Enigmatic

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Third Person's POV // Dahyun's past

Dahyun regretted several moments of her life. Some of them were in her control, some are not.

Moments consist of hours, minutes and seconds, rolled into days.. And years. Other moments were simple, while others were complex. In Dahyun's experience, moments, no matter how simple, can be irretrievable. When you add all of the moments, there will surely be ages and eras that define a whole person's existence.

At one point of her life, she stopped trying to track all of the regrettable moments of her life. After all, moments are just moments, right?

She just got back from Korea and in Dahyun's mind, somehow her father missed her. She imagined something like this:

She would be entering her father's study with a confident knock, before she let herself in: pure of confidence, and definitely far from her old self that always seeks approval from her impossible father.

She imagined that somehow her father would recognize the change, or he would somehow ask what has she been up to for the past years that she was away from home.

That they would sit down, and talk about Dahyun's thoughts, and everything that she'd learned from being homeschooled and being alone. How all the nightmares about her mother's death finally subsided and she would finally hear her father's laugh again.

And her father would listen, be interested. He would still be strict, stoic, full of elegance, but somehow she wished that behind those eyes she would see the father figure that she really wanted to see. It doesn't matter if it's a long or short conversation, as long as her father really listens.

She would then leave the study room, with a wide smile on her face with the promise of more time with her father.

Instead, things went awry the moment that she entered the room.

The door was already opened and her father immediately asked her to enter the room. She took a deep breath through her nose, and pressed her lips together. All of her confidence vanished as she saw how busy her father was. She watched as her father scanned the documents in front of him.

He definitely looked different from how she remembered him way back when she was in first year highschool. He looked even worse. Couple of years apart and I could still feel the sadness in him from when he lost his wife and our mother. He probably drowned himself in office work. And although the air of arrogance is still there and he still looked dashing, I could really tell that something changed.

Gone is the father that was once her idol, her entire world.

"Sit, Dahyun," Her father said, still not looking up.

She forgot how it felt to be in the presence of her father. She forgot how paralyzing an order from her father could be. And it made her remember all of the orders that she didn't want to follow, forgot to follow, hated to follow and tried to follow all those years.

She wanted to say, "I'd rather not." Dahyun just wants her father to look at her. But instead of saying it out loud, she forced herself to sit down stiffly. Not even wanting her spine to be near the back of the couch.

A couple of minutes more passed before her father looked up at her. If she was stiff earlier, she was even more stiff now.

Mr. Kim offered her a piece of paper.

"It's a contract with the Hirai family. You are to marry their daughter."

All hopes of moving on and rebuilding their relationship turned to dust. She knows that it was far fetched, but she never imagined that she would be facing this the same day that she landed back in Korea. She could feel the anger bubbling inside her, because of the ridiculousness of it all. She hasn't even unpacked yet.