The warm wind plays with my yellow sundress, the material tickling my knees as I lean against the wall of the subway. My long hair dances along with familiar movements, my heart also beating in the same rhythm. Sometimes it picks up as I think about the potential future, me and Seung Hyun, just the two of us and then it slows as I think of the responsibility that can lie ahead as well. I'll have to pick up a job or two, there is no way I am letting Seung Hyun give up debuting and making a name for himself. He is talented and the world has to know it. I can dance anywhere, and I dance for my own pleasure. I can always pick it up later. 

The giant clock on the tower says 11.05 am. Seung Hyun is five minutes late. My flip phone tells me there are no missed calls or text messages, so I can only pray that he isn't caught by his parents lugging a giant bag behind him as he left the house that morning. My own packed belongings lie in a suitcase beside me, filled to the brim with the bare necessities. I did it though, I packed my life away into one tiny piece of luggage. It seems like a small price to pay for a future that I want, a future that I canbuild and mold with my own two hands together with the person I love. The sun is rising even higher in the sky now, warming my face. Most days I'd shy away, remembering how Imo always said that a girl's skin shouldn't come under the sun. Today though, I don't need to listen to her anymore. Today, I look up close my eyes and embrace my newly found freedom.

Thirty minutes has gone. I am pacing. My blood orange strappy sandals make small noises as I make circles on the pavement, flipping my phone open and close in anxiety. He's not here. Seung Hyun's not here. My feet are starting to ache, my mind cloudy from the rising heat but I don't want to move. What if he came looking for me? This is where we promised to meet and start on a new journey together. I should call him, I know that, but a small voice inside of me knows what will happen once I do. That dream of mine, where the both of us snuggle on a futon in a cramped apartment in a forgotten part of Seoul will disappear. It will vanish as if it never even existed.

My phone rings, and 1TYM's song comes through. It is my default ring tone for Seung Hyun.

"Hi, where are you?" I ask, chirpily. It suddenly doesn't matter that I have been standing around for three hours in the hot sun. 

"Shin Ae..."

"I'm in front of the clock tower. Did you manage to sneak out? I told you not to carry too much stuff."

"Shin Ae, I..."

"How long until you get here, my feet are starting to hurt babe."

"I'm sorry. I can't."

"You can't what?"

"I can't run away with you. It's the wrong thing to do."

"W-What are you talking about?" I muse. "Of course it is, we talked this through."

"How are we going to live Shin Ae? We have nothing."

"We have each other. Seung Hyun, just come and meet me here, let's talk about this in person, okay? We can work this out."

"I can't. I can't go there." I shake my head continuously as Seung Hyun shoots me down each and every time I try to reason with him, begging him to just stay with me. 

"My dad got to you didn't he?"

"... He's right Shin Ae."

"No he's not. Why would you listen to him? Why!?"

"I-I've got to go."

"No, Seung Hyun. Please. Just come here and talk, okay? Just talk with me."

"Go home Shin Ae."

"Did he give you money? Did he threaten your family? Just tell me, I'll fix it please." In my 19 years of living I've never been so frantic. It is like I am grasping at straws, teetering at the edge of a cliff and with one small shove I'll fall to my death. All because of a boy with braided hair and oversized T-shirts, a boy that is my first love.

"You can't. You can't even help yourself. Shin Ae, I love you."

"I love you too."

"But we can't be together. Not anymore. Please, listen to me this one last time. You're going to do amazing things in life, the whole world is going to watch you dance. I'm sure of it. Be happy, okay? Because I can't make you happy, not anymore." The only thing I'm left with, the last thing that I can remember him by is the continuous beeps of a dead line as Seung Hyun hangs up the phone. I'm basically delirious by now. I don't know what's real and what isn't, so I stand there to figure it all out. When my legs give out from under me, I slide down the wall and sit in silence, not noticing that the bright sky has now been overpowered by threatening grey clouds. It's always after a stagnatingly hot day that a storm begins to brew. A stray piece of newspaper flies in front of me as the wind picks up. Slap bang in the headlines reads

FINANCE MINISTER GO JAE RYUNG INVESTIGATED FOR CORRUPTION:

WE DEMAND ANSWERS

I blink mindlessly at the title. I don't even care anymore. A small droplet of rain lands on my dad's name, then more and more until the entire paper is soaked with mud and water, my father's face unrecognisable as it gets stepped on and trodden by passers by attempting to rescue themselves from the weather. Amidst it all I just sit, letting the storm unleash its terror on me until I'm shivering in my dress which had clamped itself onto my body like a second skin. An umbrella comes over my head and I look up to see my dad's face. It reveals nothing.

"I told you," he says, "People like him are no good. We're going home, you and I need to discuss something. I've contacted an academy in New York..."

I hummed to myself the song over and over again. You tend to do that if you listen to something about a thousand times, which is what I did as soon as I got the call. They'd chosen me to be the dancer in the music video. The piece that I choreographed and performed in front of them was exactly what the panel of judges and the artist was looking for and the filming was starting in a few days. They had given me a fortnight to make some adjustments to what I had performed for them, a few minor tweaks here and there, but the seven days which had passed were more than enough to go over it so that I knew the routine like the back of my hand. It was also seven days that since I left Seung Hyun at the bar after a long and taxing argument. He's left me alone to figure things out as promised, but days have gone by and I'm still as conflicted as before. Honestly, I don't even know what I want.

You love him.

You don't trust him. 

Ji Young hadn't seen him for the past seven days either. It was now the beginning of June and Big Bang had a short resting period between their Osaka and Saitama concerts, which meant it was days where they could spend time recuperating. Except for Ji Yong and Young Bae who lived at the YG studio, the rest of the boys were often left to do whatever they wanted and for Seung Hyun it usually meant time with his family and time alone. Time that he would have preferred spending with me. I looked at my inactive cellphone in my hands which was devoid of the only call or message that I really wanted, one from him. I wished he would say something and fight to convince me that he has changed, proving that he believed in us. Instead, the only thing that I could think of was the words he said to me so firmly at the bar.

If I had to make the same decision over again, I would. 

I pushed my shoulder-length hair back, and let out a huge sigh, enough to get a sideaway glance from the ahjumma sitting beside me on the bus. Seung Hyun hadn't learnt at all in these last seven years. I'm not going to be a fool and say our love could weather it all once we were broke and starving. When I was waiting for him at the train station I realised that. I also realised that he couldn't protect me. The world was hunting down my dad and consequently his affluent family, daughters who grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth. Seung Hyun could remove me from my father, but that was all he could do. I was a messed up girl and I was counting on a boy to solve my problems and be my saviour. It was a disaster waiting to happen, I get it now and I got it way back then.

All I really wanted as I was soaked to the bone in my little yellow dress was for Seung Hyun to give us a chance. He thought that breaking us up was for our own sakes but his mistake was thinking that it was his decision to make. It was supposed to be our decision. It wasn't because we didn't love each other, that was for certain. We were about to runaway together and leave our family for goodness sake, there is no bigger gesture of love than sacrifice. Now though, with nothing but a bitter and desperate conversation to mark our end, I was left with only a feeling of abandonment for seven years, completely blindsided. The message that was constantly reiterated in my head being that he didn't trust me enough, not like I did him. He didn't trust me to be an equal in our relationship. I'm of the faith that something broken can't be fixed. You can chuck a bunch of glue or tape on it, but you can't hide the cracks, those points of fragility which serve as a constant reminder of of breakage.