The Afterlife

5) Your Past, My Present

Hyejin lost her mother and brother on the same day, although it took Sunghoon a couple more years to wholly eliminate their hope to find him.

The day the boy was lost alongside his mother was also the day life changed completely for Hyejin and her father.

It sure was tough - living with the hope that Sunghoon was still alive after all they have ever looked forward to was spending time as a family of four. Spending their years after on the groundless belief that their brother and son was still alive, still looking for them, shattered into pieces when Sihyeon told Hyejin that her brother died seven years ago.

It was nearly a year before Sihyeon and Hyejin met when Sunghoon was lost, and Hyejin, upon knowing how close yet far she was from her brother, was devastated.

Hyejin only wanted to see her brother again, and she never stopped believing that one day she would, that one day he could return and put a red flower in her hair and take pictures of her after painting her nails, but he never did.

Sunghoon never tried to go back home.

It hurt Hyejin - the way she never got to know anything about her brother. She never got to grow alongside her younger sibling, her baby, and she never got to learn all his little details one by one like she had always looked forward to.

Hyejin did not get to know that Sunghoon grew into the nicest boy, the most delivate being the earth had offered to its own; he grew up into a smart young man who had common dreams and uncommon ways to them. Hyejin never got to know her brother's preferences, life, facts, personality, how he fell in love with a boy not much older than him, how he was so passionate about winning board games against his lover. She never got to know Sunghoon's truths herself, and she never got to grow with him, hand in hand.

Yet she was told all about it. Sunghoon, unlike Hyejin, got to grow with a motherly love. He got to live a life that was full of noise because he gave up on covering his own ears that day, but he walked, parallel to said noise, living his life without knowing where it came from. He may have forgotten his family, but Hyejin figured it was just the world's way of showing its mercy, for the little boy saw much of said world that night that it had to empty him, pour out all thunder and rain from his ears for him.

There was no way for Hyejin to not miss her mother, even when her father made sure she never lacked any of the love. That night, Hyejin did not get to see her mother again; the moment the door closed behind her, all of her chances died down, and the last Hyejin remembered was her mother's face filled with as much tears as terror.

Sometimes it bothered her, that her father did not give her the chance back then to find her mother while she was still there, not until she was buried, and Hyejin figured that it was what hurt her the most - the fact that it was all so sudden she was not given the chance to cherish the world that was once hers.

Before Sunghoon was gone, he had done and said countless things that no one left behind knew if he actually meant, since he was gone then, there was no way for him to hurt with those words as much as them.

The boy was gone in a blink, and the amount of times Sihyeon imagined the world turning around to that day and giving her back her child needed lives and lives over for her to count. Perhaps there was not a day when she did not wake up wishing for it, and at times, Sihyeon had thoughts about believing in a diety that would, maybe, listen to her prayers.

There were other days when she plain let reality guide her, and she always knew where it took her; it was ironic - how a place so lifeless was sometimes the only life she knew.

She even found herself, one time after the other, doing things she did not normally do.

Sihyeon sang by Sunghoon's grave. She talked to him, drew messy sketches to him, cried to him, and she even went back to reading just so she could read to him.