Wishes in Your Eyes

In the End

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Could sorry do it? Could it fix all the things that she had tried dismissing, not feeling the past four years?

This thing, apologies and all, Namjoo just didn't know. Her mind felt like a ball of yarn too tightly woven together. She couldn't sort out her thoughts, her feelings, anything.

She was happy, sad, angry all together. Sehun coming home could fix everything but she didn't want his presence filling all the holes in her life. It was just complicated like that. Not anything that had to do with a woman or a man. That kind of complicated shit of tugging and pulling.

It was not like that.

Truly, she wanted to punch his guts. For leaving the day after her birthday and going missing leaving her waiting. Call he'd promised, but never did. He promised first. But Namjoo could not just thrash him around.

She saw Seulbi first. Being raised by a single father. She felt for Seulbi. At such a young age, how many more things would she have to witness her father go through before she grew up and took hold of the reins of her own life? Too much like the shit she'd witnessed from her parents. An angry mother. A useless father.

Seulbi like she would have to fill in half the shoes because Sehun would have to work twice as hard when she started growing taller, needing more. And then, would Seulbi have a best friend to sit with under the moonlight; cheer her up?

Namjoo tried not to soften too much when the smell of meat began permeating the kitchen. She had surrendered to a chair at the table. Sehun had dropped off a cool glass of water in front of her, as if quietly saying sit child while I prepare your dinner.

Namjoo turned the cup round and round and round. Glancing over her shoulder where the voices of some animated cartoon burst out of the tablet Seulbi was glued to. Kids these days and their technologies. Must make life easier for Sehun while he focused on his father duties. The way she often sat in the tiny living room watching television while her father went missing and her mother prepared dinner in the kitchen. Namjoo had always been cautious not to bother her, especially after a long day of work.

Her mother had worked at a match factory. Boxing those tiresome things, standing twelve hours a day on her feet. Then coming home to tend to her and her man child who was never home to help rear their daughter. Instead of dropping dead in the middle of the night her mother screamed at her father, arguing about money, the house, their kid. How nothing gets done around here! In the coming morning, she'd go back to that factory standing twelve hours and repeat.

It was a miracle she had withstood a shitty marriage for fourteen miserable years. And then vanished to nowhere.

The only woman Namjoo wanted to make it up to for bearing an awful life. The only friend she had had.

All gone.

There had been no Sehun to lean on. The only person who understood the true depths of her difficulties had not been able to lend an ear, his dumb shoulder, extend an arm around her, or tell her cheesy jokes. She had been left with a useless father incapable of fending for himself. Like a stork had just dropped him on her doorstep. Here, he's yours now. He couldn't manage his bills, his bank savings, the food in his fridge, clean the house, do his laundry, wash a dish. Namjoo had had to pick up where her mother left off.

No one knew she had wanted to run away, too. Out of this town. From everything dropped on her. The many times she screamed by herself in the darkness of the night howling like some wolf at the moon on the seashore.

In the end, she just couldn't.

Instead she chose to run down a cheap route where she could temporarily forget all for a while. And it worked. On those nights she could feel like she was just a woman living a simple life. The responsibility of her father? Nada. She was just a woman living by herself, enjoying random dates, and going to his place to finish the night. Good stuff.