Erase.

I despise the very sight of you and the way you've cut your hair now. You are the one who agreed so easily to breaking up with me yet you seem like a totally different person without me in your life now. Your once comforting gaze flickers from the menu nestled between your slim fingers to the blank canvas of my face as I observe your mannerisms with clear envy.

I'm not okay, yet you're just fine.

"How?" I murmur as the waitress carefully sits our mugs of hot chocolate onto the table's surface. Jooyoung waits until the nervous employee excuses herself to wait another table before he parts his lips to answer me.

"In order for me to move past our broken relationship, I had to focus on ridding myself of the thing that mattered most to me." He answers barely above a whisper. "I had to erase and forget all those memories with you in order to push forward and live."

"So, it must have worked." My heart ached as he placed the menu neatly back onto the table, his gaze never once losing its agonizing warmth—the pity that I did not seek and the compassion I could no longer run to and crumble before.

"I could not be here with you now if it hadn't worked, Hyojung."