A friend by definition is a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard. Therefore friendship is simply defined by ‘the state of being a friend’; a rather simple definition for something so intricate, fragile and intimate.

No individual friendship is ever alike. Some start before birth while others begin late in life. Some friendships are voluntary while others (like those between co-workers that don’t necessarily like each other) are forced. Some friendships begin through other friendships; others begin through an accidental bump into a total stranger on the subway. Some friends know everything about each other, while others know very little about the other’s past. Some friends make rude jokes while others would never risk saying something insulting. No matter what the unique friendship is like, one thing remains the same: friends have something in common.

In the case of Leeteuk, Ryewook, Zhou Mi and Heechul, their something in common is their own misery. The four weren’t introduced by a common friend, but instead a common pain: the pain of losing someone you love.

Lovers are often like friends. In fact, some say that your lover is your best friend. However, the difference between a lover and a friend is that the rules break. The things that you would never say to your friends; they are gone. The things that are blatantly obvious but ignorantly ignored are brought out in the open. With lovers there are no secrets. It is this openness that makes love so beautiful…and so painful.

Leeteuk, Ryewook, Zhou Mi and Heechul each have their own story. They are beautiful stories with unhappy endings. They are simple stories as it is not always the fairy tales that are the most heart wrenching. For normal people it isn’t fire breathing dragons or treacherous moats that keep them from those they love; it is life. It is everyday life that throws bricks at them as they go about their business. Most of the time those bricks miss and they continue on their way, but sometimes those bricks hit them and cause them to come crashing down.

Leeteuk, Ryewook, Zhou Mi and Heechul had all been hit by those bricks. They had come at them, unannounced and unwelcome, and destroyed a love that had been so treasured. Losing a lover is something that nobody wants to go through, but it is something that everybody deals with. Having someone and loving them, one’s life revolves around them, and often times it is difficult to know what to do when they are no longer there. Once they are gone however, one must relearn how to function without them as they had before the one they loved entered their life.

For these four boys, that’s what their friendship was: relearning how to live their lives. The four met because they lost the ones they loved, and their friendship brought them a kind of uncertain peace. They didn’t talk about their ex-lovers and nobody ever mentioned finding someone new. Instead they acted like nothing had ever happened. They laughed at each other’s’ jokes, whether they were funny or not, and went to movies. They visited the same bar and poked fun at the couples they saw there. They were friends. It was an odd friendship, a friendship that was created by a thin string of hurt, but a friendship none the less.