i would wait (forever and ever)

XII - end

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i'll wait, don't worry

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02/24/2024

nayeon-chan,

i'm sorry, i'm not really sure what i had in mind when i decided to write you this. i've never even written an actual letter in my entire life. or maybe i'm just trying to warn you in case you find yourself extremely confused about who the hell would possibly send you a letter in 2024 and why.

but three years had flown by a little too slowly for me and in between i always find myself wanting to know how you've been. i didn't want to write you an email, though. i worried i'd end up getting lost in the mountains of other important uni stuff of yours.

anyway, i hope this letter finds you all right. or finds you at all.

before anything else, i want to ask you something. have you ever seen a movie so good, you get post-movie depression right after seeing the ending? like, everything about it is so good, returning to the real world hits too painfully apparent, somehow?

if you haven't, let me tell you, it's the most excruciating feeling ever.

it's like coming down from a high but rather too abruptly, that instead of gaining satisfaction of feeling the ground beneath your feet, you get awfully wounded, and the scar feels as if it's gonna be there forever. just with you, everywhere. that's exactly how i felt after graduation, when it was all over.

the ending with you, it was just so good.

i don't know if i'd told you this before, but i've always hated being in high school.

i know, that's when we first met each other. i hate it. i thought the universe could've done a whole lot better than letting us stumble upon each other at fifteen.

that was quite appalling to me. and tremendously unfair. i couldn't fall in love with you back then.

or maybe, if i happened to have done so, nonetheless, i still couldn't possibly let myself acknowledge that.

something i learned during that time, throughout the first eighteen years of my existence, was that nothing in high school is real. everything you see is an illusion and everything you feel —it's just not gonna last.

for example, our old friends, sana and jihyo. did you know they'd broken up a year after graduation? they say it's long distance's fault, because jihyo got accepted to columbia and sana had to go back to japan. but we both witnessed with our own eyes how head over heels they were for each other, and i don't blame the distance.

i blame the timing.

my parents were high school sweethearts. did i happen to tell you about that before? if not, i'm sorry. must've slipped my mind. but like jihyo and sana, they met in high school, too. like jeongyeon and mina. like you and me.

they say nothing in high school lasts forever. false in some ways, but also true in many other.

my parents lasted to the point that they marry each other, but i don't think their feelings ever did. maybe they stay together because they have to — because they have me, and that's only when it finally turned into an illusion, whatever it was that they had. maybe it was a little later for them than the others, but it still did.

it wasn't real, whatever they used to have back then. and if there's another thing i learned from my first eighteen years of existence, it's that the universe is always gonna find a way of proving that high school is nothing but a fantasy.