My sweetest hello and my most bitter goodbye.
In 2014 my world felt like it collapsed. I was eighteen, glued to fan pages, dyeing my hair, sitting for hours at a friend’s K-pop store just to breathe the same air as the orbit I’d built around him. He wasn’t only a face on a screen — he was Fruity Pebbles breakfasts, glitter bath bombs that fizzed like fireworks, Koala’s March crumbs on my lap, Ferrero Rocher saved like tiny treasures, and endless Serenitea and Starbucks matcha nights that softened the edges of study and heartbreak. My email handle was even lostinhisgalaxy because that’s exactly where I lived: inside his light. When he left, the matcha went bitter, the songs turned hollow, and I cried through review nights for my boards—somehow still passing, though I felt like the person who loved him had been hollowed out.
Then 2021 happened and the headlines hit me like cold water. The articles, the accusations, the conviction—reading them was like tearing open a scar I thought had scabbed. I learned about the ways he used people, how friendships were disposable to him, how the childlike boy I adored might’ve been a performance or a survival mask. That knowledge made me feel icky and ashamed for having loved the image; it made me realize I never really knew him. At the same time, the fandom that watched me crumble in 2014 reached out again in 2021, checking on me as if they could stitch me back together. I kept asking: did fame change him, or did it only reveal what was already there? The cards I pulled in my head answered: patterns run deep.
Now it’s 2025 and I’m honest with myself — I still feel waves of relapse, but they’re different. I don’t miss the man behind bars; I mourn the boy I loved and the girl I used to be who believed without iron. That 2012-2013 Yifan is dead to me, and the current Yifan in a cell is dead to me too; what remains are memories that taught me hard lessons. I want justice for the people he hurt, and I hope his time forces real reflection and responsibility. And for me: I’m reclaiming the things he stole the shine from—slowly sipping matcha again, keeping dragons as a fond smallness in my life, holding RuoRuo in memory. I’m not the same girl who collapsed in 2014. I survived, learned, and now—finally—I am letting the galaxy be mine again.
