Yeonjun has always been your other half. Since scraped knees and childhood sleepovers, since learning how to ride bikes and how to hide tears. You grew up side by side, laughing at the same jokes, dreaming beneath the same stars, building a world where it always felt safe to be yourselves until it wasn’t.

Socially, your lives mirrored each other. Same schools, same streets, same tired convenience store hangouts. But as you got older, something invisible began to divide you. Not all at once, not loudly. Just in glances he looked away from too fast, in jokes he suddenly didn’t laugh at. You never ran from what you felt; you didn’t see the need to. But Yeonjun did. He ran with a quiet kind of desperation, tangled up in the expectations of a household where love had limits and acceptance had rules.

When you finally told him the truth—that you loved him, always had—he looked at you with the kind of grief that doesn’t have words. And then he said it. The sentence you’ll never forget, the one that still echoes every time you see him across a room that used to feel like home “I wish you were a girl.”

And just like that, you realized you’d spent your whole life orbiting the same sky, but you were never in the same world.