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CHAPTER ELEVEN ( Falling Into Memory Lane )
CHA SI-WOO IS a collector. It is with gratitude and an embarrassed sort of pride that Cha Jaehwa is relieved of such a fact.
Her father likes the physical reminder of something he can hold, see, and feel — Something that doesn't threaten to seep through his fingers like sand.
Perhaps that is why he chooses to decorate the Cha household with bitter reminders. If Jaehwa cannot remember, at the very least she can feel welcome.
Beneath all the cloudy confusion and lack of memory, Cha Jaehwa will forever and always be Cha Si-woo's only child.
( And he could never hate a child who so yearns to be loved ).
He understands, although, with a bitter underlaid sentiment that crawls into his frown, that his daughter will never be the same. Si-woo accepts that her love will never be something that can be pieced back together without a few missing parts.
He accepts such a fact, but that doesn't make it any less excruciating.
Cha Si-woo just misses his daughter. Sometimes such a thought consumes his mind in the depths of night, and he feels stray tears graze his pillow, and he despises himself for thinking of someone the way he thinks of his daughter — As though the one standing before him is not really his Jaehwa.
Maybe the guilt that eats him away is what drives Si-woo to be better. If not for the Cha Jaehwa that he once cherished beyond his own life, then for the Cha Jaehwa of now, whose smile is far too bitter and her face is far too weathered to be seventeen. To the Cha Jaehwa who cries in a curled-up ball in her room when she thinks Si-woo is asleep, leaving his heart a trail of broken fragments for ever thinking that she is anything other than his one and only precious daughter.
Missing someone who is still there haunts Si-woo's aging mind. Guilt pierces his chest with an ache, and he finds thinking about his daughter in the past tense is something he does often.
It is difficult, to bear the life of another person who cannot even remember their most cherished moments together.
But Cha Si-woo is a father. If there is anything he is, it would be resilient.
( Or at the very least he is when the family watches. He is nothing more than a burning pile of flames in the cabin of his mind, when the sun goes down and both Moon Boram and Cha Jaehwa sleep soundly ).
IT IS WITH the fading image of a blurry memory that Cha Jaehwa awakes, panting and shivering and sweating within the confines of her blanket cocoon.
