143 | pjm ✓

the end

finally.

the end of the love yourself trilogy. we saw its beginning in mid 2018; its end in early 2020. kinda crazy how much love this trilogy has gotten. also pretty crazy how much i've improved (in writing) over the course of a lil more than a year

let me be straight up honest. illegirl was supposed to be a solo book but as i've said before i just fell in love with portraying the characters: yn and jimin. well, i mean, i fall in love with any character whose story i'm able to complete. and illegirl is the second book i've actually finished writing, and the first book i finished writing all by myself. so yes it has a special place in my heart, and i wanted to continue yn and jimin's stories

to this day, you & me both is my best accomplishment. and being the angsty bitch that i am it's the best writing i've ever seen myself do lol. y&mb was hard for some people to stomach, so i decided to follow that up with some fluff!!

143 is the unnecessary book of the trilogy that was only written for closure. even at the end of y&mb i believed yn and jimin would come back together because hOneStly i think they're soulmates 🥺 143 was only there to ensure that happy ending

also the idea for the ly trilogy didn't blossom fRom NOWHERE lol. the books follow the pattern of bangtan's love yourself albums!! ly : her is representative of illegirl—where two people meet, serendipitously fall in love and explore what it means to love someone else. ly : tear is representative of you & me both—when we see the complete adoration and love in the beginning fade into something else, something darker. like a breakup. then finally ly : answer that represents 143. in which the answer is to love yourself first before you love someone else

oh yeah i want to apologize for my lack of author's notes in this particular book. there were days when i felt like saying "fuck it." i REALLY wanted to write a long ass author's note ranting or giving y'all some hearty life advice but since this is a text fic i didn't want y'all to read only 35 words of the story but have to read 3k words of me ranting about irrelevant shit from my life lol

but i guess this long ass 'the end' note kinda makes up for it?? hopefully?

anyways i think this journey has taught me a lot about myself as a person, a friend and a writer. when i started writing illegirl, i was kinda a stupidly immature, dumb, mentally unstable fourteen yr old bitch. i wasn't happy with my life and had no idea how to change things. just because ONE major thing in my life didn't go correctly, i thought my whole life was going to come to an end. but it only got better from there. by the time i was writing you & me both, i was the happiest i've been in my life. literally the peak, dare i say. and it showed in my writing too. pretty ironic because that book was supposed to be lowkey gloomy and i was anything but while writing it (but life rlly be like that). it's full of irony and contradictions (:

i am not afraid of math anymore. i'm not afraid of failing. i let myself off of pressure and relaxed more over the years. as a result my grades actually skyrocketed and i actually finished first in calculus among all my math teacher's classes. imagine being third to last in math then suddenly going to first. it's insane. i would've never thought it was possible. but you don't know what is possible until you do it. i guess what i'm trying to say is don't give up so early because good fortunes will come sooner or later

right. and 143. well when writing 143 i was pretty stressed out because well, JUNIOR YEAR. i actually started writing 143 while writing y&mb, which was over the summer between soph and junior year. but then i started running out of chapters to post during the school year so i had to go on a CRUNCH TIME and write like twelve chapters in two days. i got 143 done!! granted, it ended unrealistically happily, but i mean, my excuse is that some of you needed that happy ending after that depressing shithole of y&mb lmao. though i'm definitely not proud of 143 at all, i'm happy it's finished because now i can plan my future books!