Bend & Break | Wooyoung [Ongoing]

5 | he sees 'it' for what 'it' is

Him.

WHAT WAS I INTERESTED IN? People ask, but I flee with my answer each time because I hated labelling things. I was as good as a financial advisor—in my head, that is. But all the years I'd spent slaving under Kim did is gain me some good old know-how in computerdom. What it's cobbled together is an ambitionless phlegm born with a resting bitch face that made even a blind person want to throw a slug at me.

Changbin had odiously called it Bring Your Friend To Work Day; I'd humorlessly thought it was no different from the ones I lived through under the age of ten. Dad, subjected to the influence of his spouse, had kept up an office ritual the rest of his co-workers hadn't bothered with. I knew given the fact that I was the only pint-sized person entrenched in the midst of middle-agers. (Don't blame me; I was less than a decade old, everyone looked so old from down there.) And at the wise age of eleven, I cracked the case—not really, not that I cared for it, but it got me around my father's unusual conduct which came up about the same time of every year. Bet it'd been part of the pact they made as inceptive lovers at the altar, before I was thought to be conceived—the both of them shooting responsibility between each other like it was a food fight. Every once in a while, Mom wanted her head to breathe since it appeared I was a piece of work. Back in the day, grownups were insatiable, plain and simple. Always achieving to have something to bellyache over, when it's there and when it's not. Up until I left for college and never looked back (literally, I hadn't looked back to see if the two of them had been standing there, watching my cab become a tiny dot, unblinking till it dropped out of sight), I was the headstream of Mom's complaints, the fallback for Dad's. I got so damn used to it that just a month settled in college, I'd started missing all that time she testified to her husband, when I was thought out of earshot, that I was suffocating the crap out of her. I knew why; how, was what I never understood. All I ever did was give her a taciturn kid growing up, impelling myself adapt to selfreliance pretty quick, once it translated to me as the moment I'd fully get to stand on my own two feet, answer to no one, finesse the hang-ups without an adult puffing hot breath down my neck, her man not very far behind.

The whole bit of the idea about dragging your kid to watch you whilst you work summed up a most dreadful period in my earlier years. My father would restrict movement to the four corners of his tiny office. We'd always nurtured a translucent relationship between us, Dad and I. Then we'd step out for lunch at noon, anticipating five in the evening to get out of there. All grown-up (and out of work), it's no different for me. As if I was back to my younger self, Changbin fitting into the role of my hypervigilant father barking over and over not to touch anything, giving me the stare of death should I even think of speaking to the doorknob. Thus far, I'd accomplished, in the last hour, my life form sprawled across a long leather seat, my phone in my hands suspended midair and peering down at me. Lunch was not around the corner.

Mingi's gift to Muye was still with me, sitting, dutifully waiting, arousing Changbin's interest by the second even if he tried to hide it. But I was holding back, depriving him an answer while he wasn't in that big of a mood to find out himself. I say it's best this way.

"How long do you plan on keeping me?" I asked. "Bring Your Kid—I mean friend to Work Day is exactly the way I prefigured. Just like old memories." Everything I could recall is hypermnesic, so vivid it was as though I lived them just yesterday. My head was congested with them: of my mother wishing, for a moment, she didn't have a child; of my father wishing, throughout the entire stretch of a day, he neither had a wife nor a child. I twisted to the side to see what Changbin was up to. He was sitting in his office chair—the swivel kind—hunched over a table of musical equipment and a headset around his neck. His office was every bit a producer's den. Never would have imagined his job description meant he got all these snazzy stuff, in a private office, by himself. The way he presented Hongjoong always had me believing he could relate to my kind of ill-treatment back at Kim&Co. Apparently, he was way more upgraded than that, and seeing him sat there, Changbin was in his element. An inspiring picture. "Your folks ever drag you to those?"