He hears the faint buzz of the fluorescent ceiling, and felt the intensity of its artificial lights radiate through his skin. There’s an oddly familiar beep of a heart monitor; continuous, monotonous, everlasting. He hears the faint chatter of eleven boys, lined up outside, peering anxiously through the window. His eyes didn’t open, despite all the strength he used to try.

    “Ah, Jongin, I’m worried about him,” said one of the young men outside the room. “He looked worse than dead after all of that.”

    “The doctor told me he might have brain damage. His head hit the windshield after the truck hit our bus. Gave him some blunt-force trauma,” Jongin replied. The boy next to him started to cry.

    “You know, it’s almost a good thing that the media outlets are saying we’re all fine. If the public knew that one of us is severely injured, we’d never hear the end of it from journalists and our fans.”

    “Jongin! Is he brain dead?!”

    A click from the door interrupted the buzz of the white lights above. He hears a deep, rugged voice in the room and it tiptoed closer to his bed.

    “Hello? Can you open your eyes?”

    He sluggishly raised an arm to block the lights of the ceiling, and gradually opened his eyes to lay them on a man in an ivory lab coat. He wore glasses without frames and had jet black hair that shined in the light. All the boys outside trickled into the room, one by one. The stoic doctor continued to ask him questions that left the young man puzzled and slurring incomprehensible phrases. He shook his head and whispered something slowly to Jongin, who buried his face in his hands after the doctor left the room to write a report. The boy in the bed bobbed his head. His eyes began to roll around and he closed his eyes to sleep again.

“Guys, they think he has some memory issue or mental illness he developed in his coma. Of course, he doesn't know what. They still have some examinations to do.”

The boy next to him was still crying. Jongin stood up and slowly approached the one in the hospital bed.

    “Oh Sehun, twenty years old.” he said, turning to the other boys with a trembling voice. “What's sad is that he could be forgetting his own identity and just who he is to the world."