> "She stopped crying in front of mirrors because she feared I'd speak."
—Tears
I was born before she knew his name.
Before she knew her own.
I formed behind her eyes like vapor behind broken glass—
not from sadness,
but from the pressure of holding in too much.
I've lived in her longer than any lover.
Longer than her voice.
Longer than her script.
I am the tear she never shed in public.
The one she swallowed so deeply
it turned into melody.
---
She thinks she created herself with ink.
With lyrics.
With rebellion.
But before any of those things came to life—
I was already leaking through her silence.
I was there.
When she was a child in the corridor of machines—
where nurses called her numbers
and she named herself stars.
I slid down her cheek the first time they called her a product.
She wiped me away with the back of her sleeve
before anyone noticed.
But I was there.
---
I lived in the pauses between her rehearsed smiles.
I pooled under her pillow
in the days after they made her say Joon didn't exist.
And the worst part?
She believed them.
---
She kept performing.
Kept shining.
But inside, I grew heavy.
She called it exhaustion.
They called it "burnout."
But I was grief—
refusing to leave without being named.
---
She became a woman with thousands of photos and no reflection.
Every mirror edited her.
Not with glass,
but with memory.
And when she finally began to remember—
not him, not details,
but me—
I shook.
I wept for her
when she could not.
---
She sang into microphones,
but her real voice lived in the space between verses.
In the second before the chorus.
That inhale?
That's where I screamed.
---
She never wanted to be famous.
She wanted to be loved safely.
But they turned her into a soundbite.
A spectacle.
A tragedy with perfect eyeliner.
---
She only cried twice in front of him.
The first time,
she said:
> "I don't know how to make this stop without stopping myself."
He touched her face.
Let me fall.
Didn't wipe me away.
He watched me.
As if I were holy.
And in that moment,
I was.
---
The second time she cried in front of him—
she didn't speak.
But I did.
I fell with a weight she hadn't allowed in years.
And he kissed where I landed.
Not her lips.
Not her skin.
Just the space between her tremble and her breath.
---
Then they took him.
And she locked me in again.
Buried me behind studio walls,
beneath awards,
inside carefully rehearsed breakdowns.
She called it control.
But I was suffocating.
---
The girl they sold was not the girl who hummed lullabies in the dark.
That girl?
She bled me daily.
Let me tell her story without shame.
But now?
I waited.
Inside.
For the moment her silence cracked.
---
It came on the twenty-fifth night after she said his name again.
She sat at a piano.
Not to play.
But to listen.
She placed her palms on the keys
like they were skin,
and whispered:
> "If I scream, they'll mute me.
But if I cry… they might think I'm still marketable."
I wept for her then.
Not because she was in pain—
but because she didn't trust pain anymore.
---
You see, I'm not just her sadness.
I am her witness.
Her resistance.
Her confession when words fail.
---
She used to fear me.
Because in her world, crying was weakness.
A liability.
A vulnerability to be edited out.
But I am not weakness.
I am what remains
when every lie has been told,
every scene has been shot,
and all that's left is truth without audience.
---
She once said:
> "Maybe I'm only real when I'm breaking."
But that's not true.
She's real when she lets me speak.
And she's learning that again—
not by choice,
but by necessity.
---
The world she escaped still wants her back.
With contracts.
With nostalgia.
With apologies dipped in control.
They don't miss her.
They miss what she gave them.
---
But I miss her.
Not the performer.
Not the icon.
The girl who used to name clouds after forgotten friends.
The girl who once carved a lyric into a school desk because it made her feel like she existed.
The girl who let me fall without shame.
---
She's coming back now.
Piece by piece.
Through letters she hides in library books.
Through songs she sends anonymously to underground radio stations.
Through the notebook she keeps under her mattress labeled:
> "Things I Never Performed."
I read those pages.
I soak into them.
And with every word—
I become more than a tear.
I become a flood of memory that cannot be erased.
---
They will try to silence her again.
They always do.
But now she knows:
She doesn't have to scream.
She doesn't have to write.
She doesn't even have to speak.
She just has to let me fall.
And I'll speak.
For her.
To him.
To the world.
---
And one day—
when the world has tired of perfection,
when it aches for something raw,
when its own silence begins to crack—
they'll hear me.
---
Not as a tear on a girl's cheek.
But as a voice soaked in everything she survived.
---
This is only the beginning.
I've been waiting a long time to talk.