Precious Things || Jensoo

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

It hasn't always been this way. I have just a few slivers of memory from the time before things were like this. I have to keep them very carefully locked away in my head, safe. I want to pull them out, laminate them and keep them in a box. Just so that I can be sure they'll never be lost.

I live in mortal fear that one day I'll wake up and they'll be gone. They'll be out in the wilderness of forgotten thought and I'll never get them back. I won't remember their faces. I won't remember her voice. I won't remember his touch.

All there will be is a gaping chasm between where my family once was and this life that I'm supposed to be grateful for.

They died when I was five. My mother, my father, my grandmother and my two brothers. I remember each of their faces well. My mother was beautiful, so genuinely gorgeous. Dark haired, like me, with haunting brown eyes and a loving smile. I remember her mother, my grandmother, as the perfect ideal for that station. She was warm and cuddly, plump and powdered, always smelling like baking and rose water.

My father was my hero. Always there to love me, always there to hug me and play with me. He used to tip me upside down, carry me around by my ankles until my face was bright red. I loved it.

My brothers, Jin and Joon: Two completely different people who sometimes merge into one in my head. Ironic really, since Joon was an adopted black kid. Not that it made any difference. From day one he was my brother and I think it took me ten minutes to adore him. He was just an adorable type of kid. Jin was hardly adorable, far more annoying, but he was still my brother. I remember him beating up Lucas Forge because the bastard broke my Barbie doll. That was Jin, always there for me, even if it got him in trouble.

These people were my world. These people were my life.

And then they were gone.

I've never forgotten that I should have gone too. That I shouldn't be here. It feels like there's something not quite right in the world because the whole Kim family was supposed to be together.

I had a cold. I was sniffling and pathetic and my mother didn't want to take me out in the cold weather that night. Snow was threatening, as it did in Ohio. We were visiting from home, seeing my mother's parents as we often did. There was the movie, they wanted to see the movie. I wanted to see the movie but my cough had been getting worse.

My grandfather was not the movie watching kind, so they took my grandmother. To give her a trip out of the house I guess. I can't imagine living with my grandfather would have been any fun.

I remember so vividly, standing at the front door in my footie pyjamas and waving goodbye as they left. I remember wishing I was going to see the movie. I remember being put to bed.

I don't remember much more.

I know what I've been told, once. I have to store that away in my memory too because Grandfather says there's no point dredging up old stories that just hurt. Grandfather says a lot of things like that.

It was a short story. There was ice on the road, black ice. There was a truck that lost control. There was nothing my father could do. There were five dead people. There was grief.

There was a little five year old who didn't understand where her family had gone. There was an old man, already having done his time raising a child, left as the only guardian of that little girl.

And there is still loss. There is still grief.

I can't help but miss them every day. If you lived in this house, and knew that one split second decision might have changed everything, then you would miss them too. If only my mother or grandmother had stayed home to look after me. If only my father hadn't hated highways and insisted on taking back roads. If only they'd ignored my cold and taken me with them, or ignored the movie and stayed at home.