THE PAST, THE PRESENT, & THE FUTURE, txt ✓

02. Letter Two, To Choi Yeonjun

choi yeonjun, the one I loved most for almost four years...
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Wow, Yeonjun...you're really the last person I'd expect myself to contact. I'm sure you know from my vague stories of my childhood friend, Beomgyu, but I have an annoying habit of pushing away everything that's prone to hurt me, even a little bit.

For years now, Yeonjun, I've been pushing away thought that's come into my head of you. I still do love you, even if not as much as before, but it's true. To be honest, Yeonjun, I find it difficult not to love you.

I hope you're happy these days. I hope you've found someone you love completely and wholly, because that's what I always envisioned with us—a vision that no longer has any chance of coming true.

It's time to rehash our past, Yeonjun. Do you dread it? Or have you already played it all out in your mind and think you're prepared? Unfortunately, love, we're going to rehash our past before we ever became intertwined romantically.

When I first entered our school the year that we turned fourteen, I was scared. Change had previously brought a whole lot of pain and misery into my life—pain and misery that I was still recovering from. I still have faint scars on my left arm to prove it—back then, I hid all my scars beneath the long sleeves of my uniform and no one had to know.

Do you remember my first words to you on the second day of school? I asked you, genuinely confused, "why are you so nice to me?"

To which you replied with a smile, "I just am."

In my experience, guys were bold and confident like you, and they tended to say stupid things that landed them in trouble a bit too often, just like you. Although I never approved of your habit of talking back far too often for anyone but our other classmates' liking, the ones who had the same habit themselves, some part of me admired that stretch of confidence not too many other guys had.

Well, several of our classmates definitely did, but in my opinion, you were the most good-looking, and the only guy who was actually, genuinely, nice to me. Although we did have our moments where we mocked each other—you once called me a baby for being afraid of a bee (listen, they sting people, and those stings hurt, okay?) to which I retaliated by tossing an eraser at you, which hit your nose painfully hard—none of it was meant to be vicious and mean or any of those things.

We weren't friends; oh, no, we wouldn't call each other that. You were just that one classmate I found to be really nice. But of course, there's my weakness popping up again. Just like with the boy I liked before, you were handsome, cute, and nice to me, but in a different way than with him. You and I mostly yelled light-hearted insults at each other.

I remember the day we had a seminar about something important. What the seminar was about isn't what I remember so clearly—it was something about us having to take our education a lot more seriously now that we so close to the GCSEs. It was just two or three years, which seems like a long time when you're actually two or three years away, but when a year or so passes, suddenly you feel like there's not enough time to revise so much material and still pass.

I ended up having an anxiety attack and was very desperately holding back any cries that threatened to escape me. Mostly, I ended up sniffling and rubbing my eyes a lot. I don't know if you remember, since it was such a long time ago, but that day while Lee Nayoung was trying to comfort me on the way back to class, you saw I was quiet and worse, crying, and asked, "are you okay?"

That shocked me enough to stop crying for a few seconds. In my experience, boys were never that concerned about or attentive enough to say things like that. It's a small thing, but my instinct had always been to keep away from boys whenever I started feeling overwhelmed, because I was afraid that I would be teased and called a baby for crying. They wouldn't know about my anxiety; but it's not nice, teasing a crying person.