Yoona – Kibum

“Ready?” I hear my best friend Yuri tells me. I nod hesitantly. She grasps my arms gently and pulls my face to face hers. “You don’t have to do this,” she says. I shove her hands off my face and give a weak smile, “I have to, I owe him my life.”

She holds my veil carefully and puts it down as I start walking down the aisle. There I see him standing straight in his suit. He fixes his tie and smiles nervously. I close my eyes and try to imagine that it was Kibum standing there and not Taecyeon. I smile unknowingly, but when I open my eyes, it fades. I was reaching the center when I hold on to my dress and lift it a little higher just enough for my feet to have space to run. I turn my back and run away as fast as I could. Murmurs, shouts, and gasps filled my ears but I don’t care. I don’t want to live unhappily. I remove the veil when I reach the door. Yuri then yells to me to run as she stalls the guests. I’m sorry Taecyeon. I might owe you my life but love isn’t the exact payment for it.

I don’t care what the people talk about me. I just have to continue on walking. I feel the first snow drop on my bare shoulders. I look up to the sky and remember how Kibum and I first met – on the first snow of 2006. I was sixteen then and he was nineteen. We were overlooking Seoul in a small gazebo on the mountains. From that moment on, it all happened. But my parents didn’t like him, they said I have to marry someone rich. We planned to run away. We planned to meet up by the church unfortunately while I was in it, it got caught up in fire. I could barely see and the smoke crawled up to my lungs suffocating me. When I woke up, it was Taecyeon who was beside me in the hospital. Eventually, we got pretty close but it never crossed my mind that he was actually for love. I never heard from Kibum again. Many have told me that only a few survived the fire, and Kibum wasn’t one of them. Days, nights, years – I couldn’t sleep; night after night of nightmares engulfing me like the flames. Still, after calculating the math, I thought I would be happy with Taecyeon. Until the day he asked my hand for marriage. After I said yes, hesitation and unrest ate up the whole of me. Some string in my heart pulls me away.

And now I made a run for it.

I begin running again because things in the back of my mind says that someone’s still catching up on me. I look back but then bump onto someone. “I’m sorry!” I bow.

“Gwaenchanha,” a voice speaks; a voice so familiar that I can’t be mistaken. I lift up my head and I didn’t know tears have already escaped my eyes. I just stared at him. This couldn’t be a dream. “Yoona-ssi? I haven’t heard from you since ages!” he tells me as if excited to see me. But no longing from him like the same thing I feel. Haven’t heard from me? I’m the one who haven’t heard from him!

He offers me a ride to his house.

“Are you a runaway bride?” he asks me while taking glimpses. I remain silent and instead look outside. He sighs. “Hey, you changed a lot. You’re not the silent type!” he cracks a joke but it doesn’t seem to lighten up my mood. It’s true that it was him who was the silent guy and I was the mood maker, but bringing up the past just worsens how I feel. Why isn’t he feeling any regrets? Don’t he miss me? Am I the only one hoping that things could be back the way it was?

“I miss you,” I blurt out, still not looking at him. I can sense that the bright aura from him vanished.

He tries to say with the same bright tone, “Do you still like the beef stew I always make? I could cook your dinne—“

“I said I miss you,” I emphasized my words, and this time I face him. Tears swell up but I don’t want them to fall, not yet. He sighs.

“Then you should’ve told me that seven years ago,” he stops his car outside a well-built house. He tells me ladies first, just like how he used to. I step in his house and sit on his couch while he makes coffee. It’s pretty cozy and I never thought Kibum would be this successful. And how he drastically changed surprised me as well. I search the house with my eyes and it got stuck on one photo frame. My heart sank at the moment I understood the image and at the same time the door opens and someone says, “Appa!”

“We’re home!” says a tired woman. Her face looks fresh still, and I see the little girl run to where Kibum is. The woman looks surprised to see me as she closes her umbrella and shakes of the snow from it.

Kibum comes in the scene with the girl clinging to his legs, and he puts down the coffee on the table right in front of me. I remain speechless. “What is this?” the woman asks but still in a pleasant tone.

“Oh, Ara. She’s Yoona, and I guess you can see what just had happened to her,” Kibum says as if nothing went between us.

“Oh, Yoona! Yeah, Kibum mentioned you to me before. Did your groom ran away from you?” she says with concern. I stay still and look at the people standing right in front of me – a family.

I bow to them and leave, “Thank you for the time.”