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CHAPTER THREE ( Bury Me On That Hill )
JAEHWA DREAMS OF sweat-slicked floors and old training mats. Her vision fills with deteriorating punching bags and discarded gloves when they flutter shut, and more often than not, leave her awakening with shortness of breath and a drilling pain in her head.
Moon Boram tells her that she had often frequented a gym, per cause of Ahn Suho and his affinity for boxing.
( She looks sad as the words leave her lips, before she bids her daughter goodnight and departs to her bedroom ).
Jaehwa thinks to herself, that she wouldn't be much of an athletic person — She isn't much of anything these days.
Ahn Suho feels like a scar she can't scrub off in the shower, constantly there and constantly attached to the confines of her fragile mind. He is a shadow, one that follows Jaehwa even in sleep, caging his slender fingers around her neck and suffocating her.
( Jaehwa awakes a panting mess, drenched in sweat. The image of a lopsided smile burns into her retinas ).
The scent of hospital still clings to Cha Jaehwa, and she can still feel the unsatisfactory chafe of the thin gown they placed her in on nights she can't fall asleep, listening to the soft hum of her electric fan from beneath her sheets.
Jaehwa resigns herself to sips of week-old water and perhaps the occasional bag of chips she finds half-eaten in her room to survive.
It makes her feel guilty, but she would rather feel guilty than out of place. Cha Si-woo and Moon Boram are faraway images in her burring mind, and Jaehwa bites back the bile that forms against her throat every time she is forced to meet their watery eyes because she is not their daughter — She is not the Jaehwa they yearn for.
She is just an empty shell residing in a body that doesn't belong to her.
CHASING AFTER FANTASIES had never been Jaehwa's thing, or so she presumes with what memory she has left.
The push to leave everything she knows for something uncertain is like falling into the ocean. Jaehwa can only drown in the tepid waters, until she is full of nothing but ocean and toxins.
Shivers wrack her body. Jaehwa is unaccustomed to the growing September chill, much less after sundown. She recalls the only time leaving her house being when she met Yeon Si-eun.
Jaehwa had developed a habit of avoiding people after that, lest one of them ended up being an acquaintance of hers she could no longer name. Yeon Si-eun is among those, but not limited to only him. She thinks that if he ever brought it up, perhaps Jaehwa could spare them both and simply start over.
