36 MINUTES TO FALL, jaemin ✓

11 | life story

❝ Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.❞

"How many minutes do we have left?" Yumi asked, beginning to paint again. It looked as if a third coat would be all it took to cover up the red paint.

Jaemin looked at her sheepishly. "Barely fifteen."

"Are you serious?!" she exclaimed, shocked. "But we've only gotten through ten!"

"Well, ignore the four minutes part," he suggested. "Just tell it as fast as you can."

"Alright, then," Yumi sighed. "I don't like talking about it, but I suppose I can trust you with this information."

"Does it hurt you very much?"

"Yes," she said. "When I was twelve or thirteen, my dad...well, my mother found out that he wasn't exactly being faithful to her. That ensued a lot of fights, so much yelling and screaming that some nights I would wake up to them arguing downstairs. I'd lock myself in my bedroom and stay there, wide awake and crying most nights, until the sun rose, at which point I'd fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion."

"Yumi, I..." Jaemin looked at a loss for words. He'd halted his painting.

"Keep working," she said quietly. He obeyed, staying silent and listening as she talked. "It was around this time that the pressure on me increased, especially from my mother. She'd yell at me to study harder and if I didn't make it, she'd accuse me of not sparing a thought for her when she was struggling so much—at that point we stopped receiving much financial help from my father, so we struggled to make ends meet, and it was taking a toll on her mental health."

"That's not fair to you," Jaemin protested.

"I know. My father having done what he did felt like a betrayal to me, too, and most of the time I had no concentration to do anything, so I just sat around doing nothing at all. I tried talking to her about it but it was always about her. How deceived she felt. How she regretted the day she married him. I understand that being betrayed by the man you love is never a pleasant experience. She was heartbroken and I understood that; I tried to help her out. I learned to do things I normally wouldn't do to help her around the house, just so she could get some rest because she didn't sleep most nights. Even if it had been a sleepless night for me."

"And you were only twelve or so?"

"Well, yes. I tried to study, too, but for the next year or so, I failed miserably. But it was never enough. I lost confidence in myself and whenever I failed at something, it was always about how ashamed she was. How this made her look bad because I couldn't do it. Eventually, I stopped talking to her about anything at all. Right now, my parents have more or less made up. They nearly got divorced at one point but for some reason, they managed to fix their differences. They're not as close but at least they're not fighting anymore."

"Where was your dad in all this? Your differences with your mom?"

"Him?" she scoffed. "He was barely there at all. Even now I barely see him more than a few times a week. He's drowned in work all the time. I tried to tell him what was going on out of desperation but he just said to ignore her and do my best or whatever. No help at all. These days the relationship I have with both of them is very...strained. We never fixed our problems at all. I don't think it's possible anymore, to be honest."

"Yumi, I can't imagine what that must have been like for you," Jaemin didn't stop the painting, since Yumi was steadfastly avoiding his gaze and concentrating on her own work. "I'm sorry that you had to go through all that. You've never really healed from it, have you?"

She took a shaky breath. It felt good to get all of that out of her system, but suddenly, she felt like she wanted to cry. "No."

"Have you ever talked about it to someone?"

"No," she said. She blinked several times, until she decided she felt decidedly unshaken. "What about you?"

"What more is there to say?" he asked, stepping back from the wall and dropping the brush on top of the can. "For as long as I can remember, I've never been enough, not with my sister in the picture. I've pretty much explained it to you earlier. But what I didn't explain is our constant fighting."

"You both seem to have a tense relationship."

"It's actually pretty chill most of the time, when we're not angry, which happens a lot," he admitted. "The thing is, I'm so resentful of her that I just can't help getting way too irritated by everything she does. It doesn't help that all the praise people, including our parents, give her has gone to her head and she's too full of herself. She doesn't miss a single chance to put me down, to insult me on some level, to make me feel inferior."

"She's very vindictive?"

"I suppose you could say so. I know she feels resentful of me, too, since I get a lot of attention from our parents, however negative, and she's just...there. My parents know she's going to do well anyway, so it looks to her as if I'm getting all the attention. But that doesn't explain why she doesn't get that they're always hurting me with their words and their expectations. Why she feels like she has to annoy and insult me."

"Your parents?"

"They just let her do it," he said, and his voice was nonchalant enough, but Yumi knew he was angry about it. "They say that it's my fault it descends into a screaming match. In a way, yes, that's true. I can never stop myself from snapping right back at her when she says something. But do they expect me to just stay there and not defend myself at all when she starts at me? I'm sorry, but my pride will not allow me to be put down like that without a fight."

"I can understand that," Yumi said. "My cousins and I argue a lot, too, mainly because they're the pride of the family. Except for one, and her parents don't talk to her much because of what she chose to do in college. See, her parents want her to be a doctor, like all of ours want us to be, and although most of us don't want to, she did. But not a surgeon or a neurologist or anything like that. She chose forensic pathology."

"What's that?" Jaemin asked, perplexed.

"Basically a coroner, but it's different," Yumi said. "She told me forensic pathologists, um, slice up dead people to determine the exact cause of death. Kind of like examining living patients but, well, they're dead and you can't take their vitals, so you need to look inside their bodies."

"Okay, that just sounds gross," Jaemin made a face. "But she likes that kind of work, so why not?"

"That's what her brother tried to tell their parents," she said. "They told her that they didn't know what to say if people asked what kind of doctor she was. Not that she cares anymore—she says she's done with letting them dictate her life. I wish I was half as brave as her."

"You will be, one day," he said confidently. "Moving on to the next question..."

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WORD COUNT: 1275