𝐦𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐝. -jjk♡

p r o l o g u e

A voice.
Your voice brings you more than you think. Your voice tells your loved ones how much you love them, tells them jokes, makes them smile by your singing. Your voice gets you through arguments. Your voice tells people the way to that restaurant, your voice helps them to find the right place.
Your voice is such a big part of you, but many don't realize that. You only realize you miss it, your voice, when you loose it.

That's exactly what happened to Park Minjoo.
Four years ago, the happy little girl was diagnosed with cancer in her vocal cords. That was a huge shock for Minjoos family, because their daughter was fatally ill, but also because they were very poor.
The kind of poor where you work very very hard to pay you daughters school, the kind of poor that makes people bully your daughter, the kind of poor that starves you sometimes.

Minjoos parents both got extra jobs and worked 16 hours per day to pay Minjoos treatment. Hardworking and strong Minjoo did as much as she could to earn money by doing chores for the neighbors until she was too feeble to do anything, besides laying in her bed. 

The operation that would hopefully save her life, got postponed and postponed, because the family still didn't have enough money to pay for that operation. While Minjoos parents kept working and working, Minjoo kept getting worse and worse while waiting for that life saving operation. The longer weak but hopeful Minjoo had to wait, the lower her chance to survive this awful illness was.

When it finally came to the time Minjoos parents had the money, they performed the operation as soon as possible.

Minjoos tired, worried, and starving parents waited 7 hours while the operation was going on.
Their little Minjoo, at the time 13 years old, getting a hard and long operation for her illness. Her parents felt so bad for the girl, they couldn't stand next to her bed while she was getting worse, because they were working and working for money for the operation. They felt bad that little Minjoo had to go through all of that on her own, the last three months before the operation she only lied in bed, with her eyes closed. Was she gonna survive?

Soon after she was diagnosed, her voice slowly became weaker and weaker. She would have to cough a lot and her voice would sound rough, it would sound like her vocal cords were slowly being cutted through. At the time before operation, she didn't talk at all, she nodded and smiled, but she couldn't say a word.

Her parents hoped for her she would get back her voice after this operation, because she used to love to sing and she was a very chatty person  before the diagnosis.

Oh how badly a little tumor can ruin your life completely. It can kill you, it can make you lose everything you had. It can make you lose your feelings, your control over your own body. It can make you feel like you weren't supposed to live anyways. And that's how Minjoo felt right now.