when it blooms | yunsan

Chapter 10

His mother looks like how Yunho had remembered from four months ago. Maybe a little tanned from the sun of Bali, but she had always looked the same, young and lively. He tells her as much, and she giggles in joy, slapping Yunho's arm playfully.

"How was Bali?" Yunho asks, taking charge of her suitcase down the stairs.

"Great! I've sent you pictures of the beach right? It was beautiful."

The town he has grown up in only offers rivers and ponds as water bodies. Yunho has had a chance to see the oceans and beaches, but he is familiar to them more through screens. They were always aquamarine and emerald blue, reflecting all the sunlight they could gather to themselves. And yes, just like that, the beach in Bali was beautiful.

The taxi comes around rather quickly and the conversation in the car is taken over by his mother, filling her son with her adventure which Yunho is happy to listen to. Ever since the divorce, his mother had been the one looking after him. His father did pay for his tuition and did pay him an occasional visit, but it's not the same as having to be responsible for a child. Yunho thinks he has grown through her blood, sweat and tears, and he can't begin to imagine how outstanding it is to let him go to the university even. Yunho should have chosen to work in a well paid job instead of working in a shelter that barely manages on its budget, if he wanted to pay what he owes her.

Once when he had told her so, she laughed it off.

"You don't owe me anything, my boy. I chose to have you, and it's only my responsibility to look after you. If you do owe me anything, it is to live healthily and happily. That's how you pay me."

The basic idea is that a child cannot choose their parents, but even if Yunho could, he would choose to be her son.

And just like how she mentioned, she had proven herself to be more than capable, being a successful business person, earning enough money to keep her exploring the world she hadn't seen. Yunho is glad he wasn't tying her back any more, and that she had found her joy in travelling, just like how his father had found a new family. Those are where their happiness belongs now, and that is how Yunho learned that happiness is never one dimensional.

One of the many things he has learned from his mother is that happiness doesn't necessarily rely on romantic love. Although society is keen on promoting them as the epitome of successful life, labeling people as misfit when they don't adapt to the concept, when he sees his mother beaming brightly without meeting such society's criterion, he witnesses the truth. That happiness comes in every shape and colour, and no one can determine one for you.

"Did you get the wedding invitation from Jiyoon?" his mother asks him while placing a straw hat on Yunho's head, the one she was wearing saying that it was a gift from Bali.

"Yes, I did."

Yunho is reminded of the white wedding invitation he had received a week ago, from his childhood friend. Also one of the two he had dated.

Yunho had met Seo Jiyoon in primary school. They ended up going to the same highschool, obviously because they didn't have a lot of options anyways. Oddly, they found themselves sharing the same classes most of the time, their mothers seeing each other frequently befriending themselves, and as they started spending more time together, only naturally, they have grown to like each other's company.

Jiyoon asked Yunho out on their sixteenth summer. It wasn't anything serious at first, Yunho thinks. It started from how she found Yunho the most comfortable male to be around with, and with their mothers teasing about their marriage like the cliche conversation motherly figure would have, she probably thought that wasn't a really bad idea. Yunho answered with a 'yes' without much thought. She was no doubt the most comfortable female to be around with, and she was cheerful, lively and cute. There was no reason for him to turn her down.

The imbalance emerged when they started spending more time with just the two of them, stepping into the closer relationship shared by couples. She wanted more and Yunho couldn't give. It was never enough.

She broke up with him in the eighteenth winter. Among graduating friends and classmates bidding farewell, they bid their farewell as a lover. Yunho remembers a girl in a school uniform within the white snowscape, huffing a white puff out of her mouth as a tear ran down her cheek under a snowfall. He instinctively thought of wiping it away, but he didn't dare move, knowing he had lost the right to do so. And that was the last time he saw her before she left for the university in Seoul.

"I can't believe my baby Jiyoon is getting married!" his mother exclaims excitedly.

And now after seven winters from then, she is getting married with someone who deserves her, more so than Yunho. He smiles at his mother as a response, hoping that there will be no more of the girl in tears under the snow.

A/N:

I'm doing a horrible job at managing this book lmaoo

anywho, if you are sticking through and reading, thank you!