All Your Lies | Yoon Jeonghan

CH 41: His Home

[ Our Own Kind Of World. Part 2 ]

The house appeared awfully miserable as Jeonghan stared at it, standing outside in his suit, hesitant of what he should do next.

He dreaded to be there, every step he took was heavy thinking that it would lead him inside, even as he walked away from it, it would still be as if he had to carry the weight of the world on his hands, and it would stagger his footsteps.

Right then, he was already swaying, assuming a few more steps and he would fall.

That place shouldn't be real, it was killing him to know that a place like that existed. And to think that it was tied to him, no matter how much he tried to escape from it.

Jeonghan lowered his head, covering his eyes with his palm before running it up through his hair. Sighing deeply, something dense filling his chest as he walked towards the heavy-looking wooden front door.

It was empty and cold when he found himself inside, the occupying silence and the dark shadows on every corners despite the whole house being illuminated, he remembered how much he dreaded the place, for the uncountable of times.

He wasn't still sure why he was there, he was the only one in there. It was the day of his Dad's funeral, and everyone were still lingering on the last bits of that Dad that he had forgotten the way he should think of him of.

No one came home except for him. He left the cemetery as soon as the ceremony was over just so he could be there, seeing the house as it was without anyone blending in to the place.

As Jeonghan headed for his bedroom, he tried to ignore his surrounding as much as he could, despite all the details of it tempting him to look.

Like when he was still this small and innocent kid, in that exact same place, sprinting to his room imagining the darkness running after him, in his head there was this alluring voice telling him to look back. A child's silly imagination, really.

He clicked the light switch when he made it in to his room and perhaps because it was his Dad's funeral, but the light seemed to shine on the specific spot where several frames of photographs of his family were standing.

There was no hesitation when he slowly made his way towards the wooden cabinet, on top where the picture frames were, most consisting of him and his Dad, each were distinct and on different timelines of his life, as if his Dad had especially pulled out days just to spend it with him.

His Dad was not the type, yet maybe it hadn't been always.

Growing up, Jeonghan had a lot of good memories with his Dad, all of them buried by the bad ones, obviously outnumbered.

Those moments in the photographs, they were all just hazy memories in his mind. The more he thought about them, the more it had became difficult for him to believe that they weren't just a trick of his mind, dreams he dreamt of at night perhaps, but situations that had actually happened at certain points in his life.

Riding his first bicycle when he was seven, his Dad holding it from behind, preventing him from loosing his balance as they smiled into the camera.

Leaning against the guardrails at the deck of a yacht, nine and skin burnt, his Dad's arms were around him, the other one holding a bottle of beer, beaming brightly for the picture.

Seated on a bench with the building of their family's company behind, his Dad in a suit and him in his own formal clothes at his raw age of eleven, like all the other taken photos of them together, they smiled, equally as wide and gleaming.