A Thousand Purple Stars (JinJi)

Goodbye Dream

A waiter brought a pan full of noodles, soup, and vegetables and placed it on the electric stove-top between Jisoo and her father. They waited for the brew to come to a boil.

"I guess I'll have to get used to it," her father said, looking into the soup. "Since you'll be working here and all."

Jisoo looked up at him with a puzzled expression. She held her breath. Was he saying what she thought he was saying?

"Do you mean... you're okay with me staying here?" she said.

She watched as he gave her a slightly sad smile and poked at the noodles with his chopsticks.

"You're getting too old for me to tell you what to do, anyway," he said. "The tighter I try to hold on to you, the more you'll squirm to get free, too."

Jisoo felt a surge of gratitude overwhelm her. She smiled at him and let the warmth spread through her. She didn't realize just how badly she'd longed for him to say those words to her until now.

"You really don't know how much it means to me that you're okay with me staying here," she said. "I really thought I was going to have to fight to get you to approve or I'd have to disappoint you."

Apparently, she had been doing that a lot, lately.

"Disappointed?" her father said, leaning over the table and furrowing his brows at her. Jisoo looked up at her dad with a sad expression, but the look on his face was serious. He held her gaze for a long tie before saying, slowly:

"Jisoo, I am so proud of you."

Jisoo swallowed a lump in her throat.

"You shouldn't be," she whispered.

"Why?" her father challenged.

If she were to answer that question truthfully—

"Because..." Jisoo said, her voice stuttering as she tried to hold her emotions back. "I mean, four years of college and being out here and I really don't have anything to show for it. Nothing's really changed about me. I don't think I've gotten any wiser or braver or stronger or smarter. I don't feel like I deserve..."

Your pride. That was what she was about to say, but her voice suddenly cut out, and a long, heavy silence followed. Her father sighed.

"Jisoo," he said. "Do you know how your mother and I met?"

"You were schoolmates in high school," Jisoo said. She'd heard the story before. Her parents' romantic love story was part of the reason she believed she was categorically obsessed with anything romantic. "You guys started dating and then you got married and you had me. Then Mama got sick."

That was always the one snag in her parents' love story. It was cut short by her mother's sudden illness and passing.

"Did you know she had already beaten it before she had you?" her father said. Jisoo furrowed her brows at him. She had already beaten it?

"No, I didn't hear that part," Jisoo said. "What happened, then? She relapsed?"

Her father took a deep breath and prepared himself, as he always did when he was going to talk about his dear departed wife.

"The doctors warned us that if she got pregnant, it might cause some complications," he said. "She knew, we both did, that if we wanted children, we had to risk the possibility that she could get sick again."

He recalled his wife's face, summoned back to his mind from the depths of his memory the image of her in her wedding dress. It took at his strength not to burst into tears there in the middle of the restaurant.