As of 4th March 2018, this is my wishlist for all my closest friends' futures: 

 

South Korea will no longer be homophobic and legalise gay marriage, so that Chen and Xiumin will be the first male couple to register their marriage and make history in this country. They will finally be allowed to adopt the two daughters that Chen had always dreamt of nurturing into pristine young ladies with an intelligent mind like his partner's. Chanyeol's music store will make it big and grow into a franchise. Hojung can quit her stifling job as a hairdresser or open a boutique of her own, after giving birth to a son who is as musically inclined as his dad.  Baekhyun will be immune from all ually transmitted diseases and never ever impregnate a girl by accident. His stamina shall be amazing even at the age of 60, when he is rolling in gold from his ever-flourishing business and harem. If he chooses to settle, his wife shall be Miss Korea standards.  Sehun can have a special place in hell. Irene is spared. 

 

Our chatroom went crazy the morning Baekhyun and I sent out red status alerts to our friends. All of them made time for my parents immediately, although they only did that after laughing at us for the longest time. Or more precisely, Chanyeol and Chen were just clarifying how far they should apply their trolling skills. 

 

As a sort of throwback for old time's sake, the gathering was at a family restaurant that was near our high school. While the place had been renovated, its furnishing remained largely the same, and all of us couldn't be happier to revisit the place where we had so many of our gatherings after school. 

 

Chen and Chanyeol had to bite back a smirk when they saw Baekhyun and I wearing strangely coordinated outfits that hinted at a couple wear. Of course, it was one of those couple discount things that we grabbed during the sales period. Looking at the couple watches that we were wearing on our wrists (it's our weapon at the bars, without the trouble of getting a ring as a prop), a knowing twinkle flashed past our friends' eyes. Baekhyun shot them a warning glare from behind my parents. All I could hope for was that Hojung and Xiumin would control their hellish other half. 

 

A round of greeting and hugs later, we finally settled down at a long table in the corner of the restaurant. I was kind of glad that Sehun and Irene could not make it, because they had some errands to run in the afternoon. Fewer the people, lower the chances of errors. 

 

I had no idea what got into my parents, but three years of retirement in a foreign country had somehow sharpened their sense of intuition to a whole new level. First there was inspecting our apartment and combing it like some sort of police investigation. I had this theory that they were trying to find other signs of us, in their perspective, having a fallout. The separate bedroom arrangement really got to them, and it took me a while to realise that it was completely irrational that any parent would like their daughter to sleep in the same bed with a man before marriage. Am I being too conservative, or were my parents unreasonably liberal?

 

Then there was randomly dropping questions of what we've been up to lately. My parents were sly on that one - dad cornered Baekhyun while mum rounded up on me separately to check if our stories corroborated. Aside from a few stories that we agreed on fabricating - how we celebrated Valentines' Day and our respective birthdays - Baekhyun and I had opted for honesty in our answers. We decided that lying with a mix of omission and honesty was the best policy, simply because that would produce the most corroborative accounts. It wasn't too tough a challenge, simply because we did live together after all and we did spend most of our time together. It probably had to do with the fact that we were both living independent of our parents, and the other person in the house was the closest we had to a family member. So all the interrogation over meals, weekend outings and movie nights were simply a piece of caje. 

 

"-and I think the thing that retirement teaches me is that we should have a better work-life balance. I look back now and realised we should have allowed ourselves more travelling when we were younger. Now our backs are sore and knees are weak, we can't even sightsee that much in Europe," my dad was doing one of his lectures abou