Salmon Bagel and a Hot Chocolate

6 - The Power of Vulnerability

Minjeong walked through familiar doors, greeting familiar staff, before finally reaching Jihyo's office, knocking before making her way inside.

"Good afternoon, Minjeong," Jihyo smiled. "Lovely to see you."

"Good afternoon," Minjeong let out a smile back, taking a seat on the couch she was oh-so-familiar with, but the one chair she did not want to be sitting on. "Are we just getting right into it?"

"I thought I'd catch up with you for a bit first," Jihyo hummed, grabbing her notebook and taking a seat across Minjeong. "It's been very long."

"Well, where do I begin?"

"Where we left off," Jihyo shrugged. "What's happened since then?"

"Seven years ago, so a lot," Minjeong laughed. "But lets see... I was just finishing up residency, became a psychiatrist, earning well, Yizhuo's still my best friend, Yerim and Yunjin are still my other close friends, I bought a car, I've helped my clients work through a lot of problems, found a café I like going to, found another café when the first one closed down, exchanged a couple of words with the barista there, found out the barista is Yizhuo's date's best friend, finally came back to therapy."

"A variety of things," Jihyo nodded, glancing at her notes. "I'm glad you've got all these positives, it's refreshing, but any negatives?"

"Some of my clients are... tougher cases," Minjeong took a deep breath in. "Occasionally, if it's too much, I'd have to take a moment to calm myself after a session. I guess since I've been desensitised to a lot of things, feelings don't come easily to me as well."

Jihyo hummed in acknowledgement, noticing one more thing Minjeong seemingly refused to mention. "Anything else?"

"Apart from shutting myself out from the general public, no." Minjeong shook her head.

"When did you start doing that?"

"A year into my job, I guess."

"And can you identify anything that happened in that year that might've triggered such a response?" Jihyo looked at Minjeong, the woman shifting uncomfortably in her seat. "You know what I'm getting at, right?"

Minjeong was quiet for a bit, but spoke up after about twenty seconds,

"We broke up."

"What did he do?"

"What makes you think he did something?"

"You've completely shut yourself out from new relationships," Jihyo said. "Can you identify what happened?"

"It was a bad break up," Minjeong muttered. "It hurt me more than I thought it would."

"Do you mind explaining?"

Only Yizhuo knew about what happened, and it was not easy telling her at all, so Minjeong took a deep breath in before starting to speak, "We were growing apart, there was no doubt in that. I was too busy with work and so was he, we were barely seeing each other anymore."

"He still made it clear he loved me... or at least he let me believe it. Five years we were together and not one day did I believe he didn't love me, until the last month of our relationship when things just started falling apart."

Jihyo nodded, encouraging Minjeong to continue speaking.

"Earlier that year, he proposed to me. I obviously said yes, I was so in love with him, I don't think I've ever felt the same kind of happiness as I did that day," Minjeong told. "It was all going great. Everything was going great until he went out to meet his old friends. This woman was there– an old friend of his who has sort of fancied him since the beginning– but I wasn't worried about anything. I knew he was not the type so it didn't bother me at all that he was going to see his friends, including her. What I didn't know was that she was the only one there."