Seventeen years old when he broke my heart,
Seventeen day later when another picked up the piece,
Seventeen years together,
Seventeen thousand problem,
Seventeen days of reliving my past and finding a new future,
Seventeen minutes until I took my l...
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"I CANNOT BELIEVE we are at this bar. I suddenly feel really old," I complain, glancing around the small dive bar in town we frequented in college.
"Oh, shut it,Lalisa. We are not old," my best friend, Rosie, scolds.
I watch as she flips her long red hair over her shoulder and scans the room. "Okay, so we're a few years older than most of the people in this place, no big deal.""A few years? I'm pretty sure I used to babysit that guy at the end of the bar," I tell her with a roll of my eyes.
The guy in question looks over at me and raises his bottle in my direction in a silent toast. I grimace and quickly look away, bringing my beer to my lips and taking a huge swallow.
"He's hot. Did you seriously used to babysit him? Damn," Rosie says with a low whistle.
"That's disgusting. The last time I saw him he was ten."
She shrugs and takes a sip of her rum and Coke. "Well, he's definitely not ten anymore. The things you could do to him would be completely legal."
My best friend,Park Chaeyoung a.k.a Rosie, is amazing and the closest thing to a sister I'll ever have, but the stuff that comes out of her mouth sometimes makes me question her sanity. We've been friends since the first day of high school. When her name was announced and a few students chuckled at the unusualness of it, she put her hands on her hips and stated,"My name means fiery one. Don't piss me off or I'll burn your ass." Her little outburst earned her an afternoon in detention, but there were no more giggles during roll call. Rosie more like confidence and assertiveness and I wanted to be just like her.
She has been by my side through every one of my joys and every one of my disappointments. In the month since Taehyung and I separated, she has been my rock. Instead of telling me I-told-you-so and going on about how I should have left him years ago, she stood by me in companionable silence while I worked through my emotions. After four weeks of pouring myself into my job and ignoring every single text, phone call and voice message from Taehyung trying to guilt me into letting him come back home, she finally convinced me to get out of the house and take my mind off of everything.
"So, I filed for legal separation today," I tell her as she sips her drink.
She chokes on the liquid and I pat her on the back as she sputters and tries to cough away the shock of my news. When she finally regains control of herself, she sets her glass on top of the bar and looks at me with her mouth wide open.
"I think this is the first time in all the years I've known you that I've seen you at a loss for words," I joke.
She immediately snaps her mouth closed and shakes her head. "Sorry, I'm just trying to process what you said. Are you okay? Fuck, that's a stupid question, of course you're not okay."
