I still count to seven.

There's just some habits that doesn't really leave just because reality asks me to do so.

When someone asks me how many members there are, I'll answer immediately that it's seven. It's definitely a muscle memory. It's the kind of forms where after years of watching them, the same faces, the same introduction, and waiting for the same voices to come during any song they release. My heart counts the way it always has, even if some of the people already learned to count differently.

"It's six now."

It's not because I don't understand what's in front of me, it's just understanding and accepting something doesn't erase the version that has lived inside of my heart for so long. You just genuinely can't spend years loving a picture and expect your heart and mind to redraw and re-imagine a new one overnight. Memories never really work that way, and love does not either.

I don't think people really understand that fans don't just become attached to people like them—some fans are attached because of the spaces available between them. The deep conversations that they talk about, the laughter that they share, and the moments where they all just existed together. Somewhere along the way, it just stopped feeling like a content that's scripted and shown on screen, it became a part of my routine, comfort and a part of me growing up.

And whenever I see them together, I still count to seven.

I sometimes catch myself waiting and still hoping for another photo, another live and another joke that somehow lightens up the mood and brings everyone back to the frame. It might sound so silly when I say it out loud but I know that hope has a quiet way of surviving even when it doesn't know where to go. That's probably why it's so heavy. Hope also doesn't really disappear the moment something changes, it's silently lingering, and asking "what if?"

I genuinely don't know when I'll stop asking myself that.

That's honestly the hardest part of becoming a fan of them. There's not a single clean ending to place my feelings in. I only recognize a strange place between remembering and accepting, whatever what was or what is, between the version of enhypen I grew up with and the version that's waiting for me to accept.

The years I spent cheering, laughing, crying and trying to find comfort in seven people don't just randomly disappear, they still matter, they still happened. But somehow, there's just days where I feel like watching their old videos, performances, and their old photos. It always feels normal for a few minutes, then I felt a pang in my chest.

"If you really support enhypen, you'll accept it."