Ditto, True Beauty.

⠀⠀⠀⠀PROLOGUE: The Archived Memories

LIFE
THROUGH
THE COLOUR
#57636F

     Every child on their first birthday are given a set of choices. Their choice determines what fate they will have, and what success they will fall into in the future. Laid out on the table, they would put various objects, these were as follows . . . A novel: a scholar. Pen: a writer. Seal: high official. Calculator: a businessperson. Money: an affluent person. Cassette: a musician. Ruler: a lawyer. Straw: an agriculturalist, and so on and so forth.

     During Jeong Hwa-Yeon's Doljabi celebration, her parents and relatives hoped for either a calculator, seal, money or whatever they could predict. Upon the lace cloth that covered their dining table, they had those exact things, and whilst her brother chose the cassette tape, Hwa-Yeon chose . . . a cassette too.

     Okay, that was a normal decision. It was a normal celebration. Everything had been normal. Her choices, as the years progressed, were normal— This continued from cradle days to the age of seven.

     The number seven: symbolism of good omen and a strong path ahead.

     At that age, a hurricane wasn't consistently tangled within her hair. The winds weren't always heightened and thinning the air around her. It wasn't like now. Where broken branches and dried leaves, from skeletal trees, are thrown down her throat by the hurricanes' very hands. It would have then continue to wrap them around her neck and begin compressing . . . compressing . . . and compressing.

     But the number seven passed, and positive omens weakened, the strength of normality in Hwa-Yeon's life was diminished to a nil. The people who made her life iridescent, began to leave. Thus, Jeong Hwa-Yeon started to look at life through the colour #57636F.

     It was neither light nor dark, black or white, grey or blue.

     It was a null shade.

     And it all started with the very second choice that Jeong Hwa-Yeon had to make.

     Everything had blurred in a hasty speed. It was as though Hwa-Yeon was sat at a bustling train station, watching multiple train carriages journey across the rail tracks. People were inside of them, making the right decisions, going to the right places, getting off at the right stops. But Hwa-Yeon was glued to the waiting seats, with no ideas of whether she should be boarding the next train, or if she was at the right station at all.

All that churned inside of her, were emotions of envy, and desire towards those people.

     Choices. People make them all the time.

     But just one thing that Jeong Hwa-Yeon wanted to know, was how people are able to affirm their choices and have fate within the palms of their hands? Or was fate biased? It probably was. She didn't blame fate.

     "Would you like to live with me? Or your grandparents?" Her aunt had asked.

     It was all too much for a nine year old.

     Whimpering with red-rimmed eyes, she scanned the people before her. There were multiple colours, but the two primary colours in her life were gone.

Blue and red.

Her mother and father.

     Now she could see yellow, and secondary colours, green and purple. The expressions engraved upon her family member's faces were coercing. Their stares vacant, but their mannerisms clearly bellowed for her to make them the result of her choice. With a misty vision, Hwa-Yeon gave another look at her aunt, who was forbearing and understanding. For a moment, she thought she saw the colour blue, a soft and amiable shade, like her mother . . . it prompted Hwa-Yeon.