jung wooyoung is a typical high school bad boy. he drinks, he gets high and raises hell.
choi san is a shy boy with a stutter and no where left to call home.
when circumstances force their lives together will the magic of christmas kindle first love...
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11. wooyoung of the past and the future
loneliness had always been wooyoung's companion.
ever since he was little he always remembered being by himself. he spent most recesses observing the other children play around him. he swayed alone on the swing set, toes tapping the sand without enough strength to move him. he'd watch the slow crawl of the clouds in the sky or the cars zipping by on the highway but his eyes were always drawn to his classmates.
there was a buoyancy to the step, their laughter like tinkling chimes in the wind. they bounced and played together like silver bubbles caught in the sunlight while he watched on quietly at a distance. there was an unseen divide between him and them like the carefully drawn lines in a sandbox. he learned from a young age that his circumstances were different which meant that he was different.
most of them had a mom, a dad, maybe a brother or a sister and a pet if they were lucky. he saw them when one of his classmates got sick at school or when they were proudly presented with their kid's achievements at conferences. seeing them always made wooyoung's insides twist with hurt.
he wondered why he was alone.
it's a hard truth to accept, especially as a child. but as weeks turned to months and months stretched to one unbearable year after another he had learned to accept it. he had pushed his pain into a box and put it up on the tallest shelf in the furthest corner of his mind. that way it could never hurt him. from up there, the painful memories could only gather dust, not his tears.
then in ninth grade he met a soft spoken girl that changed everything. she was kind and pretty and always wore blue ribbons in her hair. they were partnered for a school project and from then on it seemed as if it was her personal mission to get to know him.
she sat next to him at every lunch even if they ate in awkward silence. she helped him in class even if he never asked for it. she kindly greeted him in the hallways even if he made it a point to ignore her. but wooyoung wasn't as stubborn as he thought and over time his cold indifference thawed and they became tentative friends.
he learned that yumi had been lonely too, although not in the same way. in all his time watching other children and their parents, wooyoung had never seen ones who loved their child more than yumi's loved her.
she lived in a nice house with a full ride scholarship to yonsei university and sepia colored dreams of becoming an architect. she even had a sweet cat named cheese with downy white fur that was soft as plushie stuffing. but there was something inside yumi that kept her from ever being truly happy.
nearly two years into their friendship, she'd finally told him why.
they were both studying quietly side by side as music played softly over the radio. the windows had been opened to let in a nice spring breeze that smelled faintly of freshly cut grass. yumi sat criss cross on her bed mulling over a geometry problem. wooyoung sat with his back against her bed with cheese curled contentedly in his lap.
