7 springs

That familiar feeling of disgust settles in your stomach, and you push yourself away from your desk to look outside your window, only to realize it’s gotten dark. The sun—the only thing you found comfort in these days—has disappeared and given way to the same dark sky that watched your life fall apart. A glance at the clock above your window told you it was nearing 11 PM. The quick passage of time only made you realize that you spent your day wallowing in your sorrows again, instead of doing something productive like writing in your journal or taking the initiative to call your agent and maybe book some jobs. Well, it’s too late for the latter, so you decide it’s going to be a long, long night of writing, and that meant you had to go out and get some food to sustain you through it all.

From the corner of your eye, you see the dark clouds start to roll in. Ah, it might rain tonight, you think. You wouldn’t be out for too long. The convenience store was only a 20-minute walk from your apartment. It will take at most 10 minutes to get your food, and then another 20 minutes to walk back home. You pick up the black coat left on your chair, along with your purse and an umbrella, and rush out the door. Ideally, you’d be back home by midnight. By the time you get down to the lobby of your apartment complex, after scaling 11 flights of stairs, you see that the rain has started and is only becoming heavier by the second. It was probably a better idea to drive to the convenience store, rather than walk, as you had initially planned. A few minutes driving in the rain couldn’t be as bad as nearly 30 minutes walking in it, right? That was the rational part of you talking again. You make your way to the parking garage, where your Aston Martin DB12 is parked. Not the most convenient car to drive around Seoul, but it was the only car you had, only because you got it in the divorce. Apparently, Yoongi just couldn’t leave you out on the streets with nothing, so he gave you this stupid, expensive car. Thinking about that moment, you scoff. As if giving you a luxury car would somehow make the situation better.

As you settle into your car, you really think about that moment. It feels like Yoongi really didn’t know you. This car was proof of that. You hated driving it, not only because of its obnoxious luxury, but also because of your lack of confidence. You’d never really been an experienced driver. Even before the divorce, you always had someone driving you or someone in the car with you. Rarely was there ever a time when you drove on your own. Now, you’re all alone in a city that seemed to be too big and too fast for your heart.

11:10 PM. According to your memory, the nearest convenience store closed at midnight, so you were still good on time. You hurry to start the car anyway. Better to be safe than sorry. There is a bad feeling settling in your stomach as you see the rain start to come down harder and harder, but you decide to ignore it. The goal for tonight was simple: go to the store, grab some food, go home, write a page or two, and just let your emotions out. As soon as you get home, you’ll take your therapist’s advice to write down how you’re feeling and start the process to heal. As soon as you get home, you’re going to start moving on. Tonight would be the start of a new beginning

As you drive out of the parking garage onto the main streets, the rain comes down hard on your windshield. Much harder than it looked from where you were in the parking garage. Seeing this made you nervous. Heart racing, you can faintly feel your hands start to shake. It was raining on that day too, you think, reminiscing about the day the divorce papers were placed in front of you by Yoongi’s lawyer. He didn’t even have the guts to give it to you himself. Remembering that caused your hands to shake even more, prompting you to grip the steering wheel hard to control it. That day, you slammed the door in his lawyer’s face and waited until he left to run out of the house and sit under the pouring rain to cry. There was something poetic about your tears being washed away by the droplets of rain.

After that, you constantly asked yourself why you were even surprised by the divorce papers when you already knew what he was hiding under your nose those last couple of months. But was it really hiding when he and his friends made it painfully and disgustingly obvious? Though you know Yoongi would never physically cheat on you, he had willingly entertained the feelings of that woman and eventually reciprocated them. They saw each other every day because they were label-mates under the same company, and if there were any budding rumors about the growing feelings, subtle touches, and looks between the married global superstar Min Yoongi and the rookie model Kwon Yura, it would be shut down as quickly as it was brought up because Min Yoongi had that power. He was a member of the group that built that company from the ground up and turned it into the multi-billion-dollar entertainment giant that it is now. He could protect that woman, but he couldn’t protect you from the slander and bullying you faced when you first started dating, or when you got married. He didn’t protect you when his friends and co-workers constantly snubbed you or indirectly said something insulting about you at company events or Sunday dinners.

When he started to drift apart from you and from your marriage, it was painfully obvious. It’s like he wasn’t even trying to hide it. Late nights at the studio turned into never coming home. Taking you to company events turned into not even telling you about them in the first place. You found out with everybody else when he started taking her to those events instead. On top of that, it seemed like he never fully supported your career as you did his. Those last couple of months of your marriage just felt like a humiliation ritual, and you were the only one being humiliated while millions of people witnessed it. So really, should you be surprised that you got betrayed and your heart was trampled on by the man who swore and claimed to love you more than anything in the world?

No, you should not have been surprised. In fact, you should have seen it coming. He was a coward who betrayed you in the worst possible way he could have, and you were a fake who couldn’t own up to your own struggles and save the relationship.

A pain shot through your heart, and your train of thought was shattered by an ear-piercing honk coming from the other side of the car.

Before you can even get a grasp of what’s happening, the car overturns, and you feel your body being whipped violently by the force before everything goes numb. Your ears are ringing, and you can practically feel your heart beating out of your chest. You can’t breathe. You can vaguely see shards of glass cutting into your skin. You can’t feel it, but there’s so much blood that you know it’s going to hurt like a bitch when you wake up, if you wake up.

You couldn’t help but laugh at the situation. Or wheeze. Of all the times you thought about dying,  you never once imagined being taken out by a fucking car accident. And you certainly didn’t think you would still be wallowing in your sorrows about Yoongi’s betrayal on your deathbed.

 Today was supposed to be the day you moved on. Tonight was the start of a new beginning.

How ironic.