Dear Diary, | Seonghwa [Ongoing]

i | first, there was news

When it was morning, first thing I'd tumbled to was the sun peeking through with the whisper of a day holding promises. Dare I say, pregnant with them because for the first time, I smiled before I sat up in bed, surprised and alerted. It disrupted the rigid order at cockcrow, shifted from routine. Made me pause in my gait toward the bathroom, and along came a second dawning aside the morning star's as I flipped the switch at the entrance.

   It had been a doubtable feeling

   I abhorred surprises. I was the peerless byproduct of a police commissioner and a culinarian, two people without high expectations for anything once they discovered they weren't perfect. No one should remind them of that. Hence I lived and loved life the way I wanted to, hence no surprises. The unexpected was a myth. Yet I'd spurned into the likeness of a dream child. Good grades, home before curfew, bedtime up until last year.

   Five years ago, my parents had met with a lawyer, signed papers, wrapped up their marriage. Mother got on the first flight out of the country, Father stayed behind, but not by choice ... maybe by choice, I don't know what's enough to keep him. His job or the child. His keepsake from a demolished marriage. Then a week following, I got tagged in a post on social media: Park Hayoung piggybacking a wholesome chunk of beefy muscles pouring out the sleeves of a V-necked shirt and a cascade of curly black hair, their backs to the Trevi Fountain. It gave me the warm fuzzies, crippling the disgust. It was hard to be mad at her. My mom had fled to Italy and never looked back. I'd always assumed her stop would be Japan, she'd shared her fantasies with me before, about visiting her husband's hometown. She talked about setting up a temporary base in Kyoto.

   In any case, it was a trashed dream.

   Today, the arm candy remained her arm candy. I was tagged in their every photo. More piggybacks, an ample lot of pepero kisses, a handful of moonlit picnics. My mother had snatched up a newfound happiness for herself, her life up until then seeming to just evaporate out of existence. Soon, it mightn't exist. Maybe I won't either.

   I couldn't be proud of two parents at the same time. Where one was off the hook, living out the ending chapters of a hardback unimaginative romance story, the other wasn't. Instead chasing skirts, upholding professional stereotypes, and darting me looks that demand I understood. For some reason, my father was hung up on the fact that half a decade later, his teenaged daughter was still torn over the separation. I let him have his way with those notions because I figured it kept him in check as my only guardian, roused Aoi Fujiyama's withering instincts to cherish his only daughter.

   I had been shoved to second place. With him strongly believing this was an unspoken war between him and his ex-wife, he'd decided to hold a torch to someone who easily passed up for my elder sister. Again, he wasn't perfect, the divorce had bestowed that permanent record an eternal black eye that it stopped being permanent. However, my middle-aged old man craving to kickback on the chesterfield of youth, rather searching for his wish in the wrong well, was farther up the alley of a chronic brain malfunction.

   Who knew whether it was my driving force to try to be on par with first-rateness or anything that looks like it. My parents were not model behaviors, despite my father claiming to be a model citizen, one of those kinds who took up positions because he'd been ruled by his goals to make a change, not by the perks it was going to offer him. What I saw when I gaped long and hard at their wedding photo offset whatever future I hadn't gotten panned out yet. And the reminder that a peek into several months from now (what I deem The Future) was nothing but a bleary image, offset my existence as a whole.