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The first thing she does when she finally leaves the company is to book a flight back to her hometown. Sure Seoul had been home for a good few years, but nothing quite compares to the feeling of being back in Taizhou or Shanghai. She knows the people there like the back of her hand, she could navigate the places and still look in wonder even with the tug of familiarity in her chest. Seoul is amazing, and she would treasure the place with all her heart, but Shanghai is home.
Freedom doesn’t really feel as emotionally exhilarating as it should be. There’s no big moment with trumpets playing inside her mind, just a breath of fresh air and the knowledge that she could finally do whatever she wants without people breathing down the back of her neck. She should have gone with the others when the group finally disbanded. Should have looked for another company who would give her something to do, instead of only knowing her when they have business with China.
Maybe she’d still be well-known in Seoul if that happened. Maybe she wouldn’t just be another fragment of a girl group that dominated and fell just as quickly as it rose. But that’s really none of her business anymore. She’s already coming home, and back home, there are other projects waiting for her. It’s better to just think ahead instead of going back to the things she regrets.
Since she’s not exactly entitled to any of the dorm rooms of the company, she finds herself booking a room in a hotel. Not a fancy one, but not dingy either. Just the right amount of pretty and obscure that she could last in it for weeks if she wants to. No one could find her here too, not unless she tells them her exact whereabouts. Jieqiong wouldn’t, though. She knows better than that.
Leaving is like ripping a band-aid off. Painful at first, but when it’s done all at once it wouldn’t even hurt as much as should. It just feels numb later on. In this moment, this exact moment where she finalizes the ticket purchase, is the numb that goes along with the band-aid. There’s not much for her to think about anymore. Just home.
She doesn’t really tell anyone except Minghao. There’s enough trust between the two of them to guarantee him an update about her standing with the company. If Minghao tells anyone else, then that’s not really her problem anymore. It’s not like she’s hiding it anyway. The whole world knows that Zhou Jieqiong wants to leave the company for good.
However, telling the world that she’s finally free seems weird to her. So she sits in her hotel room, unblinking as she refreshes her twitter feed to see if there’s going to be news about her departure. When an hour has passed and there’s no news still, she decides to switch to her messages, finally getting to the series of messages her previous company-mates sent her.
Minghao congratulates her, and apologizes to her for telling his entire group. Sungcheol tells her that he told Nayoung. Nayoung texts her with crying emojis, saying that she’s proud of Jieqiong. Eunwoo’s going to miss her. Yehana sends her a sad emoji, but tells her that she’ll be rooting for Jieqiong anyway.
She opens Mingyu’s message last. It’s nothing special, he just tells her that he’ll be rooting for her. She goes through the text a few more times before the numb disappears, and is replaced by this sort of longing in her chest. Sure Seoul isn’t home, but it’s comforting anyway. It could well be the sort of place she’d long for even when she goes back.
\
Walking the streets of China feels different. The language is all-too familiar to her. She doesn’t pick up on random strange words that she’d have to ask her members to translate for her anymore. Everything’s just too familiar in a weird way that puts her off. She thinks it’s just her adjusting to the life of never-ending promotions in China, and never coming back to Korea because why would she? She’s found her audience in her hometown already.
Try as she might to convince herself that this is amazing, that everything in her life is finally going well, she couldn’t turn the yearning off. It’s like there’s an itch deep in the crevices of her heart that she couldn’t quite get to. It’s always longing, asking for something that Jieqiong couldn’t find, even if she’s already home.
It shouldn’t be this hard to be back home. She should be happy, ecstatic that she’s finally with friends and family. Yet she finds herself looking at her phone to see a promotional post for SEVENTEEN in her twitter account. Automatically, her eyes find Mingyu somewhere in the middle. It’s been months since she’d seen him in person for the last time, but nothing really changed. He still looks good.
Uncharted territories involve stepping foot into a place that could possibly be dangerous. A place that has the ability to hurt a person if they make just one wrong move. Kim Mingyu is an uncharted territory. Or at least, she and him are.
( She and him . Not them. Never them. It would be blasphemous to speak in such a way.)
Their days of hidden glances and going out for soju in a less-populated area of Seoul are gone. It will never return. But sometimes, when she’s looking at the plain white wall in her new apartment in Shanghai, she imagines her phone lighting up to a text message from Mingyu asking her if she wants to go out for some drinks.
It never happens though.
She crosses the street without giving the idea another thought.
\
Studio recording sessions are a hit or miss for Jieqiong. The way she delivers in the songs they make her do can vary depending on her mood. If she’s bored, then the producers would get an okay-sounding set of vocals from her. If she likes the song, she’s more likely to outdo herself and give the producers her best singing. If she manages to be in a bad mood before recording even starts, her voice is more likely to shake and falter.
The song is a ballad. A b-side from her up and coming album that’s supposed to capture the hearts of China and the rest of the world. While she’s usually done sexy and girl crush concepts from her last few months as an idol in Korea, she’s never really done a more vulnerable, soft concept. Apparently, her management wants her to look more soft, like a girl next door kind of thing except she’s not cute. Just someone who fans can feel like they relate to.
It’s a bold move, honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that she does not know how to be vulnerable. She doesn’t know how to convey feelings of emotional vulnerability towards the people, or how to make herself seem relatable. All her life has been spent hiding away feelings in favor of advancing her career to the next level, there is no room for emotional vulnerability in the life of an idol.
Intertwined hands and gazes held in the dark comes back to mind. Suddenly the studio is not the studio and she’s not looking into the lyrics sheet anymore. Instead, she finds herself lying down on a bed that’s not hers, in an apartment that’s only used during late nights where two people seek each other out for comfort in complete desolation. She’s looking at his eyes under the glow of a fluorescent light that’s always blinking. He’s looking back at her with a wistful look in his eyes.
Connections like this aren’t unheard of. She knows that every idol back in Seoul has had one or more rendezvous with others just because they’re all so broken beyond repair and they tend to look for the slightest bit of comfort in the arms of someone equally broken as them. Jieqiong and Mingyu, they’re never strangers to this.
The only difference is that to the others, the connections are mostly physical in nature. Never expanding into anything emotional at all. It’s a momentary comfort to most, something that would remind them that they could still feel instead of just being these… manufactured products. For Jieqiong and Mingyu though, it’s different. The meaning behind their actions transcends more than just the physical attachments. Every brush of a fingertip against her face, or the feather feel of his lips against her - it all screams of unfathomable feelings.
An abundance of feelings does not equate to proper communication, though. They’ve been good at that, holding each other and letting each other know their intentions by their actions. They’ve been so good at it that they eventually forgot to define what they are.
It’s a mess, Jieqiong thinks.
When the producers call her into the booth, she finally knows what it’s like to become emotionally vulnerable.
Jieqiong asks her company to allow her to write with the rest of the songwriters. She claims that it’s good for the whole making bank out of relatability concept, but really she only wants to write some songs because it’s the only way she could talk about her feelings without yearning too much.
The ghost of Kim Mingyu is found in between the lines of the songs throughout her entire album.
\
Junhui comes home sometime during the fall. He asks to meet with her in a coffeeshop in Shanghai, just near her apartment. So she agrees. When she sees him, his hair has grown a few inches longer, his face turned a bit older, and his actions unfaltering. He’s so different from the Junhui she first met years ago.
They talk about the weather and how SEVENTEEN is already dominating the entire world. There are questions that she wants to ask him, but she never does. (Do you think Pristin would have been the same if the company treated us better? Do you think they regret letting us go? Is Mingyu okay? She stops at the last question.) Instead she finds herself just listening to all of his stories, while smiling and nodding along to whatever it is that he has to say. It goes well, just like old times when they talk about a lot and poke fun at each other. It’s almost like a year didn’t pass by between the two of them.
He offers to walk her back to her apartment, like he’d always done before back in Seoul - except they both live in dorms back then, not apartments bought by their own idol money. They mostly walk in silence but that’s until he asks her if she misses anyone in particular.
Mingyu, she wants to say, but she finds herself biting her cheek and smiling instead.
“I just miss the girls, and maybe you and Minghao. But you two don’t count as much as they do. We see each other enough during the holidays.” She laughs, but she knows that Junhui knows it’s fake. That her laugh is hollow, filled with yearning and too many thoughts that never really left.
When she’s back in her room and finally sitting on her bed, her eyes glued onto a polaroid of her and Mingyu taken sometime during the summer of 2018, she curses his name out. He’s never supposed to stay on her mind like this.
\
Jieqiong finds herself in Seoul during the summer of 2022. Truthfully, she wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Chungha who convinced the hell out of her to finally join the IOI girls in a reunion. While there’s a yearning in her heart to be back in Seoul once more, she really doesn’t want to act upon it. Going back would mean that the memories would come rushing back into her system like how freshwater expels out into the sea.
Jieqiong has too many unwanted feelings and unfinished businesses back in Seoul, and she would very much prefer if she doesn’t go back to them anymore. Let them stay that way, unfinished and unwanted, never to be dug out again by anyone. Not even her.
Still, she navigates the street with a smile on her face with such familiarity that it’s almost like she never even left in the first place. Despite her adamance at the thought of returning to Seoul, she still feels warmth in her chest as if there’s a gaping hole that has been filled.
The girls decided that they wanted to meet in the chicken place they used to frequent before they debuted. It’s situated somewhere in the less-populated area of Seoul. Quite near to Jieqiong’s old dorm too, the one that she shared with the rest of Pristin, and the one she moved into after the group disbanded.
(It’s dangerously close to SEVENTEEN’s dorm too, but the thing is she doesn’t even know if they still live there or if they all moved out and got their own apartments for themselves. It’s the only reason why Jieqiong is not internally freaking out.)
“We never see you anymore.” Sejeong directs the sentiment towards Jieqiong who’s trying to savor the first authentic Korean fried chicken she’s had in two years.
Jieqiong doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be guilty that she never visits.
“Are you having fun back home, at least?” Nayoung asks this time.
“I mean, yeah. I get to see my parents often, and besides, who wouldn’t want to become famous in their home, right?” She smiles, but even then, the sentiment feels fake. Fun could only last for so long before she starts visualizing herself back here.
Sometimes, home is just not the place one wants to be in all the time.
“I’m glad you’re doing well over there, though. I’m sorry about… the Pledis thing.” Doyeon tells her.
Jieqiong feels like she’s choking on air. No one ever mentioned Pledis to her, not even when she came home from Seoul after finally terminating her contract. This is the first time someone dares to mention the company and what happened two years ago, even if it’s just an innocent apology.
Grace under pressure , she tells herself as she smiles at Doyeon. “It’s whatever. It’s been two years. I don’t think it matters now.”
But it does. Pledis had given her everything in a short span of time, only to let her crash and burn and take away everything she knows. The girls, her friends that she grew up with, Mingyu .
It pains her to think that it’s still him who could make her hurt this much.
\
She receives a text from Minghao when the flowers outside her window start to bloom. Apparently, he’s coming to visit her when he comes back to China in five days. He doesn’t say anything else, just tells her that he’ll be going with someone and goes back to not responding to the rest of her messages. It’s the thing she hates the most about Minghao, his constant disappearing act whenever she’s asking him about something important.
Without thinking much, she figures that it’s probably just Junhui. Minghao doesn’t really take anyone else back home with him, just Junhui. Jieqiong doesn’t really know if there’s a different connotation there, but she wouldn’t put it past them to be secretly dating.
Just for teasing purposes, she smiles as she sends a text to Minghao.
You can tell me you and Junhui are dating. She sends it to him three minutes after she receives the notification that he read her text.
Shut up, Jieqiong. He replies instantly. Jieqiong laughs and finds herself excitedly waiting for the day that she’ll finally be able to hang out with both Minghao and Junhui. It’s been too long.
Then the day comes and she finds herself staring at Mingyu in the face with a shocked expression. He’s smiling down at her, and she feels like it’s been an entire lifetime since she last saw his smiling face like that. An entire lifetime since she felt his fingers graze her skin, or his lips against hers.
She finds herself gulping in fear. It’s not supposed to happen like this. Minghao and Junhui are supposed to be with her today, and they’d hang out like they used to because it’s always been the three of them who understood each other the most. It’s always been them who would take trips back to China together and bid each other goodbyes and hellos at the airport.
It’s never supposed to be her and Minghao and goddamn Mingyu in China.
“Oh, it’s Mingyu you brought.” Jieqiong finally breathes as she stares at Mingyu and Minghao for seconds too long.
“He wanted to tag along.” Minghao shrugs, always so nonchalant as he goes back to giving his full attention towards his phone.
“Stop texting Jun. I thought you came here to give me a tour?” Mingyu steals the phone from Minghao’s hands and tucks it in the pocket of his jean jacket. “Your boyfriend’s flying in tomorrow morning. You have all the time in the world tomorrow to cozy up to him.”
That’s when Jieqiong finally tears herself away from this Mingyu-induced trance.
“Since when?” Her eyes are wide and she links her arm through Mingyu’s like a little girl. She looks at him, prompting him for more details when Minghao only laughs and unlinks her arm from his.
It’s never been this way between the two of them, what changed?
Confused and dazed, she resorts to just following Minghao around when he leads Mingyu and her to the pretty coffee shop Jieqiong had discovered back in the holidays of 2017 when she begged Minghao and Junhui to explore with her before going back to their respective provinces. The coffee shop had all of these games that she remembers spending all afternoon playing with. Jieqiong always loses to Minghao or Junhui, but she doesn’t mind.
Except it feels like there’s something heavy in the pit of her stomach when Minghao pushes the door open and settles for their usual booth. She doesn’t know if it’s because of how much things have changed, or if it’s because Mingyu is there. All she knows is that she wants to come home right this instant, but couldn’t and wouldn’t because she’s a good friend.
Minghao briefly leaves her alone with Mingyu, saying that he needs to call Junhui. There’s an apologetic look on his face that he directs especially to her before he walks out of the cafe. Jieqiong hopes that he’ll be back soon because sitting alone with Mingyu in this coffee shop that’s supposed to be her safe haven feels like boulders upon boulders on her chest.
“I’ve been…” Mingyu clears his throat and he stutters for a bit. “Well I’ve been seeing that your career is thriving in here.”
When he smiles at her, her heart drops to the floor.
“Well… it’s home so I guess it’s much more comfortable here.” She says this as if she doesn’t miss Seoul every single day.
“I’m happy for you, Jieqiong.”
She wants to ask him what he would have done if things were different. Would they still be acting the same way if she stayed? Would they be able to define what they are if she didn’t terminate her contract with her agency? Would he have kept in touch if she told him firsthand about her decision?
Like all of her other questions about Mingyu, these ones never make it out. They sit in her brain, waiting for the day that she would finally voice them out.
He walks her home, just the two of them because Minghao decides that his head is aching and that he doesn’t really want to be out anymore. Like the gentleman that he is, Mingyu offers to walk Jieqiong home to ease the worry of Minghao. If Jieqiong had any say in this, she wouldn’t agree at all to this arrangement. She would have gladly taken a cab home even if it’s not that far.
The thing about Minghao is that when he worries, he does it so very well that it would be impossible to turn down anything from him. So when he shoots her a pointed look, she knows it’s a losing battle. He calls a cab and disappears in the backseat, leaving Jieqiong alone with Mingyu again .
Their hands brush together too often for her liking. But she doesn’t make an effort to make sure it doesn’t happen again. She doubts times like this could ever happen again, so she cherishes it and makes the most out of tonight even with the possibility of regretting it. She thinks she has to see Mingyu for just one time though. Just one more time before she finally decides to cut ties with Seoul, with him, with the way he looks at her, and the way his hands feel against her.
Just one more time with him and she thinks she’s ready to let it all go. She’s been thinking about him for years without even knowing if he thinks of her the same way she thinks of him. He sticks to her mind like glue and yet she doesn’t know if she’s even a passing thought to him.
“If you didn’t come home, where do you think you’d be right now?” Mingyu asks her when they take a turn at an intersection.
“Still in Seoul, probably. Hanging on to loose threads of a life that’s crumbling down anyway.” There’s a bitter taste in her mouth when she speaks. Because it’s true, yet she doesn’t want it to be true. Everyone she loves is in Seoul, including him. So why must she belong here?
“I didn’t think you were crumbling down, though. People love you. But… they love you better here.” The last part of the sentence sounds like he didn’t want her to hear it at all, but she did.
Now everything hurts.
They love you better here sounds like noise to her ears. Of course she wants that, it’s what they’re supposed to want as idols right? The love and support from the people around them. Validation and popularity. Like fame is going to last them longer than any other option, like they’re not going to fade out after someone younger takes the spotlight.
The only person whom she wants to love her back is standing right next to her, with his hands inside the pockets of his jacket. It’s cruel really, that she has to give up one for the other. Give up Mingyu for a better career in China. It’s either that or she stays in Seoul where there’s no certainty.
“They might love me better here, but it doesn’t mean it’s better than the things I felt back when I was in Seoul. I still feel them until now. Maybe that’s something better than a country with a population of one billion people screaming my name.” She allows herself this moment of vague honesty before she slips into the doors of her apartment building.
When she looks back at him before going to the elevator, she realizes that he looks confused. If she didn’t know better, she would have run out, talked to him and asked if they could do better this time. Do better than them going through the nights of allowing their actions to speak louder than words. Do better than brave the blurred lines on where they stand with each other.
She knew better, though. And she understands that this is where she belongs, and he belongs to the rest of the world, but never in here with her.
Back in her room, she stares at the polaroid of them yet again. All of her better judgment tells her to take it off the corkboard of her most treasured memories, but she doesn’t. If this is the only thing she could have with Mingyu, then she’ll keep it. Even if it hurts.
\
Life happens faster than a bullet train. Before she knows it, she’s turning twenty six and Seoul feels like an entire lifetime ago even if it’s only been four years since she left. She doesn’t even realize that everything has been moving that fast. Only that she’s been trying her best to just live well and be happy that sometimes even the definition of living well and becoming happy is getting muddled in her brain.
This is what she wanted though, ever since she was young. The only difference is that everything had been different back then. She had been so sure of herself to the point where it fueled her right down to her fall from grace. Now, she’s not so sure anymore. She feels like she’s hanging on by a thread, but also feels like the world is holding her up a pedestal. Nothing is certain anymore.
Jieqiong changes though, in such a way that she becomes stoic. Barely anything gets a reaction from her anymore. Of course she could still be cheery and happy for the cameras, but in the presence of strangers in the entertainment industry and the amount of people watching her? She couldn’t bear to bring herself to become that Jieqiong anymore.
Her phone dings just after she steps into her apartment after a long day of shooting. It’s Junhui, and she finds herself wondering why he texted. While they’ve known each other for years and have pretty much built a solid foundation of friendship, it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t drift apart. He rarely comes home now, and she’s always busy. It’s bound to happen.
The reemergence of his name in her messages makes her nervous though.
Whatever you do, don’t look at Dispatch, or your social media. I know we haven’t talked that much but I know you’re not one to quickly forget things. It says. It feels ominous somehow and she knows that he’s giving her this warning for her to be safe. She knows Junhui that much. But her curiosity is itching to reach for her phone inside her purse and scroll through her twitter account.
So she does that exactly.
[BREAKING NEWS]: Kim Mingyu of SEVENTEEN and former label mate Jung Eunwoo (PRISTIN, HINAPIA) confirmed to be dating.
Jieqiong feels her heart break into a million tiny pieces.
She feels herself cursing his name out once more, because he’s not supposed to stay in her mind for this long, or in her heart.
What was she expecting, though? He belongs there, and apparently, she’s loved better here.
But that doesn’t really change the fact that in a country of one billion people screaming her name, it’s still him that she wants. Even if he’s eight hundred and sixty six kilometres away from her, in a different country that will only remember how she fell from grace.
\
and i hope you’re happy
living life in taxis
but you’ll always have me
you’ll always have me