you remind me of the stars

I suppose this is how my life continued for the next few years. I went to school, I went home, and I did little in between. Sungjong and Howon were colours to my eyes, extra stars to make things feel better than they did before. My life remained peaceful. I thoroughly enjoyed the moments that I spent with both of them, and probably the only thing unusual about this schedule was the fact that Sungjong had never asked for his umbrella back. I remember when I was sixteen, at the end of the school year Sungjong told me.

“I’m going to be an idol.”

At that time I felt my body shudder with cold, heartless laughter. It was my second idol friend, I had thought. My second friend who wanted to be a trainee and leave their lives behind for an image which would soon become them. I said nothing though. It was still not my choice.

“That nice,” I told him. He showed me a picture of seven guys.

“This is us,” he explained. The stars were shining behind his eyes. I glanced over.

It was the exact same picture Howon had shown me a few days before that.

“They’ve changed us into a seven member group,” he had said without malice.

It was then I realised that Howon and Sungjong worked to the same goal, and that Howon and Sungjong, by means of fate, had their paths interlocking. I told no one though. Even in my disparity to be heard, it remained a secret to everyone but me. I wanted someone to listen to this, but at the same time it was a secret I felt that was mine. I felt my heart break, because I’d lost the two people I had thought I loved, and around then I questioned if it was love at all. Had everything I had done simply been out of the fear of loneliness? I had no idea.

Nevertheless, time did not wait. Spring turned to summer again, and in the last year of my schooling, I was confronted by a strange request.

“Can I have something of yours?” Sungjong asked.

I found the question peculiar, but I nodded anyways. I gave him a book full of my printed edits. Now, I understand, I should’ve known we were ready to part. It was the first hint of separation.

“This is nice, Hyesoo,” he had commented, and it was cruel as well, because he took with him a part of myself. Sometimes, when the night got too cold, I hated him vehemently.

I graduated without a dream, with only words and conversations kept in my memory. I graduated without a clue of what I wanted beyond school; I graduated with a pile of books and a belief that it would sort itself out. People were weird like that, they trusted important things onto unusual sorts of people. I wondered that if someone had chosen my future, I wouldn’t be strangled into such a state. I left for a university, one neither prestigious nor disappointing, and in there I studied commerce, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“I never got people who studied commerce,” Howon shrugged at me when I told him. “But I suppose if it pleases you, that’s okay.”

I chuckled. “Thank you.” It was more of a spur of the moment decision though. I had no interest in commerce.

Funnily enough, Howon never asked me what I intended to get out of commerce. Perhaps he knew I was as lost as any other Korean student would be. I had no idea of my future, or whether I even had one. I suppose this was what it would be when you gave students strict goals, and then abandoned them to find themselves. We’d all been so used to being told, I thought, that we’d forgotten how to think for ourselves. This year was my most melancholic. I supposed I should’ve done what Sungjong did – I presume now I should’ve prepared for separation. A few days after a blank graduation, Howon had news which made a smile stretch across his whole face.

“We’re going to debut!” He said excitedly. “All seven of us. I can’t believe it. The CEO confirmed our group, and now we’re going to be idols! Oh, I can’t wait Hyesoo.”

These were more or less the last actual words he ever told me. His training as an idol consumed most of his days, and eventually the time we had spent was diminished to once a week, then once a month, then every three months, and by the time he had actually debuted, our interactions became on a six month basis.

‘Cheer for us’, he texted me a day before his debut.

I suppose now that Howon knew, days and weeks and months ago, that our parting was somewhat, though indefinitely, permanent. An idol’s life ate away any kind of spare time you thought you had, and I suppose Howon was an honest person, but even he couldn’t tell me that we would probably never be the way we once were. I realised, by unanswered letters and thousands of missed calls, that having a crush on an idol hurt more than anything else. I never forgot Howon, and still now sometimes I go by myself to a park and think of him. I am reminded of Howon on windy and sunny days. I am reminded during rain and hail and happiness and tears. Everything, frankly, has been contaminated with the displacement known as Howon. Today the stars look up at me and I think of Howon again.

Sometimes I wonder why Howon was so cruel to have lied and pretended that we’d always be best friends and that things would remain the same, yet sometimes I wonder how I didn’t see that it would eventually fade. I was particularly fond of autumn days, once, long ago, but now they feel like I have lost something, and now I know it’s true. I lost a friend.

In the night of my early years in university, I spent countless nights surrounded in thoughts of Howon. Sometimes, in the back of my mind, I resurrected him from his death in my life, and I make him come to life like a puppeteer with broken memories. This is, perhaps, the ‘ending’ of my story of Howon.

Sungjong was a bit different, I suppose. I don’t think Sungjong’s departure hurt any less. I heard from Howon first that they were going to debut as seven, that their name had been confirmed as Infinite, and they would be just that. On the next Monday Sungjong called me to a small bookstore. He arranged for us to meet at five am, a time odd even for me. I came at four thirty to our designated place. It was a small, narrow thing. The room was earthy and the shop felt like it had been here for centuries and centuries. The books were all hardbacks, arranged by author and genre at times. There was a ladder propped up next to the counter near the entrance. A small bell rang every time the door was opened; it was a cheery sound, a reminder of human existence. People too often got lost in books and stories. By the time Sungjong arrived I had already chosen two books.

“Punctual,” he observed.

I smiled. “I don’t have much to do now.” I slid the book I had been considering back onto the shelf.

He looked over to the stories in my hands. “You read fairy books?”

I shrugged. “Occasionally. It gets boring when all you read are books which make you think.”

“You think so much though,” He returned.

“I’m honoured.”

We searched through the bookshop together, going through each shelf at a pace so slow the owner stared at us with suspicious eyes. He eventually subdued though. Anyone could tell we meant no malice. A skinny boy in jeans with his friend could do nothing. By the end of our little hunt, Sungjong had bought nothing.

“I’m going to debut soon,” he whispered quietly near the gardening section. It was like a secret, something even I shouldn’t know. I suppose it felt surreal to him, to have finally discovered his dream. “There will be seven of us, and intense training starts tomorrow.” He paused. “I won’t be able to see you Hyesoo.”

Not not as much as before, not not as frequently as we used to, just not being able to meet. I felt my body stiffen. I should’ve known of separation.

A book caught my eye. I took it out and placed it in his hands. I admit now, I shouldn’t have. The book was called The Five Degrees of Separation.

“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely.

“I know,” I replied. He wasn’t, as selfish as I’d been, forgiven. I continued my search.

“Today we can spend some time together,” he suggested. “Til five tomorrow morning.”

“That’s a long time,” I told him. “You’ll be busy tomorrow, won’t you?”

“Truthfully, I don’t think I’d sleep anyway.”

And that was how I spent a whole day with Sungjong. We didn’t do much. We looked around bookstores and ate at cafes and played on swings in the park trying to swing as high as we could but never reaching the top. I thought of Howon then (in a non-longing way) and thought that this, surely this, was how he felt at the Han River at two AM. I wondered if he felt the lightness that I felt on the swing, Sungjong by my side. I wondered if this was how he felt at two, the way I felt at six in the evening. I felt, for once, that I could reach infinity, and that this moment would never end.

“Hyesoo,” Sungjong said as we swung.

“Yes?” I replied.

“If I could prevent our separation, I would have,” he said.

“I know.”

“If I could, I would give you the stars.”

“I know.”

“If I could, things wouldn’t change.”

“I know.”

“And if I could, I’d make sure that you broke things off, so that you wouldn’t have to suffer from the side-effects of separation.”

I stopped swinging at that. My voice felt caught in my throat. It was only a friendship (perhaps more, but we’ll never really know), but it made me happy.

“Sungjong,” I said quietly, “Thank you.”

We swung and swung and swung. I sat against Sungjong, our sides touching as we talked til midnight. There was nothing particularly important we had to say, but there was a sense that this moment wasn’t allowed to end. We wouldn’t let it, at least. At twelve we bought midnight snacks from an old woman who sold til late in the night. We came back, and continued to talk. I spoke to him until five, and then we said what seemed to be then as our final goodbye.

“Interesting people are always awake at five,” Sungjong said. “I’m not surprised I’m spending it with you.”

“I suppose the unusual are attracted to each other,” I returned. “Thank you.”

“Thank you too.”

He turned to leave, before I caught him once again. “The first day I met you, you gave me your umbrella,” I started.

He stopped me, “Keep it.”

I shook my head. “No, there’s one more thing.”

“What is it?”

“Why were you crying?”

Sungjong paused, as if he was contemplating on answering. Finally, he said: “I was upset.”

I nodded. It was vague. “What for?”

“Many things – this career path was one of them.”

“I see. Are you happy now?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

He paused. “No, because I’m losing my friend.”

I came home the next morning at five am in tears. There had been none when I’d seen him, but now they wouldn’t stop. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to be with Sungjong. I wondered briefly about his umbrella, but I supposed we’d both had enough of things which reeked of each other. I caught an early bus home, arriving at 5:07 exactly.

My parents were quite furious.

“You’re nearly twenty!” My mother yelled. “You have classes tomorrow, a life to live – why are you still staying out? Do you think you’re still a child? The reason why you’ll never come to your brother’s level is because you’re so obsessed with things which aren’t important!”

“What is important?” I countered, but left before either could say anything else. I locked my door and sat against it, crying against my legs. I wondered why I cried, but I suppose now it was over many things. Because I would never see Sungjong, because I had no future, just as my mother said. I cried over my brother, because I remembered when we were young and when we were close enough to be best friends. I cried and cried and cried. My parents were knocking loudly against the door, but eventually realised it was of no use. They left me alone.

Someone else knocked on my door after that. A soft knock, one I found oddly familiar, yet foreign. It was like someone had awoken a memory. “Hyesoo?” My brother said.

It was the first time he’d tried to connect with me in years. I opened the door slowly, letting him into my room. He looked around, surprised. I supposed my room had changed since I was a child.

My brother held me for awhile while I tried to get rid of my tears. He chuckled, in a faint, soft, brotherly sort of way.

“Oh kid,” he said. “You’re still just like you were as a child. Tell me, do you still look up to the stars?”

This made me brawl harder. “A friend just promised me the stars today.”

“He sounds like an amazing friend.”

“He was.”

The good bit about my brother was that he knew when not to ask questions, and knew what the right questions were. He held me close that night, and rocked me to sleep because my heart was hurting from unusual explosions of pain. I suppose in a way Sungjong and Howon’s departure from my life had been a moderately uplifting one, even if it hurt a lot, since it gave me back my brother. I had missed the friendship he had given me. I felt like he and I were children again, that we were again looking up at glow-in-the-dark stars. We had changed though. We were older. The stars we saw were now real, and things had changed.

This brings me, now, to the present. You may wonder why I am telling you all of this, but I actually have little to say. It’s just a story, really. Something I needed to get off my chest. I suppose liking and loving people are vaguely similar terms.

Years on, I received a call just earlier this week, which had propelled me to write this. A recount of the events which had made up my high school life and had kept me up with an indescribable sense of longing. It still did, if I was to be honest. Still in the night I would think of Sungjong and Howon and I would imagine that they were here in my present. Still in the night I am attacked with memories and memoirs of what could have been, but wasn’t, us.

I had received an unusual call on a Monday while I was making some kimbap for lunch, since today it felt like a kimbap day. I picked up my mobile phone and answered it cautiously. The number was unknown.

“Hello?” I heard. The voice sounded familiar; a Busan accent, I faintly recognised. It was covered in strings and strings of Seoul, but still the rolls of the tongue were undoubtedly there.

“Howon,” I breathed. It came out as a faint noise in my surprise.

He laughed. “How have you been?”

I looked over to the boiling rice and ingredients on my bench. “Forgetful, and you?”

 “Tired and amazed.”

“I see.” I waited for him to continue.

“Do you want to hear a story?” He asked suddenly.

“Yes, I would very much like to.”

“Last night Sungyeol took my wallet and began tearing apart all my things. I was slightly annoyed, but I supposed I’d gotten used to it. It was all in good fun, after all. The other members moved towards him and we ended up in a circle as Sungyeol went through every single receipt and card I’d kept. He then found a photo, isn’t that strange?” Howon paused. “It was from that time I took you to the Han River. Wasn’t that a nice time?”

“It was,” I agreed.

“Anyway, Sungyeol took this out. He thought you were my girlfriend, but I told him we were strictly friends. They ended up passing the picture along. Then it reached Sungjong, and you know what Sungjong said?” I knew from the way he paused, Howon was biting his lip. “He said ‘Hyesoo.’ He knew you, didn’t he?”

I saw no point in denying it. “Yes.”

“He told me the odd story of how you guys befriended each other, and I told him that it was funny, since I’d been around you then too.” Howon’s tone wasn’t unfriendly. “So I suppose this was the one thing I never knew about you.”

“It wasn’t particularly important.”

“No,” he agreed, “I don’t suppose it was.”

For a moment, we basked in the comfortable silence we had once called ours. I said to him, finally, “Congratulations on reaching your dream.”

“Thank you,” he replied simply. He then paused. “I think someone wants to talk to you.”

I heard the exchanging of hands, and before I knew it, a familiar voice reached my ears. “Hyesoo?” I heard.

“Sungjong,” I said. I had missed him.

“How have you been since I heard from you last?”

“Slightly nostalgic, and you?”

“Similar, very similar to that.”

I smiled at the sound of his voice. The long conversations and days spent started to come back. “Nostalgic over you,” I said finally.

“Nostalgic over you, too,” he replied. “Hyesoo?”

“Yes?”

“There was something I didn’t formally say to you before.”

“I think I can guess. A final separation, perhaps?”

He paused. “Yes.”

“I suppose I knew,” I chuckled without laughter. “Do you have anything more to say?”

“Our conversations were lovely and irreplaceable.”

“Yes, I would think they were too.”

We simmered in the ending of our friendship.

“I wish you luck on your comeback,” I said.

“And you on your dreams and goals in life.”

“Goodbye, Sungjong.”

“Goodbye, Hyesoo.”

The phone clicked, and that was that.

A/N:

and so this ends a terrible story for a terrible person I really do half love you Divvy loljks my heart is for you I'll be studying for awhile now (something I should have done awhile ago). And thank you for reading the terrible word vomit that is Monday. Have a good Monday. :)