Soulmates - The Last Line

The Thracian princess

"As we can see from this slide, there's been significant improvement in terms of amortization and budget management. Our three to five business plans, as stated in the previous slide, managed to capture what's needed for development in our marketing strategy in terms of production and distribution. We are, however, becoming the third major player on the field with more than 25% increase in sales just in the past two months. Now- "

Bored. Twenty-seven-year-old Kim Yongsun was bored. The whole conference room was heavy with silence. The occasional slide of someone's carton Starbucks cup on the desk table, the subtle pen clicking noise, or the soft buzz of the laptop fans, weren't enough to disrupt it though. They just added more depth to it. The faint smell of coffee, warm paper, and wood polishing cream should be enough to keep Yongsun awake but the invisible tension in the air was giving her anxiety that she didn't know how to deal with. Nancy from accounting, who was sitting on the right side, was carelessly browsing through her phone, Mr. Haewon was throwing daggers at Taehyun across the table, after it turned out the young web developer was dating Haewon's daughter. Mr. Todorioh was sitting a bit far from the table on the left, turning around like a lost squirrel in a cornfield, looking extremely entertained with his VR set. The senior manager got obsessed with the new technology recently and kept insisting on everything in the company having a VR version. No one seemed to be paying attention to what was going on on the presentation screen. So, why would she? Sitting in the middle of the conference table, wearing a very uncomfortable pencil skirt and a tight cotton white shirt covered in miniature cat hair that she forgot to clean was - Kim Yongsun. The Junior marketing manager. How did she end up here one might ask? She's been asking herself the same question for the past couple of years.

When Yongsun graduated college all she wanted to do was travel and take pictures. Experience life, as she liked to call it. But her parents were quick enough to bury her dreams by telling her she'd have to take over the family business one day. Her father wasn't overly obsessed with control, but he liked things in his multimillion company to go his way. Yongsun was given two weeks of vacation in Europe, then her father got her an unpaid internship at Brakes and Co., a company he had shares in. Yong didn't need anything from her parents. She insisted on doing everything on her own. Got a job as a waitress to pay her rent, started working part-time as a nanny after work, and then added a four-hour restaurant shift on the weekends so she could save up for a dream trip around the world. Everything seemed to be going well until one day she lost her younger brother.

Car crash. Drunk driver. He was out with his college friends. Someone decided to start a race. Two people lost their lives. Her brother was one of them. He wasn't even driving. He was in the car, trying to convince his drunk friend to go home. Mark made it. Jaewon didn't. People gathered at their house telling her how she should be strong and move on. It was all too much. Everyone saying sorry for your loss. She ran away and hid in his room. Everything was exactly how he had left it. Yongsun spent the night hugging his favorite shirt, crying her eyes out. Because nobody gets it. She fell into a figurative hole after that night. Having only three years of age difference made the Kim siblings extremely close. Losing him felt like losing part of herself. She stopped going out, stopped dreaming, and stopped needing anything from life. Her parents were worried, and her friends tried to make her go to therapy, but she decided that she could deal with it on her own. Drowning herself in wine and work, Kim Yongsun, despite everything, became the most successful intern that Brakes and Co. had ever had. She was quickly promoted and given a job, and here she was on this fine Wednesday, 6 years after her brother's death, at a company that her father approved, working something she never dreamed of, waiting to take over the family business, feeling, well, lonely. She was only twenty-seven and yet it felt like she had experienced so much more. "Old soul" as her friends liked to call her. She was getting bored too fast and getting irritated too easily. She knew she could flip everyone off and just go be whatever she wanted to be but for the lack of a better expression, she didn't have the "balls" to do it. She knew they'd find someone else fast. It wasn't like she was irreplaceable. Wait... Wasn't that a Beyonce song? "you're irreplaceeeaablee"