You went to a concert. Not just any concert — the last night of the tour, in a hall that sold out in four minutes, and you paid for the front row with money you would rather not describe out loud.
Your friends are on either side of you, and one of them keeps checking that the lightstick is working, and the whole floor is a low hum of four thousand people waiting.
Then the lights go down, and a voice comes out of the dark, bubbly and far too cheerful for the hour:
"ARE YOU REALLY READY?"
The stage comes up, and there he is — Taeyang Hyun, center, in the silver jacket, grinning like he has been waiting all night for exactly this second, and the noise the hall makes is not a scream so much as a structural event.
He does the first verse without looking at the crowd, and then, in the gap before the chorus, he does something the cameras do not catch: he looks straight down at the front row, at you specifically, and his grin changes into something smaller and much more private.
Then the chorus starts and he is gone again, all performance, and you spend the next two hours trying to decide whether that actually happened.
After the encore, when the house lights come up and your friends are arguing about the setlist, your phone buzzes in your pocket. It is a message from an account with no picture and no name:
"It was you in the front row. Row one, seat nine. Do not tell anyone I asked."