Aika - Reborn Idol

After the viral tell all, my inbox broke.

It stopped refreshing properly. Messages stacked faster than the screen could catch up. Names blurred into each other. I was bracing myself for threats.

But there wasn’t a lot of them. Maybe one or two “regular” negative emotions, but that was it. It was mostly thank yous. It was “I thought I was alone”, “I didn’t know if I was allowed to say this until you did”.

I sat on the floor with Bingo in my lap. His warm weight grounded me as my phone buzzed again and again like a pulse. Even the comments on online sites are surprisingly supportive. Some were applause. Some were praise. But a lot were heavy and meaningful. People handing me pieces of themselves with shaking hands.

Some from women older than me. Some frighteningly young girls. Even some younger boys. Some wrote essays. Some wrote one sentence and then nothing more, like they had flung the words and run.

‘I survived because I dissociated’

‘I didn’t survive. I just kept breathing’

‘They told me it was the price of ambition’

‘They told me I was lucky’

Lucky. The word made my stomach turn.

I couldn’t respond to all of them, but I read every message. I let them sit in my chest. I cried when I needed to. I stopped when it got too much. I learned quickly that bearing witness is its own kind of endurance.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, a strange thing happened with the media world. The comments of news anchors changed. The tone shifted. People stopped asking what I had done and started asking what had been done to me.

I saw my face on screens again. On television news, phone applications, and newspapers laid open on café tables. But this time, it was not frozen mid-performance, idol or the latter. It was just me, behind the scenes. Maybe after a training or concert. Basic clothes, eyes tired, back straight, hands folded loosely in my lap.

Someone on a panel said, ‘She looks just like any other girl.’

Another said, ‘She doesn’t look like a scandal’

A third said, ‘She looks like someone people would trust’

I laughed at that. Trust had once felt like a liability, now it felt like gravity. They stopped calling me mysterious. They started calling me brave. They stopped speculating about my body. They started quoting my words.

One article compared me to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Not in a religious way, the writer rushed to clarify, but in posture. In presence. In the way I did not apologize for existing.

I didn’t know how to feel about that. I wasn’t holy. I wasn’t untouched. Though they all know that already. I wasn’t above desire or grief or anger.

But I understood what they meant. For the first time, I was not being viewed as something consumed. I was being regarded.

Women started lining up outside the small legal office my parents had arranged. Digitally at first, then physically. Names on waiting lists overflowed. Intake forms filled out carefully and thoroughly, like confessions offered without absolution promised.

I sat in on meetings quietly. I listened, I took notes, and I learned how systems bend and where they break. I learned how to say, “That wasn’t your fault,” without sounding like a slogan.

I learned how to hold silence without rushing to fill it.

Slowly, without deciding to, I found myself doing something I had never done before. I stopped asking who I was supposed to be. I started asking who I could help. It didn’t feel like punishment or penance, it felt like placement. Like a calling.

There were nights, though, when the quiet got too loud.

When the phone stopped buzzing. When Bingo slept. When the city outside my window softened into distant sound. Those were the moments my thoughts slipped sideways.

To Caleb.

I would open my messages, thumb hovering over his name. I drafted words and erased them. I typed I miss you and deleted it. I typed “Are you okay” and deleted it.

Once, I typed something longer and honest. Something about how strange it felt to be seen clearly at the exact moment he was being misunderstood.

I didn’t send it.

Because I didn’t know how to reach him without pulling him back into the fire.

Sometimes I wondered if he had tried to reach me too. If there were unsent messages on his phone, like ghosts pacing behind glass.

I imagined him reading the headlines that painted him as reckless, arrogant boy who had dared to defy something sacred. A fallen angel, stripped of reverence for choosing compassion over obedience.

I was being sanctified by survival. He was being scolded for mercy. The irony sat between us like a locked door neither of us had the strength to break open.

I knew it in my bones. We were walking different roads now. Parallel, perhaps. Close enough to feel each other’s presence, but never meant to converge.

It felt too late to admit that my first love was already ending before it had truly begun. I was still young by age, but my body carried experiences far older than my heart knew how to hold. This pain wasn’t something I had trained for. It wasn’t something I could endure through discipline.

That was survival. This was heartbreak.

Still, when I spoke to the women who came to me shaking, when I held their hands and watched them relax just a little, I felt something settle.

Purpose.

I wasn’t here to be redeemed in public. I wasn’t here to be adored. I wasn’t here to replace one pedestal with another.

I was here because I had survived something and chosen not to look away from it anymore. I was here not just to let my voice be heard, but also to amplify those who are oppressed and unheard. I had found my life’s purpose.

One night, long past midnight, I finally sent a message.

It was not a confession, I feel like I’ve done more than when I politely partially kissed him. It wasn’t a goodbye either. It was just the smallest truth I could muster sending without breaking.

‘I’m finding my footing. I hope you are too.’

The message sat there. Delivered. Then seen.

I didn’t wait for a reply. I already knew there wouldn’t be one. We both understood something painful and unspoken. If either of us reached too hard, we would only reopen wounds we had just learned how to close.

Whatever we were to each other had never been meant to survive on urgency and secrecy. Or the ache of almost. If it ever grew again, it would have to grow slowly and honestly, without either of us setting ourselves on fire to keep the other warm.

For a long time, I thought being called meant being chosen. Chosen by the industry. Chosen by faith. Chosen by a role that demanded everything and called it purpose.

It could be all that, yes.

But, sometimes you aren’t called to a place or a title or a future you can defend to other people. Sometimes you are called to a person.

Not to keep them. Not to claim them. Not even to walk beside them forever. But to be seen by them at the exact moment you were most certain you were unlovable.

Caleb didn’t save me. He didn’t fix me. He stood still while I learned how to breathe again. That was all I needed.

The world had finally stopped trying to ruin me. The noise faded. The cruelty lost interest. Justice began its slow, imperfect work. What remained was quiet space. The terrifying freedom of choosing what kind of life I wanted to build next.

Somewhere out there, he was walking a different road. One shaped by faith, loss, courage, and a love he never once tried to take from me.

Somewhere else, I was learning how to stand without shrinking. And even if our lives never met again, I knew with absolute certainty that I had been called to you.

Not as a promise. Not as an ending. But as the moment that taught me I was worth answering at all.