BTS Love Yourself: The Notes

Love Yourself: Answer Notes

Seokjin
3 August Year 22

I opened the door to the storage room of the classroom. It was a midsummer night, and there was a smell of a mix of mold and dust in the unfiltered air. In a flash, some scenes crossed my mind. The principal's shoes were shining. Namjoon's facial expression when he was standing outside the door. The day I ignored Hoseok and walked back alone. My heart started hurting and I got chills. I had this complex feeling that overwhelmed me with pain. It's hard to say how it felt like because it wasn't annoyance but it wasn't fear either. The sign was clear. I knew I had to get out of this place.

It seemed like if Tae knew what I was thinking and he held my arm. "Hyung try a little harder. Try remembering what happened here." Then I got Tae's hands off of me and turned back. We walked through the heat for hours. We were extremely tired. Other guys looked at me as if they didn't know what to say to me. Memory. What Taehyung said about memory was just a meaningless story. That I did that... That it happened to me... The story that we did something together. It's possible that it happened. I think we did that. But, memory isn't something that you can understand or accept. You don't understand experience through just hearing something. Experience is something that is deeply rooted in your mind, head, and soul. But for me the memories I had about that place was only about the bad things. Things that made me painful and made me want to escape.

A fight happened between me and Tae who stopped me from going back. But we were both tired. Hitting or avoiding... it's both felt heavy and slow as if it were in a hot viscous liquid. It happened in a sudden when Tae and I tripped over each other. I lose my focus and fell.

At first, I could not tell what had happened. I could not open my eyes or breathe because of the foggy dust. Coughs burst out without a break. Are you okay? I was hung up on the fact that I tripped because of someone's words. When I got up, I realized how fragile this place looked. There was a ton of space beyond the wall. Nobody moved for a while. Oh my god. How long did we stay here? Someone spoke. No one knew a place like this existed beyond the walls. But what's that? After the dust settled, there was one single cabinet that stood in the middle of the empty space.

Nam Joon opened the cabinet door. I inched closer. In it, there was a notebook. Nam Joon opened the notebook to the first page. His breath stopped. In the old looking notebook, the first page had an unexpected name. It was my father's name. Nam Joon flipped another page, becoming more and more surprised. Flipped over the cabinet. The note fell out of his fingers. 

The notes written in his handwriting were the work of the father and his friends in high school. It was a daily story of their lives. It was written monthly. But I still knew. My father and I suffered from the same thing. He had made the same mistake and had ran and ran to make up for it.

The notebook had a record of my father's failures. In the end, my father gave up and failed. He avoided his friends. In the last chapter of the journal, everything was left white. There were no marks, and the page after that, and the page after that. This showed his failure.

How much time passed. The wind passed through a dark time, right before the sun rose. Nam Joon's sister listened as well. I looked up at the wall and lifted my head. Somewhere in here, my father wrote this. Below that, this was written. Everything began here.

I could see the ink make up some letters. I felt the energy. However, the night was not over yet. It was not night, yet not sunrise. As the light tangled, in the dark spot, the letter was faintly between lines and lines.

More memories came to me. Between the blank spaces and the letters, what my father had forgotten and what my father did not remember remained intact. The color flew away, but the rinse marks remained unchanged. The number of times my father felt fear, seemed unlikely to be won. Father's map lay untouched on top of the map.

As I closed the notebook, I felt tears. I sat like that for a while and raised my head, and saw my friends in sleep. I looked upon them, one by one. We might have to come back here, I understood. Everything started here for us. We knew the reason for our existence and why we laughed together. The first mistake I made was that the first mistake that I could never admit to my mouth was left as a broken wound. I think it would not be all of a sudden. I had to come to the end of the way. I was able to find out the meaning of suffering. I would take the first step of finding the guidance of my soul.