January 2017

“Do you know that feeling when you are lost and can’t find your way  back home?”  Park Chanyeol asked as he touched his bruised face.  The waves of the ocean ravaged the rocks beneath him.  Chanyeol took a deep breath.  He noticed that his camel oversized sweater with a broken heart was tattered.  This isn’t real.    This feeling he had inside him seemed far away like a mirage on a deserted island.  Before the director yelled cut, Chanyeol asked to be excused from the Missing 9 set.  Was he the selfish one?  Had he forgotten how to love?   He thought about Nana and how much of a loser he had become over the past few months.  He regretted his actions. He should have stopped his ex-girlfriend before going public with her past.  Because of him, Nana was no longer an idol.  

Chanyeol looked at his saddened eyes in the mirror.  His cuts and makeup scrapes melted on his skin.  He thought about his character, Lee Yeol.   His character was a clown just like him stuck with his thoughts of loneliness.  Why did he smile when he needed to survive on a deserted island? Park Chanyeol smirked.   He was as powerless as the character he played.

He was a friend to Nana and he couldn’t protect her from the gossip spread on Dispatch.  He wanted for her to care for him and to love him as much or even more than she loved Choi Seunghyun; Park Chanyeol was a loser and he knew it.  

After eight hours on set, he drove home, took a shower and dressed for the musical.  He sat front row next to Woozi from Seventeen.  When the lights turned off, Woozi’s sneakers glowed in the dark.  He covered them with a Playbill since the fluorescence could distract the actors.  

Chanyeol watched as a clock ticked down time.  In the opening scene, a high school student appeared on stage and an actor threw a notebook on the desk with the words Death Note. Chanyeol’s thoughts turned back to the time in middle school when his parents flew to Italy to attend culinary school and he was left in care of his grandparents.  He used to read manga in the school library.  One day, a bully took his precious copy of Death Note and a girl named Nana protected him by taunting to write the bully’s name in her own death notebook.  He couldn’t stop thinking of her.  He liked Nana then, but he loved her now.

His daydream was interrupted by Junsu’s a hauntingly husky voice as detective L.

Woozi stood up for the ovation and Chanyeol followed but quickly sat down suddenly conscious of his own height.  He was still that same kid stuck in seventh grade.

Chanyeol and Woozi hurried backstage.  The pink-haired songwriter from Seventeen knocked on the white pine door of the dressing room like an eager fanboy waiting for the JYJ star.  

“It’s me Woozi and Chanyeol,”  he said.

Junsu wearing a white