Chapter 1: Day 1

“You are going to be fine, trust me princess,” my mom wiped the tears from my face. It was useless though as tears by tears kept on approaching my already wet face. I must have looked like a clown right now.

Yes, I was going to college. For the first time ever, I was going to leave my family in Daegu. I was nervous, however, the feeling of terrified seemed to overcome everything. I was haunted by a lot of other things that might come as obstacles in my college life later.

At this very moment, I was standing inside my soon-to-be dorm.

“You know this is my first time staying in the dorm, mom. Your face will not be the first thing I’ll see once I wake up from my beauty sleep. And, and my roommate might be treating me badly. I’m scared,” I sobbed hard, hoping to catch my mother’s attention.

My mom shook her head but there was a small smile on her face. I knew that was a sad smile. She was letting go of her own daughter to study at another city. Who wouldn’t be sad? She was so closed to me. We were so closed to each other and it was hard to separate us both.

“For the sake of your future Irene-ah.. Mummy has to do this to you. You are a great student. You even make me proud by getting straight As in your exams before. This is a great opportunity princess and you can’t let your emotion to get in your way,” she caressed my face oh so lovingly.

I kept quite. What she said was right, and I couldn’t deny it. I was a top student. I beat a lot of other students in my school in order to be on top, and be the teachers’ apple eye. It was really hard since two years ago, I didn’t have a place in the top 3 students in my school. At first I didn’t even care about it because I wasn’t that smart even though I was placed in the top class in my school.

However, everything changed since my dad got into a car accident.

My dad went into coma, leaving my mom and I alone. Mom cried every single day, hoping my dad to wake up but to no avail. The situation happened for 3 months. After 3 months, my dad still hadn’t had any progress, making the medical bills to increase frantically, which was two times my mom’s monthly salary as a nurse.

Knowing that she wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the medical bills, she worked for three jobs. Nursing, teaching at a private school during the weekends, and waitressing at night; it wasn’t a pleasant sight to watch your own mom struggling really hard to save the family. I tried to help her, by offering to apply for a few jobs in town but my mom insisted me to just focus on my study. She told me it would help her a lot if I study hard and achieved a good result.

Since then, I went into tuition classes or any extra classes organized by my teaching for free at school. I didn’t want to waste my time, thinking of my family’s hardship and I just wanted to do what my mom wanted me to do. Thankfully, all of my hard works had paid off; I passed my exams with flying colors!

After the success, I didn’t ask my mom to buy me any presents for achieving something that was hard to achieve in this modern life with the technologies being the leader of the world, blinding the other important things that should be done by the human beings instead of just staring at the phones.

But then, my mom got a better a surprise for me.

Guess what? My dad finally had woken up from coma! It was the best present ever, if anyone could ever ask me. I’ve never asked for other things but for my dad to wake up.

Long story short, after that miracle, I got an  offer to study a few hours away from Daegu, which was one of the most prestigious university in South Korea; the Seoul University.

I didn’t want to go, honestly. I just wanted to stay in Daegu with my family instead of wasting my time buying the tickets to Seoul. My mom convinced me to go to Seoul, but I insisted on staying in Daegu, studying in Daegu College, which was just a few minutes away from our home. I tried to give her a thousand of excuses, starting from our financial problem. I thought I had convinced her to let me stay until  a week later I got a letter from the Seoul University that they would be glad to give me a full time scholarship when studying in their university.

That letter alone crushed my hope to stay in Daegu as my mom happily chirped that I would be going to Seoul University with a scholarship to my dad. It wasn’t hard to predict that my dad agreed to let me go to Seoul.

And here I was.

“Earth to, princess,” I felt my mom’s hand caressing my waist, bringing me back to reality. Okay enough with the sad tears thing, I put on a small smile on my face. “We should uhmm, go to dad. He might be waiting for us in the car.”

My mom was taken aback with my sudden change of mood and I would not b