On the end line

What to write at the end of a year? This question has smoldered in my mind for the whole day. I didn't have many good memories to write about like others. I tried my best to forget as much as I could about what happened to me during this freaky year and while I'm enjoying myself for the effort, I don't wanna soil my beloved room with any of that dirt.

This time last year, I was neither home nor at my usual place. In my dim memory, I still remember how hurt and painful I felt while sitting in a warm little room, a peaceful corner which is a huge pride of its owner, tears wanting to burst out but they couldn't. Mentally and physically, I was deadly sick. Thinking over it, I'm surprised at how I managed to live through it all and come back to this endearing life. I know this is not an appropriate time to talk about death (but I wonder when  should be) but if you know how badly I wanted to leave this world, you'll understand how amazed I am when looking back, seeing how far I've gone to get to this point, even talking about love in this room post after post. When I'm writing down these words, a strange feeling keeps fluttering all over my body. I don't know what it really is, maybe because I, in some way, am recalling what has been  long buried and when it comes to mind again, I feel overwhelmed.

I had a horrible beginning and all I feel now is a deep gratitude towards God (or any powerful high spirits above) for letting me enjoy a peaceful ending. I cried a lot, I screamed (in my heart) a lot, I cursed this life a lot, I hated people a lot, I wanted to end my life in a bloody way... but now, in my mind there is only one voice softly whispering: "let's go home, dear."

Let's go home and start it all again, your precious life.

This year is over.

Random thought

The (probable) fact is:

- I'm gonna study Environmental Management (Master)
- Next to it will be Environmental Economics (PhD)
- It will takes me at least 5 to 6 years in Japan
- I don't really like the country but thanks to Mom I can have a chance to study in a prestigious school where accepted people are far far more hardworking than I am

While...

- I want to study Communications in US as well (from Mater to PhD)
- But Mom said I can't become a professor teaching it in my country because there's no school for me to do my job
- And it's a thousand times harder to be accepted into a good school with my poor result without any help or endorsement

And:

- It's already pointed out what I can and should do
- But I don't know where this feeling of regret comes from
- So here I'm babbling again

The end.

A gift of love

I really love the song and the drama and I'm content with my own combination of the two of them, which took me a white night. Rather than using words, I'm glad to find a new way to record moments.

After finishing this video, I realized that in none of the cut scenes I used were there any dialogues between the two characters. I just love the way love exposing itself in silence. Let's let the song sing for them, and that's what I did.

I don't really remember how I found this song out of thousand pieces of music on the Internet but I truly thank God for letting me enjoy such a nice melody where I feel like love is told by the softest breezes of winter.

Cool Whispers
by Ike Yoshihiro

Cool whispers drift from the north on the night
Yet you warm my heart for we hold the light
The land must fade from green into white
Hush my heart this love is a fire
This love will burn like a fire

Lie side by side in the soft winter white
Hold me close to you as we brace for flight
In time I pray they’ll see what we feel
Gentle love this pain won’t retire
This love must burn like a fire

Close your eyes and dream what I see,
peace for a moment the future unclear
Hand by hand as we stand on the wire,
the ending so near our start close behind
Light bends through trees, leaves spiral and wind
We’re far from here and frozen in time

Cool whispers drift from the north on the night
Yet you warm my heart for we hold the light
The land must fade from green into white
Hush my heart this love is a fire
This love will burn like a fire

Cool whispers
Yet you warm my heart for we hold the light
This love will burn like a fire
Hold me close to you as we brace for flight

A moment of love

Of all I've watched about my favorite drama, Will It Snow For Christmas, with a lot of sweet moments together with tragic clichés, don't know why I've always felt so thrilled each time replaying this scene:

 

 

 

 

This is when Ji Wan was still pretending not to recognize Kang Jin, after eight years of separation due to a tragic accident which killed her beloved brother in his attempt to help Ji Wan find Kang Jin's treasured pendant under the cold river. Overwhelmed with grief and guilt, Ji Wang ran away from home and disappeared from Kang Jin's world all of a sudden. Eight years later, when fate led their paths to cross again, no matter how vivid and clear their memories about each other were, Ji Wan tried her best to the deny the truth of Kang Jin's identity. Either for her or for Kang Jin's sake, she kept pushing him away, claiming not to know who he was even though just hearing his name was enough to make her body tremble, and suffocate her heart. But still, stubbornly and hurtfully, her answer always was "I don't know" when asked "Do you know who I am?" by Kang Jin. We, however, all know that in their hearts, the right answer was already done, but buried deep down under a lot of complex and messy emotions.

To me, this very short moment, which on the surface appeared not to be very important or emotion-packed, was when Ji Wan, in some way, confessed her recognition of her childhood Kang Jin for the very first time. As she was trying to hide the scratches on her hand from Kang Jin's eyes, my mind asked on the spot "Why does she have to do that?". It was totally not something so serious to hide. Would anybody else mind some scratches that much?  And my answer is: because it was Kang Jin who was standing there, HER Kang Jin, not anybody else with the same name, she knew that he would mind. She knew that only her Kang Jin would get mad seeing her acting foolishly trying to save a man who had left her alone in an engagement ceremony. Yes, she knew it. Because in her heart, she knew this simply was her "Kang Jin-oppa".

And then, only Kang Jin, in his turn, could be the one who realized what Ji Wan was hiding and pull it out of the dark in fury. The moment he grasped her arm and stared at her wound, I felt an overflow mixed of love, anger, frustration and pity bursting out from his eyes as well as repressed in his strong grasp. Because he knew it was HIS Ji Wan, the foolish, stubborn yet adorable girl whose name he had screamed out loud in the past. This Ji Wan, who liked to interfere with people's business, she'd rather hurt herself than see others getting hurt. Yes, this is the Ji Wan whom he has been searching through the last eight years. How come he didn't mind those scratches she bore for the sake of a worthless person? How come he didn't get mad at her stupidity? This very moment touched me so deep as in Kang Jin's eyes, I found no jealousy, instead I could feel how much his heart ached seeing the one he loved and treasured get hurt, mentally and physically.

Love appears in many forms. Some are colorful and bright. Some hides under a shadow. Some are intense. Some are just as gentle and soft as spring water. Some go with kisses and embraces. Some glow in eyes meeting each other. I just love the way Kang Jin loves Ji Wan, like a long piece of music with all the rise and fall of its notes, he's always there trying to protect her against any storms and get her sunlight afterward. The ways he cradles her face, strokes her hair, looks at her in the eyes, embraces her in comfort or against danger... in silence they speak a thousand words. All of that, simply the way love should be.

" I dreamed a dream. In that dream, I met Ji-wan. In the dream, I promised Ji-wan never to let her go again. That I wouldn’t be foolish like before, in our Sancheong days."

Don't let go of your dream, Kang Jin. Don't let Ji Wan cry again...

Me and friends

1. Close friends

I've got very very few of them. I call them "close" which means: they are people who can see through me, calling out both the good and evil sides of me,

My very first close friend was a beautiful, charming (and rich, like an ideal chaebol girl in K-drama) girl from junior high school. She's one of the most mature, cleverest with such insightful thoughts I've ever met of my age. No wonder she is the first and also the only one who can understand me the most to date. Our personalities are almost completely different, so it kinda amazes me thinking over how we could tolerate each other through all those years, especially when we all knew that both of us belonged to the super stubborn and pig-headed kind of girls. Since she went abroad for her study (to succeed her family's business), we haven't been in touch regularly. You may say it's me who avoids her rather than it's geographical distance to blame. Don't ask me the reason, it may sounds stupid to some but to those who know what kind of person I am, they will not wonder so much about this. However, no matter what happens and however much we may change in course of time, I know that forever she's a friend that I never can forget for my entire life.

The second one I wanna mention here is another girl from high school. She's also pretty and very smart (in many ways, except for the matter of foreign languages). If the first one mentioned above is the one who can understand me best, this second is someone who had to tolerate me the most, over last eight years, I suppose. Maybe it's just my super luck to find her, an extremely out-going personality so that she could easily forgive and forget all of my madness from time to time. She's the one who taught me lots about life, I mean "normal life" - literally. I don't know if it's due to the fact that I was born in autumn, people tend to look at me (and I also get it myself) as a girl-with-her-mind-in-the-clouds. That's why to some ordinary matters of life, I appear to be an strangely ignorant person, much that she had no choice other than holding back her laughter and teaching me how to deal with such things.

The third one, a girl again. But actually she's much younger than me. She not as pretty as the other two but charming and has her charisma. I bet many must feel jealous at her attractiveness. If you wanna find someone who can be crazier, more impulsive, moodier than me, it's her. But she's got an admirable talent for language and imagination. At the age of fifteen, she already had a short story which was spread over hundreds of local online forums and personal blogs. But above all of that, to me she's like a guardian angel. A true angel in its beautiful meaning. She always appeared in time when I was at my lowest stage or in the very worst circumstances of my early life. She gave me her hands, raising me up, comforting me then disappeared again, back to her non-stop journeys (she travels a lot). But as  told you earlier, because she's not less crazy than me, we fought a lot over many tiny things. However, we both know where to stop before things get out of hands and in our heart, we see each other as someone who cannot be traded for just nonsensical stuff, thus, we know what it is to reconcile and treasure one another after all.

The forth, and also the final for today, is a boy. The only boy who can accept me as who I am, an ugly, weird, hot-tempered, arrogant, straight-forward girl, and a cold-minded friend who can throw hash words at him any time if she's mad or when he acts foolishly over something. The best guy I've ever met (even a thousand times better than my ex) but also the guy I never can LOVE as a girl does a boy. Yes, it's kind of a mysterious question for which I can't find an appropriate answer yet. He's just someone who leaves me messages of comfort everytime I'm in bad mood, knowing that I never answer them. He listens to my petty stories hour after hour until my phone account is out of balance. He drives me along the dark, flooded streets in the heavy rain of a summer night to make sure I'm home safe and sound. He collects pictures of my Mom, who is also his teacher, in their field trip to send me via Y!M because he knows that I would love to see them. He's someone about whom another close friend of mine once said: "Whatever may come, I know he'll never leave you alone."

2. Buddies

I call them buddies because they're friends who I can share some moments but not those who can be by my side at critical times. I've got quite a lot of them since my enrollment to the university and through my jobs as well. They're all nice, they left me something to remember, but I know when time passes by, I may fade away in their memories and vice versa.

3. Online friends

Well, it's kinda strange that some of my best friends come from the Internet world, where people find it hard to build up any long-term relationships. I got my first online friends in high school time and now they're still my special friends. It's been almost eight years, I think. Later I also made some more online buddies but don't know why they couldn't become as close as the first ones did to me. Perhaps it was because of me. I changed, indeed. I closed down my world and was afraid to deal with anyone/anything wholeheartedly. I didn't proactively approach anyone for years like I used to, and consequently, my inner world became smaller and smaller until one day it was too narrow to accept anything new.

These days, suddenly I felt an urge to reach out to the world again. It's like how Kang Suk felt when he could resume his love with Dan Ah (in Family's Honour), that "I feel like can breath again, can live properly again". This morning, when an older sister, who I first met in a forum and we felt in loves as sisters, asked me if it's fun to be a "fangirl", I answered without any second of hesitation "It is. I feel like I'm living again." She said if we had a chance to meet again, she would hug me ten times for what I said today which many others have longed to hear from me for so long.

4. Disconnected relationships

I'm not talking about those I hate because I would never mind giving any room in my mind and any minute of my time thinking about them. Instead, I'm gonna write about why I dropped some should-have-been-good relationships.

To me, people in such relationships are all good, at least they're as fine as ordinary buddies to whom I wanna give some of my thought. But for some reasons, I felt unable to bring myself to handle all of them. Our connections were like loose strings on which I had to spend time and effort to keep them... as loose as ever. That made me tired, my mind tired and my body also tired. I totally understand they all were nice and nothing wrong if they wanted to deliver me some sweet words, "bubble care" but like I said, maybe I'm a crazy, weird and greedy creature who doesn't know what it is to be content, I just felt like needing some gentle touches, some radiant smiles, some vivid voices, some body warmth, some more actions of care so that I know they were real, our relationships were real. Then, once things went off my limits, I ran away. And that's how I gave up, cowardly and irresponsibly. From time to time, I do wonder: is there anything wrong with me?

Me and family

1. Brother
2. Mom
3. Dad
4. Grandfather (dad's side)
5. How I was raised

(edit later)

Me and dreams

1. What I dreamed of

When I had to make a choice of which university I should enroll, I chose my current one 'cos I dreamed of being an expert of Japanese so that I could go (back) to Japan someday. I loved Japanese comics, some of which were so brilliant that they did effect my view of life back then.

I wanted to become a successful business woman so that I could earn lots of money as well as fame. I wanted to be recognized, to be honored. It was just a dream, I told you.

I wanted to built a gorgeous house for my family, and in order to do that, I knew I must study hard to earn enough money. It wasn't just a dream, I was a promise which I don't know if I can keep.

2. What I'm dreaming of

I don't know if it still can be called a dream once you can see a clear way to achieve it. So, I'm just gonna count what I've still got no idea how and what to do as "dreams".

I'm dreaming of the day when there's someone who can wake my heart up from death. I don't hate people for what I've got through, just simply I don't and can't feel anything after which.  There were some trying to act cool to me, but all I could do was... running away from them, and now I still am. Is this bad, I mean my present condition?

I still want to make the dream of that gorgeous house come true but it seems so hard for me at the moment, especially as I haven't got much vision of where life will lead me in several years to come.

I want to become an excellent translator. It's far more difficult than people think it is. Being good at a foreign language doesn't mean you can be a good translator. It takes you tons of study and years of life experience. I wish for a day when my translation of a foreign literary work appears on the bookshelves of local bookstores, and my name can be found under the book title as its main translator. I don't know why I love this job so much though it doesn't earn me much. No translator can be rich without another job.

3. What I did to my dreams

To some, I abandoned completely. The business woman, for instance.  After all I've got through in my fucking university (which is considered as one of the best domestic schools), I'm now pretty determined to become a professor like my Mom, by which I can help reduce the increasing number of crappy, heartless and irresponsible teachers in this country. One more reason for the abandonment is that after more than a year working in that famous company, I realized business environment is not where I can fit myself in. I worked hard and earned some recognition but all the time I felt like an actor on stage, putting on just fake appearance. I got almost no friends there and every work day left me exhausted.

To some, I hardly manage to carry on. Going to Japan is among them. To tell the truth, I'm really sick of the language but an inner voice tells me not to give up since I've been going this far. Mom is going to to find me a school in Japan next year and she's hoping that I can be accepted to her old school, a prestigious one. Do I owe you for any huge debts in my past life, Japanese?

4. What I'm doing to realize my dreams

I'm still struggling with my resistance to Japanese. If it's not for the sake of my further study and the dream of becoming a professor, I would kill anyone who dares to spill a single Japanese word in front of me. I like my Japanese name, which means "a beautiful flower" and sounds similar to my real name, I like Japanese manga and anime, I like Japanese arts but they're not enough to serve as a motivation in this situation, where I find myself totally lack the so-called "passion".

I'm going to study hard for the final graduation exams so that I can make up a little for the poor academic result at school over 4 years. I will follow anything my parents tell me to do and let them show me a way. I've been really really tired during the nightmare so I think moving on on a good path is somehow a good way to rest.

I'm gonna be a good child again from now on.

Me and life

1. Who I am

I was born in fall which is said to be the season of poetry. I really like this season and thus, am very proud of my month of birth. But it's kinda strange that no matter how I favor September as well as its yellow-turns-red leaves and cool breezes, summer appears to be the most lucky season of the year for me. I don't hate winter, the time that teaches me the meaning of warmth and hugs. It also allows me to show off my huge collection of winter coats which helps change my colors every single day. "You look like a colorful ice-cream" - said a classmate when I was in junior high school. However, winter, with its cold and rough weather, plays as the toughest  time of a year for me. The worst things I've encountered in my life so far all happened on winter background. If a friend is close enough, he/she never cares to leave me any greetings on Christmas 'cos they know it's the time I hate the most of the year. 10 years in a row, this year included, Christmas was such a nightmare to me, as if I'd been cast under a cruel spell against the season. Since the death of my grandfather (dad's side), spring is no long special to me. I even want it to pass faster so that I can go back to my daily routine in summer. This is how I enjoy a year.

Parents, close friends and strangers, they all tend to use one word to describe me: WEIRD. They find it hard to understand what's going on in my mind, and sometimes frustration is the only thing they can get as my reactions go against all of their predictions. But also, there's one thing on which they all agree and thanks to which I'm not abandoned despite my weirdness, that is: I always am the one in front of whom they can put their hearts on their sleeves without being afraid of any hurt.

2. How I lived

For the first 19 years of my life, I was a good child to my family. I made them so proud that they could boast about their daughter anytime, anywhere. I was all new to the outer world, and hence, to me it was beautiful and fantastic. I could easily trust people and believed that my kindness would be repaid with kindness. My heart was wide open (although my behaviors appeared to be not) and I did everything with 100% enthusiasm. My friend said I was so innocent back then, yet most beautiful.

For the next 3 years, after I first experienced what it was to be heart-broken and betrayed, I began my long journey to see this world more clearly. Let alone I let my study drop off shamefully, I was a true rebel against my family. I got a job in a famous company which is a dream place for many people. I worked like a professional and never in my life, I'd had to smile that much. Yah, I say "had to" because it wasn't what I "wanted to". My friend, again, said "You seem to smile a lot more and easy-going towards people, but your heart is closed". It was the darkest time in my life so far, the worst and longest nightmare I've ever had.

3. How I want to live

Now, as the nightmare is gone, I wanna be back to my true self. It may not be so good and professional-look, but it's simply who I am.

To me, a day would be perfect if I wake up after a sound sleep, do some house chores, read books, listen to music, cook delicious meals, write several words about something I like, learn foreign languages, meet a nice friend and on that day, there shouldn't be so much sound.

I don't have many friends and I don't want to, either. I can't handle so many relationships at the same time even though I tried hard. However, on the other hand, I want to open my heart again, to let people in and let them decide to stay with me or not. It feels better than to live like a moving creature with a dead heart, I think.

4. How I'm gonna live

The idea "how I'm going to live" is not always the same as "how I want to live", but for once, I'm wanting them to be one.

I'm going back home soon, to start all over again. Maybe in one year, I'll be leaving it again but I believe it'll be different this time. Because it's the journey that everyone earnestly wants me to take so that they can see a bright me back.

Overwhelmed with emotions...

...after watching 6 eps of my favorite drama in a sitting.

What is love about?

What is fear about?

What is fighting about?

He's strong. He's smart. He's determined. He'd never lost to anyone. But he lost her. And he got hurt. So badly. He moved on, he succeeded but it feels like there always is hole unable to be filled in his heart. Until one day, he found her. Again.

She appeared to be strong, spunky, upbeat girl yet still had a fragile heart. She's not smart. But she's also determined. Determined enough to run away from home after her brother's death, blaming herself for causing it, torturing her heart over years. Guilt and fear have filled up her life. She hid herself in a dark, stuffy room as if she also closed herself against the world. She had lived that life for eight years. Until one day, she met him. Again.

If it was her who gave him the warmth of innocent love in the past, now it is him who gives her light of forgiving love to bring her back to life. Cradling her in his arms, installing a window to her room, protecting her against danger with his own life... step by step, he pulls her out of the nut-shell in her heart, teaching her forgiveness and at the same time, finding the answers for so many questions having been left out since their broken past.

People say, love is a kind of magnet which pulls two persons irresistibly close together. That's how fate led them back to one another. "To find each other again. To forgive again. And to love again." But because happiness is something so ultimate and treasured, they must fight hard, experiencing the final yet most hurtful stage of pain before they can find it.

Will it snow for Christmas?

I'm just praying for the purest white snowflakes to land on their smiles this Christmas and then echoing in their hearts, we hear "spring is coming".

Messy 1

I don't really know why I got mad like that.

Jealous?

Sad?

Losing?

I don't know...