THE ONE | wong yukhei ✔

FUTURE

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chapter three
– F U T U R E –

after that came the end.
the boy, the girl, the love, the conflicts.
and death.

She loved dancing and the feeling that came with it of almost being able to fly.

He loved doing sports, training his body, trying out hip-hop dances, and any kind of exercise that came closest to it.

She couldn't sing, and when she did, she did it alone.

He wanted to sing, become a vocalist one day, but he knew he had to practice a lot for it. For now, he was happy with his passion for rapping and writing lyrics.

She adored the smell of freshly mown grass.

He sighed every time he inhaled the smell of gasoline when he refueled his motorcycle.

Before she bought a book, she opened it in the middle and smelled the pages, the freshly printed paper, as if she could tell by the smell whether the book was promising or not.

He always bought a book and then inhaled the scent of pages that were so pure that they gave away so much of their soul.

Yes, the closer you looked, the more the line between the two blurred, between Yukhei and Chaelin. The deeper you went, the sooner you realized that they weren't as different as you had originally thought. And maybe that was what connected them so much. They had different interests, that was a good thing – a friend of them once said: A relationship can only go well if both are like opposites, but strive to respond to the other one's interests.

And that's how they were. Yukhei took Chaelin to the river with him (where he was fishing or working on his lyrics), played with her at the game console and she took him to her sport, where dancing was not uncommon and girls were thrown into the air.

Over time, they also learned how to plan the future. It hadn't been easy, they knew that, but it was worth fighting for what was important to them – their relationship. They wanted to stay together, no matter what, and so it came about that both lived in different countries and built their new, personal lives. But they had managed not to forget the other, they had learned what it meant to surprise the other. A text message here, a gift package there, even Yukhei himself once stood in front of Chaelin's apartment door and knew that she would be glad to see him. He had made his debut with a group called NCT and had to train a lot for it, but the free days he had, he wanted to spend with his girl and no distance seemed too far for him. So the years went by, school time was long forgotten, Chaelin's studies were now over and it was time for Chaelin and Yukhei to finally be together again.

Chaelin moved to the city of Seoul, to Yukhei, to a small apartment on the fourth floor above a kiosk run by a middle-aged man, who always smiled at them when he saw them holding hands in front of the apartment door. The apartment was just one block away from the dorm of Yukhei and his friends, so they often had dinner together, or made plans together, sometimes Yukhei slept at Chaelin's apartment, and sometimes Chaelin slept at their dorm with the other boys from NCT. Although when the other members were around, they never slept. Instead, the other members turned it into a sleepover, full of snacks and movies and games. And sometimes, in the middle of playing UNO, Chaelin and Yukhei coincidentally looked at each other, and both sensed that they were a family. Especially with the boys who accepted Chaelin so well and loved her for making Yukhei a better guy. It was nice. Life was beautiful.

From time to time they drove to visit their parents in the westside, on the rolling land where they had once run through the woods and meadows, where they had kissed and loved each other, where they had been just children. Where they had been together for three years before their ways separated for years and now they were finally back where they always wanted to go - together in the unknown.