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Taehyung's Epilogue

Out of everyone that I'd needed to interview, never in a million years would I have thought that Taehyung's would end up being the most difficult. He was a wreck the whole time, struggling emotionally while he tried the best he could to tell me everything that had happened back then. Unlike the rest of us, he was the only one who'd never truly healed the scars that came with his past. I had repeatedly tried my best to calm him down at least a little and remind him that he wasn't the only one out of all of us with the mark that he had, but my efforts barely worked. Jimin was the only one that could properly calm Taehyung down, I concluded after some time, not me, and the reason for that would become clear to me later.

Going through the process of Taehyung's interview had ended up draining my confidence in this project slightly, only because I had begun to feel that I would end up putting everyone under a lot of pressure for asking so many personal questions. I, too, was putting myself under a lot of pressure just by carrying all of this out. I got especially stressed whenever I had to find a time where we were alone without any cameras around to work on this because, as you can probably assume, these times would usually only come around once in a blue moon. After I had started to feel down, this constant burden that I was putting myself through had finally started to become apparent to me, and for a little while after I realized this, I ran the idea over my mind of just stopping there and not continuing with the rest of the process. But just as I told myself to find a way to endure my troubles in the past, I had told myself then to keep going through the struggle so that my stress could begin to fade at least a little.

Taehyung's whole life, I'd come to realize after this was over, was filled with significantly more burden than any of the rest of us. The thoughts of his mistakes that he'd witnessed so many years ago continue to haunt him to this day, and no matter what he tries, he can't do anything to get these negative thoughts out of his head permanently. They'd go away at times, and you could tell when this was from his mood. These times were the ones he was the happiest and the most energetic as if he were still the rowdy kid that all of us had known in the beginning when we were first starting to get to know each other. But even with times like these, the stigma that was left from the memories of his past, we all eventually came to realize, would never leave him.

For the past 6 years, Taehyung has been living the dream that he's had since him and his friends made that promise to one another. Just like how the memories had never left him, his childhood dream had never left him, either, and he is more than thrilled to be following it successfully today. He's living out his friends' one and only dream for them, and we all continue today to believe—I especially—that being together with us brings a bright smile onto Youngsoo and Eunmi's innocent faces.

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