Seunghyun was passed out in one of Jiyong’s guest rooms after they spent the better part of the night smoking up his apartment, a curated hip-hop playlist playing in the background.

Unfortunately they didn’t get to do this very often within the past 6 months since the group started dedicating all their time to the newly released album. They just spent all day shooting or recording, sometimes even sleeping in the studio because they would need to come back and record in a few hours. Their own homes foreign to them during those times.

Little words needed to be exchanged between the two. Besides, they’re in a good head space so it wasn’t like they needed to be muddled in emotions. It’s just some bonding time and much needed stress relief from an intense promotional period. Sometimes interactions can be a little too superficial though, especially when they’re supposed to be best friends.

They would spend all their time doing superficial things together such as smoking, partying, etc. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but part of him knows it wasn’t good either.

As he lays on his expensive king-sized bed staring at the ceiling, his racing mind keeps him from sleeping. The announcement of the dating rumors from earlier in the night sparked many conflicting thoughts from the recesses of his mind he thought he had buried.

He hasn’t really spoken to anyone about his thoughts or feelings concerning his “break-up” with Kiko since it happened a few months ago during the MADE promotions. Jiyong guesses it was good that he was too busy to focus on how he felt, but they had ended things amicably so he led himself to believe there wasn’t a lot to dwell on. If he were to really delve deeply into the complexities of the relationship and how he really felt about them ending things, he sincerely doesn’t think he’d be as okay as he believed he was.

It’s not like he doesn’t think about it at all, because he does. It was his most serious relationship and he had genuinely loved her. Not the kind of puppy love with cliches that only occur in movies, but really in love. The feelings were so powerful that they blinded him in realizing just how toxic they were for each other.

Their love stemmed from substance use and social groups. It was the reliance on these things that allowed them to continue for as long as they did. He only recently realized how much he loved the fun they had when they were together and how perfect they looked with each other after it all ended.

But he ended up realizing a lot of things.

How physically and emotionally dependent they were of each other. How much they fought because of their pettiness. How much pain they caused each other.

Ultimately, he loved her as much as he hated her. They walked away from each other as friendly as they could have, but part of him still hurt knowing they didn’t even try to fix things.

They gave up on their love too easily.

Jiyong turns onto his side and reaches for his phone lying on his nightstand. The screen lights up and the time reads ‘3:12AM’. He sighs at the resolve of yet another sleepless night and decides to scroll through his phone since he couldn’t sleep anyway. A little monster called ‘insomnia’ keeps him up most nights. Social media was an easy distraction from heavy thoughts these days, especially on his instagram explore page when he just wanted random things to show up without any specific theme.

Jiyong pauses his careless scrolling when he sees his own instagram posts show up, obviously reposted from fans, which isn’t a new concept to him. But if he wanted to see duplicates of his own posts he would just look into the tab on his profile showing other people’s tagged images of him.

It wasn’t until he started seeing himself and Taeyeon tagged in the same pictures did he realize that they were posts pertaining to the previously mentioned dating rumors involving the two.

He vaguely remembers Youngbae mentioning that phones were starting to pick up words from personal conversations, using them to cater people’s feeds to things they actively spoke about. Seeing it happen to him in real time was jarring. It was even more shocking because he doesn’t actually follow her on instagram, or well, he doesn’t follow anyone on instagram. But even if he did, she would probably be one of the last people he’d ever even entertain following knowing how insane netizens and fans can get.

However, it doesn’t stop him from getting curious about her feed now that she’s one click away. The thought has been entertained.

The most immediate posts on her feed are of her upcoming solo debut, and he only knows this is the case because netizens are obsessed with SNSD and won’t shut up about how long it has taken Taeyeon to debut solo. Which if he really thinks about it, has been a long time coming.

It took him about three years since Big Bang’s debut to release his solo hit with ‘Heartbreaker’ and if he can remember correctly, SNSD only debuted about a year after them. So it took Taeyeon about eight years to make a solo debut.

Jiyong’s eyes narrow in confusion wondering why this is the case. He thinks musically their careers are pretty similar success-wise, with styles being the only big contrast between them. Curiosity can only get him so far though. It’s not like he could just ask her why it took her so long to go solo. His best guess was her company wanting to focus on group promotions rather than solo projects.

He looks at her most recent post which was uploaded about an hour ago. It’s a picture of what seems to be an album cover no doubt, the barcode on the bottom left being an almost dead giveaway. The image is of her in grayscale with light pink hues, shadows of tree branches covering her body, and a single branch of flowers covering her face. The letter ‘I’ in large font on the top left.

It’s a very simple yet elegant cover.

To be honest, minimalism was never really his thing. Fans have always known him for his weird styles and loud colors in everything he posts; however, he could still appreciate it.

But it was her caption that really caught his eye.

taeyeon_ss 네 맞아요 저 아직 안잠. 아니 못잠 #미치게따별드라 #태연아 #자라 #폰말고너만자라 #i
(translation: Yes I’m not sleeping yet. Actually, can’t sleep #stars I’m going crazy #taeyeon-ah #sleep #not your phone only you sleep #i)

He laughs to himself at the way she expresses her predicament. It sounds like she also has trouble sleeping.

The posts prior to this one are also highlighting teasers to her solo debut. It’s hard to tell what the exact concept of the debut is going to be just off of those two posts, but the earlier pictures give him some better insight.

There’s a short teaser of her music video that was just posted yesterday showing her in various shots by the water and a vast green field. Her hair is platinum blonde and the lyrics “My life is a beauty” resonate in his dark bedroom.

From just these few posts alone, he admits to himself that time has been extremely kind to her. He can still remember meeting her for the first time in person when both groups were still rookies back in 2007. SNSD had their “Into The New World” promotions and Big Bang was promoting “Lies.”

Call him shallow, but her image then wasn’t exactly the most memorable.

Everyone knew that her vocals were the most impressive out of all the members, but it wasn’t enough to make her really stand out to him compared to Yoona, Tiffany, or Yuri. He even mentioned Yoona once on a Strong Heart episode back in 2011, but Taeyeon hadn’t come to mind during then. Fast forward to 2015, she’s lost all