633 w
angst, slight romance, slice of life

Soojung was seven when her sister first told her not to play with fire. A lone candle burned on top of the kitchen counter as she fed its flames with rolled-up pieces of paper. “Are you trying to burn this house down?” were the exact words she said to her. She might have said other things but Soojung doesn't bother to remember because if she did, she'd never hear the end of it. 

Soojung was twelve when a fire broke out in their neighborhood. Their father was at work, their mother long gone and she watched her sister pack their whole lives into two bags – cash, IDs, birth certificates in one; clothes and provisions in the other. She could have mistaken the panicked conversations outside their home for excited chatter – you see, Soojung has always been fascinated with glowing embers – but that was the first time she saw her older sister genuinely scared, her voice shaking as she barked out orders, her hands shaking as she contemplated the prospect of losing everything they ever owned.

“Better a robbery than a fire” – it goes. So when her sister told her later on to build a firewall around herself because love is a fire, you bet Soojung built a mothering firewall.

When she met him, she realized that her sister forgot to tell her that firewalls can keep the fire out but not the arsonist. She realized that Sooyeon forgot to tell her about the boy who will po