H.Y.Y.

H
(Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa)

THE
NOTES
NAMES DATE
Hoseok July 23, 2010
Taehyung Dec. 29, 2010
Jimin April 06, 2011
Yoongi Sept. 19, 2016
Namjoon May 02, 2018
Jimin Dec. 10, 2018
Jin March 02, 2019
Yoongi March 15, 2019
Jungkook May 28, 2019
Yoongi June 12, 2019
Jin June 25, 2019
Taehyung March 20, 2020
Namjoon May 15, 2020
Yoongi June 25, 2020
Jungkook June 25, 2020
Jin July 17, 2020
Hoseok Sept. 15, 2020
Jimin Sept. 28, 2020
Jungkook Sept. 30, 2020
Hoseok Feb. 25, 2021
Jungkook May 02, 2021
Jin Aug. 09, 2021
Namjoon Dec. 17, 2021
Hoseok Feb. 25, 2022
Hoseok March 02, 2022
Taehyung March 29, 2022
Yoongi April 07, 2022
Taehyung April 11, 2022
Jin Apr. 11, 2022
Jin Apr. 11, 2022
Jin Apr. 11, 2022
Namjoon Apr. 11, 2022
Namjoon Apr. 11, 2022
Jungkook Apr. 11, 2022
Jungkook Apr. 11, 2022
Yoongi April 11, 2022
Namjoon April 28, 2022
Taehyung April 30, 2022
Yoongi May 02, 2022
Yoongi May 02, 2022
Jungkook May 02, 2022
Hoseok May 10, 2022
Hoseok May 12, 2022
Jimin May 15, 2022
Jimin May 16, 2022
Jimin May 19, 2022
Taehyung May 20, 2022
Hoseok May 20, 2022
Taehyung May 22, 2022
Taehyung May 22, 2022
Namjoon May 22, 2022
Jungkook May 22, 2022
Jungkook May 28, 2022
Hoseok May 28, 2022
Jimin May 29, 2022
Jin May 30, 2022
Hoseok May 31, 2022
Jin June 04, 2022
Taehyung June 07, 2022
Yoongi June 08, 2002
Namjoon June 12, 2022
Jin June 13, 2022
Namjoon June 15, 2022
Yoongi June 15, 2022
Yoongi June 23, 2022
Taehyung June 25, 2022
Namjoon June 30, 2022
Jimin July 03, 2022
Hoseok July 04, 2022
Jimin July 04, 2022
Namjoon July 13, 2022
Jungkook July 16, 2022
Taehyung July 17, 2022
Namjoon July 20,2022
Jimin July 24, 2022
Jungkook July 24, 2022
Jungkook July 26, 2022
Jungkook July 26, 2022
Jungkook July 26, 2022
Jimin July 28, 2022
Yoongi July 29, 2022
Jin Aug. 03, 2022
Hoseok Aug. 13, 2022
Jin Aug. 15, 2022
Jin Aug. 30, 2022
Jin Aug, 30,2022
HOSEOK
July 23, 2010

When I counted to three, I heard the sound of

laughter like a hallucination. The next moment,
the young me passed by, holding someone’s
hands. I looked back quickly but there was no
one there except my classmates, staring at me.
“Hoseok-ah”. The teacher called my name. only
then did I realized where I was. It was a class
field trip. I was counting the fruits that were
drawn in the textbook. Five, six. I kept counting,
but as I did my voice trembled and my hands
grew sweaty. The memory of that time kept
surfacing.
I couldn’t clearly remember my mother’s face,
that day. I only remembered the chocolate bar
she gave me as we looked around the amusement
park. “Hosoek-ah. Count to ten and then open
your eyes.” When I had finished counting and
opened my eyes, my mother was gone. I waited
and waited, but she never returned. I had only
counted to nine. If I counted one more it would be
fine, but my voice wouldn’t come out. My ears
where ringing and my surroundings grew cloudy.
The teacher kept pointing, telling me to keep
counting. My friends were staring at me. I
couldn’t my mother’s face. It seemed like if I
counted one more, my mother would really never
come back for me.
Just like that, I collapse to the ground.

TAEHYUNG
December 29, 2010

I took my shoes off and threw my bag and went

into the main room. Dad was there. I didn’t think
about how long it had been or where he had gone. I
only raced thoughtlessly into his embrace. I don’t
remember clearly what happened after that, whether
the smell of alcohol came first, or the cursing, or the
slap to my cheek. I couldn’t know what was going on.
He smelled of alcohol and when he panted his breath
was foul. His eyes were bloodshot, and his beard was
growing wildly. He hit my face with his large hands.
He hit me again and asked what I was looking at.
Then he lifted me into the air. His scarlet eyes were
frightening, but I was so terrified, I couldn’t even cry.
This wasn’t my father. No, this was my father. But it
wasn’t. My two feet shook in the open air. In the next
moment, my head crashed into the wall and I slumped
to the floor. It seemed like my head was exploding. My
vision flickered, and I blinked a few times. My head
was filled only with the harsh sound of my father’s
breathing.
JIMIN
April 06, 2011

I faced the gates of the Flowering Arboretum

alone. The weather was gray and a little cold, but
I was in a good mood. It was the day of the
picnic, but my mom and dad were both busy. I
was a little disappointed at first. But at the
flower drawing contest I had been praised, and
my friends’ mothers had said, ‘Wow, Jimin is so
mature.’ I had seemed a little cool, then.
“Jimin, wait here. Teacher will come soon.”
When the picnic ended, my teacher had asked
this, but I hadn’t waited. I was confident that I
could go myself. I grasped the straps of my
rucksack with both hands and walked maturely.
It seemed like others were looking at me, so I
spread my shoulders even wider. Quite a while
later, it started to rain. My friends and their
moms had all left, and no one is looking after me,
and my legs hurt. I covered my head with my
rucksack and crouched under a tree. The rain
started come down harder, and there was nobody
passing by. Eventually, I started to run through
the rain. I didn’t see any houses or stores. The
place I arrived to was the back gate of the
arboretum. The side door was opened and
through it I could see a storage room of some
sort.
SEOKJIN
March 02, 2019
A damp smell came from the principal’s room as I
followed my father in. It had been ten days since I
came back from America, and yesterday I had heard
that I would be entering school one year behind, since
the school system there was different. “Please take
care of him”. My father put his hand on my shoulder,
and my whole body flinched without me realizing.
“School is a dangerous place. There need to be
regulations”. The principal looked at me. Whenever
the principal spoke, his wrinkled cheeks and the skin
around his mouth sagged, and the inside of his
blacked lips was pure, dark red. “Don’t you think so,
Seokjin?”. I hesitated at the abrupt question, and my
father rested his hand more heavily on my shoulder.
It was a grip strong enough to make the veins on his
neck stand out. “I believe you’ll do well”. The principal
met my gaze with tenacity. And my father put
increasingly more weight into the hand on my
shoulder. It hurt so much I thought my shoulder
bones would crumble, and I clenched my hand into
fists. My body trembled, and I broke into a cold sweat.
“You must always speak to me, Seokjin. You must
become a good student”. The principal looks at me
with an unsmiling face. “Yes”. The agony disappeared
as soon as I squeezed out a response. I heard that my
father and the principal laugh. I couldn’t lift my head.
I only looked down at my father’s brown shoes and the
principal’s black shoes. I didn’t know where the light
was coming in from, but they seemed to shine. I was
afraid of that light.
NAMJOON
May 15, 2020

As I crossed the storage classroom that had

become a hideout for those of us with no place to go, I
set a few chairs straight. I picked up a desk that had
fallen over, abandoned, and wiped the dust away with
my palm. Endings make people emotional. Today is
the last day I would come to school. Two weeks
earlier, it had been decided that we will move. Maybe
I would never come back here again. And maybe I
would never see my hyungs and dongsaengs again.
I folded the paper in half and set it on top of the
desk, and even got out a pencil, but I didn’t know
what words I should leave behind, so I just passed the
time instead. In the middle of scribbling a few useless
words, my pencil lead snapped with an audible sound.
‘You have to keep living’. On the paper, which was
covered the smudges of the fragments of pencil lead, I
had scribbled without even realizing. In between the
black lead dust and the scribbles were scattered some
stories of poverty, parents, dongsaengs, moving.
I crumpled up the paper and put it in my pocket,
then stood. I pushed the desk away and dust rose up.
As I started to leave I paused and breathed out onto
the dirty window, then wrote three characters, no
goodbye would be enough. And even if I said nothing,
this would convey it all. “Let’s see each other again”.
More than being a promise, it was just a wish.
YOONGI
June 25, 2020
I swung the door open and came in, then pulled
the bag out from the very bottom drawer of the desk.
When I turned I inside out, a single piano key fell out
with a clack. I threw the half burned piano key into
the trash and laid down on my bed. The fire on my
heart wouldn’t cool down, so my breathing was a
mess, and at some point, soot had smudged all over
my fingers.
I had gone alone to the house that the fire had
destroyed, once the funeral was over. I had gone into
my mother’s room and had seen that the piano had
been burned so badly you could barely recognize its
shape. I sunk down at its side. I sat there as the
afternoon light came in through the window and then
began to fade. The last of the light rolled over a few of
the piano keys. What sort of sound would come out if I
played them? I had thought about many times my
mother’s finger had touched them. Then I had put one
of them in my pocket and left the room.
Almost four years had passed since then, the
house was quiet. It was insanely quiet. It was past 10,
so my father would be asleep, and everything
afterwards held its breath. Those were the rules of
this house. It was hard to endure its stillness. It
wasn’t easy, either, to keep to prescribed times and
regulations and forms. But nevertheless, what I could
endure even less than that was the fact of living in
this house. I received allowance from my father.
Rather than opposing him and going astray and
causing trouble, I lacked the courage to abandon him
and leave the house to live on my own, to make that
freedom into action and not just words.
I suddenly rose up from the bed and dug the piano
key from the trash can under the desk. I opened the
window and the night air pushed in. That air slapped
me in the face with the strength of everything that
had happened that day. I threw the piano key out of
that air with all my strength. I listened hard, but I
couldn’t hear the key hitting the ground. No matter
how hard I thought, I couldn’t imagine the sound that
piano key would have made. No matter how much
time passed, that piano key would never make a
sound again. And I would never play the piano again.
JUNGKOOK
June 25,2020
I stroked the piano keys with my fingertip and
smudged the dust. I put some strength into that
finger, but the sound that came out was different than
the sounds of Hyung’s playing. It had been ten days
since Hyung hadn’t come to school. Today, the rumor
had gone around that he had been expelled. Namjoon
and Hoseok Hyung didn’t say anything, and I was too
afraid to ask. On that day two weeks ago, only Hyung
and I had been therein the hideaway classroom when
the teacher opened the door and came in. it was a
visiting day for the class parents. I didn’t want to be
in the classroom, so I went thoughtlessly to the
hideaway. Hyung didn’t even look at me and kept
playing the piano, and I put two desks together and
closed my eyes like I was pretending to sleep. Hyung
and the piano were slightly different, but also seemed
so much like one and the same that I couldn’t
separate them. While I listened to Hyung’s playing, I
somehow wanted to cry.
Since I felt tears threatening to flow I rolled over,
and the door suddenly slammed open and the piano
sound came to a stop. I was slapped across the face,
stumbled backwards and ultimately fell. As I
crouched to withstand the violence, suddenly the voice
stopped. When I lifted my head, I saw Hyung
standing over me, pushing at the teacher’s shoulder.
Over Hyung’s shoulder, I saw the teacher’s shocking
expression.
 I pushed the piano key. It was a mimicry of the
sound Hyung used to play. Had Hyung really been
expelled? Would he never come back? Hyung always
said it was ordinary for him to get beaten up a little.
If I hadn’t been there, would Hyung have had to stand
up to the teacher? If I hadn’t been there, would Hyung
still be here, playing the piano?
HOSEOK
September 15, 2020
Jimin’s mother paced back and forth through the
emergency room. After checking that the name on the
head of the bed and the IV bottle were properly placed,
she brushed a blade of grass from Jimin’s shoulder with
one finger. I approached hesitantly, feeling that I should
tell her why Jimin was in the emergency room, about the
seizure at the bus stop. Jimin’s mother seemed to
discover my presence only then, and she looked at me
with a long, evaluative gaze. I didn’t know what to do, so
I hung back. Jimin’s mother said only ‘Thank You’ and
then turned back to him.
The next time Jimin’s mother looked at me, the
doctor and nurses had started to move the bed and I
moved to follow. Jimin’s mother said thank you again
and pushed at my shoulder. Rather than pushing, it
would be more correct to say that she touched me
slightly and then pulled her hand away. But I suddenly
felt an invisible line being drawn between Jimin’s
mother and myself. That line was sure and solid. It was
cold and sturdy. It was a line that I could never
surmount. I had lived for an orphanage for 10 years. I
knew that much with my whole body, my sight, the air.
In a moment of bewilderment, I took a step back and
then collapsed to the floor. Jimin’s mother looked
vacantly down at me. She was a small and beautiful
person, but her shadow was large and chilly. That
shadow fell over me, collapsed on the emergency room
floor. When I lifted my head, Jimin’s bed had left the
emergency room and could no longer be seen. After that
day, Jimin didn’t come back to school.
JUNGKOOK
SEOKJIN
3 August YEAR 22
I opened the door and went into the storage room of
classroom. In the middle of a summer night, the odor
of fungi and dust were mixed with the humid air. I
had flashbacks of many different moments at that
time.
I remembered the shiny shoes of the principal,
Namjoon’s facial expression when he was standing
outside the door, the day I ignored Hoseok and walked
back alone. My heart started hurting and I got chills.
I had this complex feeling that overwhelmed me with
pain.
It’s hard to say how it felt like because it wasn’t
annoyance but it wasn’t fear either. The sign was
clear. I knew I had to get out of this place.
It seemed like if Tae knew what I was going through
& held my arm. “Hyung, try a little harder. Try
remembering what happened here"
Then I got tae’s hands off of me and turned back. We
walked through the heat for hours. We were as tired
as we could be. Other guys looked at me as if they
didn’t know what to say to me. Memory. What
taehyung said about memory was just a meaningless
story.
That I did that..That it happened to me… Story that
we did something together. It’s possible that it
happened. I think we did that. But, memory isn’t
something that you can understand or accept. You
don’t understand experience through just hearing
something.
Experience is something that is deeply rooted in your
mind, head, and soul. But for me, the memories I had
about that place was only about the bad things.
Things that made me painful and and made me want
to escape.
A fight happened between me and taehyung who
stopped me from going back and leaving. But we were
both tired. Hitting or avoiding...it both felt heavy and
slow as if we were in a hot viscous liquid. It happened
in a sudden when tae and I tripped over each other.
My shouldners bumped into the wall and I faltered as
I lost my balance.
At first, I couldn't tell what happened. I couldn't open
my eyes or breathe due to the dust filling up the
whole place. I continuously coughed. "Are you okay?" I
realized I fell after hearing that person.
As soon as I tried to get up, I see something that I
thought as a wall crumbled. There was a huge space
over the crumbled walls. No one moved for a second.
Oh my world. Someone said, "we spent such a long
time here" we never imagined there was a space
beyond the walls"
But what's that? As the dust settled down, we were
able to see a cabinet in the middle of the empty space.
Namjoon opened the cabinet. I took a step closer.
There was a note inside the cabinet. Namjoon picked
the note up and turned to the first page. I instantly
held my breath.
The first page of a note that seemed pretty old...the
page had a expected name written on it. That was my
father's name. As Namjoon tried to flip another page
over, I took the note away from him. Namjoon seemed
surprised and looked at me but didn't mind much.
I went through the book shelf then an old note tipped
over as if it was about to crumble.
This book written in my father's handwriting was a
diary by my father that recorded what he experienced
with his friend in high school. All the days weren't
recorded.
Sometimes,the diary skipped a month and there were
pages where there were covered with blood stains. I
knew that my father went through the same thing as
me. He also made a mistake in his life and tried to
run and run to make up for his mistakes.
The things that was written on my father's note were
the records of his failures. My father ended up giving
up and failed. He forgot, ignored, and avoided it. He
lost his friends. The last page only had a date written
and the rest was covered with dark ink.
The ink was stained into the next page and the page
after where nothing was written on it. That stain
seemed to show my father's failure like if it was some
sort of an announcement/speech/advocate.
After some time passed by, all my senses got blurry.
I felt the cold wind blowing over the window and
knew it was the darkest time of the day, the time
right before the sun rose. My dongsaengs including
namjoon were scattered around sleeping. I looked up
to the ceiling. I remembered seeing my dad's name
written somewhere here.
Below that, there was a sentence written "everything
started from here."
I felt something from the tip of my fingers when I was
able to close the note. I was able to see letters written
under the ink stain. I felt something out the window. I
guess the sun was about to rise.
But this night didn't end yet. The time wasn't night or
past midnight (AM). As the darkness and blurry light
intertwined, I was able to see the words on the line
from the darkly stained page.
The note had memories that was beyond something
that was recorded.
On top of the words, in the spaces in between the
lines, the things that my father decided to forget and
not remember remained on the pages. The color
evaporated but the traces of how the pen was pressed
onto the paper were left. My father's time of fear,
hopelessness.
And his small and fragile hope and despair whirled
around. My father's map of soul was reflected and left
on the note. When I closed the note, I teared up. I
looked at each one of them. Maybe we had to come
back here. Everything started here. I realized the joy
of being together.
I realized the meaning and the joy of being together
and being able to laugh together. The initial mistake
that committed...the mistake that I was never able to
confess was left like a scar. I think all these things are
not a coincidence. At the end of the day, had to get
here.
So that I will find out about the mistakes and faults
that I have committed and find the meaning of the
pain and my agony. And perhaps take a step closer to
finding a map to my soul.