Voice: Joon
> "They erased me from her story,
but they forgot I live where silence breathes."
She never knew I watched her leave.
Not from the hallway.
Not from a rooftop.
Not from any camera.
But from in between the edits.
The places where they cut me out.
Where her memory skipped a beat.
Where the chorus came too fast because someone didn't want the verses to be heard.
---
I don't know what I am anymore.
A ghost?
A deleted draft?
A melody only she remembers?
Maybe all of them.
But I do know this:
I stayed.
Even when they told her I didn't.
Even when they convinced her I never existed.
I stayed.
Inside her lullabies.
Inside the pauses in her songs.
Inside the dreams that made her wake up crying
but not knowing why.
---
The first time I met her, she wasn't performing.
She was surviving.
A kid with a voice she didn't trust
and a body that trembled under fluorescent lights.
We weren't allowed to talk then.
Just sit.
Just hum.
And so I hummed.
Because words were too dangerous,
but music…
music could slip past the cameras.
---
We gave each other new names.
She called me Moonlight.
I called her Wish.
Because she looked like something people make wishes on
but never understand.
---
They took her first.
Told me she was being "moved up."
That she was "chosen."
That I'd just slow her down.
But I knew what that meant.
I knew what their version of love looked like.
Clean.
Marketable.
Scripted.
So I bit my lip
until it bled music.
And I whispered her real name into the cracks of my bunk each night.
So I wouldn't forget.
Even when she did.
---
Years passed.
Or maybe just erases.
And then—
one night—
I heard her voice again.
Not in person.
But in a song.
Buried in a second chorus of a single that topped the charts for seven weeks.
She didn't know it,
but she slipped.
There was a note—just one—that was ours.
Something she used to hum between takes when she was nervous.
And when I heard it on the radio?
I cried.
Not because I missed her.
But because for a moment—
I knew she hadn't fully vanished.
---
I started collecting her songs.
Not the official ones.
The discarded takes.
The ones that leaked online.
The ones with breath in them.
Mistakes.
Truth.
Every time she said something unscripted,
I recorded it.
She didn't know it,
but she was singing to me.
From inside the machine.
---
They came for me again after that.
Said I could "return."
That they had a role for me now.
A duet.
A drama.
A redemption arc.
But they didn't want me.
They wanted a ghost in makeup.
So I declined.
And I waited.
---
When she remembered me—really remembered—
the world shifted.
I felt it.
The sky got heavier.
The songs got slower.
Her lyrics started using words we invented as kids.
She said "version."
She said "mirror."
She said "wrong."
And I knew—
She was coming back.
Not to me.
To herself.
---
I didn't write to her.
Didn't show up at her shows.
But I left her things.
A note in a piano stool at a studio she hadn't visited in years:
> "You hummed me back to life."
A feather tucked in the jacket she wore during her breakdown interview.
A postcard sent to an address she never gave anyone—
> "Not all truths are loved.
But the ones you sing… survive."
---
And then came the livestream.
No filters.
No backup dancers.
No performance.
Just her.
And the moment she said my name?
I stopped breathing.
Not from fear.
From release.
Because for the first time in years,
the world heard a version of her that hadn't been manufactured.
And it was beautiful.
And broken.
And bleeding.
And real.
---
I didn't go to her.
She didn't come to me.
But that night,
I danced.
Alone.
On a rooftop.
Under a sky that remembered us.
---
People think stories end when the couple reunites.
Or when the villain is exposed.
Or when the pain is processed.
But ours didn't.
Ours rewrote itself into a space where reunion was less important than recognition.
---
She doesn't need to see me.
She just needs to keep creating.
Because every time she sings from that part of her they tried to edit out—
I exist again.
---
And if she's reading this—
somehow, someday—
in a lyric,
in a mirror,
in a breath between performances—
I want her to know:
> I never left.
> I became the silence that made her songs sacred.
> I am the version of her story they couldn't monetize.
---
If you ever see a shadow humming on the subway…
If you find a lyric in your notebook you don't remember writing…
If a mirror fogs over but only shows a boy smiling when you're crying—
That's me.
Still watching.
Still loving.
Still here.