“How’ve you been, Baekhyun?” Dr. Kim asked as he sat down in his usual seat across from me.

“Um, I’ve been...uh...”

I brushed my hair behind my ears.  It had got pretty long now; at least, longer than I usually preferred it to be.  But Chanyeol hadn’t wanted me out of his sight for the past couple weeks and had barely let me even go to work.  I didn’t even think about asking him if I could go to a salon.

After he came back – or rather, after he decided to make his presence known to me because he said he never truly left – he spent every moment he could with me.  It was nice for a while; it almost felt like our early days of dating again, where we just couldn’t get enough of one another.  We sat around the house all day, cuddled while watching movies, talked about nothing in particular, and acted like the cheesy romantics we used to be.  Chanyeol was awake to see me off to work every morning and was there in the doorway when I came home at night.  I felt like I had my boyfriend back; the same one I’d initially fallen in love with.

But that only lasted for a week.  My hours working alongside and talking with my friends and my sessions with Dr. Kim had me realizing things that I hadn’t noticed before.  I spent a lot of my time replaying old arguments with Chanyeol in my head and really thinking about them.  I was starting to see a few cracks in his stories and other things that just didn’t seem to add up right.

So when Dr. Kim asked me that question, I didn’t know how to respond at first.

“I’ve been confused,” I finally admitted, looking down away from Dr. Kim’s face.

“How so?”

“I-It’s Chanyeol.  He confuses me sometimes.”

Yesung patiently waited for me to continue.

“Sometimes he loves me.  Sometimes he hates me.  Sometimes he appears and disappears randomly and I have no idea how he does it.  I still don’t believe that he stayed at our apartment for those four days he was missing without me noticing.  I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking too much into this.  Something just doesn’t feel right.  He always seems to know just what I’m thinking, too, and it’s so weird how he can know something like that.  I mean, we are in love, but I think this goes beyond that.  He...H-He’s taking control of me, and I give in so easily, but it’s after everything is all said and done that I realize...maybe I shouldn’t have just given in.  I-I’m so confused.”

I let my head fall into my hands in defeat.  I was so lost as to what to do or what to feel.  I finally admitted to myself that I needed help, and that Joonmyun was right to send me to Dr. Kim, and that Dr. Kim was actually helping me and was not a quack like Chanyeol kept trying to tell me.  So far, Dr. Kim was the only one that actually listened to what I had to say and the only one who I could trust completely right now.  There was so much doubt circling in my mind about Chanyeol and Joonmyun that I didn’t know what to do; though I loved Chanyeol with all my heart, and though I was very glad I was talking to Joonmyun almost normally again, I just couldn’t get over the fact something was missing in both of their affections.  They weren’t letting me know everything.

And though I’d promised Chanyeol a long time ago to talk to him about everything and never keep any secrets, I thought that keeping a few things to myself wasn’t such a bad idea.  We hadn’t fought for the past few weeks, and I wanted to keep it that way.

I heard pages rustle, and I knew that Dr. Kim was looking through my file at all his notes from our sessions, making a few more notes here and there about what I said.

“Alright, just to clarify,” Dr. Kim began, “you’ve known Chanyeol since primary school, where he stayed through third grade, correct?”

I looked up and nodded, removing my head from my hands.

“And he was transferred to a private school for fourth grade and beyond because he was having trouble with people hating him at his old school?”

Another nod.

At that, he removed a small object from the file.  It was a picture, that I could tell.  Dr. Kim looked at me for a second before flipping the picture over and showing it to me.

“Is this Park Chanyeol?”

I took the picture from him and stared at it more closely.  The stringy hair, the protruding ears, and the dorky glasses gave it away instantly.

“Yeah, this is his third grade yearbook picture.”

The last picture I ever got to see of him.

Dr. Kim saw the way I was lovingly staring at the picture in my hands, and he let me keep looking at it for now.  Chanyeol was so adorable when he was younger.  A little chubby but in the cute kind of way that children are.  I remembered that he had a ferret as a pet back in primary school that he once tried to bring to class for show and tell before his parents stopped him.  He never told them that I was the one who helped him try to sneak it in.

“Do you have any recent pictures of him?” he asked me.

“No.  He doesn’t like taking pictures.”

“Do you know why he doesn’t like it?”

“I’m not exactly sure.  He says he’s not very photogenic, but...”

I set the picture down on the coffee table in front of me and looked back up to Dr. Kim, though my eyes had a distant look to them when I finished my sentence.

“...he hasn’t taken a picture with me in over ten years.”

I reminisced on all the times I’d tried to sneak a picture of him or begged him to just take a small little photo with me that I could put on my desk at work.  But he never let me.  And even when I’d been sure that I’d finally taken a candid shot of him, I’d looked back at the photo reel of my camera only to realize that he wasn’t there at all and had somehow miraculously ducked out of the way before my camera could catch him.

Dr. Kim, sensing the forlorn look on my face, brought the conversation in another direction.

“Did Chanyeol change after third grade?  You know, when he transferred schools?  Any new trait that stood out as being different than before?”

“Um...I guess he started hating people a lot more.  He talked about it all the time and kept saying that I was the only one that understood him and didn’t hate him.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I saw him a lot more.  He was always with me.”

“So you two were hanging out together a lot?  At least most of the time?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he come over to your house often?”

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