June 2007

    I remember logging in our own fan cafe that late night in June. I was supposed to sleep early because we have to prepared for our new album. We were all supposed to.

    But it was a sleepless night. For everyone in our dorm.

    Our dorm, like I said earlier, was cheap. And the walls were so thin we could hear each other even we were in different rooms. I slept alone in the tiniest room among my not so many clothes.

    That night, I was using our manager’s laptop to look at forums. There were over 30,000 people in fan cafe. But something was going on, to be exact, something was not going on. We were slowly losing popularity which came from the Bigbang Documentary hype last year. Our songs did okay, but they weren’t popular enough to bring fame to a rookie group like us.

    While I scrolled the page up and down. I heard it.

    I heard a short melody from the Nail Nibbler room.

    It was short but it was damn catchy. I couldn’t get it out of my head, I decided to get up, walked to his room and knocked just for that one melody.

    “Why are you here? What do you want?”

    I told you. The Nail Nibbler wasn’t the friendliest person in the world.

    “Err, I can’t sleep. What are you doing?”

    Plus he had said he didn’t know what to feel about me.

    “Oh, you should really sleep. We’re going to have a long day tomorrow.” he didn’t answer what I asked. It’s obvious he planned to stay up all night writing songs.

    Back then, we all knew how much he liked writing songs. What we didn’t know is that he’s going to be so famous because of it.

    I was uninvited. He wanted me to go to bed, to get out of his  room, to not hear his new work, to not be the first person to hear this melody. I guess I was a ing stubborn fool who pretended not to notice any of his hint. Not even his oh-get-the--out expression.

    I blurted out. Like a fool that I was. Or am.

    “That melody. It sticks.”

    “What?”

    “Can you played it again? Can I hear it please?”

“You’re such a weird kid” to my surprise, he laughed and turn around to play it for me. And it was as unforgettable as the first time I hear it. The kind of melancholic piano notes that sounded similar but you couldn’t remember it because you actually haven’t heard it before. I played an invisible piano on his drawer unconsciously and stopped when realised that the composer saw it. 

    “What do you think?”

    He narrowed his already small eyes, stared at the laptop monitor.