It is around seven in the morning, I have finished the pre-recording for [BLAME] and I am preparing to record the performance of [New Me]. Inkigayo is the last music program of the week but I will have a recording all next week too so it doesn’t feel like the week is coming to an end. I don’t feel too tired, but I somehow feel exhausted. Singing in the morning is the worst thing, you can ask any singer in the world and they would say the same thing. Today’s outfit is the same I wore in the music video; a burgundy patterned lace skirt set. It was the one I said at the music video set looks the best but is the kind of outfit you only wear once. To the burgundy dress I am wearing a pair of black suede platform heels, golden bracelets and in my mirror reflection I am grimacing at myself. “It looks y.” “I should wear a coat or something,” I mutter at Yong Hyun’s comment. He is with me today, Mi Young is here too, and while I am happy to have the two of them around I am tired and in a bad mood because my stomach is upset with me because I am not eating. I have been awake for hours and my body wants something to live on and I can’t wait for the pre-recording to be over so I can eat. After what I have said I know my stylist is glaring at me, I don’t even have to see him to know he is. “It looks y on you, Hannah, don’t try to turn down my clothes now,” Yong Hyun tell me. I grimace at my mirror reflection though, breathing in and out to see my stomach move. “Can’t I wear a potato bag or something instead? Who says tight clothes have to be y?” I comment. “I’m sure you could make a potato bag look y too, darling,” Yong Hyun answers with his head tilted on the side to look at me through our reflection. “Now what’s up with the bad mood?” If I say it is because I am hungry, they will just make me eat. “I’m sleepy,” I mutter, turning away to get my phone. “She’s upset,” Manager Lee answers, twirling around in a chair looking bored. Yong Hyun raises his eyebrows at him and I find myself trying to ignore them as much as possible. “Why is that?” Yong Hyun wonders. “Because we got KBS requesting modification in the lyrics of [New Me] or they won’t let her perform it on Music Bank starting next week.” Ah right, I had forgotten that. I groan so loudly at the reminder that KBS want one tiny line in my song changed. Yong Hyun looks like he doesn’t understand though and since my manager has brought it up, I give him a glare. “KBS has no problem playing the song on radio but they want the line that goes *I can kiss a boy and a girl – Someone play the music because we lost our mind* to be changed for live performances as it can seem offensive or invite people to different ualities or something.” Yong Hyun starts gaping at my bored explanation. “I love that part!” I love it too. “But Music Bank was two days ago, they had no problem with it then?” Yong Hyun remembers. “Some critic mentioned it in an article,” Manager Lee answers. “So KBS caught up on it and Hannah was sighing nonstop about it earlier.” “I love it though,” Yong Hyun tells me again. I love it too. “No one cares about that,” Manager Lee ruins it and I walk past him just so I can hit his hand. I am hungry. And when heading towards the stage I feel grumpy because of KBS and [New Me] and I wonder if my title track will vanish with critique and failure for not being as typical pop like [BLAME]. I wonder if I made a failure with this album and it is putting me in a bad mood, all because of that one request from KBS and the fact that I am starving and sleepy. “Out of all people here,” Shiwon keeps talking next to me, “I have never seen Hannah as a morning person but today … must take the price.” I sigh as his focus is on me. Why am I so tired suddenly? Why am I in such a bad mood and why are all eyes on me? Why is today different from yesterday? We get ready for the stage. Fans with their purple balloons are present and my smile is wide seeing them, and I had such troubles smiling on the way to the stage. I think fans have this power that makes it hard to not smile. “Hannah, how is your voice?” a fan asks me as we take our positions on the stage. “Slightly tired,” I honestly answer, and my smile grows when the crowd of fans gives out a matching pitying sound. “Just slightly tired, okay? We have worked hard this morning, have we not? Aren’t your voices tired from all the cheering?” “No~” my fans answers and I give them a grimace. “Liars,” I laugh. They do great though, like always, my fans never fail to show their undying support and their voices are loudly cheering as we record the performance for [New Me]. I keep questioning myself for why I decided to go overboard with the music for my first solo album; am I supposed to sing this song live every single day for two months? We record the song three times, live all three, with breaks in between to rest for a bit. My fans tell me to get enough rest and I tell them to rest too since they work even harder than me. I haven’t had that much work this week, it has mostly just been singing and singing and singing and my voice is already tired after four music programs. As soon as I am off the stage the smile is off. All I want is food and sleep and my large cardigan to hide underneath, and nothing can stop that because my pre-recording is done so there is five hours until the live broadcast of Inkigayo. I’ve got five hours to sleep and eat. “Baby!” Maria shouts out as soon as I step inside the dressing-room. It’s like my own personal bubble is stung by an angry wasp as I am met by a crowded room. My members, Kyung Ho and the camera crew for Good Sister is in the room now and among them is also Doctor Song sitting and waiting. I sigh at the sight of them all covering up in my room, this tired exhausted sigh, and I walk inside to take a seat to get the high heels off, to put on my slippers and cardigan and lean back with my eyes closed. “Tired?” “Mm…” “Hungry?” I open my eyes to tiredly look at Kyung Ho. The whole room smells like food. “We made breakfast,” he tells me. Without a word I roll my chair over to the table where my breakfast is waiting for me, and what is waiting for me is roasted bread, bacon, an egg, cucumber and some kind of beans. It smells delicious. “I made this,” Kyung Ho says and leans over the table to point at the bread and beans. “Emelia helped me with the rest. It was supposed to be sausage there too-” “Hey, boy,” Emelia laughs from the sofa. “No word about sausage, I said.” “We ate them,” Kyung Ho whispers to me and out of the blue behind me a cap suddenly flies by. Kyung Ho backs away from the table with a laugh and I turn around, gaping. “Emelia!” I burst out, opening my arms at the food, “What if you had hit my breakfast?!” “It’s a good thing I didn’t then,” she jokes with me, smiling widely. I don’t care that they ate the sausage, I’m just happy that when I put the food in my mouth it just melts on my tongue and I chew thorough, saving the flavours. Food tastes the best when you haven’t eaten in hours and your stomach is craving for ANYTHING. My breakfast is salty but it is really good, and not even Doctor Song ruins my appetite when she comes to sit down next to me. “How are you feeling?” she asks and out of the blue puts her fingers on my wrist. Because I was not prepared for it I am pretty fast to remove her hand, staring up at her as if she hurt me but as soon as I have done it I know why she put her fingers on my wrist. She was checking my pulse. “I’m sorry,” I whisper and keep my hand still so she can put her cold slim fingers on my wrist again. I look bored when she counts, I never really get it but she is doing her job and I don’t question it. “How are you feeling?” she repeats. “Hungry,” I answer, looking at the breakfast I have left. “Mood-swings?” she quietly asks. I look at Kyung Ho who has grabbed his bag to bring it to the sofa where Emelia and Carolina are sitting. The room is filled with chattering, no one focuses on me and Doctor Song, and I am happy my dancers are in here too as they are busy talking to Julia. Manager Lee sits down on the other side of the table where Kyung Ho just sat, and I know he does it to hear our conversation. It annoys me. Doctor Song moves over a writing pad next to my food, a pen too, as she writes down a question for me. ‘Do you want to talk in private?’ We are in a room filled with cameras and friends, yet the corner we are in tells me that there are only three people that will hear our conversation; Doctor Song, Manager Lee, and me. I shake my head. “I am tired and hungry, that’s why I got mood-swings, I know,” I tell her in a low voice. I do want Manager Lee to step away, but as my manager he will still be told by Doctor Song how I am later. I know the routines. “Causes for mood-swings can also be anxiousness and stress,” Doctor Song tells me. “Your body language tells me you are stressed.” “I am fine,” I mumble, staring at my food and I realise that I have not taken one single bite of it since she sat down next to me. Doctor Song gets quiet at my answer. I remember the times I have told Jonghyun that, “I am fine”, and he gets so mad at me because he knows whenever I say that, I am not fine. How could I be fine now? I am stressed because of my album and promotions, to manage my voice and to wear tight clothes and that I am here as the solo artist Hannah and not part of 5 Pieces. But Doctor Song is nothing like Jonghyun. “Finish your breakfast,” she tells me, “Then you can try getting some sleep.” I really don’t like that she tells me what to do, and especially since it is exactly what I am planning on doing, but since she is done talking I take my food and rolls over to the sofa in my chair to join my ladies and Kyung Ho in their conversations. Breakfast is over quickly once I listen to my friends’ conversations and once I am done eating, I go to use the bathroom and when coming back I grab a tablet and earphones and makes a corner for myself on the floor. I am sitting on two blankets, leaning against the wall and armrest of the sofa, and though Kyung Ho and my members are here they are not bothered by me sitting in the corner to get some rest. Even Kyung Ho lets me be. But I don’t close my eyes, instead I look through the performances from earlier this weekend and I look through different things about my comeback. About yesterday’s Music Core, my fans are congratulating me for winning and saying the stage was really good. Fans seems happy with the comeback stages, I have had a lot of fans commenting that I look y and charismatic for the stage but for endings like yesterday when [BLAME] won first, I am a different person. I don’t know which side they like the best; the performance version of me or the shyly smiling, thankful version of me. The responses for my stages are good, but there are other things that fans talk about online. Jonghyun and Hannah, Hannah and Jonghyun – what better is there for fans than having a real life couple promoting at the same time? They have kept searching for some moments between us and that is exactly what Jonghyun has been giving them at the ending stages of the music programs. Seeing the comments online I wonder if he does it on purpose. Is he playing around for the fans? What would happen if our fans found out we have broken up? The comments are mixed, some are tired of us and telling us to focus on our music instead while others wish for more lovely moments. One simple sentence from a fan-account has written ‘at Music Core ending, Jonghyun had his hands on Hannah’s shoulders and they were smiling while quietly talking, it was lovely’ has been spreading around online on different sites, other fans re-blogging it and adding their own comment to it saying they wished there were pictures of it and hoping to get more moments like that. I wonder what we are, me and Jonghyun. We aren’t a couple anymore, but we haven’t told the public about it so does that mean we are an act for media and our fans? I don’t even know what to make of it. Eventually my eyes are forced close as my will to look around on the tablet fades and I lean towards the wall to hide from the bright light in the room, and from curious eyes and cameras wondering if I have fallen asleep. I don’t fall asleep. It is impossible to fall asleep because the sofa keeps moving against my back, sudden screams surprises me and my mind is a mess with thoughts that I can’t calm down. While sitting there in my corner getting annoyed for not falling asleep while I have the chance, someone sits down in front of me, along the wall. I pretend to sleep, not knowing who it is or what this person wants. The tablet I have lightly been holding on to is carefully taken out of my hands, the earphones in my ear is still connected to it but the person just moves the tablet a bit to do something on it, leaning it on my legs while not unplugging it. My own voice is suddenly heard through the earphones and the tablet glides back into my hands. I look up hearing my voice, and it is Emelia sitting in front of me with a smirk. “Watch it,” she says and points at the tablet. Looking at the tablet I see she has taken out a video on YouTube, completely black but with white letter writing in Korean and translating to English the video says the words I’m speaking. It is a reaction video by two international fans, where they watch my comeback stage on yesterday’s Music Core. The words I say in the video are from an interview where I say “the album title is NEW ME because I wish to show new sides of myself”. I look at the video, seeing the two girls in the video talk in English and constantly burst out with “OH!” and “AH!” in their reactions. They even say “life as we knew it is over” and when they watch the [New Me] performance they say “her eyes! Her eyes are mesmerising!” Then I look up at Emelia, just to see her smiling widely out in the room and I know I am smiling too. Back in the reaction video the two girls suddenly starts screaming; it is the chorus playing. “How can she move her hips like that?” they comment. I notice one thing though; for [BLAME] at first they were commenting and moving along, knowing the song, but for the [New Me] performance they are quiet just to suddenly burst out things. I don’t know why Emelia shows this to me, but it is pretty hard not to smile. “I’m good, ye?” Emelia asks me, pushing my leg a bit. I put down one of the earphones to hear her. “You are in a better mood now,” she says as a statement. Yes, I am. I am still tired but I am in a better mood. Emelia looks so satisfied with herself, as if she can see straight through me. Emelia has that. We don’t need to talk the two of us to understand each other, with Maria I am always talking but with Emelia there is no need to use words. She takes the tablet from me again, and I smilingly close my eyes when she starts playing old classic songs she always used to listen to when we were kids, telling me to get some sleep. I might have fallen asleep briefly, for a few minutes, while Emelia is playing on the tablet and sending music to my ears, until I give up on sleeping to instead taking my phone in hand to see what text messages I have received. One from Sunny, one from Hyejong, one from an unknown number and two messages from Jonghyun – isn’t Jonghyun coming to Inkigayo today? Why would he text me? I write to Sunny first before checking what Jonghyun has written. I was right; he is here, he writes that my room seems crowded and wondering if it is okay for him to come over. He wants to see Kyung Ho. I write back that Kyung Ho still doesn’t know that we have broken up, and that Kyung Ho would be happy if Jonghyun came over. I would be happy too, I think, and awkward, but I would get to see him a bit more so what else is there to say? And that means I have to leave my corner. I am okay with that because I am hungry again; I should eat small meals often, not big meals less time