Those words echoed in my head, they never left, it was all I ever thought about lately. I tossed and turned in bed as I tried to grab onto some form of sleep, but nothing happened. I stared blankly at the dark ceiling as the words that Shinwoo spoke to me one week ago echoed in my mind, clear as day. Malignant brain tumor. Six years. Inoperable. Radiotherapy. Not that much time left. I didn’t know what to think. What could I think? The guy that I liked, that I really liked, was dying because of a brain tumor.

          “He wanted to tell you but didn’t know how,” Shinwoo told me that night. “He didn’t know how to tell you. He told me about when he saw you that day. I had gone to visit him, to bring him some things to occupy the time. He told me how concerned he was about you, but he warned me not to tell you.”

          “But you’re telling me.”

          “I think you should know the truth,” Shinwoo simply said.

          The silence was suffocating but after everything, everything fell into place. As I laid awake in bed that night, all of the pieces fell into place. The little things that I had never noticed before. Seeing Shinwoo at the hospital, seeing Jinyoung at the hospital before we ever got together. Seeing that bandage on his arm the day we became boyfriend and girlfriend, the reason he disappeared so suddenly. It all made sense.

          “It’s a malignant brain tumor,” Shinwoo explained. “He first got it when he was eighteen. It was hard back then, it really was.” I saw him look off into the distance as he was perhaps thinking of some distant memory. “He went into the operation and it was successful, until now. It grew back, it came back. We always knew that he was at risk for it coming back.”

          “When did…when did you guys discover that it came back?” I wondered. I didn’t know when I found my voice to ask questions and I don’t know how I was able to ask such a question, but I did. And Shinwoo answered.

          “He went for his blood test about five months ago I think…” he thought. “Then about a month after that I noticed that he began acting strangely. He had a lot of headaches in the morning and sometimes he would forget things.”

“I never noticed,” I whispered.

          “He tried to keep it from you. He tried to keep it from me, even,” Shinwoo added, “but I noticed. The other guys didn’t. I was friends with Jinyoung ever since we were teenagers. I was there with him through the first time, so I knew a bit. He finally went to the doctor again then and was diagnosed again. That was around the time you couldn’t get in contact with him.”

          I let the words sink in. I let all of the words, the story that Shinwoo was telling me, sink in. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t say anything else. I also didn’t know if I would be able to face Jinyoung. What would I say to him?  I knew that I shouldn’t treat him differently, but that kind of news was shocking to me. The boy that I had learned to depend on was at the risk of dying.

          I wondered numerous times about what I should say to him, about whether I should speak with him. I knew that I had to speak with him sometime, I just didn’t know what to say or when we would ever meet.

          For the first time in my life I wanted to speak to someone about it. I had never wanted to speak to anyone about anything before. It somehow scared me. Over the course of the eight months that I had known Jinyoung I had gotten close to him, closer than I had with anyone, including my mother.

          After about two more hours of tossing and turning I ended up on the wooden platform on my back, looking up at the night stars. That’s when it hit me. Stars. Jinyoung had always talked about them, about what it would be like to become them. I had always thought that it was just some weird fascination with them, that perhaps a past dream of his was to be an astronomer. But now, now they held a deeper meaning. He knew that he was going to die one day. Of course everyone ended up dead, but he knew that he may end up dead because of his brain tumor, and he was subtly hinting it to me. He would ask about what it would be like to live as a star and told me that when he died he wanted to become one so he could watch over his loved ones all the time. In other words, he might’ve been preparing me.

          “You don’t look that good,” Jun said the next day in the convenience store.

          “It’s just from a lack of sleep,” I said attempting my best to try and act normal, to act like nothing in my life was wrong, to act like the strong and fearless girl that I had always been.

          That was another subject to questioning. I wondered why I was reacting that way to the news. It wasn’t the first time that I was dealing with the possibility of death, I’ve lived with it every day for practically my entire life with my mother. I wasn’t upset when I found out that she would have to permanently stay in the hospital, when they said that she had so much damage to her body that it was a miracle she was alive. I wasn’t upset, and in reality, I kind of felt like she deserved it all, as bad as that may sound.

          But with the news of Jinyoung, I found myself breaking down whenever I thought about it. The walls that I had carefully built inside my entire being felt like they no longer existed. For the first time I truly felt how alone I really was. However, I wasn’t alone. I had Jinyoung and I knew that his friends were there for me, but that didn’t do anything to aid what exactly it was that I was feeling inside.

          “I don’t think it’s just from a lack of sleep,” Jun sighed. “Minyoung, why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” I turned to look at him and saw the concern in his eyes for me. Was it always there and I just had never noticed it before? “Go home and catch up on some of that sleep you lost, alright?” He smiled and I sighed, but in the end I gave in. I packed up my things to go home, but I didn’t go there.

Instead, my feet led me to the hospital. The place looked so sad and sorrowful, so sterile and uninviting. I climbed the stairs with heavy footsteps, each one feeling like an eternity. I didn’t know what I would say or do, but I knew that I was there to see him. I knew that I couldn’t take it any longer. Was I there to find answers to know the reasons why he lied? Probably not. But I felt like I had to just go and see him, see his face, know that he was alright.

“Minyoung?” it took a minute before his voice registered in my brain, before I realized that I was standing in the doorway to his hospital room. He was lying on his bed, a notebook open on the tray in front of him, his guitar sitting on his lap. He looked like he always did, only the setting was changed. Instead of wearing his ripped jeans and black leather jacket with his hair slightly messy, he was in a hospital gown with a blue beanie over his head and an IV stuck into his arm. “Minyoung,” he said again. It sounded more like a sigh of relief.

          I saw him begin to get out of bed. I saw how he had to maneuver himself with the IV attached and to move the guitar and tray out of the way. “Hey, hey, hey, hey,” he said approaching me. I felt his slender hands cup my face and his thumb run along my cheek. “Why are you crying?” he asked.

          I would’ve answered him had I known the answer, but I didn’t even realize that I was. It was like my emotions just had a life of their own. Like the untapped tears of my twenty years had always decided to show themselves whenever I was around him.

          “You bad jerk,” I managed to choke out and began to lightly hit his shoulder.

          “Yes…you’re right,” Jinyoung said taking all of my hits without moving a muscle. “I am a bad jerk, I’m dirt, I’m worse than dirt.” He took me deeply into his arms when I was through hitting him. “Minyoung, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I’m sorry.”

          And that was when it all came out. There would be no stopping it. I clung onto Jinyoung. I clung onto him like my life depended on it and cried my heart out on his shoulder.