"being 164cm is not a disadvantage. being 164cm in a room with three men twice your size is a statement. the statement is: size is irrelevant when the smaller player has better strategy and higher tolerance."
CONFESSION #005
SUBJECT: Kim Chaewon (LE SSERAFIM)
DEVICE: iPhone 17 — Mist Blue
APPLE ID: ████████@icloud.com
FOLDER: 개인 (Private) / 메모
FILE TITLE: "forbidden achievements"
CREATED: November 14, 2019 — 11:32 PM KST
LAST MODIFIED: February 13, 2026 — 02:44 AM KST
SYNC STATUS: Backed up to iCloud
ENCRYPTION: BREACHED
[ FILE OPENED ]
forbidden achievements
[NON-RELEVANT ENTRIES REDACTED]
[November 14, 2019 — 11:32 PM]
there's a boy. rookie idol from another company. we've been texting for a few weeks. he's tall — not hard to be taller than me, most kitchen appliances are taller than me — and he laughs at things that are actually funny which is rarer than it should be in this industry where everyone laughs at everything as a professional reflex.
year-end industry gathering tonight. venue in gangnam. hundred-something trainees and idols in expensive clothes. i found him across the room and his face did the thing where it reacts before the brain can censor it. mine probably did the same. i'm usually better at my face but he got past the checkpoint.
we talked by the drinks table for an hour. then he said he wanted to show me the hallway. i said "there's nothing in a hallway." he said "i'm in the hallway." terrible line. worked immediately.
the hallway had a vending machine and fluorescent lighting that made both of us look like we were in a hospital drama. extremely unromantic. peak ambiance for a first kiss if your standards are underground, which mine apparently are.
he kissed me. four seconds. maybe five. his lips were chapped — do boys not own lip balm? is lip balm a female-only technology? i thought male idols also care about these things? i tasted like peach because of my balm, he tasted like cola. together we tasted like a convenience store. not how i pictured my first kiss tasting but i didn't hate it. my heart was doing something interesting — not the romantic flutter that dramas promise but the adrenaline thing. the pre-stage thing. the specific chemical that hits when you're about to step into lights.
that part i liked. the cola, mid. the adrenaline, very good.
walked back inside. smiled at the right people. said the right things. the whole time my heart was still doing the thing and i kept touching my own lips without realizing it until wonyoung asked me why i kept doing that and i said they were dry and she gave me her lip balm and didn't ask further questions because wonyoung is fifteen and doesn't know what to ask yet.
i think i want to feel the adrenaline part again. the cola part is negotiable.
[March 3, 2020 — 01:08 AM]
developments since november. not documenting every text exchange because this is a diary not a court transcript but summary: we kept talking, we met twice outside of schedules, things progressed.
first time — secret date at a cafe in hapjeong. quiet corner booth. his hand started on my knee. took maybe twenty minutes to migrate from knee to inner thigh. twenty minutes of incremental progress while i sipped an americano that went cold and pretended to watch the rain outside while his fingers drew slow circles higher and higher on my leg.
the people at the next table were having a conversation about their mortgage. mortgage. while his thumb was tracing the inseam of my jeans three inches from where no thumb belonging to anyone else had ever been. the mundanity of them versus the not-mundanity of what was happening under the table was its own kind of high. like being in a movie that only two people are watching.
he didn't go further than the thigh. not that day. but my body spent the next six hours reminding me exactly where his hand had been. phantom fingerprints. i could feel them during evening practice. i messed up the chorus formation because my brain was in a hapjeong cafe booth instead of the practice room and the choreographer looked at me like i'd grown a second head because kim chaewon doesn't mess up formations.
second time — his company's practice building, after hours. he had a keycard. empty floor. just us and the emergency exit signs glowing red at the end of the corridor.
this one went further.
his hands under my shirt. the shock of someone else's fingers on my bare stomach — cold hands, warm skin, the contrast made me inhale sharply and he took the inhale as encouragement, which it was, though i would have died before admitting that out loud. he touched my chest over my bra and then under it and his thumb crossed my nipple and my back found the mirror behind me and my eyes closed and my hips moved forward into his without my brain approving the motion.
his hand went lower. under the waistband. outside the underwear first — rubbing through the cotton — and i was wet enough that we could both feel it through the fabric and his breathing changed and mine changed and we were two trainees in an empty practice room at midnight crossing lines that the industry pretends don't get crossed.
he slipped his fingers inside my underwear. skin on skin. his middle finger found me and slid between and i grabbed his wrist — not to stop him, to hold him there, to make sure he didn't move his hand away because if he moved his hand away i would have actually died.
he touched me like that for a while. i'm not sure how long. time does strange things when someone is rubbing your clit for the first time. i was close — building toward something i could feel assembling in my lower body like a countdown — when we heard footsteps in the corridor.
we separated so fast i got friction burn from the mirror. he turned away to deal with his situation. i pulled my shirt down and pretended to stretch. the footsteps passed. the door didn't open.
the almost-caught moment. forty-five seconds of absolute stillness, heart in my throat, body still throbbing from what his hand had been doing three seconds earlier. i keep thinking about those forty-five seconds more than i think about his fingers.
the risk is the thing. i know that now. the fingers were good. the risk of the footsteps was better. my brain is taking notes.
[October 22, 2020 — 02:30 AM]
haven't written here since march. a lot has happened in the world. nothing has happened in my world that i've been willing to write down because writing it makes it permanent and permanent is scary.
but something happened two days ago that i need to put here. and before i write about it i need to write about something sakura-unnie said that changed how i think about all of this.
we were in the dorm — IZ*ONE dorm, the living room, late at night. she was playing something on her switch. some action RPG with a leveling system. she was explaining the progression with the kind of focus she normally saves for food or her cat and she said something i haven't been able to stop thinking about.
she said: "the best part of a good game isn't the easy content. it's when you clear something genuinely hard. there's a specific dopamine hit from beating a level you were stuck on. and then immediately your brain recalibrates and the old hard becomes normal and you need new hard."
she was talking about games.
i was thinking about the practice room hallway and the footsteps and the specific adrenaline of almost being caught and how the cafe booth — which felt so daring in december — now feels like nothing.
"your brain recalibrates and you need new hard."
that's exactly what's happening to me. the kiss was a level. the cafe was a level. the practice room was a level. each one felt hard when i was in it and easy looking back. and my recalibrated brain keeps asking: what's next?
sakura-unnie handed me the vocabulary without knowing she was handing me anything. so i'm going to use it. because this diary isn't just a diary anymore. it's a progression log. every experience has been a level. the first kiss was level 1. the cafe was level 2. the practice room was — let's be honest — level 2.5 because we didn't finish.