Hey Notebook

Chapter 7

Solar

                Destiny is something you can’t change, something that you won’t ever rewrite or rewind. It is something that will always be there, and is something that is already scripted by Cupid. I know I was not Jung Eunji’s destiny. In fact, I also know that we will never be more than ‘best friends’. But I guess I was destined to confess to my love to her… maybe that was the destiny intended for me.

                Back when we were kids, Eunji indeed have that shot term memory loss problem. It was something that is there, but never major that we thought it didn’t need doctor’s help. I was always by Eunji’s side throughout elementary days… not until high school happened and she decided to transfer schools. It broke me a little inside, and no one knew how I missed her bad. I guess, that’s when I realized that I fell for her, I fell for my best friend…

                And that scared me…

                Because I know Eunji… I know she can easily forget, even her feelings… I know during her high school days, she was really having fun. I know she found a new family, a love that sparks inside her heart. We rarely met at those years. Probably just thrice a year? She was so busy at school and I was worse because I can’t even come on the moments I promised her we would meet. I remembered how many birthdays came into her life that I promised to hang out with her but I’ll end up bailing out. I felt so bad about it but I was never given the chance to make up for it.

                No, I was given a chance when we were reunited in Italy. However, she has somehow changed.

                When we first met, she was so happy… we ended up living in the same dorm and like when we were kids; I was the older one who will look after her. But as days passed, I realized that nothing can really go back to normal. I can see her looking to that same picture over and over again, with those girls… I’ve heard her scream many times how she missed her old classmates, her family, that somehow it broke me inside seeing her miss someone else. She cares about them so much…

                And I know… I know that she has special feelings especially to that girl named Son Naeun, although she would barely admit it.

                And then that day happened… the secret only I remembered… a memory Eunji has kept inside a box.

                “Solar… do you think I should forget her?” Seventeen year old Jung Eunji asked me after a year, finally.

                “Forget who?” I pretended to not know although the answer was quite obvious.

                “Son Naeun.”

                When she said her name, the way those words went out of , I can easily say she was suffering, from missing her, from the sadness it caused. And I came to realize how that girl meant the world for her. I was jealous of it. Because she never see me as someone as deep as her feelings for that girl.

                “Why…? I know you miss her but don’t you have happy memories about her that you want to remember?” I asked despite the feeling of something heavy in my heart.

                She nods instantly and smiles, as if the memories were too sweet to notice…

                “There were a lot… like how childish she could be at time and then so cold the next… or how she was so weird and her little obsession with potatoes… even her type of songs and favorite artists… and even when she just smiles at me, it was a perfect memory I want to remember always…”

                “Then why do you want to forget her…?”

                That’s when she looked at me and smiled. “Because I felt that it was illegal for me to miss her.”

                Eunji always has a different way of thinking, something I am amazed and sometimes creeped at too.

                “I felt that it was illegal for me to miss her, when I haven’t dared to accept her heart… I felt like a criminal for making her like me, when leaving her hurts so much enough…” then she faced me… “I felt like a sinner for harboring these feelings inside of me when it was me who decided to leave her behind…”

                “Does it hurt… that much?”

                She nodded her head, “I wanna love her real. Someday, if I were to meet her again, I wanna do that, I wanna love her without any reason and just do. I wanna like her not because she was a past friend who made me feel all those fluttering feelings. I wanna meet her again, in a different time, in a different place, and at that time, I wanna love her for who she was, without any reason, and without any memories of her that could affect my heart.”

                That was when she did, when she started forgetting everything about Son Naeun slowly and slowly. I thought it was silly at first, but then as days passed, weeks, months, and years… I came to realize her reason.

                Every time I see her now with that Son Naeun, and how she would smile unknowingly despite all the sadness and emptiness she felt from her family, I can’t help but be relieved. Jung Eunji just want to love her, to make a huge effort to prove it, without a reason or a memory to hold unto that would tell her she have to make that effort. She wants to win Son Naeun’s heart, like it was the first time she fell in love with her, like it was an innocent love she once felt…

                She wants to love Son Naeun, as if she was the only one she has ever loved in her life…

                And like what she must’ve expected years ago, it is now slowly happening… She was falling in love over again…

                “Thinking of Jung Eunji once again, huh?” A man’s voice asked me as he took the casual seat next to me in the library of the university. I didn’t have to look up anymore. Here he was again.

                “What is it this time, Lee Jinki?”

                “Yah… You can just call me Onew…” He asked playfully while eating a burger happily, devouring large bites of it.

                I just end up shaking my head before passing him a tissue. “Eat well, you idiot… I’m going after Twelve for a moment…”

                I was about to walk away when he spoke once again.

                “You do know that it was Twelve who told me everything, right? That good for nothing friend of yours hahaha. He’s a great at basketball at least...”

                Smacking his head once, “Yah… do you go and keep ruining people’s business… Who told you to be a busy body, anyway?!”

                “Yah! That was all my character in this thing! A busy body!”

                “Oh never mind….”

                He was about to go too when he stopped and breathed out his last words. “Loving your best friend is hard, huh? You do know that is something you should’ve stopped.”

                “Yes. I love her… but