1.1 | Desiderium ✓

60|sixty

HwaShin's death was a death nail on the coffin of SeGye's heart. She had not seen him for three days, and then she heard about his funeral from a partner realty company's owner's wife. She did not believe it at first, laughing it off and saying that the media was simply making it up.

But her painful laughs turned in around to choke her, because it hadn't much long after HwaYoung's death. HwaShin — that tiny boy of five, a perfect, living copy of HwaYoung — was dead. Just like his mother.

And JeongSuk didn't even have the nerve to send over the letters for his funeral.

SeGye didn't feel angry like she had been at the death of the person she was closest to. No, she was drowning in the  abyss of ink tinted hopelessness. Agitation. Fury. Her cries smothered and limbs weighed down.

There was a gaping hole in a part of her chest where her heart used to be. Segye couldn't be the person she once was. Losing a child disabled her. Permanently.

Years later, she met JeongSuk in person when she was visiting HwaYoung's columbarium on her birthday. She reached there at the crack of dawn, just when the Sun was beginning to have itself from the horizon and cast a wobbly sphere of orange. She hadn't expected anyone but herself, as was the norm of every year.

She went there with a bunch of forget-me-nots, every year on April seventh and December twenty ninth, and laid the flowers to rest, along with some prayers and a few tears which rolled down her cheeks despite her promise to not break down.

She thought she was the only one who grieved for the two, but that day, on the morning of April Seventh, the year when HwaShin would have been eleven if he was alive, she saw Yun JeongSuk.

His head was pressed on the glass of the small niche, and flowers lay at his feet - forget-me-nots, the same purple-blue shade as in SeGye's hands - his hands on either sides of his head and his lips quivering in a prayer.

SeGye battled herself, watching that man stand before HwaYoung and act like the most devastated man in the world. Just who had given him the permission to mourn? Shouldn't he have been happier that the woman who he was so unhappy to be with was gone? The child whose birth he so detested was gone?

For a moment, SeGye felt a rage bubble inside her weak, medicated, hypertensive heart. And rage was painful. She felt it. When her heart thumped hard, she would have spasms and a chill pass over her body, and it did then too.

JeongSuk looked over at her, his eyes rimmed with red, swollen, and face ashen like a ghost. He looked ugly. Unsightly. Just his face made SeGye want to throw up. He looked nothing like he did on posters of the Conservative People's Party. Yun JeongSuk, Cabinet Minister of Health and Public Welfare.

Only if people saw his face - his real face - would they still have idolized him?

He stepped away from the glass niche and threw one last, longing glance at the dead woman and the dead child. Then he bowed down to SeGye, sparing her the anger lest he should have said any words.

She didn't look at his back when he walked away. Her sight was fixed at the flowers laying on the ground. That sight made the pit of her stomach churn. JeongSuk knew.

That man knew what HwaYoung liked, what she didn't like.

That man knew everything.

But to SeGye, he was like a thief. A thief who had stolen a living extension of SeGye's heart and thrown it away, as if HwaYoung belonged to him in the first place.