After words

I said in the final chapter that I will make an 'after words' post, but sorry it has taken a while to actually do it.

As I said in a reply to one of the reader's comments, this story very closely follows my real-life experience in high school. I will leave it to the readers' imagination to think about what parts of the story are 'real' and which part is 'fiction', but one thing I can say is that the emotions portrayed in the story are something that I have genuinely felt.

Because of that, writing out this story till the end was very meaningful for me on a personal level too. Of course, I wanted it to be an enjoyable read and a good story first and foremost, but writing this was also my way of tying up some of the loose ends that were still lingering in my heart and memories.

The real-life model for the character 'Mina' is someone I will always feel grateful for. I know that in some parts of the story, she is borderline cancer-causing, but just like how 'Nana' also had a period where she was hurtful to Mina before realizing her own feelings, I too made mistakes that I know hurt her, and I still regret them when I think about them even now.

In hindsight, this 'Mina' girl was probably the one who understood me the best during those high school days although our friendship started with an agenda, so to say (I can and will reveal that the whole thing about Mina approaching Nana because of her interest in Juno is 100% how things happened in real life between this girl and I). We spent a great amount of time together talking about someone else (equivalent to Juno in this story), only to realize much later that we had built our own story along the way. So this was my way of telling this 'our story' which had plenty of downs just like here but still is a story that I will always remember fondly and gratefully.

Finally, I seriously considered about continue writing this story and making a volume 2 and then volume 3, and so on since this was the most well-received story I have ever posted on Webnovel. I was so happy people were reading it and enjoying it that I did not want to stop. But just as someone in the review said (thank you very much, you know who you are), ultimately I decided that ending it here was the right thing to do. Extending this story any further would have pushed it way deep into the territory of pure fiction and things would probably have become rather contrived.

So anyway, thank you very much to all those who read this story together and supported it throughout. Writing this story meant a lot to me and I really appreciate those that shared the experience.

Thank you.