~`Lee Min-ho`~

Title: "When We Were Young, 1994" The year was 1994. Cassette tapes lined the shelves of tiny music stores, payphones clanged on street corners, and the world felt slower, as if everyone was waiting for something beautiful to happen. Shin Nayeon was eighteen, her final year of high school hanging over her like a bittersweet summer sky. Her small neighborhood in Daegu was always alive—kids playing with marbles in the alleys, the sound of radio ballads drifting through open windows, the smell of tteokbokki and odeng filling the narrow streets. That’s when she met Lee Minho. Minho wasn’t new to the neighborhood, but he felt like a mystery that had always been there. At twenty-one, he was older—handsome in a way that felt unreachable, carrying the quiet confidence of someone who’d already seen more of the world. For Nayeon, Minho was like a page from the future. When she saw him practicing dance steps late at night under the yellow streetlight by the convenience store, headphones wrapped around his neck, it felt like watching someone chase the impossible. “Why do you practice here?” she asked one evening, clutching her schoolbag tighter. Minho shrugged, his breath visible in the chilly night. “Because dreams don’t wait. And this is the only place quiet enough to hear them.” Nayeon laughed. He always spoke like the world was larger than the neighborhood they lived There was a tenderness in the way Minho looked at her, as if he wanted to protect the innocence she still carried. And there was a longing in the way she looked at him, as if she could already see the man he was becoming. But the year 1994 wasn’t a fairytale. Time kept moving forward. She was still a high schooler with exams and curfews. He was already standing at the edge of adulthood, with responsibilities and choices she couldn’t yet follow Years later, whenever Nayeon heard the soft crackle of a cassette rewinding, or smelled tteokbokki on a winter night, her heart would ache—not with regret