8 years together and after only 2 months of knowing she was sick, she's gone.

Our daughter is all that is left. She is so young and fragile.

At only 3 years old i'm scared she wont remeber Sowon. It'll just have to be my job to help keep her mother's spirit alive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2 Years Later

"Jieun!" I called out as loudly as my dry throat would allow. "Jieun, where are you? Please answer me, Jieun!" The only response was dead silence and the looks of shock on every face in the store. 

I paused to catch my breath. My hands were desperately pulling at my hair for the last twenty minutes. That was how long I had been searching for my precious 5 year old daughter. I took her to look for her first ever school uniform and I had taken my eyes off of her for just one second, but that was all it took. She was gone.

At first I calmly walked through the shop, pretending to admire the uniforms for the prestigious schools we could never afford while really looking for my Jieun. As I came back to the clothes rack I had started at however, I was forced to conclude that she was no longer in the store.

I immediately became tense and worried. She was all I had left. I couldn't lose first her mother and now her...

Jieun was not usually one to just wander off whenever twe went out, she was typically attached to my hip. The noise and attention seemed to frighten her, much like her mother. I can't  imagine her just walking off into a crowd.

I went into every store we  had ever been to on that street to and called for her, no longer caring about making a scene, but had had no luck so far. 

I couldn't bring myself to even briefly think about the possibility of not finding Jieun. She was my whole world. She was the reason I got up in the morning and the reason why I didn't completely shut down after Sowon died. 

Having gotten some of my breath back, I hurried to continue my search. The only shop I had yet to look in was the trinket shop he had never ventured into with Jieun before... but it was worth a shot. I paused briefly and took a deep breath as I barreled through the narrow door that I hadn't entered in 2 years, hoping that Jieun was somewhere to be found in what had once been her mother's favorite shop.

There, next to the counter, was Jieun talking to the same older woman who has run the sho p for as long as I could remember.

"Jieun!" I yelled as I embraced her tightly, "You can't just run off like that! Appa was worried sick!"

"I saw the paper that eomma used to use in the window." she said as she pointed to the display at the front.

Sowon wrote a bunch of letters to our daughter before she died...one for each birthday she would miss. There were 50 total. they were all written on special paper only found here.

"I knew she looked familiar," the older woman said, "You look just like Sowon did at your age..." the older woman said with a kind smile.

"Have some of that paper for free," she said as she handed a small packet to Jieun, "use it for something as special as your mother did." 

It brought tears to my eyes that the older woman remembered my wife. 

It just proved that Jieun would always remember her mother. She touched enough people that she would never be forgotten...