the girl who promised me forever

(and meant it until she couldn't)

I stopped believing in promises on a Thursday.

Not the dramatic kind. No rain. No slammed doors. Just a text message that took three minutes to type and two seconds to destroy everything.

"I'm sorry. I can't keep pretending. This is goodbye. Please don't call."

Ahn Yujin, who once held my face in her hands and said "I'll never leave you" with such sincerity that I believed her. Ahn Yujin, who laughed like a goose and cried like a faucet and loved like she was running out of time. Ahn Yujin, who was twenty years old and already tired of being strong.

She typed those words with the same thumbs that used to trace the shape of my jaw. She sent them from the same phone that held three years of our texts. She deleted my number after, because that's what people do when they're trying to survive.

I didn't delete hers.

We met in the stairwell of a music show.

She was seventeen. I was nineteen. She was crying because she'd forgotten a dance move on camera and the internet was already making compilations. I was holding a bottle of water I'd been sent to fetch for my boss, and I didn't know who she was, not really. Just a girl in a sequined outfit with mascara running down her cheeks and her shoulders shaking in a way that made me want to cover her with something warm.

I sat down next to her. Didn't say anything. Just sat there, three steps apart, breathing the same stale backstage air.

"Go away," she said.

"No."

"I said go away."

"You're crying in a stairwell. I'm not leaving until you stop."

She looked at me then. Really looked. Her eyes were red and puffy and fierce in a way that made my chest ache. "You don't even know me."

"Does that matter?"

She stared for a long moment. Then she laughed — a wet, broken sound that turned into a sob, then back into a laugh, and I watched her cycle through five emotions in ten seconds and thought: oh. this one is dangerous.

Her name was Yujin. She was from IZ*ONE. She was tired of being perfect. She was seventeen and already knew what it felt like to be owned by strangers.

I gave her the water. She drank the whole bottle. She didn't thank me, but she didn't have to. Her eyes did the thanking.

She started calling me after that.

Not every day. Just on the hard nights. The ones where the schedule was too long and the comments were too mean and the other members were asleep and she was alone with her thoughts in a room that smelled like eight other people.

"You're my emergency contact," she said once. "Not officially. I mean — I didn't put your name on any forms. But in my head. When I'm scared, I think of you. Is that weird?"

"It's weird."

"Do you hate it?"

"No."

"Good. Because I'm not going to stop."

She didn't stop. For three years, she called. For three years, I answered.

She had a habit of falling asleep on video calls.

We'd be talking about nothing — her day, my day, the stray cat she'd seen outside the dorm, the book I was reading that she'd never finish — and her eyes would get heavy, and her voice would slow down, and she'd mumble something that wasn't quite words before drifting off.

I never hung up first.

I'd watch her sleep through the pixelated screen, her cheek pressed against her pillow, her mouth slightly open, the tension in her face smoothing away. She looked younger like that. Smaller. Like the seventeen-year-old in the stairwell who didn't know how to ask for help but took the water anyway.

Once, she woke up at 3 AM and saw I was still there.

"You stayed," she whispered.

"I stayed."

"You're always here."

"That's kind of my thing."

She smiled. Sleepy. Crooked. The kind of smile she didn't give to cameras.

"I love you," she said. "I know I don't say it enough. But I love you. You're my favorite thing."

I didn't say it back. I was afraid of what would happen if I did. She fell asleep again before she noticed.

I never got another chance to say it.

The thing about loving an idol is that you're always second.

Not to another person. To a schedule. To a career. To millions of people who have never met her but feel entitled to her attention. You learn to take the scraps — the 2 AM calls, the rushed coffee dates, the texts that go unanswered for six hours because she's in rehearsal and her phone is in her bag and she's thinking about you but she can't say it out loud.

I learned to be grateful for scraps. I learned to measure love in voicemails and screen time notifications. I learned to stop asking for more because every time I asked, she looked at me with those tired eyes and said "I'm trying" and I believed her because what else could I do.

She was trying. That was the cruelest part. She was trying so hard to hold onto me while also letting go, and I was too in love to see the contradiction.

The breakup didn't happen all at once.

It happened in increments. A call that lasted forty minutes instead of two hours. A text left on read. A weekend where she was supposed to visit but her manager scheduled a fan sign and she said "next time" and next time never came.

I pretended not to notice. I was good at pretending. I had been pretending for years that I wasn't terrified of losing her.

The last time I saw her in person, she was wearing a grey hoodie and no makeup. She looked like the girl from the stairwell — tired, fierce, beautiful in a way that hurt. We sat on a bench outside the dorm at 11 PM, and she held my hand, and neither of us spoke for a long time.

"I don't want to do this anymore," she said eventually.

"Do what?"