“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

(T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)

—

Present Day

There is no harder question than the one asked by what if.

It’s amazing how two small words can cast such big shadows and make you question every single decision you’ve made, whether big or small, and make you ask yourself what could’ve happened differently if you just chose one over the other.

What if you never went to ULS? What if you accepted the scholarship from Maryknoll? What if you went to St. Thomas instead? What if you just didn’t get mad at Chanyeol that one night? What if you were a bit more understanding when the two of you were still together? What if you knew all the things you know now back then?

So many questions. So many what ifs.

But ultimately, it all boils down to a single one.

Would you and Chanyeol still be together?

You sigh and wrap Baekhyun’s borrowed coat tighter around your body. It’s about half an hour before midnight and the air has gotten colder. You and Chanyeol are walking back to the reception now, your bare feet leaving prints on the sand before the tide washes them away.

Chanyeol has his left hand in his pocket as he carries his shoes with the other. He looks more relaxed than he did earlier this evening, his face radiating this odd calmness.

In a way, you feel calmer too. Lighter. Perhaps it’s because the two of you have managed to somehow talk about the past even if you’ve just barely scratched the surface. There’s definitely more to talk about. You let out another sigh.

“What’s wrong?” Chanyeol asks. “You’ve been sighing for the past five minutes.”

“I was just thinking about… some stuff.”

“For someone who has a degree in literature, you’re not very articulate,” he says, chuckling incredulously.

For a split second, you freeze. “How did you know I changed majors?” You don’t remember telling him about it, and he couldn’t possibly have heard it from Baekhyun because you didn’t tell Baekhyun about it either. Aside from your family, only Sehun knows that you shifted in your second year.

“I know Junmyeon,” Chanyeol explains. “Kim Junmyeon. He teaches Creative Nonfiction at the Athenaeum. I saw a picture of you and him, maybe at some writing workshop? I’m not sure. Anyway, I was surprised, so I told him that I know you. He mentioned that you were from ULS Lit.”

You haven’t heard the name Kim Junmyeon in a while now, the last time probably a year or two ago. The two of you met through various writing workshops where both of you were invited as guest speakers, and a friendship would naturally grow out of your many opportunities to work with each other. Actually, it was more than a friendship, but you don’t mention that minor detail to Chanyeol. It didn’t work out with Junmyeon, anyway—just casual that happened maybe three to five times (which just goes to prove that relationships between two literature majors are doomed to fail).

Junmyeon eventually stopped attending the workshops and at first you thought it was because it was his final phase of ghosting you, but later on you found out that he flew to Japan to get his PhD in Asian Literature.

“Why didn’t you continue with International Studies?” Chanyeol asks. “I thought that was your dream program. You’ve been dreaming about it since we were juniors.”

You purse your lips, not knowing where to start. “You know that feeling when you really want something, but when you get it, it doesn’t feel like the thing that you’ve been dreaming of? Like it doesn’t live up to the dream?”

Chanyeol nods weakly.

August 2008

Like all other things, college isn’t like how you thought it would be.

Even though the school is exactly like you imagined—nice campus, good professors, and everything else in between—something still feels out of place. To be more specific, you feel out of place.

Homesick. That’s how you feel.

The Capital isn’t anything like the small town you spent eighteen years of your life in. You’ve been to the city before, but actually living in it is a whole other story.

The Capital is loud. Chaotic. It will eat you up alive if you’re not quick on your feet. People move fast, but everything else runs slow: the lines at the train stations, the traffic along Highway 54, the passage of the week as you eagerly wait for Friday to come.

You miss your old town. You miss the stillness of your neighborhood as dawn breaks. You miss the sound of birds chirping as you open your eyes in the morning. You miss seeing the stars from the terrace of your parents’ house.

But above all, you miss Chanyeol.

The first month has been a mess. Every night since the term started, you cried in your room until you fell asleep. For the first few weeks, you had Chanyeol to cry to through the phone. It’s been harder to get a hold of him as the days went by. Now in your second month in the city, you only manage to talk with Chanyeol on the phone for maybe once a week, sometimes not at all. You haven’t even seen him in two months.

You try your best to understand him, as you’re not the only who’s adjusting to this whole thing. People get busy and Chanyeol is no exception. You’ve been busier yourself now that term’s starting to pick up its pace since your university runs on a trimestral system which means one term lasts only for more or less four months.

But your instincts keep on telling you that something’s wrong.

You and Chanyeol rarely fight. If you do, it’s about something petty that’ll be resolved in less than a day, three days, tops. But since the start of the new academic year, the fights between the two of you just keep on piling up—mostly about Chanyeol not being easy to talk to.

The calls stop coming.

The messages get shorter.

This is how it feels to lose someone, you realize.

October 2008

Waking up is easy because you didn’t sleep a wink last night.

Your eyes feel heavy, the soreness from crying all night dragging down your eyelids and stinging like acid on your pupils.

Waking up is easy, but getting up isn’t.

You’re pinned down on the thin mattress you’ve come to call your bed for the past four months, your body refusing to work against gravity with your heart acting like an anchor that weighed a thousand tons, immobilizing your limbs and numbing your senses. It’s too heavy on your chest.

The shrill, metallic sound from your phone catapults you back to your wits—what’s left of it, anyway—and reminds you that you need to get up. You need to get up because you’re doing something important today. It’s the day that you’ve been preparing for, the day when the world will come crashing down on your shoulders. It’s the day that you’ve lost sleep for. The day that’s been the only thing on your mind for the past few months.

It’s judgement day, the beginning of the end.

The conversation you had with Chanyeol last night plays over and over again in your mind as you stand under the shower. The words he said… they don’t feel real at all. They don’t feel like they came from Chanyeol at all.

You step out of the shower feeling more weary than refreshed. Staring blankly at the rack of clothes in front of you, you wonder what you should wear today.

On a normal day, on any other day that you would go to school, you’d pick the best casual outfit you could put together so that you’d look your best the entire day. But today isn’t a normal day, and you’re not going to school. You want to dress like how you’re feeling—dark, but maybe, just maybe, if you don yourself in soft colors, the pain that you’re feeling would lighten as well and the outcome of today would change.

But something tells you that’s not going to happen.

After half-heartedly picking at your pancakes, you decide to catch up on the book that you’re supposed to read for your literature class. The novel had been assigned to the class a couple of weeks ago, but you haven’t read past two chapters because of all the things that have been fighting for space inside your mind, distracting you from functioning properly in school and everywhere else.

Even now, you find yourself reading the same paragraph over and over, restarting when you realize that you didn’t understand a single word. Eventually, you give up and succumb to the dread in your heart that only grows heavier with each passing minute.

The anxiety from overthinking about what’s going to happen in a few hours feels like you’re being stabbed in the chest and you try to control your breathing by synching it with each tick of the hand on your gold wrist watch.

You know what’s going to happen; you knew it since a gut feeling told you that something was wrong with Chanyeol. But still, you want to stop it from happening. You want to iron through this huge wrinkle even though you know well that it’s already beyond repair.

It’s wrong to pick up the broken shards of an irremediable bond, but can anyone blame you for loving Chanyeol so deeply that you want to fix everything even if it would leave cuts and bruises on your hands and heart?

Yes, the sane part of your consciousness answers your stupid question. Yes, it’s wrong, stupid girl. It’s all wrong. That’s not love. That’s martyrdom. Use your ing brain.

Of course, you don’t listen. You find it hard to listen to advice, even if it’s your own.

Your phone lights up and buzzes on the table and your heart almost bursts in your chest.

[ Chanyeol / 11:47 ]
I’m almost there.

You grab your bag and bolt out of your apartment to head to the train station as soon as you read Chanyeol’s text message.

The Yellow Line is uncrowded, which is odd even for a midday trip, since every hour is rush hour in the Capital. But even if the train is cramped like a sardine can, you wouldn’t mind. You’ve gotten used to the nuisances of the city. Perhaps desensitized is a better word to describe it.

It’s sad that when you’ve managed to get the hang of living in the city, you’ve lost hold of your relationship with Chanyeol.

It’s as if the universe is telling you that you can’t have two of them at the same time, like you have to give up one to enjoy the other.

The train arrives at North Avenue after seventeen minutes, and every step you take towards the meeting place that you and Chanyeol agreed on adds weight to your heart that’s already too heavy for you to carry.

The ‘Circle’, as locals call it, is a park located inside a large traffic circle in the shape of an ellipse and is bounded by a two-kilometer roundabout which circumscribes it. You and Chanyeol agreed to meet here because it’s halfway between your side of the metro and his, which means it’s easily accessible to both of you.

The park is expectedly empty since it’s the middle of the day in the middle of the week and people are probably at school or at work taking their lunch breaks. Apart from that, the sky is overcast, making a stroll outside rather uninviting.

Chanyeol sees you before you see him. He taps your shoulder and his sad smile is the first thing you see when you turn around to face him. Your chest tightens, but you force yourself to smile back, no matter how fake it would look.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hey, Chanyeol.”

November 2008

Losing Chanyeol doesn’t happen all at once.

Losing him comes in fragments—in how his name stops popping up on your phone, in the way his scent fades from the dark blue hoodie he left at your apartment the last time he was here, in how you gradually forget the taste of his lips and the feeling of his touch on your skin—until nothing is left.

Losing Chanyeol is like dying a slow death.

His words still ring in your ear like it was yesterday.

“I keep on hurting you even if I don’t intend to and it hurts me to hurt you.”

As you lay on your bed with your pillows stained with tears, you wonder if Chanyeol is hurting right now, if he was hurt at all. Seems like he wasn’t, not when he’s already posting photos with a new girl and captioning them with hearts.

“I’m doing this more for you than it is for me.”

Maybe he was lying. Maybe it was more for him. Maybe you were the only thing that was preventing him from being truly happy, the only obstacle that was hindering him from being with the person he really wanted to be with.

“You deserve someone better.”

Maybe he was really talking about himself, about how he deserves someone better than you. Chaeyoung. Maybe that was his way of saying Chaeyoung was better than you. You wouldn’t doubt it. She was all Chanyeol talked about the last few weeks of your relationship, thinking you wouldn’t notice.

But you did. You notice everything.

And try as you may, you couldn’t simply shake off the feeling that there was something going on between the two of them. No matter how many times you try to convince yourself that Chanyeol’s probably just had a lot to say about his new friend, your instincts insist otherwise.

And they were right. Your instincts are rarely wrong.

A soft knock resonates on your bedroom door. Footsteps that sound unmistakably like Sehun’s plod through the wooden floor as the smell of greasy Chinese takeout fills the room.

On any other day, your stomach will rumble at the mere aroma of food, but your appetite has left you for more than a month now and is yet to come back. Sehun single-handedly tries to feed you. If it isn’t for him, you wouldn’t be eating at all.

It’s childish to kill yourself slowly just because you’re heart is broken, that, you are immensely aware of. But at the same time, you can’t do anything but succumb to the pain throbbing in your chest because when the heart hurts, the entire body suffers with it.

Sehun sets down the takeout box on your bedside table. He toes off his slippers and climbs onto the bed, slipping under the covers with you as he wordlessly wraps you in his arms. You burst into yet another wave of tears as you press your face further into his neck and crumple his shirt in your hands. You feel Sehun’s Adam’s apple bob against your cheek, and when a tear falls onto your forehead, you realize that it’s because his throat was tightening as he tried and failed to bite back his tears.

You don’t know why Sehun is crying, but you don’t like it when people ask you why you’re crying so you don’t pry the reason out of him.

Instead, you simply say, “It hurts, Sehun. It hurts so much.”

He embraces you tighter. “I know,” he replies, as if he can also feel the pain you’re feeling right now.

—

On Chanyeol’s birthday, you send him a text message that you promised yourself would be the last one. Ever.

[ You / 17:48 ]
Happy birthday, Yeol. Sorry for everything that happened. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy. Enjoy your day. :)

For the first time, you don’t wait for his reply.

December 2008

December used to be your favorite month of the year. For starters, it’s your birth month. Another reason is that it’s the month with the longest holidays, from the week before Christmas up to the week after New Year.

But now, the holidays just remind you of two things: your birthday three years ago when Chanyeol first confessed his feelings and gave you the necklace that you still wear for some reason and the countdown the two of you begin on the first day of January to the date of your anniversary which falls on the twenty-fourth.

Your birthday isn’t the same without him. The holidays aren’t the same without him. But you remind yourself that you have spent more birthdays and holidays without Chanyeol than you did with him which means you can do it again.

He sends you a text on your birthday.

[ Chanyeol / 16:35 ]
Happy birthday! :) Enjoy your day!

You don’t reply, keeping the promise you made to yourself a month ago.

—

The Green Line of the metro rail system is famous for its interesting interior decorations that change every month. For December, the trains should be decorated with designs that have something to do with the holidays, so you find it odd that the theme for December of this year is poetry. Spanish poetry, to be exact.

Beautiful Spanish poems and their English translations beside them are plastered everywhere inside the train: the floor, the seats, the windows. Commuters look around at every corner of the train, trying to read as many poems as possible before they arrive at their stop.

One poem in particular caught your attention. It’s pasted just above the train doors, beside the emergency buttons.

Y de pronto, no estás. Adiós, amor, adiós.
Ya te marchaste.
Nada queda de ti. La ciudad gira:
Molino en el que todo se deshace.

Of all the poems plastered here on this train, of all the trains in the Green Line, the universe has made it possible for you to read this one, as if it knows that it’s exactly how you feel right now.

And suddenly, you are gone. Farewell, love, farewell.
You’ve already left.
Nothing remains of you. The city spins:
Like a mill that crushes everything.

Chanyeol is gone and nothing is left of him.

The city keeps on spinning like a mill, but you’re not going to let it crush you. Not anymore.

January 2009

When the twenty-fourth of the month rolls onto the calendar, your heart hurts anew. It would’ve been your third anniversary with Chanyeol.

It would’ve been. What a sad sentence.

In an attempt to dull the ache in your chest, you head out to The Groove, an upscale pub along Freedom Avenue in the infamous suburbs of Pobla. You’ve only been to The Groove twice, in both instances with Sehun, but its very laid-back atmosphere has already won your heart in those two short nights. It’s like a pub for people who want to drink their sorrows away quietly instead of the typical bar thumping with bass and packed with sweaty bodies.

On your third bottle of Stallion, someone taps your shoulder and asks for a light.

The voice should’ve been a dead giveaway, but nonetheless, you’re still surprised when the face you see when you turn around belongs to an old, forgotten love that you haven’t seen for quite some time now.

“Jongin,” you smile. “I thought I recognized your voice.” He has this distinct tone that’s kind of hard to describe. His voice feels like everything sweet and familiar—like honey and home. It feels warm. It makes you feel safe.

Jongin laughs, causing the weird dimple that’s way too high on his cheek to appear. You loved that dimple.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says. He takes the lighter from your hand and lights his cigarette, exhaling once before he continues, “I never thought I’d see you again after high school, quite frankly. And here, out of all places.”

Jongin takes the empty seat beside you and makes himself comfortable. You watch him with a fascinated smile; he looks good, you must admit. Better than he did in high school. But at the same time, his aura feels the same, exactly like the kid who you gave your heart to before you did to anyone else.

You light yourself a stick and take another swig of your lager. “Me too,” you admit. As a matter of fact, Jongin hasn’t crossed your mind once since graduation—until tonight. “I lost news about you.”

“I did too. But I knew you went to ULS. I wasn’t surprised, really. Since we were kids, I’ve always pegged you as a ULS girl. Cool, calm, sophisticated.”

You try to ignore the heat creeping up to your cheeks, dismissing it as the alcohol finally kicks in. You hope that Jongin hasn’t noticed. “I heard you got into St. Thomas. Engineering. I wasn’t surprised either. The only subject you cared about back in high school was math.”

Jongin laughs again, his eyes gleaming under the dim lights of the pub. His skin looks warm, like freshly-melted butter on hot toast, and you wonder silently if you’ll get to touch more of him tonight or if that’s just wishful thinking.

“Why are you here alone? Where’s Chanyeol?”

His question makes the smoke taste bitter as it swirls in and out of your lungs. You softly shake your head. “We’re not together anymore,” you say with a small smile.

Jongin’s eyes widen in shock and realization. It’s subtle, but you catch it. You’re always quick to notice people’s reactions before they even get the chance to cover it up.

“Oh… I’m—I’m sorry,” he stammers.

You chuckle as you wave his apology off. You take another drag of your cigarette before replying. “It’s okay. It doesn’t always work out between people. I mean, take us, for example.”

“Still… The two of you were together for, what, three years?”

“Almost,” you correct. “It’s supposed to be our third anniversary today, but I guess there isn’t an anniversary to celebrate anymore.”

Jongin arches his brow. “Is that why you’re drinking alone on a Tuesday night?”

“It’s the only reason why I drink at all.”

Jongin doesn’t know what to say after that. He puts out his burned-out cigarette on the glass ashtray and calls over a server to order his own bottle of beer. He still looks awkward and tries to cover it up by lighting another stick.

You laugh softly, taking a particularly long sip of your Stallion. “It’s okay,” you repeat. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me. Like I said, it doesn’t always work out between people. I’m used to being the one being left behind. In a way, I have you to thank for that. You’re like the one who prepared me for what’s possibly the most painful breakup I’ll ever experience in my lifetime.”

Jongin winces. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I never got to apologize for what happened between us. I hope it’s not too late.”

“That was six years ago,” you chuckle as you shake your head. “I’ve forgiven you a long time ago.”

Jongin’s Heineken arrives after that and he finishes half of it in record time. “I want to make it up to you. Even if it’s six years late,” he laughs. “Tell me anything you want me to do and I’ll do it. No questions asked.”

You eye him curiously, a lazy smile playing across your lips. Jongin takes a swig of his beer and your eyes fall down on his throat as he swallows thickly. An idea blossoms in your mind and you mull it over, inhaling more of your cigarette and exhaling it slowly, suggestively in Jongin’s direction.

“I want you to be my temporary fix for tonight,” you finally say.

Jongin’s pupils dilate as he the remnants of Heineken on his lips. “I’d be happy to,” he replies.

December 2009

Jongin was only one of the many temporary fixes you turned to in order to fill the void that Chanyeol left in your life. He was replaced with others soon after, but to you, they all felt the same. One-nighters. Casual . Nothing more, nothing less.

was part of the holy trinity of debauchery that was your coping mechanisms along with smoking and alcohol. They weren’t particularly healthy, but they did the job. Short-lived bliss that you used as small steps to move on from Chanyeol.

Eventually, the need for stopped coming to you. You were fine on your own. The cigarettes and booze, not really. You can only give up so much.

But that’s okay, you guess. There’s no one way to move past grief as everyone’s coping mechanisms are different. What works for you might not work for other people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not valid.

By the time one year has passed since you last heard from Chanyeol, you feel lighter. Freer. Like you can breathe more.

You’d be lying if you say you don’t think about him even once in a while because you do. More than once in a while, actually. You miss him, even. But the thing is, you’ve come to learn that you can miss something but not want it back—and you miss Chanyeol, god, you miss Chanyeol so much, but you don’t want him back. And if that doesn’t mean you’ve grown since last year, then you don’t know what does.

The seven stages of grief—shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, acceptance—doesn’t always go in that particular order for everyone. The only thing that people who are going through it have in common is that acceptance always comes last. Actually, acceptance usually comes last in everything.

But really, acceptance doesn’t come last.

Forgiveness does.

Forgiveness isn’t a necessary stage of grief. You don’t need to force yourself to forgive people who have hurt you because you have every right to be bitter from the pain they’ve caused you. But more often than not, they’re not the only ones responsible for whatever went wrong in the relationship. Owning up your mistakes is probably one of the most mature things you can ever do in your life.

Acceptance doesn’t stop at accepting that it’s over. You need to accept more things other than that. You have to accept that in a way, you’re just as responsible as Chanyeol is for the breakup. You have to accept that it’s no one’s job to cure your insecurities but yourself. You have to accept that no one can promise you that they’re not going to wake up in the morning and feel differently because you have no right to dictate other people’s hearts.

When you’ve accepted all these things, you learn to forgive—and among all the people that have hurt you, the one that you need to forgive the most is yourself.

December is once again your favorite month of the year. It’s your birth month. It’s the month with the longest holidays. It’s the month you received your favorite necklace four years ago, and most importantly. It’s the month you learned forgiveness.

You don’t know exactly when you’ve moved on from Chanyeol. Perhaps you’re still not, perhaps you won’t ever be. But the ache in your heart is gone when you think of him or hear his name. The fleeting emotions are sometimes still there—anger, fondness, nostalgia—but they don’t stay for too long. They come and they go, and you greet them like old friends.

You wonder if you’ll ever get the chance to greet Chanyeol like an old friend too.

Present Day

When you and Chanyeol get back to the reception, most of the guests have left. The few remaining people are either chatting away while drinking wine on their tables or slow dancing as the live band plays another jazzy rendition of a sappy love song.

Kyungsoo is seated with Baekhyun and Jongdae while Yuna’s dancing with his older brother. Instead of heading to the trio’s table, you and Chanyeol head back to the smoking area where the night started for the two of you to mull over tonight’s conversations over cigarettes. Well, mostly for you. Chanyeol doesn’t smoke.

“You know… I was so disappointed in myself when I realized that International Studies isn’t actually the degree I want to work on in college,” you say out of the blue after you light a stick.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like giving up on things,” you say. “It was really hard for me to leave the program that was my first choice. I don’t like leaving things halfway. I wanted to finish it just for the sake of it, even though I didn’t like it.”

“You were never a quitter,” Chanyeol smiles.

He should know, you think. You didn’t quit on your relationship so easily.

You just smile back at him. “Eventually, I realized that doing things that you love and you’re passionate about is more important than self-pride. I figured that if I didn’t change majors, I would be proud that I didn’t give up on my first choice, but on the downside, I wouldn’t be happy. I think being happy should be above everything, except when your happiness hurts other people in any way.”

Chanyeol remains silent as he watches his feet while he walks. You can’t pinpoint the emotions swirling in his features, but you feel like you’ve struck a chord.

“I’m happy with my choices,” you add when Chanyeol still doesn’t say anything. “Though sometimes, I still wonder what if I never went to ULS since I ultimately gave up on my dream program, which is one of the major reasons why I wanted to attend college there in the first place. What if I accepted the Maryknoll scholarship instead? What if… I went to St. Thomas instead?”

Chanyeol finally looks up and says without hesitation, “I would’ve been disappointed in you.”

“Why would you be?” You raise an eyebrow at him.

“Because I know that you would’ve made those decisions because of me, because you wanted to be closer to me. And even if you moved on to a different dream eventually, that was what you badly wanted at that time,” he says. “And I told you before, nothing should come before your dreams.”

You just smile at him. “I know that, Yeol. It just makes me think sometimes. What could’ve happened differently if I chose one thing over the other. It’s a fun little game, actually, because no matter how many times you ask yourself what if, you’ll never know the answer.”

Chanyeol opens his mouth as if to say something, but he closes it immediately. He does this again and again, kicking at the sand under his feet, looking up at the sky, flicking cigarette ashes that have strayed on his coat.

“Whatever you want to say, just say it. We’ve said all sorts of things to each other tonight, anyway,” you say when you can’t take his fidgeting any longer. “I doubt whatever you have to say will hurt any less.”

Chanyeol closes his eyes and sighs. When he opens them again, he says, “Sometimes I wonder what if I never broke up with you.”

You wait for the pain.

It doesn’t come.

Instead, you offer Chanyeol a small smile. “I would’ve been disappointed in you too, Yeol,” you say, flicking ash from your stick onto the receptacle. “You weren’t happy with me. I wasn’t happy with you even though I thought I was. You know that, more than anyone else.”

Chanyeol looks down at the ground and puts his hands in his pockets, nodding weakly.

“You can’t even imagine how angry I was with you, how you threw everything away like it was nothing. But eventually, I understood. It’s not your fault you fell out of love with me. What your heart feels is not and will never be your fault,” you pause for a second as you exhale smoke. You put your burned-out cigarette on the receptacle. “You told me that nothing should come before my dreams. Well, now I’m saying this to you: nothing should come before your happiness.”

When Chanyeol looks up, his eyes are shaking. The tears don’t come, but they don’t need to for you to know that’s what Chanyeol desperately needed to hear—that his happiness matters.

Chanyeol hugs you—for the first time in ten years—before you can say anything else. The gesture feels foreign, now that Chanyeol’s touch is something you’ve forgotten, but at the same time, his arms feel like home.

Like muscle memory, your arms snake around his neck without you even realizing it, and Chanyeol hugs you tighter until you can feel his heartbeat drumming against your own.

“Thank you,” Chanyeol whispers against your ear. “I’ve missed you.”

You freeze, because that’s when you realize that you’ve missed him as well. As a friend, more than anything else. He was your friend before he became anything else, which is why when you lost him, the friendship was lost as well. And nothing is more painful in the world than the feeling of losing a friend.

When Chanyeol pulls away, his face looks brighter, like he’s offloaded a thousand tons from his chest. He smiles, and it feels like you’ve traveled back in time to 2005 when the two of you were nothing but high school sophomores who were just starting a beautiful friendship and teasing each other about who knows more about basketball, blissfully unaware of what was about to come—unaware of the pain you were about to bring to each other, unaware of the consequences that came with loving someone.

You were each other’s greatest love, but you were both too young to know how to love each other.

But now that you’re both older, now that you both know better… Maybe…

A stammer. “Can we… How ‘bout we begin again?”

A glance at the wrist watch. The clock strikes twelve. Time ticks away, but doesn’t run out. Not anymore.

A smile.

- The End -

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