The Truth Untold: Yoonmin

17

Imprisonment was quiet.

The days all sounded the same. Water dripping from a faulty faucet, footsteps on a concrete floor, the rusty hinges of a cell door opening. Even their breaths released into the labyrinth of the prison cells were muted.

There was an unfaltering pattern to the days. Yoongi would get up at 5 am desperately fighting to shake off the remnants of sleep. After breakfast he'd go to work in the kitchens at 7 am cleaning and washing dishes until his hands burned raw with the hot water. Then, he was free to work out and shower by 12 pm lunch time. Every minute was controlled, every one of their actions supervised. They were mechanical, walking in straight lines that never seemed to veer off their course despite the people whose feet trod them.

Nobody stepped out of those lines.

Everyone had already lost everything.

There's nothing else to fight for.

And Yoongi... Yoongi had lost more than most.

He didn't even know who he was.

After lunch he studied. For a couple of months he studied while the rest of the men in the prison, much older than he was, spent their time outside. Eventually, he got a letter with his high school degree enclosed in a small white envelope, unassuming and uncongratulatory. It just told him he'd graduated. At least he could say that much.

Meanwhile, all the other letters he received were left in a pile under his mattress, unopened and unread. They made soft crinkling noises in the silence of the night as Yoongi shifted in his bed, reminding him that they were there. Eventually however, they stopped coming at all. Eventually, they stopped reminding him that they lay there under his mattress, waiting for him.

Prison was quiet.

And so was Yoongi's mark.

ㅅ

He'd been in the prison library, applying to online colleges the day he got out.

He'd given up hope to ever be free, ultimately realizing in a moment of cowardly clarity that he wasn't sure he'd even want to get out. In here he was just a kid among dangerous men that hardly looked twice at him. His identity had been reduced to near invisibility and he liked that. Out there, he had questions to everything and answers to some of them that he couldnt quite give. Maybe never.

As he was typing away in one of the pages that wasn't blocked, one of the newer security officers opened the door and called his name.

"Min. Let's go."

Yoongi's hands hovered over the PC keyboard where he'd been just about to start filling in the application with his personal information. He'd already been stumped on the second line where it had asked him for his address.

"Where are we going?" His voice was raspy from disuse.

"You're leaving. You're getting out."

They'd dressed him in the clothes with which he'd come in, a blue sweater he didn't even remember donning over a year ago, and had nearly shoved him out the door with a flimsy plastic bag full of what little belongings he'd gone in with that first day: his dead cellphone, a lip balm, and his black wallet.

Outside, the sun shone too brightly, even in between fluffy spring clouds. And waiting for him next to a car he didn't recognize was Jungkook, his little brother, standing nervously next to his mother.

If any other day could compare to the feeling of absolute surrealism as this moment, it was the day he got convicted.

It had been raining in Seoul that day. Yoongi had arrived at the courthouse with soaked shoes and a burning on his neck he tried desperately to ignore. His lawyers had been hopeful but realistic. There wasn't much to disprove the fact that it had been Yoongi who had last been seen with his father, arguing. That Yoongi had all the motive to kill him, having been mentally and physically abused for years. Sohee had tried her best to testify in favor of Yoongi, but it was her testimony that had them convinced Yoongi was culpable.