suddenly the music was terminated by two wrong-sounding notes – an augmented forth or minor second or one of those terrible intervals – and silence settled in.
During the pause I tried to pry a look through the milk glass window, which was embedded in the door, but all I saw was blurry fog.
The silence was broken by the muffled sound of a pencil scratching over paper. Is he composing? I thought. Why is he sitting here in the dead of night and composes?
I had only ever seen him write lyrics.

“Jjong?” I called, and my breath made the milk glass even whiter because my mouth was pressed so close to it.
“Kibum.” It was a statement not question, so I only tried to push the door open, but it was locked.

“Wait.” he said and I heard some rustling followed by footsteps, then the sound of a key being turned in its lock.
The door was pushed open. I was a little confused as Jonghyun took my wrist and pulled me into the room, locking behind us.
The atmosphere was spectral. In the darkness, the walls seemed to shift in on us. Only the lamp on top of the piano was burning and cast a veil-like film on the wallpaper, claviature, and the messy sheet music.
I was overstrained with the sudden silence lingering between Jonghyun and me, so I pushed past him and made my way to the piano.
“Since when do you compose?” I asked him with a gaze at the scribbled notes.
“Since a few weeks.” He shrugged.

“Why didn’t I notice that?”
“Because I was composing at night, like I was doing just before you interrupted me.”
I sighed at his accusing intonation.
“You do realize that you need to sleep in order to look at least decent when we perform, don’t you?”
My back was still facing him, because he had remained near the door, but I could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Did I look bad to you, then?”
“Not… exactly.”
I didn’t particularly want to talk about Jonghyun’s appearance or about him in general, so I sat down on the stool in front of the instrument.

My abilities at playing the piano were limited, yet I was sure that I would at least be able to play the first few measures of Jjong’s piece.
I placed my fingers on the claviature, but just as I was about to hit the first key, Jjong interrupted me, quiet but definite, “Don’t play.”
“Why?” I asked, slightly taken aback by his tone of voice. “Do you think I’m not good enough for your oh-so challenging piece?”
“No, that’s not it.” I was suddenly aware that he was standing right behind me now. “Move.”

So I slid to the edge of the piano stool to give him some room, and he slumped down next to me.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked him, because piano stools weren’t exactly broad and our arms and hips were practically glued to each other.
Jonghyun looked at me and said with a slight shake of his head,
“Nothing, really. Just… when a piece isn’t finished it’s not ready to be played by someone else but the composer, because… it’s still raw. It only belongs to me now, I guess. Sorry.”
Normally I would have laughed at him for acting “like a crazy artist”, but his sincerity and wavering gaze made me flinch.
 I urgently wanted to escape the situation of staring at him silently while being in such close proximity. So I suggested,
“How about you play it then?”
“Do you want to hear it that badly?” he smirked.
Because every honest answer would have been more than embarrassing, I simply took his hands and placed them on the keys.
I had often seen how pianists stare at their fingers before they begin, but Jjong was actually shooting me a glance full of insecurity. (Or what else was it, vulnerability?)
His left hand struck the first note then, and rose slowly from the lower octaves. The first few measures had a melancholic feel to it; they were clearly composed in a minor key. Eventually, the melody layered over it; it sounded frail, almost breakable. I continued to listen to the flow of the song and how it swelled in volume and alternated between minor and major. My focus switched from his hands, which seemed inexorably fluid, to his eyes and face. He looked concentrated with his lips slightly parted, but beyond that, he had withdrawn himself from his surroundings, from me. His mind was with the music that he played, it had woven itself into the music. For me, it was the first time listening to someone playing their own composition, and that right next to me. And even though we were so close that his arm was pushing into my chest when his right hand moved to the higher registers, we were in different places. He was with the piano and I was here.

Even though the melody was simple and the harmonies incomplex, the music found its way through my ears and brain, and into my heart. I wondered if there was a positive word for “scar” because this song had clearly left something behind inside me.
When his fingers made the last chord resound inside the small room, I was slowly becoming aware of our surroundings again. And of the fact that my hands must have somehow come to rest on his knee while he was playing.
After blinking once, his gaze rose from the keys. “It’s not really finished yet, but anyway… How did you like it?”

Before I opened my mouth, I first removed my hands from his thigh.
“Why… don’t you write lyrics anymore but music without vocals?” This question had actually been on the tip of my tongue since I had first set eyes on his sheet music.
He made a sound which seemed like a mixture of laughing and sighing.
“Stop avoiding my question. I want to hear your opinion on the piece. You’re normally pretty eager to criticize everything I write. Tell me already.”
Before I was actually able to think of a not too revealing answer, I couldn’t help but notice how awkward it was talking to him like this. When I turned to speak with him, our arms and legs were touching, and our noses were separated by 30cm at the maximum. But he didn’t do anything about that, so I didn’t, either.
“Well, it’s a surprise that someone as simple-minded as you is able to create something at least halfway beautiful.”
A smile burst on Jonghyun’s face and I was absolutely captivated. By the way the single lamp created cast shadows on his face, which made it look like porcelain.
“You absolutely loved it, right?” he grinned and poked my cheek. “Right? Right?”
“Shut up.”
“Then I’ll show you more in the future.”
“Great.” I tried to sound annoyed by that idea, but failed.
I needed this conversation to keep going in order to avoid the silence that I dreaded because of some reason, so I repeated my question from before.
“Will you answer me now? Why do you write music without vocals?”
“Well, you know what all lyrics of our songs are about…”
“Love and girls.”
“Right. It is expected from me to write about those subjects, but you know, girls are not all I’m interested in. There’s so much more I’d wish to express. Still, lyrics that focus on other subjects would never be used for one of our songs. And if I’m not able to sing the words that I have written down, I can’t express the meaning I’ve put into them. So ultimately, I don’t get anything from writing lyrics. Plus, I think that instrumental music can convey certain feelings much more precisely even though it’s not that descriptive. So when I’ve got something on my mind I try to write music based on that emotion.”
He surprised me over and over with his sudden depth.
“So what did you think of when writing this song?” I pointed at the sheet music.
There was that sighing laugh again.
“I know that you’re a curious person, but do you seriously need to know everything?”
“Yes.” I answered plainly and looked at him with expecting eyes.
“Ah, well…”
Jonghyun seemed to be thinking as he placed his fingers back on the claviature and randomly struck a few keys. Then the melody from before was resounding again, even more prominent and clear without the chords as accompaniment.

It had completely imprinted on my eardrums.
After a while his hands stilled somewhere in the middle of the piece, one finger lingering on a black key.
“I was thinking of something like this… here, I guess…” He made a circling gesture with his hand.
That was a very vague answer. What did mean by “here”? “Something like this”? Even in this small room, there were countless impressions one could use for composing.
While deliberating, I still stared at his hands on the piano. Almost obstinately I kept my gaze there, because – from the corner of my eye – I could see that his face was now completely turned to me. The longer he observed me, the stronger the force became that held my head into place. It was like a cramp that kept me from turning.
I felt utterly alone in those few stretching seconds. Alone together with him. As if the two of us were caught in a capsule; as if we were cut off from everyone and everything around us.
The tension was finally too much for me to take, and I had to get out of this stupor. So I voiced the first thought that came to my mind,
“I’m tired.” Even though that was a stupid thing to say, that one sentence made the tension evaporate.
After I had heard Jonghyun exhale next to me, I was able to look at him again.
“Then go to bed.” he told me and seemed to have just slightly slumped on the stool.
“You should, too. We have training tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I will. Just go on ahead, I need to sweep up my stuff here.”
With a shrug of my shoulders, I turned around to get up from the piano stool, but felt his hand on my shoulder.
He remained silent, and so I felt the need to say something.
“I really liked the melody of your piece. It’s stuck in my head.” The music had in fact left a mark on me.
I couldn’t see if he was reacting in some way. As I stood up, his hand slid from the place where it was lingering and over my shoulder blades down to the small of my back.
With a smile on my face and that pleasant scar on my heart left by the melody, I closed the door behind me.
 

Jonghyun’s behavior the next morning made the previous night seem like a dream. He had gone back to acting like an inconsiderate little brother.

We clashed during breakfast. Jonghyun accused me of not having bought enough milk for his cereal. I snapped at him for being so childish, and so we argued about this triviality until the other members told us to stop it. After he had finally given up and shut his mouth, I stared at him with a depreciative glance. How could that guy turn from sincere and sensitive to nagging and moody in a matter of hours? While I looked at him munching on his dry cornflakes, I began to doubt that our meeting last night had ever taken place.
“What?” he asked me with his mouth full as he noticed my glare, but I just shook my head.

I was exasperated. Had I only imagined the tension between us? The strange expression in his eyes when he had looked at me? And how he seemed to avoid answering my questions?
I was almost at the point of accepting that my imagination had gotten the best of me and that I had overinterpreted his actions, but then I noticed that he was beating his spoon against the side of his bowl in a certain rhythm. I recognized it at once.
It was the rhythm of the melody he had played for me. The one that had become a part of me like a scar.

And at once it all came back to me in a sharp clarity: how Jonghyun’s fingers had glided over the claviature, how his face had looked as it was only illuminated by one lamp, and what he had said about writing the piece.
What he had thought about when writing it.
And now that the sound of his melody was flowing in my head and washed all my doubts away, I took into consideration that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t been thinking about something but someone.