THE TRAGEDY OF YOUTH, jungwon ✓

08 | final blow

ENHYPEN's debut was the first time I had truly seen Jungwon in his element.

It was close to four a.m. on the first of December, 2020, when I finally made myself watch it, aware of the fact that hours ago, Jungwon had made his grand debut with a boy group fresh off a survival show. I knew that he was probably awake with the other six boys, celebrating the achievement of their dreams.

As I watched the music video, I noticed that three of the six boys looked almost exactly like the boys I had seen him with in the restaurant when our relationship pretty much fell apart. After a little research (i.e. reading their K-Profiles), I learned their names were Heeseung, Jay, and Sunghoon.

Sunghoon was apparently a former figure skater, which explained why I thought I knew him that time—my cousin liked skating and I'd watched a couple of skaters do routines with her sometimes. He must have been one of them.

Jungwon's voice was even better than before. I knew he must have been embarrassed by the little vampire-teeth act he did towards the end, and I had to smile. He was always embarrassed of little things like that, even if he did great. Then I wiped my smile off my face. Why did I smile so much at the thought of him even now?

He hadn't texted me even once since that one time. I would have thought his debut was a reason to maybe even call, but he didn't. Well, whatever. I had more important things to worry about. Such as my sick mother.

Dealing with a sick mother was difficult, especially at sixteen years old. It wasn't cancer or anything. She was just sick all the time. Her muscles and limbs and joints ached, she was constantly tired, and she was even having lung problems. It scared me, it terrified me. But I kept on my brave face and took her to the doctor's when my dad was busy. I couldn't have managed without him. Especially with the horrible joke of a development called mild arthritis that just got worse.

I helped her keep track of her medicines, did as much as housework as I could manage with school close to suffocating me at times, and spent time with her. And even so...I could see that it wasn't helping so much.

So many years of working so hard, so many years of walking back and forth between her workplace and our apartment, which had quite a distance between them...it had all added up and hit her with the full force of a pickup truck.

It also didn't help that she still needed to work, since we had to support ourselves. I tried looking for part-time jobs, but in the end she wouldn't let me take any. Even so, I did take one part-timing job at the local daycare. I let her think that it was just hanging out with kids at first, and when I placed the envelope of money in front of her on the kitchen table at the end of the month, she started to cry.

"I told you not to work," she cried. "Yoora, there's no need to work!"

"It's not exactly work, Mom," I said calmly, though tears were threatening to spill over and stain my cheeks, too. "I love the kids, and it helps to keep my mind off things. The kids are perfectly well-behaved and adorable, most of them. It's not any trouble. I would never ask for payment, ordinarily, doing this...but I have to. I need to. You're not able to work as much anymore and Dad can't hold up the family by himself."

She pulled me into a hug. "Thank you, Yoora," she whispered. "Thank you so much."

So that's how we scraped by for the next few months. My dad and I worked as hard as we could between us and my mother contributed what she could, but after two months of that, she just stopped working entirely, owing to the fact that she had fallen badly as she was trying to clean the house and very nearly shattered her tailbone. Those are days I prefer not to remember...so many tears of panic and terror, thinking that she was too badly hurt to make it, wishing I'd been awake instead of sleeping in so that I would have been able to help her with cleaning.