The sirens, the talking, the questions, everything just flew right over my head. I suddenly found myself lost with a thousand questions roaming my head that couldn’t be answered. I didn’t even know if there were answers for any of them, but the one thing that was prevalent in my mind was whether Jinyoung was going to be alright or not. That was the thing that I wanted to be answered the most, that was the question that was the most important. Was he going to be okay?

          Shinwoo must’ve felt my uneasiness as he gently patted my back. He was with me the entire time answering the questions for me. He had arrived shortly after the ambulance came and quickly rushed to save me, not that I really wanted it, but my mind wasn’t functioning. How could it?

          The nurses and doctors immediately took Jinyoung back somewhere leaving Shinwoo and I in the waiting room. “He’ll be alright,” Shinwoo said as if those words would cheer me up. I wanted to believe him, I wanted to think that everything was going to be okay but I had a feeling that everything was going to change. No matter how much I wanted to shake that feeling, it was there. There was nothing I could do about it.

          I had initially thought it was just anxiety about the entire situation but I soon found myself to be proven wrong. “He’s going to have to permanently stay in the hospital again,” the doctor said once we saw him.

          “Permanently?” I asked.

          I couldn’t digest the rest of what the doctor said as it seemed I was taken back to the time when my mother was there, when I was told that my mother was doing worse, when I had gotten there to find out she passed away. The flashbacks came and all of a sudden I felt lightheaded and needed to sit down.

          “Whoa, Minyoung,” Shinwoo said holding me up. I could faintly recognize his voice. I suppose he thanked the doctor and moved me to one of the chairs. “Minyoung? Minyoung? Hey, listen, they just want to watch him for a little, alright?”

          “He said permanent,” I repeated.

          “Hey, listen to me,” he said putting his hands on my shoulders. “You and I both know Jinyoung, you and I both know how strong he is. He’ll be okay.”

          “But it’s still in there,” I said, all of my worries bubbling over the surface. “It’s inoperable so it’s still in there. He could still die from it, though. He can’t ever escape it. It’ll be in there for the rest of his life.”

          “It will, but Jinyoung is strong,” Shinwoo said, still in an effort to comfort me. “He’s strong like that.” I didn’t say anything and let the silence take over. “Do you want to go home? I could take you.”

          “I’d rather stay here,” I said.

          “Okay. Then I’m going to stay with you.”

          I’m not sure how long Shinwoo and I sat in the waiting room of the hospital. The doctor had come back out to tell us that he scheduled some tests for Jinyoung the following day and I could do nothing but just nod my head along. But I slowly grew restless sitting there. I wanted to be able to do something, to go see if he was alright or something.

          “Why don’t you go get some rest?” Shinwoo asked as he brought over some snacks that he went to go pick up. I didn’t even notice he left. “Here, you’re probably hungry.” I accepted the snack that he handed me. “You can’t sit here all night. Go home, get some rest. I’ll stay here with him and update you if anything happens.”

          “I…I should stay,” I eventually said.

          “Minyoung,” Shinwoo softly said. I knew what words were going to come next. I knew that he was probably going to scold me for doing such foolish things, scold me for staying in the hospital when he knew that I had other work that needed to be done. But he didn’t. He just continued to stare at me and sighed as if he were going to tell me something. “Jinyoung…he…he didn’t want you to worry too much about him,” he began. “He knew that you would constantly worry about him and he didn’t want to hold you back in any way. He wanted you to be able to freely live your life and he wanted to be right there with you, accompanying you along the way.”

          “Huh?” I asked unsure where all of this was coming from.

          “He knew that there might be a day when things would take a turn for the worse. After all, that’s kind of to be expected with things like this. You see,” he sighed, “the clearance for Jinyoung to go home was granted because Jinyoung pleaded and begged with them. He wanted to be able to spend time with you like a normal person and he wanted the two of you two be able to try and be a normal couple for a little bit. Jinyoung…he hasn’t been doing well for a while…”

          I tuned him out after that. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. Jinyoung…he was dying, I figured. He knew it but he didn’t want to tell me. Even though I knew that there was a possibility of it happening, I never thought about it much, more like I refused to really think about it. But Jinyoung always knew and while that fact was always evident, he knew it even more once he got released from the hospital. It was like he knew his time was slowly coming to an end but he wanted to spend it with me, he didn’t want to worry me. He wanted to try to make me the happiest person in the world. But what did I do for him? It felt like I wasn’t able to do nearly half as much as what he had done for me over the past year. I felt lacking, like I wasn’t good enough for him. What perhaps surprised me more in that moment was that Shinwoo knew all along. Shinwoo knew everything and he always had.

          “He told you all of this?” I asked. I saw his face turn for a moment, realizing that I had put the little and few pieces together and he silently nodded. “He told you about this but couldn’t tell me? Why? I thought…I thought we could talk to each other about things like this.”

          “Minyoung, he just thought he was doing what was best regarding the situation,” was all Shinwoo said.

          I stood up from the chair at that moment. It felt like the walls were caving in and suddenly everything around me felt heavy. “I…I need to go.” I grabbed my coat from the chair and began to walk away.

          “Minyoung,” Shinwoo said behind me.

          “I just…please,” I said turning around to meet his eyes before I continued out the door.

          I spent a long time outside, just walking around under the sky that was slowly getting darker. I walked past the restaurant that we had the party at and the location that I had first met the guys. They had been two completely different circumstances yet they felt recent. But besides that, I felt completely different than I was. Was the person that was standing there even the same person that was present then? My feet also unknowingly walked to the convenience store where I worked. One of the new part-timers was inside working and I just stood outside of the door looking in for a long moment. It was the place that had started it all, really. Everything.

          The stars had come out by that point and I had no idea how long I was even outside. The stars were another memory that I had with him. Countless memories were spent under the stars but even more memories were our talks about stars. He wanted to live as a star, he wanted to always be near me, to watch and protect me. The stars had always given me strength and solace before and I found them doing the same thing again.

          And that was when the first tear started to fall. Not just for me but for Jinyoung, for his family, friends, for the people that I had come to know and enjoy being in the company of. The people that I was starting and already had let into my world, those that I had let see the real me in every sense of itself. Yet those people were on the verge of losing someone very precious, someone who we all adored and loved.

          The possibility of potentially losing him forever was greater than before and I just felt helpless. It felt like there was nothing I could do to make this feeling go away, to make everything right again, to go back and relive that morning, what could have been the best time of my life.

          My world felt like it was falling apart and I realized that there was absolutely nothing that I could do to stop it.