The Baggage You Carry • Jung Hoseok

Part 5 • Y/n

Friday, March 20
Eungbong-dong, Seoul
7:37am
Y/n

You exited the train and made your way out on the street. The air had a slight chill to it (not surprising, considering it was March) but it helped in calming you down a bit.

You were still beating yourself up over your (beyond) stupid mistake but what could you do about it now?

Answer: absolutely nothing.

You made it to the school in about 10 minutes, and class wouldn't start for another 15ish minutes so you had some time to figure out what the fuck you were going to do about your missing lesson plans.

You entered the classroom and started running around like a mad woman, trying to figure out what exactly you could do today to fill the lessons. You had some colouring pages that you could use for today.

After about 15 minutes, all your little students started filing in with bright and smiling faces, and even though you were still freaking out (improvisation has never really been one of your strengths), you felt a bit less anxious than before.

It was alright, you could get through today.

———

7 hours later, and you made it by the skin of your teeth. You don't think you've ever felt so exhausted after a day of teaching (which is really saying something because you teach and interact with kindergartners all day), but regardless - you made it through the day and it was now the weekend and you had two days to figure out what the heck to do for Monday.

You left the school after tidying your classroom and slowly walked to the train - not feeling in any particular hurry. Your feet were dragging and if you had had it your way, you would just be going home to sleep the day away. However, the world was not kind to you today, and sleep was so far out of sight for you.

First thing you'd have to do was to get ready because you had tutoring tonight. When you first got to Seoul, your Korean still wasn't the best (duh) so you had decided to take lessons considering you were planning on living here for the foreseeable future.

You actually found a student who was around your age from Seoul National University (you'd be the first to admit that you didn't know a ton about universities in South Korea, but you did know that SNU was pretty high up there) who was fluent in both English and Korean, and didn't ask for a ridiculous amount of money.

He's been tutoring you for the last 3 months and it's been helping a lot, but you still haven't figured out the "catch" yet. He had assured you multiple times that there was no catch, and he just wanted to help you out.

You didn't buy it.

But, you weren't one to turn down the kindness of a stranger in a city that you weren't familiar with (isn't that exactly what you're not supposed to do?) so you just decided to roll with it.

Unfortunately, the book that you had purchased (at the recommendation of your tutor) was in your bag, so that felt like another big kick in the crotch.

The one thing that you were looking forward to after your tutoring session was going to a night market with your neighbour and eating and drinking the night away.

Your neighbour was a girl named Lucy who was originally from Australia and her story was eerily similar to yours - cheating boyfriend and she wanted to shake things up so she moved to Seoul 2 years ago to teach English. She barely spoke the language, and was in a really bad place in her life.

Now, she was fluent in Korean and dating a really nice guy named Sun Ye-jun who worked for Samsung and she had no intentions of moving back to Australia any time soon. You were a bit jealous of her considering how your life was going right now, but looking at her and how happy she was gave you a flicker of hope that those things could happen to you.

Before you could even focus on what the future held in store for you though, you had to focus on your issues of the present. Those issues being mainly that you don't have your Korean textbook with all your homework in it. You were dreading texting your tutor - even though he was so nice and wouldn't hold it against you, but you needed to so he wouldn't think you were wasting his time when you showed up to the cafe you normally met at with nothing.

You took your phone out of your pocket and shot him off a quick text to see if he was available before calling - you would've felt really bad if he was still stuck in class and you called him over something that was completely your fault.

He responded quickly and said that he was just wrapping up a lecture and would call once he was out - about 20 minutes.

You calculated the time and that would give you enough to get back to Hannam train station and be off the train. You learned pretty quickly that it wasn't necessarily socially acceptable to use your phone on the Subway, and you tried to avoid it as best as you can.

You got on the train platform and waited for your train while anxiously tapping your foot on the ground. You knew your tutor wouldn't be mad, but you couldn't help being nervous because you felt like an overall moron.

Because (and you've said this so many times today, you couldn't keep track) who in their right mind doesn't check if they're grabbing the right bag in a random city? You couldn't wait to call your mom and tell her that you were nothing more than a common thief.

Your train arrived and you found a spot and sat down. You couldn't help but be curious about the person who's bag this was - especially because of the cassette tape. What was 'Hope World' and why did this person have a cassette of it?

Maybe this person was a hipster and only listened to music on cassette tapes, but weren't tape players super expensive and really hard to come by nowadays? So, why did this person decide to invest in one? Weird flex, but okay.

You were also extremely curious about the USB stick that you found and also the journal - but you couldn't bring yourself to look into it because let's be honest, people are weird and you didn't know what you would find.

Your train pulled up to the Hannam train station and your phone started ringing and you exhaled. Thank gosh, because now you wouldn't have to deal with people judging you for using the phone.

You looked at your phone, and as expected, it was your tutor calling.

Now all you had to do was explain your situation and hope that he wouldn't judge you too harshly on why you weren't prepared. At all.

You couldn't wait to be done with this conversation.

You answered the phone and put it to your ear and heard your tutor's hard breaths.

"Hi Y/n? You there?" Was he running? Why did he sound so out of breath?

"Yeah, I'm here. Sorry - are you okay?" You asked. Normally you'd try to answer in Korean but after the day you've had already, you couldn't be bothered. Your tutor didn't seem to mind and he responded back in English.

"Yeah, I'm good. Sorry. I just had to run to catch my train. Anyways, what's up?"

"Yeah, sorry for bothering you Namjoon, but I need to talk to you about something."