That all happened a year and three months ago.

The relationship ended in February. Krystal and Jongin went public with their relationship in April.

Sora left Korea in May.

She was a college student, and she’d planned to study abroad in Japan. She left a couple months earlier than the school year started, just for the heck of it. Her mother was Japanese, so speaking the language wasn’t a problem for her. She just wanted to get to know the land better. That, and she needed time away from Korea.

So she studied in Japan, and she studied hard.

She was an art student. She loved to draw, paint, and sing. Clay modeling was a lot of fun, and photography was something she had a real passion for.

But dancing was her true calling.

She’d been dancing for 15 years, but something happened while she was in Japan.

She’d been there for seven months, and she was just starting to get over Jongin. First semester exams were coming up, and the assignment was to come up with your own choreography and teach it to a small group of people. She already had her choreo, but as she went over it again and again, trying to perfect it like she always would, she seemed to get farther and farther from what she started with. One of the best young dancers in South Korea, lost her touch in Japan, and fell apart as she failed her exam.

She didn’t care about the exam, or her grade. That didn’t matter to her. What mattered was how she forgot how to dance.

She lost her rhythm the more she tried. She even called in her old teacher to help her, and try to guide her. Even he couldn’t do anything. The basic moves he gave her, she couldn’t do them like she used to. She was off-beat, awkward, and stiff. She would practice them over and over- no breaks. She never left the studio. She would pass out, and wake up just to keep going where she left off. She barely ate anything- she didn’t have time for that kind of thing. She spent her entire winter vacation working on retraining herself, only to get farther and farther from her end goal. She hurt herself multiple times- pulled a muscle, popped a wrist out, twisted her ankle, damaged her hip. But the pain meant nothing to her. What hurt more was that she lost something that she depended on.

Her dream was to be a dancer. She loved to dance. Dance was there for her when no one else was. Dance was how she could express herself, better with movement than with words. Dance was in her being. It was a part of her, it was in her soul.

And then it just faded away.

After that, she gave up. She did the minimal amount of work required to pass, even though everyone knew she was extremely smart, and capable of doing the work. She just didn’t feel like it. What was the point if she wasn’t even herself anymore?

She fell into a hole. As time went on, it became deeper and deeper. She barely passed her junior year in college, she lost contact with a lot of friends, and she didn’t smile anymore.

That was another thing about her that left. Her smile.

Sora was always smiling. It wasn’t ever a fake, plastic smile, either. She was always genuinely happy. For what, she didn’t know. For some reason, ever since she was little, she saw the good in things. She saw the positive, and literally looked on the bright side. She always tried to make someone else smile, too. She wanted to make people happy. She was all in all, a good person. But how could she be happy, or make others happy, when something that meant so much to her, simply faded away?

She lost her rhythm.

She lost her smile.

She lost someone she cared about for so long.

At that point, she wasn’t surprised if her heartbeat became irregular, since she couldn’t even stay on beat.

A shorter chapter, but I hope it provides more background for you.  Anticipate the next one~ :)