Byun Baekhyun is my measurement scale for friendship in many ways.

For one, depending on my level of comfort with different people in my life, my relationship with Byun Baekhyun changes. 

To people whom I have just met, I say that Baekhyun is my overly clingy cousin who decided to move in with me after my parents retired early and left for Spain, leaving their daughter to the miserable struggles of working life in Seoul. Baekhyun, then, is my relative with a mutual care relationship. 

To my employer, Baekhyun is my long lost brother who has yet to enter the family book. That's why my documents indicate that I'm an only child but he's staying with me in the heart of the city we both work in. According to this version of the story, Baekhyun and I have a funny relationship of wanting to improve our sibling relationship for the sake of our parents, but we're still slightly awkward. So we each gave up on our original lifestyles to move in together, just so that we could learn to connect better. I strongly think that this story was what helped me score at the interview and hence landed me my promotion two years ago. 

To guys who approach me in the bar and whom I am uninterested in, Baekhyun is my boyfriend. We're a stable couple who moved in together since three years ago after we both graduated with a Masters in different degree. Occasionally if Baekhyun happened to be drinking with me and I signaled to him that I needed him to fend a guy off, he might even add that he majored in Business Administration but minored in Loving Jisoo in his undergraduate years. That effectively pushed any approaching guys away. 

To my closer friends, I would joke that Baekhyun is my FWB. I think a couple of them take the joke too seriously, so they always try to dissuade me from staying any longer with him, and constantly set me up for dates. 

To my happy parents enjoying their dream retirement in the foreign land where they had their honeymoon, Baekhyun is the boy whom their daughter is supposedly in a long stable relationship with. Marriage between the two friends seems inevitable to them, and lucky for me, they were perfectly fine when I told them I was moving in to a co-rented apartment with his three years ago. If anything, my parents have always been fond of Baekhyun, more so than any of my previous boyfriends. 

To me though, Baekhyun is complicated as he is simple, weird as he is normal, stupid as he is smart. We've known each other since high school when Baekhyun moved into my neighbourhood and we became quick friends. Who are we kidding though, Baekhyun made quick friends with everyone. It just so happens that as people came and went, the two of us somehow continued to stay in the same area, and our friendship never waned. Eventually when we were 25 his mother, Mrs Byun, passed after a long battle with cancer, and my best friend started living alone since. So when my parents decided to retire early the year after and move to Spain for "a few years away from their extremely uptight and more parent-like daughter", I told him that we should both sell our family houses and co-rent a space together to save money in this terrible economy. I simply know Byun Baekhyun too well for this cohabiting to be an issue. The number of times he's seen me fart after eating Japanese beans, the occasions I've seen him burp while facing the sea at the beach, and the number of times we've stayed over at each other's houses when our parents lived with us just erased all the barriers between us. Appropriate or not. 

I suppose to me, Baekhyun is just my best friend who happens to be living with me?

Which may or may not be a good thing, because three months into staying together we realised neither of us were the best at maintaining appropriateness. For example, Baekhyun likes to sleep shirtless i