“Oppa!” I run inside his restaurant aware of the amount of people inside the area, peacefully eating their meals until I barged in. I continue to run to the kitchen and as expected my brother is cooking, “Oppa! Oppa! Oppa!” I say as I show him the material on my hand.

“What’s that? What happened? Are you okay?” He asks, dropping what he was doing as another chef takes over. He walks to me and looks at the bounded paper in my hands, “Haerin, you got a 99! You got a 99!” He exclaims as my face splits in two with a grin.

He gives me a hug and everyone in the kitchen claps their hands, “Good work, Haerinnie! All the cups of coffee and crying to your brother were all worth it!” Eunhee eonnie says to me and hugs me.

“All I have to do is revise a few parts before submitting them so they can put it in the library,” I say as I look down on the paper with the 99% mark and the signature of my professor. I let out a sigh of relief, “I did it,”

“The next thing we’re going to celebrate is your graduation,” Changmin oppa says as he continues to grill the steak on his station, “Just one more week!” He adds and I can’t help but giggle at the thought.

My brother spreads his arms wide open and I run to give him another hug, “I’m so proud of you. You’ve been working so hard and now it’s all paying off,” He tells me and I smile at him, “Soon you’ll be out there in the real world and you’ll finally be able to do what you love,”

Bringing that thought in my head, I can’t help but feel excitement take over my entire system. I have been staying up late nights since the first semester for this paper and now I am a week away from getting my degree. The struggle to finish this paper along with the other projects I had to finish was not a joke. But no matter how hard I cried and how much coffee I had to drink, I could never stop working on it. I know it’ll be worth it.

My brother set-up the VIP room for the celebration. He had it built a few weeks after his restaurant was retrieved. It only took him a while to redeem the image of the place, considering that it caused a scandal for allegedly serving food with a rat in it. We thought it was impossible to get it back, but word says someone came clean about trying to ruin the restaurant. Now, he got most of his usual customers back and his business is booming. Looking at my brother and his girlfriend—Eunhee—I just can’t help but smile through the radiating happiness from both of them.

Eunhee eonnie leaves the room to get the plates of sushi I requested. I stand up and walk to my brother as I pour myself a glass of red wine, “Why don’t you just marry her already?”

“Ahhh. We’re going down this road again, are we?” He asks as I chuckle at him. I had been bugging my brother about marrying her since forever and he’s probably sick of me telling him to just get married.

“What? Isn’t now the perfect time?” I ask him as I rest my cheeks on his shoulders, “I’m getting my degree in a week, I can help mom and dad and you can go get married, have kids and be a happy family!” He gives me a look, makes a face and takes the glass of wine from my hands.

“First off, no wine,” He says as I roll my eyes at him, “Second, sweetie your Eunhee eonnie and I are not in a hurry for such. Besides, we’re happy as we are now. Marriage can wait,”

The celebration happened. The chefs and employees stayed and of course my brother’s good friends. Tonight was all about celebrating the past ten months I have been weeping and crawling to finish my course. It’s been a rough school year being a senior and all. Production classes and lots of thesis requirements really drained me and now finals week is over and I just did my defense earlier. It’s good to know I’m a week away from getting my degree. The real world is just a week away.

“Fourth cup,” My brother says as he enters the room with my fourth cup of coffee. He looks at me worriedly while I try to plaster a smile on my face despite the amount of work I have to do, “Revisions are really stressing you out, huh?” He asks as I nod. He bends down to kiss the top of my head, “Sleep soon, okay? It’s two in the morning, you still have to take care of your school documents tomorrow,”

“I know. I’ll get to bed soon, oppa.” I smile at him and he leaves the room. When I’m left alone I take the cup of coffee, put the radio’s volume higher as I slide my chair from the desk. This paper had been stressing me out since the first semester. I want it to be over already, but sadly, I cannot graduate without accomplishing this one so I’ll have to get the revision over and done with. It’s just a few tinkles anyway. My thesis partner was supposed to do this but she’s all the way in China now and will only be getting back before graduation.

The radio plays a familiar song. A song that makes me think of someone humming to this first thing in the morning while cooking breakfast. A song that makes me miss that someone. He must be doing well, right? He’s always doing well. I look at the photo of him pinned on my reminder’s board, the one I took from when we were in the beach. He’s back is to me and it just looked like a movie shot so I took his photo without his knowledge. I haven’t seen his face in ten months and I kind of miss it. The face of the person who can only make my heart thud so loud I can hear it ring through my ears myself.

The last ten months after we separated was not easy. I thought break ups that don’t end well for both parties are hard, but ending it with I love you’s expelled is actually harder. I always end up thinking if I had made the right choice, if I had said the right words, if I had really done what was best for us. It always makes me feel like I could have stayed, his mother was no longer around to keep us apart and we were free to be in a relationship if we wanted to. A part of me chose not to do that. A part of me just knew that wasn’t the right time for us.

He’s a man of many accomplishments at a very young age. He’s got it all figured out while I don’t. At that time, I just knew I wasn’t ready for someone as amazing as him. I want to make something out of myself like he did with himself; I want to be someone not anyone can say “had it easy” because I “had the man” to get them for me. I want to work my way to where I want to be and I want it to be because of my hard work and not because I had the right connections to do so.

Sometimes I wonder if that can pass as selfishness; if wanting to prove something to myself, accomplishing something and choosing to achieve them on my own is selfish. Sometimes it makes me feel like I had been a ty person to him for saying I love you but leaving him to get to my dreams. But his words are the reason why I keep on believing that there was nothing wrong with our separation. His words of encouragement from the last we saw each other is why I believe it were the right thing to do. He understood me, my dreams and the things I want to achieve. He gets it.

I take my phone and scroll past through the messages, nothing but from my classmates and many from my thesis partner. I finally get to the bottom of the mes