Odd-eyed Beauty // hwang minhyun (#27)

Forty

Yeongwon

"My daughter, are you going to come out of your room soon? It has been almost a day since you locked yourself up in there and you didn't talk to anyone at all, are you honestly okay?" I heard my mother yelling at me from downstairs, she is exaggerating about everything that she had said.

I didn't lock myself up in there because I was depressed, I just didn't have anywhere to go today and it is my daily routine on the weekends, I am just watching my dramas in my room and I didn't want anyone to distract me so I stayed in there for the entire day.

And she is saying as if I am some emo kid who decided to shut everyone out of their world and do all the bad things in their rooms without anyone knowing about it, I am just a homebody who has no friends and I don't want to go anywhere else on my weekends, it is the only two days that I get to be at home and I didn't want to spend the 2 days being outside when I can spend all of that time doing my favourite things.

I came out of my room after making sure that my laptop is in charging mode and my mother is still preparing the food for dinner, she is not even halfway done and she is rushing me as if she is preparing for me to go for a 24 km marathon. Mothers all around the world just live to exaggerate stuff to the maximum to motivate their children to do something they don't want to but somehow it works, we just obey them and say nothing about it.

Except that I would always say something about it. I walked past the living room and stopped at the counter, staring at my mother chopping up some kimchi for her kimchi stew. "You are not even halfway done but you are saying as if the world is going to end if I don't come out of my room in 5 minutes."

"But you still came out of the room to be ready for dinner, so it is a success. What are you doing in your room all day for anyways?" She asked me.

"Nothing much, aren't you very familiar with what I do daily? I don't have any friends so the only thing that I can do as a friendless person is to be at home 24 hours a day and stare at the laptop screen for hours and hours." I told her and she sighed in relief, at least I am not in a depression episode and I will end up self-harming myself if I were to be left alone for too long.

"Don't you have a friend?" She asked me. "He came by our house the other day, what was his name again? Was it Minho or Kihyun?"

"Minhyun, his name is Hwang Minhyun," I told her and my cheeks started to heat up slowly.

"Oh yes, Minhyun. Don't you have anywhere to go with that kid? Or you guys can spend the afternoons studying and revising for your tests, there are a lot of cafes out there that is quiet and the coffees are not that expensive." She continued to ramble not knowing that my cheeks are turning hotter and hotter by the second, she doesn't have an idea that I have decided to date my one and only friend and it has been a few years since we have been official.

"We are planning to go next weekend, he is just busy with his life this week," I told my mother even though I don't have anything to do with Minhyun, I just don't know what to do when you are dating someone. What do couples even do on dates in real life?

"He is really good-looking for a high school student, I bet that he has tons of girls chasing after him and begging them to accept their confessions." She scoffed. "I know of a guy like that back in high school and he was so popular that he had received a huge box of chocolates on Valentine's Day and he didn't care for any of them."

"And he only like one girl and that girl turned out to be like you, and he is my father which is also your husband." I recited. "How many times have you even said this? I have already memorized it and it is at the back of my head, I could say it as many times as I want to but I don't want to."

My parents met in high school and they immediately got married once they graduated and a few years later, they had me and my younger brother a few more years later. It is a cute love story but it is not that cute once you have heard it over and over again and you even know where the rising climax is at and how it ends, I get annoyed hearing this over and over again.

We had dinner and I am back in my bedroom, looking forward to another k-drama bingeing session when I looked at my phone and I had almost 10 missed calls from Hwang Minhyun and he left a lot of messages for me as well. He usually doesn't message me a lot but this is a lot more than usual, did something bad happen to him?

I called him back, sitting down on my bed so that I can be comfortable while talking to him on the phone. He picked up immediately and there was a few seconds of silence and I got even more worried about him. "Hwang Minhyun? Are you there?" I asked him.

"Yeongwon, can you meet me at the nearby park right now? I am there right now and I will be waiting for you to come." And then he hung up, he sounded really sad and he needs me to be there for him for whatever reason he is going through with his life right now and I am going there to him because I am his girlfriend and it is my responsibility to make him happy.