IEW / SujeongSeo / My guitarist friend J /Jan 3rd

 It's been 8 years that I've known her. I first met my best friend when I was a high school freshman and we were in the same homeroom class. Let me call her J. She was thin and roughly 165cm tall, so sometimes J looked like a long wooden stick. And because of her pale and spotless skin, teachers thought that she put on makeup and tried to scold her at times. But she were not interested in makeup. Actually it seemed that she were interested in nothing. Unlike any other high school girls, J looked cynical because she barely smiled and talked. When she were talking with some girls about Idol stars or dramas, she just said indifferently, "Oh, really?" or "Ah, I see." Like this, whenever she had to say something, she never spoke at length. For these reasons, some girls were scared of her.

 But I became a close friend with J since we were assigned to sit next to each other in the math class. Actually it was not the math class but chatting time to us. We realized that we had quite similar taste in music and spent time to talk about rock bands like Radiohead or U2. When the math teacher warned us, we continued to have the conversation writing on the math book. Of course my math grades dropped. But I thought it was not a big deal, as I found a new friend who fitted together. Every Thursday morning, the students must keep a chapel in a church. J and I didn't believe in god so we had no idea why we should go there. Occasionally, we escaped from the church and ate some donuts or walked around.

 For the first year in the high school, we got closer enough to talk about private issues. After I regarded her as a true friend, I could feel free to share my dark and ashamed sides. I was taking anti-depressant and nobody knew it except for my mom. As it was generally accepted that people who go to mental clinic are abnormal or even insane, I hid it. Besides, no one of my friends seemed possible to understand my feeling, for they looked perfectly happy. But I felt J probably understood my situation and she became the second person who knew I got the depression.

 Then she turned to be my anti-depressant. J dragged me out to the park in sunny days and filled my Ipod with bright pop singers like Jason Mraz. Whenever I talked to her about my terrible condition, she just listened carefully nodding her head. Also, via text messages she delivered some famous sayings such as "The darkest hour is just before the dawn." Now I think it was kind of cliché but in those days I used to mutter the sentence before I went to sleep.

 Thanks for her, I could be a second grader without any big trouble. But we separated to different classes. But we still hung out and sometimes went to little rock concert in Hongdae area. I could know that J had a strong desire to be a musician and wanted to learn the guitar. I encouraged her as she did it to me. Before the summer vacation, we went to music academy and took the guitar class together. After three months later I stopped learning it to prepare the Suneung, the Korean SAT, but J slogged away at practicing. Even though she was a beginner, she was talented at playing guitar.

 When she became senior, her playing was better than any other old students in the academy. Some jealous students said her playing was not powerful but J always played accurately every single lines in scores. Her guitar teacher recommended her to go to college of music as a guitarist. But the problem was that her parents didn't want her to be a musician. J and her parents fought for this problem and eventually J ran away from home to show her strong will. She was quite stubborn. I took her to my house and we made some strategies to convince her parents. We sent her parents an email with her recorded guitar playing. After three days later, her parents came to my house and took her back. It meant her victory.

 J finally entered a college of music and made her band with two friends. The band composed several rock music and played gigs frequently. They earned some money for two years. J tried to release an album but there were conflicts of musical opinion among the band members. So she got out of the band with graduation and has been teaching Guitar in some academies. Nowadays she is applying to graduate school. Whatever she wants to be, I always support her unconditionally. Sometimes we recall the quotation that little J mentioned, "The darkest hour is just before the dawn."