days in memory
member: jaehyun (hyunjae) genre: angst word count: 3,385 synopsis: jaehyun reminisces the past as he longs for you and his youth
The bear keychain bounced against your backpack as you ran ahead. The wind blew strands of hair into your face but your smile remained unfazed.
“Come on, slowpoke!” you teasingly yelled.
Jaehyun watched you from the window. His apartment was only a floor up from the ground, meaning he could converse with you from the comfort of his bed.
“What are you up so early for?” he grumbled, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
“It’s the first day of senior year, Hyunjae,” you grinned.
Hyunjae was the nickname you gave him since the start of your friendship. There were too many Jaehyuns at your school and you wanted to specially differentiate him from the others.
“Yeah but you’re like 20 minutes early.”
“I wanna be the first to choose a seat!”
“Good for you. I don’t care where I sit, so I’m gonna sleep in a little more.”
“You’re really not gonna come with me, Hyunjae?” your expression was a mix of pouting and huffing.
“We’re literally in the same homeroom for the 6th year in a row. You’ll survive 20 minutes without me,” he rolled his eyes as he climbed back under the covers.
“Don’t complain about your seat later!”
Jaehyun gasped as he jolted awake. Glancing at the clock, he sighed.
7:12 AM.
Every year on this day, his body woke him up at this time with the same dream. Or was it a nightmare?
With a grunt, he got up to start his day.
He began by turning on all the lights to rid the place of any darkness. It was a habit he picked up over the years. He couldn’t explain why it brought him comfort. It just did.
Trudging over to the bathroom, he relied on muscle memory to go through his morning routine. He blanked out until he was done freshening up.
Staring at the empty fridge in front of him, another sigh escaped his lips. He had forgotten to go grocery shopping last week.
He threw on a hat and slipped into a pair of worn out sneakers to head out to the nearby mart. It was a small family-run shop located in front of a bus stop.
As he was looking at the cases of water bottles placed outside, he heard footsteps rush by him. The noise made him turn around, catching sight of two teenagers running towards the departing bus. They were a second too late, causing them to groan in frustration.
“Kim Sunwoo, this is all your fault!” the girl accused.
“Me? Oh yeah because I’m the one who spent 15 minutes putting on makeup,” the boy retorted.
“15 minutes is really short for makeup!”
“Whatever. Now we’re gonna be late for school.”
Jaehyun eyed the uniforms they were wearing. Hanlim Arts High School. His alma mater.
He almost chuckled at what seemed to be a familiar scene. You used to always blame him for being late. Even if he was ready and waiting outside by the time you ran out the door with your bow in your hand.
When the bus inevitably passed you two by, he would help you put the bow on as you waited for the next bus to arrive. Bickering all the while.
The old lady’s voice snapped him back to reality. He quickly picked out some things before paying and leaving.
Just like the passing sunset Memories of being immature and innocent They make me stop in place And draw out the days in my memory
By the time Jaehyun left for school, it was raining. It was a complete change of weather that caught everyone off guard. Wondering if you made it to school dry, he grabbed an extra umbrella for you to use on the way back home.
The sky angrily greeted him with a thunderclap. It nearly made him jump in surprise.
“Better hurry up to meet Y/n before she starts crying,” he mumbled to himself as he made a run for the bus stop.
You were terrified of thunderstorms. The loud noises made your heart race and your body tremble. Only Jaehyun took to comforting you without making a snide comment about your fear at the age of 17.
He anxiously waited for the bus that was delayed by the sudden downpour. He barely managed to squeeze inside before the doors closed tightly behind him.
Unluckily for him, he arrived at the school gate 10 minutes late. The dean shook his head as he handed him a detention slip, to which Jaehyun whined at.
“Come on, Mr. Choi, how could I have prepared for the storm that wasn’t even predicted by the weather app?”
“Hurry up and go to class. You’re already late and you’re getting wet.”
With an exaggerated sigh, Jaehyun begrudgingly complied.
When he finally made it to the classroom, the teacher was in the middle of introductions. Sheepishly apologizing, he scanned the room for an empty seat and made a beeline for it.
It was straight in the middle. Literally in the middle of the front and back rows as well as the left and right rows. Your voice nagging at him to not complain echoed in his head. He could already picture you snickering at him.
Except you weren’t.
He looked around but couldn’t find you. Puzzled, he wondered if you tricked him into thinking you were in the same class as him.
“Y/n?” the teacher called out.
When you didn’t reply, she looked up from the roster and eyed the empty seat in the front.
“Absent,” she said as she checked off your name on the sheet.
“Excuse me?” Jaehyun found himself raising his hand before he even realized it. “There’s no way Y/n is absent. We live in the same apartment complex and she left for school before I did.”
“Well, she’s not in her seat so that makes her absent.”
While the teacher continued to take attendance, Jaehyun pulled out his phone and hid it under the desk to text you.
After asking about your whereabouts, he asked if you were okay amidst the thundering. When you didn’t respond to his messages, he began to worry.
He snuck out at the end of first period to go to the bathroom to call you. It rang until it reached voicemail. Now he was really worried.
You were a nerd who was excited to pick your seat in class. Not the type to skip school on the first day.
After 3 missed calls, he hesitated to call your mom. What if he was just overreacting? What if you had finally decided to rebel a little for the first time in your life and he would be the one to ruin it?
His fingers fidgeted in contemplation, hovering over the phone screen.
“Whatever. She’s tattles on me all the time,” he decided as he looked for your mom’s number.
“Jaehyun?” Jacob waved his hand in front of his friend’s face. He looked over to Younghoon, who shook Jaehyun out of his memory.
“You okay?” Younghoon asked carefully.
“Y-Yeah, sorry,” Jaehyun apologized as he poured himself another drink.
His friends stared at him with concern in their eyes. Sensing this, he looked up and forced a laugh.
“Really. I’m fine,” he lied.
He wasn’t fine. Everyone knew that. And he knew that as well. If anything, he was trying to convince himself more than others.
“We can talk about… what happened, you know,” Younghoon assured.
“Today marks 3 years, right?” Jacob sadly recalled.
Jaehyun’s jaw clenched at the mention of the incident. His attention turned to the raindrops hitting the window outside. The forecast had warned him of a storm.
When it began to thunder, his heart ached in memory of you. Unable to bear it any longer, he excused himself from the table.
He stepped outside in hopes of clearing his head. The canopy roof did little to protect him from the rain. It did, however, hide the tears that escaped from his eyes.
With the sound of the raindrops as my companion I used to fall asleep during those endlessly happy times I’m thinking about those days with tears
4 days had passed since your disappearance and the entire town was thrown into a panic. After you were reported missing, the community came together to look for you.
Jaehyun was summoned to the police station for a witness statement. He wanted to do everything he could to help but his last encounter with you haunted him.
“You’re really not gonna come with me, Hyunjae?” your voice lingered in his mind.
“You’ll survive 20 minutes without me,” his own voice mocked him.
If only he had gone to school with you that day. If only hadn’t chosen a mere 20 minutes of sleep over his best friend. If only he wasn’t late and had noticed you were gone earlier. If only he had immediately called for help.
Such regrets consumed him as the cops around him were busy picking up calls and having emergency meetings. One got away from the chaos long enough to finally take his statement.
“I have here the first communication we had with you on the day of Y/n’s disappearance,” the cop said as he flipped through pages. “You were the last person to see her.”
“I told another officer exactly what happened that day,” Jaehyun’s head hung with guilt.
“Yes, we just need a little more insight into Y/n’s personality and life to fully rule out a couple of scenarios. And maybe retracing your steps could help you remember an important detail.”
“She would never just take off without a word. She’s always been mature and responsible. She’s the one who drags me to school and even left early for the first day because she was so excited for our last year of high school.”
“And you don’t know of any changes or new issues she had?”
“There’s absolutely no possibility of her hiding anything from me. She’s the type of person who just has to share whatever’s going on in her life. She also hates being alone so she wouldn’t wander off by herself. If she wanted to go somewhere, she’d beg me to go with her and if she was planning to go somewhere, she’d brag about it to me.”
He felt hopeless as he watched the older man in front of him write everything down. How would this information be of any use?
“Is there anything that would help identify any traces of her?” the officer asked.
“She has a scar above her collarbone from a surgery. A-And she jokes about how she sheds more than a dog because she always leaves a trail of hair behind. Could a police dog maybe find her through that?”
“I don’t know about that, kid,” he sighed. “We have some stuff we found on the path you two normally take to school. Could you come with me to see if you recognize anything to be her belongings?”
Jaehyun nodded before following him to the evidence room. He felt a chill run down his spine the moment he entered.
He put on gloves and began looking through the items. A broken lipstick. A notebook. A hair pin. A reusable water bottle.
Then he saw it. The bear keychain he gifted you on your first Christmas together.
With a shaky hand, he reached into his pocket to pull out his own matching keychain. He compared it to the dirtied one on the table.
A wave of dread dropped his body to the ground. Before he could hear the cop yell out for help, he lost consciousness.
Jaehyun still had the bear with him every second of every day. It symbolized a lot of things. Seeing it gave him hope. Holding it made him feel like you were still with him. Talking to it eased a tiny bit of the pain in his heart.
He was doing all of it back at the table in front of Jacob and Younghoon. Drunk, of course. His sober self would never let his friends see this vulnerable side of him.
“You’re playing a very cruel joke on me, right?” he chuckled, petting the bear’s head. “Well, the joke’s been running for quite a long time now. It’s not funny anymore. In fact, it never was. But if you come back, I’ll forgive you for it.”
Jacob quietly emptied Jaehyun’s glass into his own. Any more alcohol in his system would certainly cause a scene.
“Or are you mad at me? Did you decide you no longer wanted to be friends?” Jaehyun pouted.
It took every ounce of will in Younghoon to hold back his tears. Jaehyun was the only one who never moved on from that day. He still believed that you were alive.
“If not that, what else could it be?” Jaehyun frowned as he tried to come up with an answer.
“Jaehyun-”
“See that? It’s always Jaehyun, Jaehyun, Jaehyun. No one calls me Hyunjae anymore. How irresponsible of you. You came up with the nickname so you gotta keep it going.”
Younghoon had to step out after that. He didn’t have the confidence to choke back his cries anymore.
He and Jacob also lost you back then. He was closer to you than Jacob was, but the 4 of you were close nonetheless.
Your disappearance took a toll on everybody. Everyone mourned and felt a hole in their lives. But Jaehyun had it the hardest.
He blamed himself and spent a whole year relentlessly searching for you. He was burnt out and devastated by the end of the second consecutive year of grasping for straws. Entering the third year, his coping mechanism switched to convincing himself that you weren’t gone.
The image of the bear keychain swinging off your backpack flashed in front of his eyes every time your name was brought up. And each time, his hand reached inside to squeeze his own bear keychain.
“Not very “best friends forever” of you to leave me hanging like this, Y/n!” Jaehyun’s voice raised, drawing attention from neighboring tables.
Jacob took this as his cue to take him home.
“You think she went to Australia without me? She wanted to go for like years. Maybe she just dropped everything to study abroad there? Or maybe she went to Canada! She loved hearing you talk about Toronto.”
“Let’s get you home, Jaehyun.”
“Call me Hyunjae.”
“Okay, let’s go home, Hyunjae.”
Covered by the traces left by time Will I be able to find the days of my youth? The stars in the night sky that shined on me Are they still in the same place?
A funeral was never held for you. Like Jaehyun, your family refused to believe the worst. They left your room untouched, entering it only to keep the dust from piling over your stuff.
As months went by, the “missing” posters faded in color and nature started taking them down one by one. Your case went cold and your whereabouts remained an unsolved mystery.
Despite all that, Jaehyun persistently went around neighboring areas to put new posters up. Almost all local businesses knew him and had a poster hanging in their store.
Like that, he grew older but your smiling face in the picture didn’t. Your social media accounts stayed the same, offering minimal solace.
He looked through your old posts, reminiscing. His favorite was your most recent one—or rather, your last.
It was a photo dump on Instagram, highlighting your last summer together. The two of you hung out nearly every day. That year, you went to Everland, the beach, and Gyeongju.
Now, he could only bitterly smile at the memories.
The first New Year without you broke a lifelong tradition. Your family and Jaehyun’s family usually spent the holiday together but that year, it was different for obvious reasons. He expected that.
What he didn’t expect, however, was an email from you.
His heart dropped at the sight of your name in his inbox. He had to pinch himself to make sure it wasn’t a dream.
“Hi Hyunjae! Wow this is weird and embarrassing. I really hope my future self doesn’t regret this. I scheduled this email to automatically send at midnight. Why? Because I’m a scaredy-cat who can’t bring myself to confess. Everyone around us keeps telling me how painfully obvious it is that we both like each other. Yet I still can’t find the courage to say the words just yet. So this is a time bomb I’ll have to dismantle before the new year comes. If our friends are wrong and you actually don’t have feelings for me, then uh this is awkward. And New Year’s breakfast will be really awkward. If you feel the same way, wear a purple shirt in the morning. If not, wear black. Wear any other color and I’ll kill you for you confusing me.”
He laughed and cried at the same time. He didn’t think that was possible.
Once the initial shock wore off, he completely broke down. The sobbing shook his entire body and his heart physically hurt.
He wore purple on the first of every month since then.
Jaehyun woke up with a throbbing headache. He groaned, kicking himself for the consequences of his own actions.
He dragged himself to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of cold water. He gulped it down in seconds and let out another groan before plopping his torso onto the counter.
After staying like that for a bit, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started scrolling through pictures. A soft smile rested on his lips as he picked out that week’s highlights to compile into an email.
With 5 photos attached, he began to type out a letter.
“It’s officially been 3 years, Y/n. 3 years without you feels like 30 years. The first year was full of desperation. The second year was when despair started to kick in and I became a little delusional. Even now, by sending you these emails, I convince myself that you’re out there somewhere reading them. Or that they’ll be here for you to catch up on missed times when you come back. All you need to do is come back. Everything is exactly how it was since you disappeared. Your parents keep your room clean and I have all these photos and updates for you to know that not a day went by without me thinking of you. Best friends forever means forever. Forever means I will wait for you until you’re by my side again. I believe that just as much as I’m searching for you, you’re also trying hard to come home. So please don’t give up. I won’t either. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, though sooner is better. I miss you and I love you so so much. I won’t be at peace until I’m able to say it to you in person.”
After hitting “send,” he stared at the suit hanging up. He had left it out in preparation for his internship the next day.
The image of you in your school uniform haunted him each time he saw himself in formal wear. He was aging in the mirror but you remained a student in his memory.
He didn’t get to see you graduate. He didn’t get to see you go to college. He didn’t get to see you get a job.
Time stood still without you. He looked at your pictures every day to make sure your face never became fuzzy.
He was riddled with guilt but made the decision to live to find you and to build a life for you to come back to. He went about his daily routine but at the end of the day, you were the last thought on his mind.
Today was no different.
He pulled himself together to get ready for class. He never missed or was late to school ever since that day.
“I’ll see you later, Y/n,” he smiled at the framed photo of you two before grabbing his things and leaving.
My dreams of my first love are far away now But my heart is still the same The flowing tears are asking me Can’t I go back to those times?
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