My Name is Jisoo and I am worthy of love.
I wrote that on a post-it note on my mirror and look at it everyday
If I read it often enough, maybe I’ll believe it’s true.
I am deserving of love!
I don’t mean it in a creepy Incel way, of course. I’m not angry at the world nor the many women – many many many many women – who have rejected me. They deserve their happiness. I just want to believe that one day I’ll get a piece of that happiness as well.
After all these years, I sometimes feel as though the universe is trying to tell me something.
Why do I always fall in love with the wrong person?
It started when I was seventeen. I fell for a girl in my high school but she turned out to be a 34-year-old mother of a girl my own age. A mother! An Ahjumma!
I remember the first time she tied my shoelace, I never felt like that before. But then I found out the truth and knew it could never be.
My feelings didn’t change, of course. But I also knew it was impossible. I knew it.
Fast forward two years and I had gotten my life together and was a perfect student at en elite school. There was this whole thing where I took up cheerleading for some reason, but that’s not important. What matters is that now the object of my affections was my age. No secret identity. No future step daughter I had to call Chingu. But she still never looked at me. Instead she went and fell for my best friend and all I could do was watch. The two people I love the most are happy, that’s all that matters. But, still…
The whole thing must have affected my subconscious because I had a series of terrible nightmares where I was a prince in the Joseon era in love with my brother’s woman. I even got to marry her but she still never loved me and then she died. Seriously. This was getting to be a problem.
After some thought, I decided to pursue a career in law enforcement. I hadn’t done it long before I discovered my feelings for a childhood best friend who turned out to have superpowers. Turns out I’d unknowingly been in love with her for years and also that she had super strength. These were two large revelations to come to terms with.
I should have worked out my feelings earlier because by the time I realised I was in love with her she’d already chosen her man – a genius games designer and improbably-successful CEO who looked like he was in a boy band. There goes that.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’m starting to feel like there’s something wrong with my life. Like it’s deliberate in some way? Like life is a drama and I’m an actor being perpetually cast as the second male lead. It seems like I can’t get a part-time job or go to the hospital without being reminded that girls always choose the other guy and are happier for it.
Is this my life?
Pining from the sidelines as everyone else gets their happily ever after?
Not even able to be bitter or angry about it because I know they made the right choice?
I do want love, I do want company, I do want to grow old with somebody.
I do want what other men seem to get handed to them – almost as if they are the stars of their lives and I’m just in a supporting role.
I am Jisoo.
I want a happily ever after.
Author’s Note: This is the next instalment in the popular series: Things DB didn’t publish
Invisible Pink Dragon 