The first time Lee Felix met Hwang Hyunjin, it was spring.

Felix had just moved into a quiet neighborhood in Seoul to focus on his art—running from noise, from pressure, from everything. He rented a small rooftop room overlooking rows of cherry blossom trees. He painted during the day and watched the stars at night. Peaceful, but a little too lonely.

Then came Hyunjin.

He lived next door, barefoot most of the time, long hair always tied loosely, camera slung around his neck like it was stitched to him. A photographer, charmingly aloof, sometimes too loud, sometimes too quiet. He made coffee that smelled like heaven and had a laugh that made Felix turn his head every time.

“Your paintings look like they’re waiting for someone to find them,” Hyunjin said one day, standing in the doorway without knocking. “Is that someone you?”

Felix had scoffed. But later that night, he painted Hyunjin’s profile under a cherry tree.

They grew close. Too close.

Midnights turned into slow conversations on the rooftop. Felix spoke of his fear of not being enough. Hyunjin talked about the father who never called him back. They held each other once when the rain hit too hard, and again when it didn’t.

Hyunjin kissed him after Felix showed him his finished piece—an entire canvas of him smiling under falling petals.

“You make me want to stay,” Hyunjin whispered.

But love has its own timeline.

Hyunjin had been sick for a while. He never told anyone—not until his hands started trembling and he couldn’t hold his camera right. Felix found out from him trying to take a photo of the cherry blossoms.

That spring, the cherry blossoms fell again.

Felix stood on the rooftop with Hyunjin’s camera around his neck, holding a cup of bitter coffee. He looked up at the sky—soft pink, cloudless. The same way it looked the day they met.

He held onto every photo, every unfinished film roll, every stupid sticky note Hyunjin had ever left behind. But most of all, he held onto the feeling of being seen. Of being loved.

In his gallery a year later, there was one painting that made people stop and stare—a man with long hair, beneath a blooming cherry tree, reaching toward the light, hyunjin was looking at the painting and felix just watched him.

And in the corner of the painting, barely visible, the words:

"You made me want to stay." which hyunjin wrote in every single painting since he met felix.