The Song That Brought Me Back

To be honest, I didn’t know.

No—more accurately, I couldn’t choose.

There was always an If trailing after me in the back of my mind.

If I had kept making music with my friends, what kind of songs would we be playing now? What would we be doing?

Hip-hop had gone mainstream, and as K-pop went on to conquer the world, what kind of music would we have been making in the middle of it all, and what kind of expressions would we have worn while doing it?

Of course, if you pushed the timeline far enough, there was a future where the band boom arrived—but would we have held on until then?

Because it was only imagination, the future was always rosy.

In those imagined futures, we rebuilt Korea’s band scene with our own identity and became a band known across the world.

This wasn’t just fantasy.

It was the only hobby I had, the medicine that let me endure reality, the way I gathered up my regrets and put them back together.

And then, impossibly, imagination became reality.

It meant I’d reached the moment when I had to choose one of the countless versions of myself I’d been drawing all this time.

So I still didn’t know.

But at the very least, if I managed to gather all the members, I had no intention of making music quietly.

I was going to make a scene.

I was going to make the world hear our music.

For now, I guess the school festival is the turning point?

Just as I was thinking that, my thoughts circled back to the beginning.

“How am I supposed to rope in Kang Min and Kim Jihoo?”

Kim Jihoo, the keyboardist, at least had a connection through the music academy he attended with Heo Junseong, but Kang Min, the drummer, was a complete mystery.

Where would someone like Kang Min be hanging around at this point in time...?

He was a genuine otaku pretending to be a normal person, so maybe he’d be haunting some Japanese music site or another.

Just as that thought crossed my mind, Heo Junseong called.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Hey, there’s a guy named Kim Jihoo at the academy where I take lessons. Plays keys and guitar.”

“Huh?”

“He’s pretty good. Kind of an ass, though.”

“Oh.”

“But he heard I joined a band and seemed interested. We need a keyboardist, right?”

“Uh...”

“What? Why do you sound like that? Did you forget how to talk?”

At Heo Junseong’s scolding, I snapped back to my senses.

“No, no. Kim Jihoo. Good. Really good.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve heard of him, I think. Kind of rude, good at keyboard.”

Suddenly, a thought struck me.

It was a little too much to call it fate, maybe, but we might have been people drawn to one another all along.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Come to think of it, meeting Lee Doyeong at Nakwon Music Mall had been an absurd coincidence.

“But he says he wants to hear your song first?”

“My song?”

“Yeah. He called me an idiot. Said how could I join a band and still not have listened to the vocalist’s songs yet?”

As expected of Kim Jihoo.

Rude, but sharp.

He was right.

We were in the same class and had ended up on the same team at Nakwon Music Mall by what felt like fate, but normally people weighed their teammates’ music before joining a band.

Especially the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠vocalist’s songs. Those mattered a lot.

“Sounds good.”

“What does?”

“You should hear it too. Let’s all listen at once.”

“You sure? That kid’s picky.”

Did Heo Junseong know when I had debuted as a soloist?

That was when rumors of internal conflict had spread everywhere, the members who’d been icing me out had put up unhappy posts on social media, and the agency had released a pile of dogshit press statements.

Well, to be precise, the order of events was backwards.

They’d pulled their little stunts because they were afraid I’d blow up ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as a solo act.

Even in that situation, I was the one who’d satisfied the public, arms crossed and all.

There was no way Kim Jihoo was more exacting than those people.

“Set a time.”

“He says right now works.”

“Right now? You’re with Kim Jihoo?”

“Yeah. He’s listening from next to me.”

“Then call Doyeong too.”

“Where to?”

Heo Junseong, Lee Doyeong, and Kim Jihoo.

I met the three of them exactly one hour later.

The place was the school band club practice room, which we’d been able to borrow thanks to model student Lee Doyeong.

It was a space that wasn’t being used at the moment, so it was full of dust.

In the middle of it, a familiar face in a Cheongsol High School uniform opened his mouth with a sharp edge to it.

“Sorry for springing a song test on you out of nowhere, but I’m the kind of person who thinks a vocalist is born, not made.”

He probably wasn’t trying to sound rude on purpose.

That just seemed to be what he was like.

If Lee Doyeong was a kind, gentle honor student who knew nothing but studying, then Kim Jihoo gave off the vibe of a sharp-tempered, finicky elite student council president.

Which, of course, he was.

His narrow, cutting eyes and tightly set mouth only made the impression stronger.

“Yeah. It’s fine. I was born for it.”

“...My trust in that statement is dropping.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“Your best one.”

At Kim Jihoo’s words, I could feel Lee Doyeong and Heo Junseong looking at me.

They were probably curious too.

How well I could actually sing.

I grinned, picked up my guitar, and got into position.

What should I sing?

The answer came quickly.

Yeah. This one felt right.

The moment that smooth voice skimmed across the clean tone of the guitar, Kim Jihoo had the feeling that something was wrong.

It was a song he’d never heard before.

But the instant he heard the first line, he wanted to know more, and that uneasy feeling became something concrete.

It wasn’t that it was different from what he’d expected, or that he regretted his cold attitude.

It was wrong in a far more literal sense.

How can someone sing this well?

The comparison was a little strange, but it was the kind of good that made him feel as if something had gone wrong.

Someone might think he was overreacting after only hearing the opening, but music wasn’t like that.

One measure, one riff, one note.

Music was an art that staked everything on a single fleeting instant.

From that perspective, Cha Seoha seemed like someone willing to throw everything away.

It’s dark and scary.

But you’re my Moon

Emotion piled up over the melody, layer by layer.

There wasn’t any dramatic change in range, but the feeling was astonishingly rich.

It felt as though something could burst at any second.

Night on. I can’t stop

I’m chasing something glorious

And yet it didn’t burst all at once.

He traced the changes with delicate precision while carrying the tension perfectly forward.

That was the kind of vocalist people called immersive.

It was easy to say, but never easy to do.

Even if I fall apart

I’ll rise with your light

Notes connected, sound flowed, and emotion spread outward.

At some point, the idea that he was evaluating the performance vanished.

This wasn’t a song he was qualified to judge.

He wasn’t even sure he could take all of it in, let alone analyze it.

He just wanted to hear the finished track.

He could probably listen to it a hundred times over.

Then the chorus hit.

I’m a moon chaser-

Following the moon of you--!

Not cleanly.

Desperately.

A rough, ragged high note.

It felt like he was cutting through an unknown darkness to find the moonlight that was you.

The moment that tightly held throat let out its cracked rasp, Kim Jihoo felt something catch hard in his own chest too.

At the same time, the guitar strums surged and the vocal ad-libs poured out in a flood.

There was only one thought in Kim Jihoo’s head.

I need to join this band.

It was an instinctive, maybe even fateful, certainty.

This was where he was supposed to make music.

If he was with Cha Seoha, he could build the stages he’d only ever imagined until now.

And then it happened.

“Huh?”

Something changed in Cha Seoha.

The moment Heo Junseong and Lee Doyeong heard Cha Seoha sing, they both snapped to attention.

To them, Cha Seoha had been an interesting guy, a friend who did whatever he pleased.

He also happened to be a ridiculously good guitarist.

But because they’d been gathering in the same high school as friends, they’d unconsciously assumed they were all standing on the same level.

That changed the instant they heard him sing.

This...

This wasn’t that kind of song.

Cha Seoha was standing somewhere far above them, at a height they couldn’t possibly reach.

Reality crashed in.

Everything was up to them.

They couldn’t afford to ruin such a beautiful song with their own playing.

If they did, then making a band with Cha Seoha would only end up dragging him down.

So...

I want to follow him.

I want to stand beside him.

If they practiced hard enough to follow behind Cha Seoha, they could create perfect music.

The urge to pull out their instruments and start practicing right this second surged up inside them.

With the same thought coloring both of them, they fixed their eyes on Cha Seoha.

And then, all of a sudden, the song stopped.

“Huh?”

Because something strange had happened.

There was something people often said to me during my idol days.

Cha Seoha never gets nervous.

He never gets scared, no matter the situation.

That was why I’d debuted straight into the final lineup after such a short trainee period, and why I’d gathered fans so quickly.

The company trainers said it was because I’d been a taekwondo athlete and was used to competition.

They said I’d been trained to perform under extreme pressure.

Managers and team leaders said I was just naturally built with a big heart.

And my fans...

They said I was a genius idol who had crash-landed from the planet of idols.

All of that was kind, and I was grateful for it.

Thanks to that, I’d succeeded quickly as an idol and even managed to cover my grandmother’s surgery costs.

But none of that was the real answer.

The reason I never got nervous was simple.

I felt like I’d left the real thing behind.

No matter how dazzling the stage I stood on, the real me was in a Hongdae rehearsal room.

In a rooftop room so stifling that the summer heat came in like a physical force because the air conditioner could barely work.

In our home during winter, where our breath came out in thick white puffs because it was so cold.

And beside my friends.

That was where I belonged.

That was why I’d never been nervous.

So...

Suddenly, I was nervous.

I, who had felt nothing at all even in a solo concert that filled Gocheok Dome to the rafters, even on year-end music stages watched by the entire nation, was feeling tension in a school practice room with only three people in the audience.

Because this was real.

The moment I realized that, my thoughts drifted a little into the past.

“Ah, you guys have terrible ears.”

“That’s all because of the guitar riff.”

“Are you insulting the guitar? Then why are you even in a band?”

“Guys, do you actually like that...?”

“Let’s just listen to Japanese music.”

We were all different—different personalities, different tastes, different everything—so it had been hard to find a song we all liked. And yet we’d all loved the same one.

Adam Fritz’s Moon Chaser.

That was the song I was singing now.

It wasn’t a famous song.

Adam Fritz was a minor artist even in America.

So why did we like it?

It had been the OST from a movie we’d happened to watch together in the practice room.

The movie, which had come out about ten years ago, had been brutally boring.

Why did you even rent this DVD? Kim Jihoo had cursed at Heo Junseong over it.

But the moment the OST started playing, everything changed.

We were all watching the movie together on a shabby sofa we’d gotten through a free giveaway, and when the music began, every one of us shot to our feet.

So this wasn’t just a song.

It was a memory.

It was absurd to think this way, but suddenly the fact that I’d regressed felt real.

That day, that moment.

That space, that smell, that temperature.

Hadn’t I been given the chance to meet it all again?

The most beautiful moment of my life, the one I’d thought was gone forever.

My vision blurred all at once.

It was because of tears.