Whenever we talk, you always tell me about the interesting things you do. Your life seems like it’s made to shine. You seem like the people that I’d be writing stories about, like some sort of fictional character that I could only dream of creating.

But you’re real.

“What are you up to?” you ask sometimes. “Writing anything new as of late?”

Hesitantly, I think back to the words I hastily typed out yesterday, the ones that are sitting on my computer as I thought about you. I thought about your face, your laugh, your smile. I thought about how passionate and loving you looked when you sang and danced, how you looked at your fans like they were the whole world.

And I realized that, no matter what I wrote, no matter how much of my soul I poured into my work, it would never match up to how your songs have touched so many people.

After all, you’re Lee Jihoon, the leader of Seventeen’s vocal team, and I’m just Kim Sohee, a lowly college student who dreams of writing a bestselling novel.

So, after what seems like hours of hesitation, I shake my head with a sad smile. “I haven’t had much inspiration as of late,” I admit, forcing myself to make it sound like a confession, even though it’s the hardest lie I’ve ever had to tell.

You look at me with so much sympathy that my heart starts to feel heavy.

“You’ll be fine. Let me read what you have when you’re done, okay?”

Even though I nod, I know, in my heart of hearts, you’ll never be able to read any of my stories. Not when the main source of my inspiration is you.

---

How many times have you listened to me bounce ideas off of you? How many times have I bored you to death with the worlds I’m trying to develop? How many days have I spent worrying about my future, about what will happen if I just can’t seem to write one day?

You tell me, “I’m sure you’re talented. You’ll be fine,” with the most reassuring look on your face and the gentlest tone possible in your voice.

But you’ve never read what I’ve written.

I hope you never will.

I’ve written stories about you. I’ve written dramas where you get to be the hero and save the girl, tragedies where you lose her in some awful twist of fate, and comedies where you finally get to enjoy life and find the love I know you deserve.

But if you were ever to see this, I’m not sure what would happen to us.

Would you know how deeply my feelings run for you?

I’m scared of if that happens.

For five years, I’ve been with you. I’ve been watching you grow as an artist and as a person. For the past two years, I’ve been watching other people fall in love with you, people who have never even met you, who don’t even know the real you.

Maybe I’m just jealous, but I was here first. You know me as well as you know your own family, and I know you better than any of those girls.

I know that you love cats more than dogs, but you can’t own any pets because you can’t even keep a plant alive. I know that you get angry at your members for flooding your computer with useless downloads and games. I know that you hate dressing fancy for anything because it feels like you can’t breathe if your shirt isn’t loose and soft. I know you love English music, even if you can’t understand it, because all that matters is that the beat sounds unique.

I know you better than your fans.

But I know I’m not as good as many of them.

Your fans are so beautiful and intelligent, and they dedicate all that they have to you. I refuse to put you before or after my dreams. I can’t decide when both things are so precious to me.

I want to tell you that you are the hero in my stories and I will be the heroine. Whether that be a princess or assassin or a girl whose life ends a little too soon, you will know it’s me because of the way I know I look at you, because of how similar it is to the way she looks at him.

It’s why I look away so often whenever our eyes meet.

Please don’t look at me like I’ve hurt you when I do that. I just don’t want you to see how much I love you.

---

I always knew you were someone special.

From the day we met, you’d always been a bit different than everyone else. You never liked going out during breaks or socializing with other kids. It’d always been the two of us, silently sitting in the classroom, working on something or other.

For you, it’d started with poetry.

You’d loved the way that the words just flowed, like water down a stream. You called it “effortlessly beautiful,” and began to mimic the styles of every poet you found. You fell in love with the rhythm of the words on the page, the way they sounded like a song when read aloud.

Which led you to music.

The first time you played me a song you’d written, it was in elementary school. You’d made it on your home computer, one that was slow and old, but it didn’t matter to you. You had made it using household objects, things you found just lying around, but it somehow came out sounding professional. All this with no professional training. At that time, you hadn’t even been able to read music yet.

“This is so good!” I told you, smiling as widely as I could.

I loved the way your face lit up as I complimented you. You continued to play it on the iPod you clutched in your hands, the ones that were much smaller than they are now.

A day later, you picked up the piano and the guitar, and you started reading sheet music. You threw yourself into your passion, which had gone from poetry to music. You were determined to put your words to a song, to spread them as far as sound could travel.

You picked instruments up so fast that it was almost scary.

I never had to work as hard as you did.

All I did as we sat in that empty classroom together, while you were writing down words and notes into your precious notebook, was read novels upon novels. Words were familiar to me in a way music would never be.

After all, supporting you in your dreams was all I needed to do back then in order to be happy.

---

The mornings have been the same every day since I dropped out of school.

It’s the same routine: get up, make breakfast and coffee, eat while reading the news, get another cup of coffee, and stare at the computer for hours on end until the morning turns into afternoon.

Life is the same. It was okay with me until I saw you again. You’re a superstar now, getting ready for your big comeback. You’ve got songs to produce, videos to shoot, and photos to take. You have a different schedule every day, and you only see a few people constantly. Everyone else is a new face every single day.

I don’t stare at my computer today.

Instead, I put my hands over the keyboard, eyes flickering to the outline of a story I’d written down months ago and hung on my wall. I press down on each key, hoping that coherent words come out and embed themselves onto the document somehow.

I’m surprisingly doing well.

But then, after I get my fifth cup of coffee for the morning, I sit down and read what I’ve written in such a short amount of time.

I hate it.

Anger and frustration wells up in my stomach, and I immediately exit out of the document, knowing that the words I hate so much are now saved somewhere on my hard drive. I sigh, leaning back in my chair, the coffee I put on my desk long forgotten.

I know I’m crying again, but I can’t help it.

Nothing new has come from me in what feels like years. I haven’t been able to write anything I’ve been happy with in an eternity, and it’s slowly killing me inside.

You’re somewhere right now, doing things that only someone who’s made it can do.

I begin to wonder if there’s any way that I can catch up.

---

You got accepted into Pledis off of pure talent and hard work.

You trained for years alongside dozens of different people, all of them hoping to achieve the same dream as you. Yet you always stood out of whatever group you were placed in, showcasing talent and drive that was far greater than those of the other trainees.

Sometimes, people got jealous of you and your talent, the musicality that seemed to come naturally to you. You’d been the object of harassment many times, being told that you’d never be an idol with your looks. The people who told you that never lasted long in the company.

You always told me that, if you were patient and hard-working, your time would eventually come.

It was supposed to come with the group that debuted before yours. You never told me exactly what happened, but the group that was supposed to have seven people was cut to five, you and one of your friends being cut and told that you’d debut in another group later.

The day that you’d been told that, you were so disappointed. You were convinced that you’d done something wrong, that the boss had cut you for not being good enough.

“You’re the best, Jihoon, and they know it,” I said to you as I held you, your tears soaking into my shirt. “They probably want you to be a leader, right? Because your friends were all leaders, and you were the youngest in that group, right?”

You nodded into my shoulder, trying to stifle your sobs.

Although I knew you were upset, and I didn’t want to take advantage of you, I couldn’t help the happiness I felt as you clung to me like a lifeline. I wanted you to depend on me, even as you grew closer and closer to your dream.

In that moment though, it felt like nothing had changed, and we were still two kids with big dreams and no way to achieve them.

It felt like it was just us.

---

There was a time I thought we’d be on the same page - end up in the same place, one way or another. I thought that we’d both be “artists,” putting our work out into the world for people to see it. But I was wrong, so very wrong, and I don’t know where my prediction, my dream, went so off the rails that it had no chance of ever being on the right track again.

You and your twelve bandmates put on a show today, your first show of, what feels like, so many more to come. You stood onstage, singing and dancing with the widest smile on your face. You seemed alive, more so than I’d seen you in a long time.

In the crowd, there were screaming, adoring fans who knew your names and who knew your music, even if it hasn’t been released yet. They chanted your names to the rhythm and sang along to the melodies of each song, knowing most of the lyrics somehow.

I wanted to tell them that I knew the words, too.

You read them to me like lullabies.

Those words you read were so pure, so heartfelt. But when they were being sung, put to music, they felt like art. They were being shared with so many people now. It’s no longer just me who knows these words, who knows what you’re trying to say in the deepest part of your heart.

From now on, you’re going to share those words, the ones you spoke in a whisper as you wrote them down at three in the morning, with the world.

There’s no place for me anymore, is there?

You’re still trying to make room, though. You noticed that I wasn’t there after the second song, sitting in the seat you’d reserved for me.

Somehow, in that sea of people, you picked out my absence.

“Are you okay?” your text read. “I tried to find you, but you were gone.”

As I read that, I couldn’t help the bitterness that overtook my heart, squeezing it, encasing it, like a curse or a disease. I wanted to tell you that “it doesn’t matter that I’m not there, I’m just one person,” but I couldn’t. I wanted to cling to the belief that I was still special and that I still had a place alongside you.

So instead, I wrote back, “I had a migraine, it was too loud. Sorry. I’ll watch the rest online, promise.”

You texted back almost immediately, but I didn’t have the heart to read it.

Instead, I spent the next few hours in front of the computer, staring at the blank document, the blinking cursor practically taunting me as I struggled to move my fingers against the keyboard.

Putting words to paper was much harder than you made it seem.

---

You sit next to me on the bus, taking public transportation like you’re a regular person. I know it’s a lie, though, because of how many girls seem to do double takes, even though you’re hiding your neon yellow hair underneath a ratty baseball cap you’ve had for years and hiding your face behind a mask, the kind that people wear when they’re sick.

“You haven’t talked about your writing lately,” you say, a hopeful tone to your voice. “I heard your last piece placed second. That’s really impressive, but why didn’t you tell me?”

I want to tell you it’s because of how long it took me to write it. I want to tell you that it’s because of how many times it was rejected. I want to tell you that it’s because of how just writing that short piece made me cry myself to sleep.

I want to tell you that it’s because I was trying to hide the story about a girl who fell in love with the famous boy who used to live next door to her.

I want to tell you that it’s because I hate that piece with every part of my being.

Instead, I shrug. “It slipped my mind,” is the only excuse I can come up with.

You stare at me for a moment, your eyes telling me that you don’t really believe me.

“Okay,” you say.

Nothing more.

---

The songs you wrote earned you awards. Nominations, recognition.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t written anything in three months. The blank canvas was taunting me still, telling me that I needed to work that much harder as an artist.

Every time I put down one word,