Bend & Break | Wooyoung [Ongoing]

2 | she is a rich ... she's a spawn of '95

Her.

WITH MINGI, I WAS MORE the person to have bullied his sister throughout high school than the actual sister. Just imagine having a twin who barely tolerated you. Sometimes it annoyed me, and then in return I would spend quality time in front of the mirror and determine in my innermost self that I was going to change. I could change. Be that unselfish thing everyone wants me to be. But unfortunately for everyone, I didn't have much of that stick-to-itiveness to go through with it.

So the resentment continues, I guess, until whoever wheezed their last breath. That was likely going to be Mingi, he worried a lot, while I took my time with everything I did, hence my glorious exit wouldn't come until I said so. I pictured Mingi's self-righteous ass taking an unexpected detour on the road to heaven, straight into a waiting endless pit that came out of nowhere. The beauty of being self-aware that you were no saint, like I was, cognizant of the things I had done, lives I'd ruined intentionally and not—I have hurt, I have tainted, I have done both at once—is you know where you're going.

No heaven for me. Heh.

It wasn't that I was evil, rather I was very goal-oriented and society cannot seem to tell the two apart. It's like this: if you have ambition, you're evil; if you're Mingi, you're not evil.

The day was somewhere between noon and sunset. The mood set especially right for wine and steak—white; well-done. I had coaxed Jisu the way I knew how to and she'd driven us to MaHwa Dine, arguably the best in rich cuisine. We were led to our favorite table, outside on the deck with the most comely view of shimmering blue waters and a breed of white birds that though beautiful, didn't grasp me enough to Google their name.

The owner of MaHwa Dine was this attractive man whom I thought might like me. Because he would look at me on the rare occasions that he perambulated from table to table, interacting with customers like he was merely the manager, foraging feedback. Because he could, because he wanted to. Sometimes we'd share a smile, other times it was fleeting gazes that bordered on flirtatious. Today he was absent.

In my purse were declined credit cards, my least favourite passport, two fifty-thousand won bills. But the near future was bright. Auspicious. I was believing (this is where I have faith) to get seven million richer.

So there's this guy (in my head I call him my mystery man) I started talking with on Facebook. He'd even reached out first and upon viewing his profile, I saw it held promises. Each time I went through a new post, part-trust part-denial. Mom always said to be wary of people you meet on the Internet. Her advice was no longer valid to me, though. We were poor now, what did she know?

More days had completed their circle, morning meshing into noon, noon bleeding into evening and evening forming a gradient between itself and nightfall. I still remembered that apocalyptic day. When Dad approached us with disastrous news, shortly after the News carried the news too. Bankruptcy came, impoverished the Songs, ruined them—I tell you, it felt like we'd been given a life sentence. Whilst Song Dongchan waited for everything to sink in, he had his family at the forefront of his mind. He turned to look at us—me. Mingi preferred to keep distance by clinging to our mother, Kang Doyoen, who had positioned herself on the far end of a victorian-inspired squab. She kept honking into a handkerchief, up to a point where everything stopped feeling real. I started wondering if they were putting up a show for something, I don't know.

Mom had her favourite child hovering next to her, his arms long enough to cocoon her without knocking down his height. Dad must have thought I felt left out, since his own outstretched arms found me (they weren't as long as Mingi's) and did their cocooning. My face was crushed to his armpit, my nose forced to waft expensive cologne. Because I knew that moment wasn't one for holding breaths. Instead it was a time for convincing ourselves that where everything was lost, we still had each other. I had spaced out to think otherwise, even considered abandoning ship but that would've left me as the odd Song with nowhere to run to.