Chapter 01

I love rains. I love the earth’s rich scent just when it begins to pour and the dim greenish filter that covers everything in the vicinity. I am not a very optimistic person, but when it was raining the day we were moving to Seoul, I could not help but hope. Hope that I had something better stored for me in future and that Seoul would treat me better than Busan ever did.

Hope that like the rain washes away any traces of the harsh sunlit dusty days, my turbulent yesterday's would be washed away too.

The drive from Busan to Seoul was relatively quiet, if you can excuse the occasional fights I got with my brother over the choice of songs and the steely reprimands of our mother making us both sulk and gaze out of the window in defiance. It was such incidents that actually had any semblance to our old life and compelled me to think that maybe all was not lost, and maybe our new life would be better than the one before and that last few years of constant fights between our parents never happened which eventually ended up in a divorce, a messy affair long overdue, leading us to the current predicament:

New place, new home, new life.

My mom came off well after the divorce, though she was pretty independent and self-sufficient before that too (one of the many reasons of my parent's fallout) and hence the shifting.

I was shaken out of my reverie when the car stopped, causing my head to bang against the window, I looked around to notice that we had arrived at our destination, our new home. It was an impressive building with old style architecture and I was sure it might have cost my mom a fortune. My younger brother, always high on energy was already out of car, banging the door shut and running up the porch steps leading to the front door. I, on the other hand, was much slower in approaching the house, taking my time to observe my surroundings as this was the first time I was seeing my new home. I have to credit my mom for doing a good job on refurbishing the old driveway and converting a section of it