“One, two, three, SAY KIMCHI!”

“KIMCHI!” Everyone exclaimed in unison, the camera clicked for a several times, and Sung Gyu was pretty sure his eyes were closed in each and every one of them. His eyes were naturally small, no matter how much he tried to widen them for photographs (And this simple action sometimes made him look like a Tibetan fox, or at certain occasions, a mad man) but at that time, they were out in the lawn when the sun was beating down on them the brightest. It was the peak of that summer, with jade green leaves fluttering gently in the humid breeze, and sweat was pooling beneath their clothes under the thick layers of the dark cloaks they wore. Sung Gyu groaned loudly as the rest of his comrades gathered around his best friend, Woohyun’s, brother, inspecting the photographs which he snapped, and through their loud commentary and boisterous laughter, Sung Gyu could clearly make out Woohyun’s voice yelling on the top of his lungs; “Hyung your eyes are closed!”

Not that he cared though. He blamed the sun, the heat, the dark cloak resting on him which was a size too big (due to some inside miss-match and now it was practically trailing behind him, and he, at some point in that morning, had imagined himself to be bat man) and the loudness of his friends that he didn’t feel as nearly as excited as one would feel on the day of his college graduation. It’s not that Sung Gyu wasn’t happy. He was. Immensely so. But he was sticky and stuffy and maybe slightly sleepy and a bit hung over after having gotten drunk with his father the previous night, in celebration of him finally graduating, and all he wanted at that time was to sit down for a bit and maybe, just breath.

“You alright hyung?” Woohyun asked him, finally having extricated himself from the rest of their circle of friends. There were eight in total, Sung Gyu and Doojoon being the oldest of the lot. And while the two of them had their ages in common, Sung Gyu and Doojoon were on the complete opposite ends of the spectrum. While Doojoon was loud, happy and flamboyant, Sung Gyu was almost always lazy and quite literally a wet blanket in most good occasions. As it happened, the day that should be the happiest for any adolescent of his age, was no different to Kim Sung Gyu as any other day. He looked up at Woohyun from where he sat on the grass and shrugged. Woohyun let out a long, audible sigh then, and he too, took off his hat and perched down on the grass beside him. They were quiet for a while, allowing the loudness of the rest of their fellow graduates surround them. The two of them silent as the rest of the world unfolded; it was Woohyun who finally broke through his thoughts. “It’s her again, isn’t it?”

Upon the mention of her-her, the topic they had avoided during the time of their final year examinations and preparation for graduation- Sung gyu felt a little part of him dying, again, inside. It’s been almost a year since she left him. Im Yoora, the love of his life. Sung Gyu had loved her, cherished her, for as long as he remembered. Million times had he wondered what he could have done wrong for her to take off and disappear completely from his universe and as it happened, to be wiped off the face of the world without even a trace of her left behind. It was as if she had never existed, as if all the time he had been with her, the three years they’ve been together were nothing but a long, beautiful dream. He had searched for her, in every nook and cranny he could reach. But to no avail, he was left with nothing of her to hold on to. And the only trace of her existence now, were the memories they’ve made together. Sung Gyu was afraid of losing them too, in the same way he lost her, and somewhere during that time, lost himself as well.

Sung Gyu took a deep breath, closed his eyes and tilted his head back, his cap remaining intact due to the sweat forming beneath his soft caramel hair. Kids of that age had their hair dyed in multiple colors. Woohyun, for one, had bleached his hair blond, and all the girls in their batch were swooning over him for a reason Sung Gyu couldn’t really fathom.

“She promised me she’d be here for graduation, though” Sung Gyu awakened his voice, finally finding the courage to speak of her after having avoided the topic for almost a year of looking and finding nothing. A small, sad smile formed on his lips, one which disappeared as soon as it appeared. “I actually believed her, you know”

Woohyun sighed from his side, and rand a hand through his soft blond hair. “No offense Hyung, but you were never really the hopeless romantic type”

Sung Gyu laughed condescendingly, and looked across the lawn. Students in similar graduation cloaks as his were snapping photograph after photograph. Some were throwing their hats overhead in unison, some were sitting on the grass, asking for their parents and partners to snap stills of the memories of their last day as students. A vast world lied ahead of them from this point; a world which required for them to make less to no mistakes, to take responsible decisions as adults, a world full of doubt and uncertainty. Stepping into that unknown universe, finally with the weight of the world upon his shoulders, Sung Gyu wasn’t entirely sure if he’d ever be able to survive unscathed. And to imagine himself walking along that gravelly road without his saving grace by his side. He covered his face with both his palms and let out a sigh. He didn’t think he would be able to survive a day.

“Stop being dramatic, Hyung, girls come and go everyday” Woohyun chided, pulling his hands down with an unimpressed expression. “You make it look like your life is over. If I ever had a girl disappearing on me, I would weep for a day, for the most, and bloody move on!”

“Easy for you to say” Sung Gyu grumbled, stretching his slack-clad feet before him. “Especially since it’s you who disappeared on girls, not the other way around”

And it was the truth, though beside him Woohyun was making false claims and pulling out lame excuses. Woohyun was the popular heartthrob of the batch as well as the biggest heartbreaker. Sung Gyu would have blamed his good looks as did most in their circle of friends, but having been in more or less a love-hate relationship with Woohyun for over three years, Sung Gyu still couldn’t come into terms with the notion of calling Woohyun handsome. And if anything, he was good few inches shorter than him and that made Sung Gyu feel a lot better about himself.

“Regardless, hyung, you need to understand that her leaving was not really your fault” Woohyun continued through the soft rush of the summer breeze. “I mean, I don’t think anyone out there has ever committed so much for a relationship the way that you did. Honestly, it was so amazing that I was beginning to feel bad about myself”

“But still, why do I feel I just didn’t do enough?” Sung Gyu thought out loud, and turned to face the other. “What did I do wrong, Woohyun?”

Woohyun pursed his lips and shook his head. “Trust me, hyung. You can ask me this the next day and the next, and I still wouldn’t know. I know it wasn’t perfect between you two. No relationship ever is. But You and Yoora didn’t ever show signs of falling through. And you, hyung. I know you. So I have come to blame it completely on Yoora and I don’t know, really hope that you would move on?”

“I wouldn’t do that” Sung Gyu muttered, and fell into a quiet moment of contemplation. Sung Gyu indeed did treat Yoora well. Having been brought up in a devoted family with parents who pampered him and showered him with all the love he needed, all Sung Gyu had learned to give was more and more love in every possible way he could give. He hadn’t learned what it was like to despise people. How it was like to be vengeful or menacing or despicable. Perhaps, he had given her too much affection and care that it indeed was what drove her away, all for the fact that Yoora, herself didn’t come from a place similar to that Sung Gyu did. In any case, it was more on the complete opposite end of the spectrum where she truly belonged to. Sung gyu didn’t mind, really. Because he had always believed that people could change over time had they received the love and concern that they really deserved. What he hadn’t known, however, was that love, in certain occasions, was capable of driving people away from the most important people in their lives.

“And there are your parents” Woohyun said suddenly, tugging at the lapels of Sung Gyu’s cloaks and picking himself up off the grass. He put his hat back on, on his blond head and it crooked to a side when he bent down to brush the stray grass off his clothes. True to his words, both Sung Gyu’s parents were approaching them, eyes searching in the crowd almost frantically, his mother in the beige suit he had bought for her on her last birthday which she had instinctively kept to be worn on the day of his graduation, and his father in a well pressed suit. His sister, Jieun was also there with her newly cropped hair and a blank face. Upon noticing them, a smile pulled on the curves of his lips and he cupped his mouth, calling out loudly across the lawn; “Mum! Dad!”

Sometimes, he too felt that he was probably spoilt too much as a child since he was undoubtedly the only person in the whole lot to be overly excited about seeing his parents on the day of his graduation. Sung Gyu really was a mummy’s boy.

“Sung Gyu-ah!” Exclaimed his mother and tugged at his father’s arm before they all approached him in hasty steps. “Oh, Sung Gyu! We were looking for you!” his mother exclaimed as she threw herself against her son, and Sung Gyu embraced his mother warmly and closed his eyes. “I was just here, mum” He mumbled, moved away and kissed her on her cheek.

“How could I find you when all of you look alike, like a flock of penguins!” She chided and laughed at her own joke before noticing Woohyun standing awkwardly beside his best friend. Woohyun’s parents passed away in a car crash not too long ago and now he lived with his older brother still in their old home which was a massive, expensive mansion which Sung Gyu was sure could provide shelter for twenty families in the least. His parents had been good people, but they’ve been quiet and docile that the two sons hadn’t kept exactly a friendly relationship with them, which in turn had resulted him to be quite awkward in the presence of Sung Gyu’s rather outgoing family.

“Oh, hello, Woohyun-ah, how are you?”

While his mother was busy chatting away with Woohyun who only kept to responding with monosyllable answers, Sung Gyu took off his cap and rested it on Jieun’s head before giving his father a quick hug. “I came to my graduation hungover, dad” he complained as he moved away. “I can’t believe it”

His father chuckled and began to dust off the specs of imaginary dust off his shoulders. “It went well, didn’t it?”

Sung Gyu just smiled widely, feeling quite pleased of himself that the cause behind that proud smile on his father’s face was him. Despite all the things he had done wrong in his life, Sung Gyu was glad, that he could do at least this one right and make his parents happy.

“Sung Gyu,” Called his sister, brazenly dropping the honorifics and pointed at the cap propped crookedly on her short-cropped hair. “Take a photo of me with the cap on”

Sung Gyu wasn’t really up for complaining about her rudeness towards her own brother, especially knowing what would coma after, and in this heat with the bright sun almost blinding him, making his head pound, Sung Gyu, without a single word in response, found himself immediately complying.

“That’s ‘Oppa’ to you, Jieun” Sung Gyu’s father reprimanded firmly as Jieun plastered a fake smile for the photo. She frowned at the end result and made Sung gyu snap a few more. Woohyun excused himself to join the rest of his comrades and Sung Gyu’s mother returned to them to see what all the fuss was about.

“This is why you should have considered college” Sung Gyu complained with a sigh when he was asked to retake the photos yet again. Jieun’s smile was all pretentious and unreal in all the frames that he took, and it clearly wasn’t the fault of his nimble hands or the phone that the photos were so bad. He didn’t dare say that out loud, of course, because Jieun had her tendencies and he’d rather not get her ignited at the wrong moment. Once all was said and done, Sung Gyu’s mother suggested they take a photograph of the whole family. She called for Woohyun to do that for her, and Boohyun happened to have a high-tech apparatus with him, brought solely for the purpose. The four of them stood huddled together, arms thrown over shoulders, holding each other so close and smiling brightly despite the hot sun beating down on them from above. Boohyun snapped a couple, Woohyun examined the photographs, laughed a quiet one with shaking shoulders and crescent moon eyes and all and began to exclaim in a loud voice; “Hyung, your eyes are closed-!” Until he realized that their eyes were all the same.

Sung Gyu was happy, at least momentarily so, while he was surrounded by all the important people in his life. His mother just wouldn’t let go of his hand she securely held, and his father’s proud smile didn’t waiver once as he quietly watched the world unfold before them. Even Jieun, with her constantly stoic face and rigid demeanor, still wore his cap on her head. Woohyun was boisterous as always and never forgot to include him in their conversations no matter how withdrawn Sung Gyu was time to time, slowly slipping in and out from his own thoughts. Doojoon and the rest of his circle of friends kept the occasion loud and alive. Sung Gyu realized, standing amongst it all, being the center of attention, being the one who was loved ever so immensely, that sometimes, amongst all the people who came into his life, there were the constants, and also the variables; the ones who disappeared when its time.

*

Even though the day had started out to be rather eventful for him, as afternoon approached, Sung Gyu began to feel more and more exhausted, and a strange gnawing feeling began to settle in the pit of his stomach. It was the longing, he interpreted as he listlessly played with the food on his plate in distraction. It was the lost hopes and broken promises, it was the waiting, the yearning, and constantly wishing that finally, finally everything would fall into place. Though he wouldn’t admit it loud to himself, Sung Gyu was terrified. Terrified of everything that would come to him from this point, all with growing up and becoming an adult, trying to find his place in the forever changing world. He was as small and insignificant as a fleck of dust floating quietly in the wind, and wherever he would end up in, he could never tell. Sometimes he felt like he’d never fall, never find his place but keep floating until he dissolved into the thin air. Sometimes he felt he’d fall into immense waters beneath and be washed away. Sung Gyu really was a weak soul, perhaps the weakest among all of them, and he knew, that whatever decision he’d make now would determine how he’d spend his whole life.

At some point of time, he had thought he would be spending it with her. But now that Yoora had disappeared, just as how he imagined he would too, one of these days, he didn’t know any longer.

“And Changsub is taking the civil service examination” Sung Gyu could hear Woohyun telling him through the loud chatter of the lunch table. They were all discussing life plans, what they would be doing after this point. Changsub had told him earlier on that he was taking the civil service examination along with Doojoon, and Junghyung had confided in him about his enlistment plans since Sung Gyu had already completed his. And then there was Minho, carefree and often indecisive Minho announcing on top his lungs to the whole congregation and perhaps even to the entire restaurant that he was going to get married. Everyone gathered around groaned loudly at his proclamation, and Sung Gyu finally raised his head, distracted from his thoughts by the noises coming from everyone surrounding him.

“What do you plan on doing, hyung?” Woohyun asked, finally addressing him directly though his eyes were thoroughly focused on slicing through his steak. “Going to stick to your initial plans or…?”

If it was before, Sung Gyu would have been certain of what he wanted to do. He used to be ambitious, diligent, and hard working. Sung gyu put dreams and plans before everything else he desired. While some kids wanted to spend their entire allowance of drinks and girls and whatnot, Sung gyu invested it all on his education and becoming the successful person that his parents had always wanted him to be. Upon coming to Seoul right after getting selected to university, he decided to enlist first so that he could spend the rest of his time focusing on academics and career related matter without the burden of enlistment hanging on his back. After completing his service, it was time for him to decide what course he needed to follow in the prestigious university he was selected too. There wasn’t much of a choice though. He knew what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go, what he will be. A three-yearlong degree course in Criminology and Criminal justice, take the civil service examination and land a high and prestigious post in the national police. That was his plan, which he continued to work on for all these years. And then, the dark clouds rolled into his life with the disappearance of his long-term girlfriend. The Kim Sung Gyu now, lost in the crossroads and uncertainty of his newly attained adulthood, he wasn’t sure anymore. He remembered, a few months ago, realizing that Yoora is unreachable in every possible way, him impulsively jumping into the conclusion of ending his education then and there. Without her, he didn’t know what he could do with himself. He had his parents, of course. And his sister. But Kim Sung Gyu’s life was like a chemical combination. One element missing, he would not be himself anymore. It was Woohyun who had to do everything in his capacity to make Sung Gyu go through with his exams and graduation without making such impulsive decisions. Now, for the same reason, Sung Gyu felt like leaving the responsibility of rest of his life to Woohyun as well.

“Ah, probably so” Sung Gyu answered distractedly and drank from his glass of Soju which has been diluted with an unequal amount of cola, in case he got drunk again. He could see his parents in a table a few table away from theirs. They wanted to have lunch together with him after the graduation, but his friends insisted he joined them since its most probably going to be their last lunch together for a very long time, when everyone would begin heading on their own directions. “When is the civil service examination, anyway?”

“In a few months, I think” Woohyun says and turns to face him. “Hyung, whatever you do, that’s what I’m doing. I have plenty of money so the job isn’t really important to me” He winced in embarrassment, still, his small ears turning into a shade of deep red. “Well, at least not as important as you”

Hearing his indication, Sung Gyu raised his hand and smacked on the back of his blond head. “Eey! Always making me uncomfortable! I have no interest okay?”

Woohyun grimaced, rubbing his head gingerly. “That’s not really what I meant though….”

The lunch continued with much excitement and laughter, the talks on their future long ended, replaced by loud bickering from the boys as if they’re finally coming to accept that their days as students with no care about the rest of their lives had gradually come to an end. Once all was said and done, everyone got dragged away by their respective families with the promise of meeting that night for the grad ball. Sung Gyu wasn’t exactly looking forwards for the ball; in fact, he had actually decided to sleep on it, but Woohyun had rather persistently reminded him that he would be coming over in the evening so they could go together and that he better not be in bed by then. Originally, Sung Gyu was supposed to be going to the ball with Yoora; but now that she’s out of the picture, he had nobody to go with, so Woohyun had ditched his own date for him so Sung Gyu felt quite bad for even thinking of ditching Woohyun in return.

He joined his parents for dessert but he didn’t speak as much, only answering his parents’ questions in monosyllables and wordless gestures. He wasn’t up for much speaking and interaction either. The thought that this day was supposed to have been played out rather differently kept gnawing at his mind, the feeling of missing the girl whom he lost nearly a year ago happened to be stronger than ever before. Later as he drove back home with his father in the passenger seat and his mother and sister in the back, he tried to make more conversation with them, just to fill the emptiness in his heart and the quietness surrounding him. A year ago, his life was anything but quiet. Yoora was a girl who always had so much to say. She loved adventure, and she was the kind of a girl who had the kind of stories only the girls in fairy tales had; and Sung Gyu was lucky enough to be the one to always hear them and in certain occasions, experience them together with her. After her disappearance, him with no knowledge of her reasons to do so, Sung Gyu’s been feeling this unbearable silence and emptiness in his life that nothing he did could fill. That empty void that she had left behind with him had constantly hindered him from doing the important things in life. He felt lost. He felt as if he’s the one who’s gone missing instead of her. And no matter how much his friends and family tried to fill that gap for him, nothing seemed to work.

Finally, upon arriving at home, Jieun opened the gate for him and he quietly drove inside. After having parked the car, while everybody else filed into the house, Sung Gyu returned to the gate to pull it close, something he did out of habit being the only one in the family who was capable of driving a vehicle. For some reason, however, this tedious action of his seemed to be giving of a strange, unnerving aura on this particular day, a signal of some sort, pulling him outside the gate rather than just closing it up and returning to his home. His instincts seemed to be giving him that unusual sign, something he couldn’t possibly shake off. He followed it, that instinct of his, and found himself on the edge of their gate on the side of the road, and that’s when he saw it.

A basket. Not just any basket. It was a baby carrier.

At first, he thought it was mewls of kittens that he could hear coming from inside the basket. There were quite a few families in his neighborhood who had pet cats so people abandoning unwanted kittens around his house was not an unexpected occurrence. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but notice the distinct sound of the mewls which was quite different from that of kittens or even a full-grown cat. And it could be strange to say that someone had left kittens in a baby carrier. His heart was in his throat when he approached closer and closer to the carrier until he was certain the slow wailing in his ears were most definitely not of a cat, but of an actual, living baby.

He stood absolutely still for a moment, clenching his hands on his sides. There was no way that one could have randomly forgotten their baby in front of someone’s gate. Even if it was possible, he couldn’t figure out who even would do such a thing. There wasn’t anyone who had had a baby recently in his neighborhood as far as he was concerned. Even if anyone had had a baby, all his neighbors were of the elite type who didn’t really have the tendency to leave their child just about anywhere. There was only one explanation to his predicament; and that was that the baby had been abandoned, right in front of his house.

A baby. A baby who is now crying miserably, still wrapped in all those blankets and a baby onesie. Sung Gyu took a moment to realize that he hadn’t yet done anything an ordinary man with fatherly instincts would do. He wasn’t the type who liked children much, anyway. More than that, the knowledge he had on them was minimal, so in that situation, he was hopeless as to what he could possibly do. He could, at that moment, only crouch down next to the carrier and slowly remove the blanket which had partially covered the baby’s face. Sung Gyu held his breath, a strange emotion overtook him without warning, and his hands began to tremble. His voice long gone. Lying securely inside the carrier was a baby; tiny, pink and delicate. His faced scrunched up like a fallen petal of a rose and his small fists grasping tightly onto the blanket covering him as if it was all he had for comfort. A baby, who had no idea that he had been separated from the warmth of a mother and left out on the street under the warmth of the scorching sun above him. Sung Gyu’s hands trembled, a tight knot in his throat as he reached inside, determined to gather the baby in his arms and give the warmth that he deserved, at least momentarily so. But he stopped; his hands hovering above the carrier, hopelessly wondering what he was supposed to do. In the end, he came to a resolve. There was only one person who would know what to do in a situation of the sort. Sung Gyu gathered all the strength he had within him and closed his eyes, trying to find his voice. Once he did, he called as loudly as he could;

“Mum!”

No response. His voice just cracked.

“Mum!!”

Yet again, nothing. He was just about losing it, and the baby was startled by the loudness of his voice that he just sat there for a moment, all hopes lost. The look on the child’s face broke his heart in a way that he couldn’t possibly explain. A child who knew of nothing. A child who was the result of his parents’ mistakes and misgivings, a child who didn’t deserve this all. He gathered his strength yet again and called as loudly as he could.

“MUM!”

And soon he could hear her hurried footsteps down the gravel, a sound so comforting along with the sound of her voice saying things that he couldn’t exactly grasp. She emerged from behind the half-closed gate, saying something about her having been wondering about what could have possibly taken him so long to close the gate. But then, she stopped. She moved even closer, and he could feel the weight of her against his back as she tried to gain her composure, startled by the sight.

“Oh…oh my god, Sung Gyu-ah….” She whispered under her breath, and squeezed his hand. He didn’t know at that time, when he held her and told her that they’d figure something out, the moment she’d lift that child into her arms, the moment a thick envelop would fall into her lap, that his life would be changed forever.

*

The baby was Sung Gyu’s child. He learned of this one fact after three days of struggling to locate the whereabout of his mother, Yoora, who had left the baby only with a letter addressed to him along with the baby’s birth documents, and finally following her lead, yet quite reluctantly taking a DNA test to question her claim. And She’s been right. Sung Gyu held the DNA report in his trembling hands and saw his entire life crumbling into pieces right before his eyes. He wasn’t quite sure how the events of his life could have taken this completely unexpected turn. Months before then, he was ambitiously planning his whole glamorous life ahead. Graduate, civil service exam, become a high ranked policeman, return everything that he owed to his parents, marry the love of his life, build a home and a family and live a happy, fulfilling life. But right at that moment, Sung Gyu scornfully realized how his life had now gone in reverse from how he had it all planned, starting from how he had originally had it in mind, and then jumping straight to the very last of the events of his life, sending it in an irrevocable topsy turve. As much as he wanted to believe that there was no way that he could have gotten her pregnant, he hadn’t anything to say in his stead. The possibility was unadorned. He knew, deep down, that it could have happened, that he hadn’t been careful enough. But Sung Gyu was still unable to accept that the child had been his all along.

“What are we going to do, Sung Gyu?” his mother asked him as he helplessly ed the report onto the kitchen table. The word ‘positive’ had never sounded so painful before. Nor had the sound of a wailing child who now, as it happened, was his own. Despite the situation, his mother was unnaturally calm, trying her best to keep the child well fed and tended to, everything that Sung Gyu failed to fulfil with his conflicted mind.

“I don’t know, mum” He responded dejectedly, and stared at the child, his son, peacefully cradled in his mother’s arm. Sung Gyu had mixed feelings about this child. One moment, he felt as if he held the responsibility of him. The next he’d feel an unexplainable hatred towards him for ruining his once peaceful life. What he felt at that moment was neither. He couldn’t pinpoint what exactly he felt at that time. He looked at the child and saw everything he’s been stolen of. His happiness. His pride. His future. No matter how much he tried to convince himself, there wasn’t a slightest pinch of love in his heart. Before he could stop himself, he slapped the table harshly and covered his face in his trembling hands. “Yoora could have just told me damnit!”

The baby began to wail again, and he felt as if his head was just about to burst.

“Sung Gyu calm down first!” Chided his mother as she attempted to sooth the child who was screaming on top if his lungs. “Getting angry like this is not going to solve anything!”

“Then what do you say that I do, mum!?!” Sung Gyu yelled as he climbed up on his feet. He had never in his life raised his voice at his mother. Sung Gyu’s lived his life peacefully; never had he had a reason to raise his voice at anyone. The moment that he did yell so loudly at his mother, he realized, it was only because all his good reason had been lost along with himself. He met her eyes then, and he felt he’s about to cry. All that he could do at that moment was escape. And that’s what he did.

Nonetheless, he could only make it as far as his front door when Woohyun pushed it open in his face and invited himself in. He looked up at Sung Gyu with a look of sympathy in his eyes, and Sung Gyu simply lost all the patience that he had.

“What the are you doing here!” Sung Gyu so much as pushed his best friend out the door as he exclaimed. “I don’t need your help or your pity, Woohyun”

Woohyun, looking as calm as he could (Since he was one to lose his temper easily, himself) pulled Sung Gyu’s hands away from him and gave Sung Gyu a grave look. “But you sure do need a solution. And that’s what I have come up with. Come on”

Woohyun was the next one to find out about the problem Sung Gyu had landed himself in. On the day of his graduation, when Sung Gyu had snapped at him and refused to attend the graduation ball for personal reasons, Woohyun had come to his house against his better judgement and found Sung Gyu in his bedroom with his mother and a baby in a blanket in her arms. Woohyun didn’t take it so well to say he least; neither did he make it worse at that moment. He only left Sung Gyu with his problems, promising to talk to him on another time, and Sung Gyu hadn’t really expected him to, mostly because he was certain Sung Gyu had not only lost his pride that day, but his clean reputation and his best friend. After all, some people remained to be on your side as long as you’re good enough for them, and the moment things fall out for you, they’re the first ones to leave.

But apparently, Woohyun wasn’t one of them.

“It’s a private agency” Woohyun explained as he handed him a bunch of leaflets. “They give a three-month training before recruitment and the selection criteria are pretty much the same. You wouldn’t have the whole badge, ranks and uniform business but it’s good just the same”

Sung Gyu wordlessly went through the leaflets he’s been given, not giving them much care. As it seemed to him now, his life is no longer under his control so he might as well let it take its own toll and do as it pleased. “Where did you find it?” Sung Gyu asked.

“One of our seniors is working there. I got to know through him” Woohyun further explained. “He said the pay is good and it’s all good work…”

Sung Gyu stared at the sheaf of papers blankly, for a moment, and ed them back onto the table. “My life is over, Woohyun” He said tiredly, meeting his best friend’s gaze only for a brief moment. “There is nothing we can do”

By the corner of his eyes he could see Woohyun shake his head in annoyance, and soon he felt a heavy hand pressing on his rigid shoulder. “Hyung, listen. Your life doesn’t have to end just because your girlfriend dumped you with a baby! There’s still more to it, and we can still fix things. We only have to take things slow, see what we can do and take our time to solve everything. Besides, you’re only twenty-four. You have plenty of time to work your life out”

Sung Gyu looked up tiredly, only to find Woohyun giving him a look of reassurance. Coming from him, Sung Gyu couldn’t bring himself to say anything against it. Woohyun was right. He himself was someone who lost everything in his life overnight, with both his parents passing away the same day, leaving him behind with his brother, a mansion and a large business corporation that both he and his brother could hardly take care of. Woohyun had struggles of his own. He pulled through worse situations. In comparison to that, being abandoned with a child was something so…trivial.

Yet, they say, one’s problems are significant to their own.

Sung Gyu ran both his hands through his hair, and from the direction of the kitchen he could hear the child crying, and it was ringing incessantly in his mind. Sung Gyu couldn’t live his life like this forever. A child was responsibility, the kind of responsibility he could never take. In the letter Yoora had left with the baby, she had begged him to look after him since she herself was unable to do so. Sung Gyu had the slightest idea that things would have played out differently had she come to him herself, asking for help. If the baby wasn’t yet born, there were things they could have done. If he already was born, still there were things he could have done. He could have promised to give her financial support as long as she needed, or helped her in any other way to raise the child. But then, a small part of him knew that things would have been much different than that. Above it all, another significant part of himself was hoping for her to come back, so that they could work it out together, somehow, so he won’t be the only one lost in this predicament. As it happened, however, nothing seemed to work in the way he pleased.

“Hyung” Woohyun said then, shaking his shoulder lightly, trying to gain his attention which he returned by harshly pushing Woohyun’s hand away. “What?”

Woohyun’s eyes were grave and sincere when he gazed at him intently. “Do you want to raise him? The baby?”

It was something that Sung Gyu hadn’t really given much thought on. In fact, he didn’t think he had much of a choice there. The DNA reports proved that the child was his, and he was the only parent who could be located at that moment. The baby, as it happened, was only as old as one month, which, in his mind, left the baby completely under his responsibility, which meant that he had to raise him whether he liked it or not.

But then again, was it truly entirely the case?

“Can I not, if I don’t want to?” Sung Gyu asked him back, and Woohyun only shrugged in return. “Well, there are a few options…”

Sung Gyu’s eyes widened. Of course, there were options. Only that he didn’t really think there were. “W-which are?”

“Well…”

He could find him foster parents, whereby he could take the responsibility of the financial aspects of the child while everything else were fulfilled by another pair of willing parents. Or he could find him a foster house where the child will be raised by responsible fosters who already had a bunch of kids under them, with him taking care of finances just the same. Or he could be given to an orphanage, whereby the child wouldn’t know the existence of his own birth parents and if he’s lucky, would get adopted by another pair of eager parents. The last option was that he could simply have him given away to one of those organizations who found adoptive parents from foreign countries for parentless children. They could all work just the same.

He contemplated all these options that night as he lied in bed with the child peacefully napping on his side. There wasn’t a baby crib in their family home, of course, since both he and his sister were born and raised in Jeonju so there was no way they could have brought their old baby items along with them. Putting the baby into sleep was a heap of trouble that Sung Gyu didn’t really care to put himself in to. It was, for the time being, his mother’s responsibility while he carelessly went out with his friends in the night or did the kind of things which would help him distract himself from the troubles at home. His mother hadn’t said anything about his more than odd behavior, as if she understood everything that he’s going through. Sung Gyu had a hard time coming into terms with everything that recently happened in his life. He had never been one particularly good at dealing with the notion of change; and there was no one else who understood this any better than his parents did, so they let him have all the time he needed to adjust to this new change. There’s been only one occasion that his mother had really lost her patience on him, and that was when he refused to hold the crying baby at a time that she couldn’t. He hadn’t held him at that time, either way. He hadn’t held the baby at all, ever since he came into his life. It was because of an emotion he couldn’t really pinpoint. Every time he tried to, something would stop him, something which kept telling him that if he ever did hold the child, something would shift in the original order of their lives; of the child’s and his. And so, he had held onto that.

Regardless, that night, he thought of everything that he could do to solve the troubles that he had landed himself in. As Woohyun had said, he could still bring his life back to its original course from where it had veered off to. He only had to scrutinize his options right, see what suited better, see which solution would solve the problem the best. As of now, he had come down to two options in particular, both of which meant that he would never see the child again once all of it is done.

Which did sound as the perfect solution at that time. The child would be removed from his life, a variable which he didn’t need as well as no longer existed. It was as good as any.

Through his endless train of thoughts, Sung Gyu could hear the small sound of the baby whining, gradually growing into a loud cry. His face, when he looked down at him, scrunched into the same rose petal that he remembered from the first day, and soon his loud wailing took over the quietness of his house the same way it had for the past few days, as well as the silence of his mind. Sung Gyu sat up slowly, giving not much care for the crying child the same way he hadn’t given any for the past few days, looked down at his small limbs flaying about, and let out a sigh. “You really have to do this now, kid?”

If it was any other time, his mother would have come rushing in the moment she heard the cries, her motherly instincts immediately kicking in. But she was tired and weary and she was in no good age to be a mother for an infant now, and she had gone to sleep long before then. Sung Gyu was the only one awake in the house when they all went to bed, and now, also the baby. And Sung Gyu hadn’t any motherly instincts to react in the same way that his mother did; he had not even the instincts of a father. Though he felt slightly bad for the child, because he kept feeling that the baby lying there now was their biggest mistake, that wasn’t enough to prompt him to make a move.

And so, for a good few minutes, Sung Gyu just sat there, staring at the baby hopelessly, allowing that loud wailing to get into his mind. It’s not that he didn’t try. Sung Gyu wanted to feel even a tinge of love towards him, but all up to now, the baby’s been nothing but a ton of weight on his back; a burden, and also the one who ruined his life. How does one simply come to love the person who ruined their life?

“Okay…fine, fine” Sung Gyu muttered in the end and moved across the room to get the bottle of formula his mother had left earlier that day in the heater, in case the baby woke up in the night. It wasn’t him who purchased any of these. It was Jieun under his mother’s supervision. Sung Gyu didn’t think he would even bother. Not as much as he did now, which is still very little; all things considered.

He picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap and squeezed a few drops on to the back of his hand to check the heat in the same way his mother did. She’s told him that if the warmth was as same as the warmth of his skin, he wouldn’t feel anything, and that’s the best warmth the milk should be. Sung Gyu followed as she’s told, and luckily it was roughly the same heat as his hand, if not, slightly less, that he still thought should be good. He returned to the bed then, and stared yet again.

There lied a child who should have been fed by his mother. On the other hand, it was also his fault. And this was probably the god’s punishment to him for all the wrong he did to Yoora, if he had ever done any. So, with this thought in mind, he set the bottle away, leaned over and securely gathered the baby in his arms. It was the first time he held him. It was the first time he had ever held a baby, and it went as well as any first time would go; strange. The small warmth in his arms was strange. That tiny little weight was strange. And to think that it was a miniature sized human…

It suddenly occurred to him that it indeed was a human, and not just any but his own child. And so he quickly secured his hold, following the same way that he vaguely remembered his mother held him, one hand cupping his tiny bottom, the folded behind his head. The child soon cradled against him, still flailing his hands and legs about, crying, and Sung Gyu let out a sigh. “What the hell am I doing?”

But then, something completely unexpected happened. As soon as the baby nestled against his chest, he simply stopped crying.

Saying that Sung Gyu was startled was an understatement. If anything, he was completely astounded. Never had he ever seen the baby calming down under anyone’s ministrations. Not of his mother, definitely not of his father who didn’t exactly have deft hands anymore. But Sung gyu, of all the people only had to hold the child against his heart to sooth him in a way nobody else had managed to, and he was speechless. Mesmerized. It was a spectacle he had never imagined happening to himself, and he was terrified just the same.

“Is this…is this supposed to happen?” He asked the child who couldn’t really understand anything, but stared up at him with gleaming doe eyes as if he knew exactly what happened. “No…right? You’re not supposed to stop crying like that, right? It’s not how it’s supposed to happen right? This is just…just…” No matter how many times he questioned the baby, or himself for that matter, nothing seemed to provide him the answers that he needed.

The baby just wouldn’t stop looking up at him, seeming amazed as much as he was, and Sung Gyu couldn’t help staring back. An exchange so spectacular that he couldn’t dare take his eyes off him. And gradually, he felt it, things sifting from their original course, gearing into something completely different and remarkable, something he had never felt before. He felt that heat against his chest, the soft warmth of the baby, weighing down in his arms so gently like a cloud. It wasn’t as heavy as he had felt all this time earlier, dragging him down to the ground, making him feel lost and miserable. No. For once in his life, he felt the greatest sense of accomplishment and that indescribable wave of contentment a father would feel the first time he held his child. It excited him and scared him all the same.

He gulped hard and reached over to the bottle long left on the side of the bed and looked down at his son. “S-Sung Jae-ah…would you like your bottle?”

And just like that, Sung Gyu called the name of his son for the first time in his life.

*

Things altered significantly since then. And it was a change which could hardly go unnoticed. Sung Gyu gave his best to keep himself from changing his mind. He’d decided to give the child away. There was more than one reason for that. First off, for the time being, he was unemployed and he had already spent a significant amount of his savings on the baby, and he wasn’t sure how long he could keep up doing that until he would land himself a job, which was quite farfetched under the circumstances of him being stuck home with a baby. Second off, his mother was getting weaker and older and so he couldn’t quite possibly let her take care of the baby for much longer. It was impossible on the long run. Third off, he had a life, one completely different from what he had now, a life which had everything perfectly mapped out, where child rearing came in the final stage. And lastly, keeping the child with him would only keep reminding him of her, Yoora, and he would instinctively anticipate her return, which he wasn’t certain would happen, and he hated getting his hopes up.

Nonetheless, there were certain things which had indeed changed and which he couldn’t stop from happening differently. Sung Gyu had gotten comfortable with holding Sung jae. He had routinely started feeding him, washing him and changing him, putting him to bed and doing all the things that his mother did, at every moment she couldn’t do them, and he was afraid that the situation was going out of hand; so much so that he had also begun seeing it all as a daily responsibility. When he would go shopping for grocery, he would naturally be dragged towards department stores, where he would also just as naturally purchase baby products. Never had he ever even gone to the baby-products aisle before, but now he found himself there more often than not, idly going through cute baby blue onesies or printed nappies and flannels. As of now, he’s bought him a cute blue and white crib with frills and a net overhead, a couple of rattle toys, a few flannels and comforters, a new basin and even a baby stroller. Sung Jae was significantly underweighted and had a few health concerns when he first arrived, so he often found himself carrying him to the weekly clinics at the local hospital, completing all his vaccines and growth charts diligently. All through this, he was also incredibly weary and tired; he’s lost weight and he’s sure his receding hairline showed prospects of him going bold soon. His days and nights have changed to nights and days and he’s almost certain that Sung Jae had become a nocturnal creature. He realized that all he had done for two weeks up to now couldn’t be done on the long run. He was tired. He was fed up. Every day, he’d wake up, his feet searching for the house slippers and whining “My life is over” And he hadn’t even been the one who got pregnant the first place.

That’s why he came to a final resolve. Sung Jae would be given up for adoption. It was Woohyun who, being his best friend, settled everything out for him. It was a non-governmental organization who did wonderful things for abandoned children, from finding them foster parents and taking care of parentless, mostly disabled children under their own assistance. Sung Jae was supposed to be given to a nice couple of American ladies who were willing to adopt him and shower him with all the love he deserved. Sung Gyu had doubts at first with that whole arrangement of Sung Jae possibly having two mothers. But then it was better than having no mother at all, and they both seemed very kind and lovely, so he agreed. Another week later, a nearly two months old Sung Jae was about to be given away.

While his mother prepared Sung Jae’s things with a red and tear stained face, Sung Gyu sat on his bed and stared down at once-his son with a heart filled with strange, unrecognizable emotions. A part of him was happy, relieved that he was finally able to get his life back on track. But another part of him was guilt-ridden and void of any other emotion but strong, inevitable longing. His arms were itching to hold the baby again, carry him around and sing him to sleep in the same manner that he had for the past couple of days. His chest felt so heavy, a tight knot in his throat, and the weight on his shoulders felt heavier than it did the first time he baby came to his life.

“I’ll call you when the social worker comes” Sung Gyu’s mother said calmly even though her voice sounded heavy in his ears, and she left him to his own thoughts, closing the door behind her. Sung Gyu was yet again confined to a world of his own, a world where only he and Sung Jae were, and nobody else. Sung Jae was awake, wide eyed, looking about him in childish excitement, and Sung Gyu wondered up to which extent a baby his age could understand things. He’s heard that babies recognized their mother as soon as they were -fed for the first time. But how well did they recognize their father? Did Sung Jae recognize him? Would he now? In this moment when they’re about to part with no certainty to meet again? Would he still? Years from now if they ever happened to cross paths again?

So many thoughts were still haunting his mind, and through his distraction, he still naturally picked the baby and held him in his arms when he began to wail softly. He wasn’t crying though. It wasn’t a sound Sung Gyu could recognize quite easily. But when he finally looked down at him, he saw those gleaming doe eyes so eerily similar to his own, form into a pair of crescent moons, and his lips form a beautiful gummy smile. Sung Gyu recognized what that emotion was, what he was showing him now. It was happiness. Sung Jae was smiling. And that was the moment when Sung Gyu’s whole world fell apart.

His grasp on the child tightened almost naturally, a gesture, unconscious to him, was screaming possession and belongingness. His hands were trembling, still. Even as he lifted one while the other held him securely, even as he ran his fingers along his pink and delicate skin, even as he reached his small fisted hand and let the baby hold him. He couldn’t recognize what he felt at that moment, the very first time Sung Jae wrapped his tiny soft hand around his finger. There was warmth in his heart, together with an unbearable pain striking knife after knife into him. Remorse, happiness, sorrow, and hope; a combination of them all. Sung Jae’s hand holding his, was a promise; an everlasting one. A promise that Sung Gyu was suddenly willing to hold on to, through and through. So, he leaned in and placed a warm, lingering kiss on Sung Jae’s tuft of dark hair to seal that promise and pulled away, only to see him still smiling in glee. Sung Gyu knew, nonetheless, that this decision he would take now would change his life forever. There would be hurdles he couldn’t even imagine himself climbing over, obstacles which would inevitably come on his way. And yet, would he still keep that promise and continue to fight through it all? Sung Gyu looked down at the baby who was now gurgling in happiness, and smiled. Sung Gyu would do anything, just to see that smile again.

“Hyung?” A voice ripped through the quietness of the room, and Woohyun was standing in the doorway with a determined look in his eyes. “Hyung, the social worker is here”

Though his mother had said that she herself would call him, she eventually hadn’t. Over the time, she’d distinctly grown affectionate towards Sung Jae, so Sung Gyu could guess what could have happened. He imagined she was sitting in a corner of their kitchen, crying by herself. The decision he would take now would certainly bring a smile on her face. The thought brought a strikingly beautiful one on his lips too.

“Woohyun-ah” He called, not once ripping his gaze away from the smiling, gleeful eyes of his child. “Woohyun-ah, tell the social worker that the baby won’t be given away”

There was a moment of silence from Woohyun’s part, and when Sung Gyu looked up, all he could see was his best friend staring at him with widened eyes. “H-hyung…what-?”

Sung Gyu smiled. “I’m going to raise him, Woohyun. I’m going to raise my child”

Sung Gyu had expected Woohyun to leave the room in silence just in the same way he did the first time he learned the truth. Or snap at him, quite possibly, telling him that he’s willingly ruining his life for good. None of that came after, nonetheless. None of them but-

Woohyun smiled, his eyes gleaming in an emotion which he could only see as pride, and said; “I knew hyung would make the best decision of all”

And that was how Kim Sung Gyu finally embraced the perks of his new life, the life of a single father.

*

Days, months and years passed by, but still Kim Sung Gyu had never stopped hoping. It all started on this particular occasion when he was out in the lawn with four-month-old Sung Jae in the stroller, and he saw someone who looked strikingly similar to the love of his life, peeking in through the parting of the gate. It was like a phantom of some sort, disappearing as soon as it appeared. Sung Gyu hadn’t even had a chance to catch a clear glimpse of that face between the time of seeing her and realizing that it could be the person that he’s been quietly longing to see. The emptiness that Yoora left behind when she left wasn’t so significant after Sung Jae came into his life. As the child grew and took up most of his time, Sung Gyu really hadn’t a chance to even wonder about her. His new job starting and other qualms which came along with single handedly raising a baby, pretty much kept his hands full. And it’s also a lie to say that Sung Jae didn’t fill that large gap Sung Gyu had in his heart after Yoora disappeared. Sung Jae sure did fill that gap, and he made his existence so significant that he soon ended up becoming Sung Gyu’s whole world. But still, since that day that he thought he saw Yoora looking at him through the parting of their gate, he couldn’t stop thinking, stop hoping, that she would soon come back to them.

And that was the thought he held on to, for days, weeks and months that passed. He thought he saw her again on the day that Sung Jae had his first meal, sitting on his lap, with Sung Gyu’s newly done red hair slowly shimmering in the late autumn sun. He thought he saw her on the first day that Sung Jae went out of his home garden in the stroller and happened to pass by the park in their neighborhood. There were a few occasions where he was certain that those strange sightings or that skin prickling emotion of being watched were all resulted by Yoora quite possibly following him. That inkling got so strong to the point that he couldn’t bear, so he asked Woohyun if he could, yet again, look around for her whereabouts. Woohyun came to him with the news that Yoora had gone abroad, to a country that they couldn’t really find out. Sung Gyu didn’t give up hope just yet, regardless. The feeling of still being looked out by Yoora was strong, and considering it was her; he couldn’t be too sure of her being abroad or not. This hope, somehow, became an obsession; the progression from one point to another, he couldn’t really evade.

It started out only with him going to the gate all the time he could with the baby, moving onto him staring out the window of his bedroom at the front gate at all possible occasions, in hopes she would suddenly appear. Yoora had a habit of appearing out of nowhere, as it happened, back then. One minute, she was gone to god knows where, the next, she was right behind him, his eyes covered with her delicate hands. It’s in the same way that he hoped she would appear again, closing his eyes from behind him, blinding him, messing him up in all her perfect ways. But they could only end up as wishful thinking.

Sung Gyu for some time, had had a dream of becoming a perfect family. True, his life had veered off course completely. But that hadn’t meant to him that certain things couldn’t be set right, and that one step of his life of forming a perfect family was still one thing that could be fixed. He’d grown up in one, with parents who loved them and still loved each other just the same; and somehow, having been raised in one, had given him the false hope that he too, would one day be able to have one of his own. But at expense of his hopes and wishes, Yoora never returned. At least, not in the same way that he hoped she would. On the day of Sung Jae’s second year celebration, Sung Gyu thought he saw her through the glass panel of their cubicle of the café which they’ve come to cut Sung Jae’s birthday cake. It was still more or less a ghost of her, a tiny, insignificant thread which didn’t quite link him to her. On Sung jae’s third birthday, however, she appeared yet again, in the most cruel, vicious way that she possibly could. She winded him, messed him up and destroyed him that night. And it was the last straw for him. On the day of Sung Jae’s third birthday, Sung Gyu finally decided to put an end to his hopes of her return, lock his heart away from her, and so he installed roller gates so that she would never be able to poke her head in and mess him up ever again.

*

Sung Jae was five when Sung Gyu decided to change lots of things in his life. It was the same year when his sister got pregnant and also got married to the guy she loved; some jock or the other whom Sung Gyu didn’t think very fondly of, and that happened to convince him of lots of things. To start with, he decided it was the high time he fled out of his parent’s nest and built an empire of his own.

Sung Gyu received a large amount of money from his mother two years ago, the money she had saved up for him to have a grand wedding celebration. Sung Gyu hadn’t any plans of marriage; not with Sung jae still being very young, and also it was something he had promised himself to not to go about with under any circumstances. So, he decided to invest that money on something a lot better than that. He decided to buy himself a house. A home of his own.

It was a high-end, single story condominium house, equipped with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and no balcony nor a single window. To raise a rather mischievous five-year-old boy, it seemed to him the most perfect home. Sung Gyu had felt that pleasant homey feeling the moment he stepped inside. The pastel colored walls, the open planned set up, small confines of the only two rooms they had; Sung Gyu could imagine themselves there, Sung Jae and him, and an empire of their own. It was all perfect, a perfect new beginning.

“So, what do you think?” Sung Gyu asked his mother as he approached her, Sung jae securely balanced against his waist even as he struggled in his arms to break off of him and run around like he’d been doing for the past few hours. His mother was looking around attentively, paying careful attention on every little detail, just as expected from his mother who was a born perfectionist.

“I like it, Sung Gyu” She said, her voice thick with emotion. The moment he had announced to her that he had decided to move out from his family home, his parents didn’t take it so well. He had never lived away from his parents for long periods of time. In fact, the longest had been as long as three years, with one and half years of it being in the army, and the rest in Seoul during which time he got into an accident; and at that point they immediately returned to him and got him back under their care. So, to hear that he’s finally going to have his own home, they weren’t quite sure how they should respond to him. It was unexpected to begin with, since he hadn’t confided in them earlier on. He supposed they must have assumed, him being a single father and all, he’d expect their support all throughout in raising the child. But Sung Gyu was constantly worried and remorseful during the four years he spent with them. He hated that he put them through so much worries and trouble. And also, he realized that at some point, he needed to learn to take the responsibility of his life in to his own hands.

It was the only reason why they let him go like that. As much as it hurt to see their only son finally moving away from them, they also understood that it was for the best. Sung Gyu needed his space to grow, become stronger and finally set his life right.

“I especially like it that it has no windows and balconies” She said laughing tearfully as she watched Sung Jae now hanging onto Sung Gyu’s leg like a koala cub. Growing up, Sung jae had finally found his true potentials; and that was that he could be a troublemaker through day and night. There wasn’t one day which went by without him doing something atrocious, and his best suit so far was destroying things. Sung Gyu had often wondered if he was raising a problem child, or a monkey cub who has gone savage. But his mother would always laugh it off, saying that it was only a phase which would eventually wear off.

“Right” Sung Gyu grunted as he lifted his child off the ground. Sung Jae immediately limped against him, acting like a soggy noodle, swaying back and forth, and all Sung Gyu could do at that moment was let out a heavy sigh. He supposed that everyone threw a tantrum in their own way, and it was how Sung Jae preferred to do so; by being as twice as annoying as he usually was. “See, mum. If we had windows or balconies, I’d be completely nerve-wracked”

“Let the boy be” His father commented as he emerged from the kitchen with a fond smile on his face. “And Sung Gyu, my son. It’s a great home; I must give you credit for that…”

“But there’s still something missing, don’t you think?” Continued his mother, a strange look clouding her face. And Sung Gyu knew what that disposition on her face meant, because he had already seen it in myriad occasions. And exactly as he had done in all those times, he just began to whine. His mother was hinting at him on getting married.

“Mum, marriage is totally out of question” He deadpanned before she could say anything further. “I’m honestly trying to straighten out my life with Sung Jae, and I guess that’s enough on my plate right now”

“But Sung Gyu-ah” his mother went on, a look of hurt in her eyes. “Sung Jae needs a mother, and you…you need some support too, don’t you think?”

Support. That’s the only reason his mother had been continuously pointing out to him as to why he should get married, and to some extent, she was right. Moving away from his parents, Sung Gyu would be left alone to raise his five-year-old son who, due to his age had now gone beyond his control. Sung Gyu often had to balance between his demanding occupation and child rearing, and usually it was his mother who gave him her support throughout by looking after little Sung Jae at all times that he couldn’t. And taking care of him had a tendency to go out of hand. Sung Jae wasn’t an easy child, that’s for sure. And when Sung Gyu got absolutely worn out at the end of the day, just by trying to deal with him, he’d always find himself blaming it on him growing up without a mother. That may not be entirely the case, because his mother kept reassuring him that Sung Jae behaved like just about any five year old boy would (though he doubted it if any other five year old boy had the strength to snap the shower head in two, so much as a baby gorilla had) but support; Sung Gyu knew that he needed that.

But still, Support in child rearing was something he could get without getting married…but what about him? Sung Gyu, though he hated to admit it himself, needed to be loved and pampered as much as Sung Jae needed it; and all this time it was his mother who provided it all. Would she be able to continue giving him that attention for the rest of his life? As much as he hated to even think about it, he also understood that it was impossible. Sung gyu hadn’t seen a woman for five years. And his, well, libido, had pretty much died and become non-existent. A healthy man his age had their desires, but Sung Gyu felt as if that part of his being had disappeared completely ever since the fatherhood came to his hands. If he needed to get his life back on track, he also needed to work out his love life.

But with Sung Jae rolling down the staircase like a stray puppy right now, he didn’t think it was most appropriate to admit that to his parents.

“Support is the last thing I need right now, mum” he said finally as he approached his son who now lied on the ground, looking up at him with widened doe eyes. “I need a break. Yes. That’s what I need”

“I don’t think…that would come with you living alone, Sung Gyu” His mother said in the same, tearful tone. “You can’t even live on your own. How are you going to manage it with Sung Jae?” She sobbed loudly, and his father put his hand around her, pulling her close. Sung Gyu could only watch the exchange rather quietly, and Sung Jae too, somehow had calmed for a moment, which wouldn’t last long. Sung Gyu picked him up and held against his waist before he approached his mother. “Mum…” he mumbled, and with a free hand he wiped her stray tears away. She wasn’t always like this. Back then when he was still young, she used to be so strict and even mean sometimes, that Sung Gyu used to be terrified of her. But later he learned that it was all a false bravado while in reality, she was a softy at heart.

“Mum…look. I’m going to be fine. Sung Jae is going to be fine. Okay? What we both need is a little space to grow up. At some point or the other I will have to move out, don’t I? The longer I stay, the more difficult it will be to do that, right? I’m sure I will be able to take care of him by myself, and if it goes out of hand, I will come straight back home. Okay?” After a moment of thought, he added. “And if you really, really want me to…I will start seeing someone. A girl…and take it from there, okay?”

Sung Gyu’s mother was quiet for a moment; contemplative. And then finally she lifted her head and smiled. “Okay, as long as you’re happy, Sung Gyu. That’s all that I’m asking for”

“I will be” he reassured her and kissed her one her head before he moved away. “Now, shall we have some coffee while we wait for the realtor to come around?”

“Sounds like a good idea” his father said as he reached out to take his grandson in his arms. Sung Gyu’s father loved Sung Jae, so much so that Sung Jae too had grown so attached to him to the point that they were almost inseparable, doing their own kind of no goodness schemes. His father really spoiled him, but also in the good way. He’s taught him how to fix the things that he broke, and sometimes to break things if they needed to be fixed. They shared stories and all the good times in the same way Sung Gyu could vaguely remember the childhood him used to, and it was quite heartbreaking to be the one separating them. Yet, the thing is, when Sung Jae’s with his grandfather, he really didn’t think before he did something nasty.

And that day, they left the house with Sung Jae having smacked the intercom with a rattle toy while he was still in his grandfather’s arms. The glass was shattered to smithereens, and that was exactly how it would remain for the next four years.

The next thing that Sung gyu decided to change about himself was the dull and despondent single status of his love life. There wasn’t much he could do at that time to salvage it, under the circumstances, but he decided to take his chances. Ever since Yoora disappeared on him five years ago, Sung Gyu hadn’t even the heart to look at another girl. There were men who could easily move on from one woman to another like hopping rocks, then there were the kind of men who could look up another woman’s legs while sitting together with their own girlfriends. Then there were the kind that Sung Gyu belonged to. The rarest kind. The loyal to the core.

The thing is, Sung Gyu didn’t easily get attracted to women; he had high standards, the kind of standards that a woman with a beautiful outer appearance couldn’t exactly match. When he had seen Yoora for the first time and fallen in love with her, he was able to see past her glossy red lips and her ever beautiful eyes. He could see her soul. He could see her fluttering wings, struggling to break through, to go and explore the universe that she had always dreamed of. And she happened to be the woman Sung Gyu truly fell in love for the first time. There were other girls before, when he was still younger and very much naïve. But nothing had ever felt so breathtaking and beautiful as it felt when he met her and the world fell away. It was something about the way she spoke, the way she told all her incredible stories with so much of passion and excitement, the way her words flowed out her lips so naturally, the way her eyes glimmered like clustered stars. It was something about the way she carried herself, almost floating as if on wings, taking away everyone along with her on her long, splendid adventures. Sung Gyu had loved her for everything that she was, and he wasn’t quite sure if there was any woman who would live up to what she was for him. And that was why, even after she was gone, even after he had pretty much left her behind only as a long, distant, memory, that he couldn’t find another heart to love.

But he did take his chances. Her name was Bang Minah.

Sung gyu first met Minah in a completely normal work-related environment. Minah was a less known fashion designer who had her own small boutique, and her signing a contract with an equally less known clothing material provider had led her into the kind of a debacle that only an investigator could solve. And luckily for her (and maybe him as well) it was Sung Gyu who was around to take the case. It was like one of those fairy tale situations where the damsel in distress was rescued by the prince charming in his shining armor. Although there wasn’t really any armor involved and all that Sung Gyu had to do was following the fugitive and getting them under his trapping net, Minah weeping for the hard-earned money she had lost was indeed a damsel in distress. It was some guy with funny pink hair and lips a size too big for a man, who was just about to run off with all the money he had laundered from Minah after he tricked her into his no goodness schemes. Once the things were settled, Minah was over the moon. She was ecstatic, and immediately promised to treat him to dinner, which was a promise she fulfilled beyond expectations. One dinner meeting led to another and then another until it was Sung Gyu who initiated the dinner plans instead of her. They soon found that enigmatic spark within them, the spark which connected them, which brought them together as two people who had (madly) fallen in love with each other. Sung Gyu felt he was a different person when he with her. She was witty, beautiful and talented. The way she spoke, the way her eyes sparkled and the way she bounced in joy when she was excited, they captured the whole of him, and so he liked her. She seemed like the best person for him to move on with.

And after that realization hit him hard, Sung Gyu decided to lay out the incentives first. It’s been ages since he last had a woman in his bed, and he wasn’t sure if he even remembered how all of that worked. One evening he had his parents to take Sung Jae to their home, leaving the apartment empty, all for their evening together. After one too many glasses of wine, Sung Gyu was tipsy and far gone that he didn’t even feel embarrassed to bluntly tell her that she should come over to his apartment, and she agreed.

It would have been the beginning of a beautiful relationship, if not for all the many obstacles which stood on their way. Its perhaps that Sung Gyu hadn’t thought it through, or he was convinced it wouldn’t matter if they really, truly did love each other. But he did notice, through his vaguely sober understanding that evening that something within their more than amiable acquaintanceship significantly shifted the moment Minah’s eyes landed on the framed photographs which lined the short corridor which led from hallway to the bedrooms. They were all of Sung Jae and him.

Sung Gyu was making his way from the kitchen with a couple of bottles of beer in his hands when he saw her looking at the photographs with utmost interest. Sung Gyu wasn’t someone who could really read through people’s emotions. Yoora had been so difficult to read because of her erratic emotions and thus he hadn’t really put the relevant effort to read the others. When Minah pointed at this particular photograph of him and Sung Jae on Sung Jae’s first birthday in his cute blue and pink hanbok and giggling in Sung Gyu’s arms, and asked; “Is this your baby brother? Nephew?” with nothing so much as innocent curiosity and casual conversational trope, he really didn’t think much. He smiled, looked at the same photograph with a soft, fatherly smile in on his lips and said without hesitation; “That’s Sung Jae. He’s my son”

He really didn’t think of what may come after.

There wasn’t much, really, so to speak. Sung Gyu just made his way into the living room with beer and glasses and all, Minah followed after him. They eased into the sofa along with the comfortable silence surrounding them; Sung Gyu handed her a glass of chilled beer, had a long swig of his own, wondering where they would take thing from there, how the things could possibly escalate from that point. She was quiet, a strange stance in her eyes. They were glassy, her rosy lips were unsmiling, yet they weren’t firm or uninviting. With his meagre knowledge on women and their emotions, he had misunderstood that look on her face as something close to anticipation. He moved slowly, afraid that he would startle her by his eagerness, removed the can of beer from her hand, gently slipped his fingers behind her curtain of shimmering dark hair and around her neck, pulling her closer towards him. But then she stopped him. She said; “I’m sorry, Sung gyu-Ssi. I don’t think this is going to work out between us”

Sung gyu, the intelligent investigator Sung Gyu, Sung Gyu the second in his class in high school, didn’t need more or too long to put two and two together. He moved away from her, and gave her a look which he couldn’t tell if it was gentle and understanding, or just hard. “This is about my child, isn’t it?” He asked her, and the startled look she gave him explained it all.

“N-no! That’s not it!” She held up her hands and denied at first, but then, after a moment of silence, with her eyes still downcast, she added in a small voice. “At least…not entirely…”

“Right…” Sung Gyu nodded to himself and looked away. He didn’t know what exactly he felt at that time. Hurt? Disappointment? Angry at her for not understanding him? Angry at Yoora for putting him through this? Whatever it was, Sung Gyu knew better of himself to not to speak and make things worse than they already were, in case there was a slightest of a saving grace to salvage whatever’s not lost between them.

Silence. And after a moment, Minah finally looked up to face him. “Truthfully, I’m both surprised and devastated that you kept something so important from me the whole time. You could have told me you were married, or- or-,”

“I’m not married, Minah-Ssi” Sung Gyu clarified sincerely. “I have never been married. But the single fatherhood…” he sighed and averted his eyes. “It just so happened…”

“And the mother?” Minah prodded on.

“Ex-girlfriend. She disappeared. I don’t know where she is. It’s been five years”

Minah nodded, and with her eyes still downcast, she fiddled with the frills of her lacey skirt. “What happened though?”

Sung Gyu pursed his lips, but then decided it wasn’t anything much that he needed to hide from her. “Long story short, unexpected pregnancy. She ran away to god knows where without telling me. On my graduation day, I found a baby in a basket in front of my house.” He lifted his eyes and gave Minah a knowing look. “My baby. And I raised him”

Silence again, and she had still not lifted her eyes, even as her lips pushed a small and insignificant; “Oh…” which barely even meant anything. And then, after a while, she added; “That’s so sweet of you…”

They were yet again ed into a prolonged moment of silence, but this once, it wasn’t comfortable. It was louder than any moment of silence there had ever been. Their voices were screaming, frantic, still. The uncertainty, the doubts and qualms clouding their minds and blocking their emotions than ever before. Sung Gyu wanted to get things straight. He hated not knowing things, and it was something he wanted to change ever since what with Yoora happened. So, he took the matter to his own hands.

“Minah” he asked, placing a warm hand on the folded, fiddling ones of hers. “Tell me, is there any way that this arrangement could work?”

He really hadn’t high hopes on that, especially given that he never even told her the truth before, and when she slowly shook her head, Sung Gyu didn’t even feel hurt or disappointed, as if he had seen that coming, all along.

“Okay” he whispered, patted her hand and smiled. “I understand”

Minah swiftly moved then and took his hand in hers. “Sung Gyu-Ssi” She said, and when she spoke, her voice was so soft, almost childlike. “Sung Gyu-Ssi…I’m really sorry, but it’s just that…” She sighed, and lifted her gaze to meet his. He could see a slightest trace of hurt and remorse in them, and he wouldn’t lie that he wasn’t affected at all. “...It’s just that…I never really expected it. I mean, you’re so young and all, and you didn’t even mention it let alone give me a single hint! And I…I wasn’t prepared for anything like this, and I don’t think I’ll ever be…I can never be prepared enough for a child…”

Sung Gyu his lips thoughtfully before he pushed on. “Does it mean that you might dislike children?”

“No!” Minah quickly raised her hands and frantically shook her head. “No, that’s not the case at all! I just…I’m not ready for one, and I can’t imagine myself with someone who has a child because it inevitably will bring me to the point where I will be more or less responsible for the child too right?”

Sung Gyu nodded slowly, urging her to continue. She was contemplative for a moment, and her hesitance was evident as she tried to carefully find the right words to say. Sung Gyu could almost see her mind work, selective of her words, trying to find the right ones which could bring out the sense of her thoughts exactly. After a while, she averted her gaze, allowing it to rest solely on her folded hands and sighed. “To be honest…Sung Gyu-Ssi, I’m looking for more stability in my life right now, and I want to be with someone who can help me sort things out…but I don’t think…well, a single parent can’t exactly be fully committed to a relationship. There are…qualms. And I don’t really want that in my life right now…”

Sung Gyu in took a sharp breath, closed his eyes and nodded. It was true that he didn’t have high expectations about her after she found out about the truth, but that didn’t entirely mean that he hadn’t before. Sung Gyu didn’t really think that having a child was something that could come between him and a romantic partner as an obstacle. He’s always been a hopeless romantic, and in his hopeless romantic perception, he had been convinced that nothing could get between two people as long as they sincerely loved each other. It sure did take long for him to realize that it wasn’t exactly how things worked. And as a matter of fact, as always, rejection hurt. Badly so. Yet he also realized that it was all for the best. He sure didn’t want to be in an unhappy relationship with yet another unhappy ending, and as of now, Sung Jae was the most important person in his life and he doubted if anyone could ever top that, he also doubted if there was anyone else he’d rather be fully committed to other than his only child. Whatever the choice, whatever the decision he made now always had to depend on him, and if finding himself a romantic partner could in any way come in between him and his son, well, he’d choose Sung Jae over his love life any day.

“I hope you understand…Sung Gyu-Ssi” Minah mumbled as an end note, and finally willed herself to look at him. Sung Gyu had his head lowered, thus he couldn’t catch the remorseful look in her eyes. She moved slowly as she reached for her coat and her bag, and yet again gave him a long, repentant look. “You are a great guy. You really are…Sung Gyu-Ssi. And I myself do have heaps of regret to let you go like this…But still I hope you understand why this can’t work between us. And in any case…” She sighed and squeezed his shoulder in a gentle touch. “I hope you would find someone better soon. Someone who is worthy of everything that you are…we will keep in touch” She leaned down then, placed a chaste kiss on his cheek, and when she moved further and further away from him, until she was out the front door and most possibly out of his life, Sung Gyu realized with a pang that it was quite possibly the first time he had ever been so close to a woman in five years, and might probably even be the last for all the many years to come.

That evening, he sat in the cold and empty confines of his living room, staring off into dark, deep in thought. Thoughts about his past, his future, his life in general, and they were all flourishing and floundering in his mind until they all got loud and frantic to the point they were desperate screams in his mind. The empty house was suddenly stifling for him, the ghost of his past, he felt, was then beginning to consume him wholly in that emptiness, that quietness of his house. He wanted to get away.

Sung gyu couldn’t go back to his family house that evening. Not with that capitulating pain of rejection in his heart. He knew his parents awaited him with high hopes and better plans, and right now, he just couldn’t face them with the meekly embarrassment and self-loath he had. Right now, he needed a break, a way to smother his frustration, and there was only one person he knew who could help him with that. Sung Gyu drove off to meet with Nam Woo Hyun.

Woo Hyun’s family mansion was in a far end region in Ansan where all the rich and elite level people resided. His parents used to own a popular furniture brand, which had to be sold off when both his parents passed away in a road accident. All that the remaining two Nams had as mementos of their lost parents were the abundance of wealth that they had accumulated from selling the business and their large, now mostly empty mansion. Upon arriving at the Nam’s, Sung Gyu, realized, it wasn’t so empty anymore.

The large confines of the old-fashioned mansion were filled with loud noises and boisterous laughter upon Sung Gyu’s entrance. He felt as if he was intruding a family occasion and he soon began to feel uninvited despite the strangely welcoming atmosphere. Woohyun was all smiles and chatty as he led him into the house, always hospitable with his warm and pacifying demeanor. Sung Gyu felt much calmer under his gentle gaze and ministrations. Sometimes, his best friend was a safe haven of his own.

“What’s all the noise?” Sung Gyu asked Woohyun as they eased into Woohyun’s area of the house upstairs. The house was so big, too big for just two people to reside in that they have basically claimed their own territories, and Woohyun’s accommodated his sizeable bedroom and his own area of a living room and a small kitchenette, fully equipped with a wide screen TV and a high-tech gaming system which Woohyun and Sung Gyu spent most their time on during college days.

“Hyung’s girlfriend” Woohyun replied as he made his way across the open planned living area to the kitchenette where he grabbed a couple of bottles of Soju and glasses. “She and her sister are staying over. Been happening for quite a while…”

Boohyun, Woohyun’s older brother was a school teacher who worked for a local grade school. Sung Gyu’s met him only a handful of times, and all the times they did, Sung Gyu’s good impression on him only inflated, making him wish he had an older brother as him, himself. He had met his girlfriend as well, who was also very decent and lovely. She also had a younger sister, and at the not so vague memory of this particular sister at Sung Jae’s third birthday party, ostentatiously overdressed with glitter in her hair and a shaggy haired boyfriend. Sung Gyu couldn’t exactly remember her name, but he could never forget the angelic vibe she gave off that day. And also, that he had a huge one-time crush on her. Suddenly, all of it felt so far away from him. He realized, for the coming years, he’d have no love life. Women would be steering clear of him, and his drive would completely wither and disappear. He was probably the saddest human ever to exist.

Woohyun came over to him, set the bottles and glasses on the coffee table and looked genuinely stricken at Sung Gyu’s anxious expression. “Hyung, hey, are you alright?”

Sung Gyu shook his head without hesitation, lifted his gaze and gave Woohyun a look of complete despair. “Woohyun, I think I am entitled to an eternity of bad luck in love life”

He would have thought Woohyun would give him an empathetic response to his desolation, but instead, he popped open a bottle of Soju, and he snorted. “Hyung” he called and proceeded to pour the clear, cold liquid into either of the glasses. “One cannot simply be entitled to bad luck. You’re not just trying…”

“Hrrmm” Sung Gyu pressed both his palms against his eyes, remained this way for a moment before he reached for the glass of Soju and downed it in one go. “I got rejected by Bang Minah” He announced as he set the glass back on the table.

“Your case?” Woohyun asked, not sounding a least bit surprised and that made Sung Gyu even madder, to think that Woohyun might have actually seen it all coming.

“Why do you sound like you already knew it would happen?” Sung Gyu asked accusingly.

“Because I did” Woohyun said in the same careless manner and lifted his gaze to meet with the other’s. “Hyung. I’d have thought you did so too, especially when you didn’t tell her you were a single parent”

“Well, that was a mistake!” Sung Gyu exclaimed in exasperation and sighed. “I thought she would understand me”

“The day a woman would ever understand someone” Woohyun said dramatically, raising his glass in the air. “The skies will turn green and the oceans will freeze…and oh! There will be two suns”

Sung Gyu spared a moment to shove Woohyun away before returning to his stance of misery. He ran his fingers through his hair and let out a sigh. “And it’s not just Minah…Woohyun” He gulped hard then, and gathered all his strength to voice out the name that he hadn’t spoken of for years now. “…It’s Yoora too…”

Woohyun stiffened for a moment, looking slightly concerned, but he was still capable of looking cool and unperturbed by the gloomy ambiance clouding them as he reached for his glass and downed it in one go. “That’s just two women…hyung” he said, his eyes focused of the clear liquid being poured into the glass. “The problem with you is that you still haven’t met the right one”

Sung Gyu sighed, glancing at Woohyun with a look of all hopelessness. “Is that ever going to happen?”

Before Woohyun could even voice out his response, a loud scramble echoed from the direction of the doorway, startling them, followed by an unfamiliar voice of a woman, so loud and childlike that it immediately drew Sung Gyu’s attention. “Aish! Dal! You’re not supposed to do that!”

Then a dog barked, and Sung Gyu who was terrified of dogs ever since this pup bit his right buttock back in grade school, recoiled into the sofa in fear…or just natural reaction. Not that he was a wheeny who was scared of puppies or anything.

“Ah that ing dog” Woohyun muttered under his breath as he stood up and made his way towards the door. “Yah! Jung Eunji! How many times have I told you to lock that little away!”

As soon as Woohyun was out of that door, the intensity of the loud yelling heightened, now joined by Woohyun and also the barking of the dog along with yelling of the girl as well. Sung Gyu couldn’t exactly work out what they were arguing about but he was pretty sure they weren’t anything he needed to be concerned of. After a while, a disheveled Woohyun returned to his room, fell into the sofa and let out a heavy sigh before downing two shots in a row in order to calm his nerves.

“That’s Eunji, remember? The girl from Sung Jae’s birthday party?”

Sung Gyu nodded slowly, and reached for his own glass. “Yeah, I think I do”

“She’s had a fight with the owner of the kindergarten she works at, for the hundredth time I think. The next time she does it, she’ll be out. I swear my entire salary on that”

“Is she that bad?” Sung Gyu asked, not very interested of her but for the lack of better things to say.

“She’s terrible…I mean, she’s pretty good with kids…or I think she is…”

He looked up at Sung Gyu all of a sudden then, as if something occurred to him, which spontaneously happened to Woohyun at certain occasions, so Sung Gyu wasn’t perturbed by the strange smirk appearing on his lips. In fact, he almost saw it coming, and what Woohyun said next, confirmed his suspicions.

“Hey, Sung Gyu Hyung…Eunji is-,”

Sung Gyu laughed rather condescendingly before giving his best friend a hard, unimpressed look.

“No”

Woohyun laughed. “But hyung-!”

“I said don’t Woohyun” Sung Gyu deadpanned, which made Woohyun laugh even more. “Eunji isn’t going to like it when she hears this”

“Woohyun”

“In fact, she’d be livid! She thinks nobody could-,”

“Woohyun”

“-actually resist her!”

“Woohyun”

“I mean, she’s not even that pretty but-”

Sung Gyu finally lost his patience and he simply launched on the other and held him in a stifling headlock, tightening his grip every time Woohyun tried to fight him off until he yielded, limping against him. “I swear one of these days, Woohyun-,”

“But you love me!”

Sung Gyu wordlessly shoved a chuckling Woohyun to a side and continued to drink. Sometimes, he realized, it wasn’t worth responding to certain things which happened in his life.

After the incident with Minah happened, Sung Gyu gave up entirely on even trying to find a way to save his love life. In his mind, there was nothing he could do within his capacity to change the way most women would think. It was almost always the same. They needed stability, they needed space, they needed commitment, consistency, complete attention and a whole heap of things that Sung Gyu simply wasn’t capable of delivering. He wasn’t certain how he could have lured women into his life back then. He had had an ample number of girlfriends back when he was younger, the first one being when he was still twelve years old, the same girl whom he had his first kiss with when she was about to move out of his home town. But as it happened, no amount of experience could ever mount up to understanding women and fulfil their demands all at once. He could love. He could offer his heart to them in all the perfect ways, but he didn’t think he could be a full-time father and a fulltime boyfriend at the same time. Though he wasn’t sure how married men catered to their wife’s, looked after children and did their jobs at the same time, he was pretty sure he wasn’t one to ever attempt being a husband in his life.

But his parents thought rather differently. At least, not his mother. Ever since the Minah incident happened and he was returned home that night by a worn out Woohyun while Sung Gyu was stinking drunk and complaining about the streak of bad luck in his love life, his mother hadn’t ever stop trying to set him up with some woman she knew. She was blunt about it at first, sending him to blind date after blind date with hundred different women until he was tired of seeing them, and at some point, he finally found the strength to demand his freedom to find a woman of his liking. But when that had also failed, with Sung Gyu barely heeding any attention to what she thought was precedent, she tried other subtle methods of pushing women onto him, and he was tired.

And the fact that Sung Jae was growing up with his mischief never changing wasn’t helping him either. He started to become more and more difficult and beyond his control as the days passed. It was just his innocent curiosity at first, which led him to do small, trivial mischiefs like wrecking things and breaking a havoc time to time. But then the intensity of his troubles just grew to the point where he heeded no concern to whatever he did; from throwing things if his likes weren’t met, to not listening to his father or teachers and frequently making other kids cry. It grew to the point where not even his parents could handle him without getting completely worn out and yielding to his antics in the end. Things were simply growing out of hand for him, and so he came to a resolve. Sung Jae needed to be disciplined, be given proper guidance and care, and they weren’t the kind of things that he and his parents alone can provide. Sung Jae needed a baby sitter.

That didn’t turn out to be an easy task either, considering that Sung Jae was still capable of driving just about anyone mad out of their wits. It wasn’t a popular job either, in this time and day since most parents now resorted to leaving their children under the care of day schools. But Sung Jae wasn’t exactly the kind of a child who could be left at a day school with a bunch of other children of his age without paying him complete attention. He needed someone who would only focus on him day and night, and there weren’t many who would likely take that job.

The first one whom he hired was a young college student who was majoring in child psychology, and she’d thought that being with a five-year-old boy would help her observe his behavior rather closely; but that wasn’t the kind of a thing that one could actually achieve with a kid like Kim Sung jae. The first one left right after two days since she started working, when she found her mobile phone floating leisurely in the filled sink and soap suds. The second one was an old retired kindergarten owner who couldn’t handle Sung Jae even for a day. He vaguely remembered the third who only just slacked for a day and disappeared. Fourth one was just someone Sung Gyu didn’t approve of and Sung Jae hated just the same. The fifth was someone that his mother found for him. And that particular baby sitter left too, but still managed to leave a long-lasting scar on Sung gyu as the first ever stalker he had ever gotten himself in his life.

It wasn’t so obvious in the beginning, and all things considered, this girl, Son Minsoo was pretty ordinary who didn’t exactly show stalker tendencies. She did her job well, diligently so, and Sung Gyu never had anything to complain. In fact, he had thought he’d finally landed the one for the job, and that he’ll have working for him for quite so long. She did house chores, she looked after Sung Jae, she managed pretty much everything in the house and all was good. But then…she started to take care of him too. Not in the nice way, but in a creepy manner that it began to get on his nerves. At first it was only washing his clothes, making his bed and cooking; but then gradually she began to do the kind of things not an ordinary housemaid would do. In her small, meekly voice, she would ask, managing to be shy and reserved the same time, if he needed a shoulder massage on the days he came home dead beat. She’d make his favorite food which god knows where she’s learnt from, and at some point he found her rearranging his closet which he allowed nobody to even get closer to. He’s always considered his closet to be something very personal, and for him, someone going through it was a very intimate behavior, someone seeing the kind of things he’d rather from everyone’s prying eyes. That’s the point where he lost his patience and decided to confide in his mother.

And that explained her odd behavior. The baby sitter wasn’t exactly a baby sitter. Son Minsoo was a daughter of one of her mother’s friends from their circle of old ladies in the neighborhood, and she’s been trying to set him up. There was no wonder the girl had considered him somewhat intimate, because his mother had led her on that path from the beginning itself. Sung Gyu figured, her mother’s intentions must have caused her to develop some sort of possessive mentality and intimacy to some extent to do the kind of things she did. And that definitely needed to end. With a rather irate and aggravated mind set, Sung Gyu decided to take the matters to his own hands. There was one thing he could and needed to do. He asked Minsoo to leave. And she agreed to do so, especially after he laid out all the reasons why she had to, without any hesitation. By the looks of it, she was deeply embarrassed and self-reflective as she resigned. But apparently that hadn’t exactly been the case. Son Minsoo wasn’t just meekly, shy and self-preservative. She was plain, plain mad. And things weren’t over just then and there.

Two days later after she left, one night, after a long and tiring day at work, Sung Gyu was at home having a cold shower to wash off the exhaustion; and that’s when he saw it. A small red light in a corner of the shower stall. With his expert knowledge of an investigator, he was able to find the small, almost unnoticeable camera placed snuggly in an edge of the stall. The bathroom’s been bugged. And he was stark in the shower.

Things weren’t very pretty after that incident. Sung Gyu near got her arrested for stalking charges if not for his mother’s pleas and Son Minsoo’s mother promising him to keep her daughter as far away as possible for him. Sung Gyu still didn’t feel safe in his own home let along his own skin for a time, and it took long for the fear to wear off. The only good thing that came out of the incident was that his mother stopped trying set him up with anyone at that point, and it soon became a topic they didn’t ever touch since then.

They still had twenty-four more people trying for the position, only to leave without fail, and he was tired.

The thing was that Sung Jae was growing increasingly curious, even if all his mischievous days were slowly waning away. He still had things to learn and discover, things that he had to experiment and learn consequences of, and there was no stopping to him. Sung Gyu wasn’t the kind of a father who would stop his son either. He wanted to gather knowledge about life, about his environment, about people in his own ways. He didn’t believe in children learning from books and school subjects. As much as they contribute in increasing a child’s theoretical knowledge, they still didn’t do much in the logical and practical sense of most things; and so, he believed that they all came to children through experience. Maybe Sung Jae’s need to learn, experiment and observe was a tad bit higher than an average boy of his age. Six-year-old Sung Jae wanted to learn how the coffee machines worked; he wondered what whirred inside that funny little thing which caused it to spout the steaming brown beverage that all seemed to consume continuously in the place his father worked at. That was the only reason why he flooded he place with coffee, not because he meant harm. Seven-year-old Sung Jae wanted to know where his best friend’s pet hamster went. But of course, his father was an investigator. Sung Jae grew up with him and his remarkable stories of chasing criminals in exciting and dangerous adventures. Sung Jae only wanted to be brave like his father, and there was a big chance that the hamster had crawled into the toilet and someone had accidentally flushed it. The only reason why he called the fire brigade was to save the life of the poor rodent and stop his best friend from hurting, exactly the same way his brave detective father did. He did not, at all, mean to waste anyone’s time. What Sung Jae needed was someone who understand him, someone who was capable of reading through his actions from a likely perspective, through a mindset similar to his own. What Sung Gyu wanted to find for him was a kindred soul.

And that’s exactly what the thirtieth baby sitter turned out to be.

The first day when Jung Eunji walked through that door, Sung Gyu had never imagined her to be the one who’d last the longest and also the one in whom Sung Jae would finally find that comfort in. In the beginning, Sung Gyu only imagined that hiring Eunji, who had recently lost her job and was looking for an income and a way to straighten her life out, would only be that he was doing his best friend a favor. Woohyun had done so much for Sung Gyu during all of those years, and it was only right that Sung Gyu did the same. What he realized through time was that it wasn’t entirely the case. Yet again, the tables have turned, and it was Woohyun who was doing him a favor, yet again, by introducing him to exactly what Sung Gyu’s been looking for. A baby sitter for Sung Jae who would be a little more than a baby sitter for him; someone who would connect with him in more levels than one, and by some miracle, Eunji did exactly that.

Sometimes, Sung Gyu felt she was a child as much as his own son was. She was often tactless, childlike, didn’t think much to not at all in most occasions and only seldom would do something actually smart. But then at this strange, unlikely moments, when he’d see her with Sung Jae curled up in her arms, the warm concerned gaze in her eyes and just the manner she treated him like his own child, Sung Gyu would see her as a mother, someone who was capable of being one, and that gave him an indescribable sense of security in a way that he had never felt before. And then sometimes…a very handful of times, he saw her as a woman, and these were the moments which scared him the most. Subtle at first, it wasn’t that Sung Gyu didn’t notice the way his heart picked up when she did certain things at the moments most unexpected in a way that he has never seen any other woman do before. She had a way around with things, with her words, in the way she carried herself which seemed to continuously draw him into her, more every time than the first. Sung Gyu was unsure of what it all meant, the warmth in his heart upon her smile, the security and reassurance he felt when his hand was in hers, the way his heart stopped pace every time he met her eyes and he saw the millions of stories told and untold glistening inside them. And this uncertainty always scared him. Not knowing had constantly been putting him on the edge, and to not know his own heart…

That moment, when the collision only loudly echoed in his lost and ringing mind, all that his waning conscious could find was the warmth of her hand, the very same hand he’d held through one of the toughest moments of his life; he held it, then, through his pain. Sung Gyu didn’t know where it hurt the most. It hurt all over, and the pain was slowly numbing him, dragging him away from the reality. He was dying, perhaps. He was just about to lose himself completely, he had thought. The hand he held onto the, the warmth he felt through the stickiness of the blood on their hands, the warmth of her heart and the soothing quality of her voice even in her panic-stricken frenzy had been comforting for him than ever before. In her presence, he was safe. In her presence, he had nothing to fear for. He trusted her with his entire heart; to save him, and if she failed to, to protect the most important person of his life. He entrusted to her everything, at that moment; through where they connected, with his life barely slipping away, holding onto the last string of his consciousness, he entrusted his whole life to her.

And he died.

Probably so.

Not that he knows himself what dying felt like.

Did people feel when they died? Did they hear? Did they hope? Did they wish? Did they long? Did they wonder?

What exactly did people do when they died?

Did they trust?

Did they love?

All Sung Gyu knew was that he was floating, floating for a very long time. He walked down the memory lane, for miles and miles, for hours and hours. He recalled everything fom the course of his life; the day he last remembered from his childhood, the day his sister was born, the day she first walked, the day they were the happiest as a family, the day were the saddest. How he lived, how he loved, how he broke, how he stopped living and how he loved again. He didn’t remember every detail of it, but he still remembered the taste of his first kiss from that late summer day in the field of his school when he had kissed her, the girl whom he secretly loved when she’d told her that he was leaving. Bubblegum. He remembered it so well. And then he remembered the last day of high school, leaving his then girlfriend, a woman with no name and no face; why he had forgotten, he wasn’t so certain himself. The first time he tasted Soju, that burning sensation down his throat, his father’s cheery laughter before everything went black. Two years away from family and friends in an unknown place, an unknown world, returning not knowing that it was the point his life would change…and her. He could still remember that day too, oh so well. They were playing an old-time classic in the background of that café he played gigs at, and then the doors opened, to his world, to his heart; she walked in, and everything changed…He remembered their first kiss, the first touch, the day they connected, the time they became not two people but one…and suddenly, gone…

Memories flashed by him, it was kind of like watching a rerun of an old, badly arranged movie, but only they were all bits and pieces of his life, the only snippets of it he hadn’t forgotten. It was all kinds of amazing, especially given that he had never been the one to remember things. But they say mind was a strange thing. Maybe all of these odd fragments of his memory had always been tucked away safely somewhere in his mind, only to rerun, like this in the moment of him dying (or probably dying. He still wasn’t very sure)

Then Sung Jae…the day he met him, the day his life ended and started again, where the adventure of his lifetime finally began. Everything changed the day he first held him and he smiled. Was it wrong to have allowed his heart to sway? Maybe there was no stopping to that. He was, even then, a father at heart. So many things…so many. The times they smiled, the times they cried; all the memories they’ve collected together as father as son, as family. They were all beautiful, and all his.

And then her….a different her this time around, but still a her who will then become yet another constant in his life? How did that happen? When did it start? Sung Gyu didn’t know. His memories couldn’t recall. Maybe there wasn’t a trace of that occurring at all. All he knew was that on that morning, he had opened the door, dripping wet, welcoming the baby sitter into his house. He hadn’t known at that time that he was welcoming the newest addition to his life.

He opened the door again that moment, when slowly the rerun of memories came to a gradual hault. But only, it was a different door this time. It wasn’t the dull brown one from his home. It was larger, wider and stiffer. It was white. He pushed it open then, and there she stood. Eunji.

She was in a wedding dress.

*

Sung Gyu has heard of that phenomena before. Doojoon, one his friends from college currently worked as a police officer, and that one time when he was shot and went into coma, he had seen it too. There wasn’t an exact term for it, or an explanation for it, but it had occurred more often than not. Waking up from a coma, Doojoon had seen his mother come to him, dressed as a bride.

They say that the woman who would await your return in the purest form they could, were the most important women of their lives. That could be anyone, depending on the person who was waking up from near death. For certain, it was their mother; for certain it was their wife. But Sung Gyu guessed that there were odd, unexplained occasions too. Sung Gyu imagined he was probably waking up from a coma because that was what Doojoon had told him, that he saw a bride upon his wake. The bride that Sung Gyu saw, however, unlike Doojoon, was his son’s baby sitter, Jung Eunji.

And she was beautiful as she’s always been. Her porcelain skin slightly tanned, the white of the dress a stark contrast to the gold of her skin. Her dark hair gracefully fallen on her shoulders were silken and smooth, yet her face, he could only trace through the veil which covered her. Still, Sung Gyu would recognize Eunji anyway. She had that quality so unique to her that she’d never go unnoticed. At least for him, that was the case. Nonetheless, she hadn’t a bouquet in her glove clad hands. She held one out to him, and then she held out his hand.

“Boss…are you coming?”

Her voice echoed throughout; a chillingly beautiful sound, he was reminded of the wedding chimes from the church of his hometown on bright spring mornings.

And who was he to say no? Eunji was beautiful. Eunji was sincere. In her presence, he was safe, it was her words, her grasp, her eyes, that he trusted the most. When he’d dies, he’d entrusted everything he had for her, and thus, who was he to say no? Why would he? Sung Gyu trusted her.

He couldn’t see or feel himself, and everything else was dark around him, except for her who was brilliant and glimmering than ever before. Sung Gyu looked at her extended hand, looked up to meet her eyes and faintly caught her warm, reassuring gaze piercing through the obscureness. He felt that trust, that protection, that sense of familiarity once all over again, and he needn’t think anymore.

Sung Gyu reached out and took her hand.

Let's continue to love, for love is Infinite.