ENHYPEN's debut was the first time I had truly seen Jungwon in his element.

It was close to four a.m. on the first of December, 2020, when I finally made myself watch it, aware of the fact that hours ago, Jungwon had made his grand debut with a boy group fresh off a survival show. I knew that he was probably awake with the other six boys, celebrating the achievement of their dreams.

As I watched the music video, I noticed that three of the six boys looked almost exactly like the boys I had seen him with in the restaurant when our relationship pretty much fell apart. After a little research (i.e. reading their K-Profiles), I learned their names were Heeseung, Jay, and Sunghoon.

Sunghoon was apparently a former figure skater, which explained why I thought I knew him that time—my cousin liked skating and I'd watched a couple of skaters do routines with her sometimes. He must have been one of them.

Jungwon's voice was even better than before. I knew he must have been embarrassed by the little vampire-teeth act he did towards the end, and I had to smile. He was always embarrassed of little things like that, even if he did great. Then I wiped my smile off my face. Why did I smile so much at the thought of him even now?

He hadn't texted me even once since that one time. I would have thought his debut was a reason to maybe even call, but he didn't. Well, whatever. I had more important things to worry about. Such as my sick mother.

Dealing with a sick mother was difficult, especially at sixteen years old. It wasn't cancer or anything. She was just sick all the time. Her muscles and limbs and joints ached, she was constantly tired, and she was even having lung problems. It scared me, it terrified me. But I kept on my brave face and took her to the doctor's when my dad was busy. I couldn't have managed without him. Especially with the horrible joke of a development called mild arthritis that just got worse.

I helped her keep track of her medicines, did as much as housework as I could manage with school close to suffocating me at times, and spent time with her. And even so...I could see that it wasn't helping so much.

So many years of working so hard, so many years of walking back and forth between her workplace and our apartment, which had quite a distance between them...it had all added up and hit her with the full force of a pickup truck.

It also didn't help that she still needed to work, since we had to support ourselves. I tried looking for part-time jobs, but in the end she wouldn't let me take any. Even so, I did take one part-timing job at the local daycare. I let her think that it was just hanging out with kids at first, and when I placed the envelope of money in front of her on the kitchen table at the end of the month, she started to cry.

"I told you not to work," she cried. "Yoora, there's no need to work!"

"It's not exactly work, Mom," I said calmly, though tears were threatening to spill over and stain my cheeks, too. "I love the kids, and it helps to keep my mind off things. The kids are perfectly well-behaved and adorable, most of them. It's not any trouble. I would never ask for payment, ordinarily, doing this...but I have to. I need to. You're not able to work as much anymore and Dad can't hold up the family by himself."

She pulled me into a hug. "Thank you, Yoora," she whispered. "Thank you so much."

So that's how we scraped by for the next few months. My dad and I worked as hard as we could between us and my mother contributed what she could, but after two months of that, she just stopped working entirely, owing to the fact that she had fallen badly as she was trying to clean the house and very nearly shattered her tailbone. Those are days I prefer not to remember...so many tears of panic and terror, thinking that she was too badly hurt to make it, wishing I'd been awake instead of sleeping in so that I would have been able to help her with cleaning.

She was okay to start working again after fourteen weeks, but she never did. Her already weak body just hadn't been able to take the extra strain anymore. That was how I came to start working extra hours at the daycare, even during the weekend if there were any kids. I even began babysitting for a couple of my neighbors with kids during weekends when they wanted to go out or something.

My dad never said anything about the part-timing as a babysitter, but he smiled at me every time I returned from work and he once told me that I was doing well. It didn't really occur to me what he'd meant until a few days after that. I was happy that between me working hard enough that I wanted to sleep for the next century, and him spending almost endless hours at the office and using the family car for a taxi service, was helping us get by now that my mom was just a housewife. A very sick one whose daughter still did a lot of things for her, but that was the way the three of us made things work.

And you know what? I was happy, despite it all. Working hard tired me, and seeing the condition of my mother upset me, and even seeing the way my dad only caught a few hours of sleep a night at that point angered me, too, wondering what mercies had been seen upon our family for the last few years. But at least we were together and in as best as health as we could manage. We didn't want anything else more than what we needed and yeah, a few things here and there.

Truthfully, from the time my mother started getting sick, I didn't have the luxury of an incredibly long and idealistic wish list like so many teenagers, so I outgrew that quickly.

And then came the final blow that very nearly pushed me under the surface of the ocean I had succeeded in trying not to drown in. My father's death in the middle of December 2021—and it happened in such a predictable way, such a cliché way, that I was angry; too angry for words. Why did such an amazing man, in many ways my own superhero, have to die the way he did? Why an incredibly stupidly common way of dying? It was a stupid train of thought. But I was, yet again, consumed with anger and grief.

My mother took it a lot harder than I did. As soon as we heard the news that he was a victim of the fatal car crash that had taken place on the nearest highway to our place, I let out a scream—both because of horror, and that my mother had collapsed right then.

Barely managing to catch her, I somehow managed to put her down on the sofa and as much as I didn't want to hear the horrible details, I knew I would have to, so I snatched up her dropped phone and demanded to know what happened. I had my eyes closed and I was clenching my fist so hard that my nails cut deep, bloody lines across my palm before I had heard the worst of it.

I didn't want to know that it was the storm that night that had taken his life. I wanted to be told that he was okay and he'd come back to us soon, not that he had probably died on impact. I didn't want to be told that the heavy rain and sleet had sent his tires spinning out of control over the iced-over road as he tried to swerve out of the way of a motorcycle which was speeding by (which promptly fell over, badly injuring the rider).

I didn't want to know that his car crashed right through the rails and flipped over the rocky terrain, leaving the car a mangled mess and robbing my father of his life and soul.

I called an ambulance for my mother after that. It was kind of a haze, but the doctors told me that she was just out from the shock. A few of our distant relatives handled all the things to do with the accident and my dad in place of her, but without her knowledge of things, they were so lost. Still, they tried their best.

When she did wake up, she was strangely efficient about things; the funeral preparations went by pretty quick, and before I knew it, with both me and my mother having become quieter, paler shells of ourselves, the funeral was upon us. I don't even remember how it went; all I remember was that my grandparents on my dad's side were completely and utterly devastated, sobbing as if someone had torn out their hearts right alongside my mother—which, I suppose, had been, in a way.

I also remember thinking, where's Jungwon? And his parents? But of course, he nor either of his parents were in attendance. They had long since moved away to a different place, and I hadn't given much notice to it. Why, when I was too occupied with other things, such as the fact my life was beginning to fall apart?

I know both Jungwon's parents did come over to say goodbye and promise to keep in contact—I never fact-checked this—but I wasn't at home at the time. I was at school for after-school club activities, and of course, Jungwon, who was the one I really wanted to see, was off busy with his training.

After the funeral, our apartment was so empty. My mom went to bed and just stayed in bed for so many days that I couldn't count. I asked her to get up and move around and please eat something good, but she only got up if she had to use the bathroom or maybe eat something small if she was really hungry.

It concerned me, but what could I do? I was alone now. It was me by myself.

More than once, the thought of calling Jungwon crossed my mind, but I pushed it away. He was too busy. I knew he was preparing for a comeback with his group, as, painfully, my friend was a fan of them, hence, I was aware of most things that went on with them. I was not going to be the one to bother him. Even though I knew he had a right to be aware of the death of someone who had cared very much about him and vice versa. I also knew someone had to tell his parents.

But I kept away from my phone, constantly ringing with calls from random people that I didn't know, and especially my mother's which rung more so, having heard of my dad dying, apparently. The one time I did pick it up, it was my mother's old friend and the lady peppered me with questions I didn't want to answer, so I hang up on her and kept the phone on silent.

As it turned out, I didn't have to do anything. He came to me first.