[KD] Thousand Day Promise: Episode 5

Ji-hyung and Jae-min share a drink, and Ji-hyung confesses that he
regrets it – regrets thinking that being the dutiful son was the right
choice, when all he had to do was cast off that burden. He says he
should’ve let it go, that he mistakenly thought that not stirring up
trouble was the most important thing.

Jae-min tells him that he gave Seo-yeon his message, and that she
said not to worry about her. Ji-hyung asks him to tell her that it
wasn’t because he loved her any less, and how sorry he is. “I already
know how pathetic I am. That I’ll spend the rest of my life being
pathetic.” Yes, while that’s not untrue, it also does nothing for
anyone, does it?



He adds that she should forget him as quickly as possible, and
Jae-min tells him it’s pretty funny for him to be worried about that –
she’s her and he’s him, so it’s really none of his concern anymore.

Jae-min reminds him that Seo-yeon hates dangling threads, loose ends.
Ji-hyung sighs, “I know. But Jae-min-ah, I think I’ll be dangling my
whole life.” Jae-min counters that he’s overstepping to worry about her.
He knows it, but can’t help worrying anyway.

Ji-hyung loosens his tie, sighing that at least sitting here like
this with Jae-min feels like he’s got a needle’s worth of breathing
room. It’s a nice visual both as an action and a metaphor, because he’s
so utterly suffocated by his life.



Myung-hee denies Moon-kwon’s request to quit working at her bakery
(because he brings in the high school girls, ha) and at home she wonders
if it’s because Seo-yeon is mad at her or something.

She confesses to badmouthing her when her husband pointed out a
picture in a magazine saying it looked like Seo-yeon, and now she’s
convinced Moon-kwon overheard and now both of them are mad. Ha. If only
that was the height of their troubles, lady.

Jae-min tells Ji-hyung to stop being a crybaby and get it together.
There’s nothing he can do for her anymore because she wants nothing to
do with him. “So just consider her dead.” Ji-hyung says he gets it, and
tears brimming, he asks that Seo-yeon at least know that it wasn’t
because he loved her any less, and that he’ll spend the rest of his life
endlessly sorry. Dude, what good does that do for anyone? GUH.



They get up to pay, and Jae-min heads to the counter… where he runs
into Seo-yeon’s doctor. Oh. The doc recognizes him as Seo-yeon’s
guardian and asks if he’s spoken to her about needing treatment soon.
Jae-min says he hasn’t yet, and they part ways.

But Ji-hyung’s heard enough to know something’s seriously wrong with
Seo-yeon, if Jae-min has met with a doctor because of her, and that if
it were really nothing as Jae-min insists, the doctor wouldn’t be
concerned with her treatment.

He asks what it is, if it’s cancer, what’s wrong. Jae-min holds his
ground, insisting that they’re over and it’s Seo-yeon’s business. It
starts to get heated as Ji-hyung relentlessly asks what’s wrong, and how
he could stand here and pretend not to hear.



Jae-min: “She wouldn’t want you to know and neither do I. It has
nothing to do with you – it’s our family, our business!” It turns into a
shouting match as Ji-hyung pleads, but Jae-min refuses and sends him
away. I want him to know, but I adore Jae-min for not making it easy.

Ji-hyung runs back into the restaurant to look for the doctor
himself, and catches up to him on the street. He pleads with the doctor
to tell him what’s wrong, insisting that he’s Seo-yeon’s boyfriend and
her guardian too.

The doc says he can’t tell him because it’s the family’s private
matter. Ji-hyung begs, asking if it’s cancer. The doc tells him that if
he comes to the hospital tomorrow with Seo-yeon herself, then he’ll tell
him everything. He adds that even if it’s not with him, she needs
treatment.



Jae-min walks along and runs into Seo-yeon walking home just ahead of
him. She’s barefoot and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in English, for some
reason. Well that’s just the oddest drunk behavior I’ve seen to date.

He runs up and finds that she’s had some drinks, which she announces
happily, since it was to celebrate her surprise bonus. She grins from
ear to ear as she tells him it’s lots and lots of money, and she had a
great time singing and dancing and drinking.



He worries about her feet, and she says she didn’t want to stumble in
her heels and there was no one, so she just took ‘em off. He says that
she should’ve called him or Moon-kwon, and says that he’s here now.

He bends down to put her shoes back on, worried about her cutting up
her feet, and offers to walk her home. Swooooooon. He insists on
carrying her purse too, and she takes his arm, laughing that it’ll look
like they’re dating.



She leans on him as they walk. “Oppa, thank you.” She says she’s
grateful to Aunt and Uncle, Myung-hee and her husband too. “But I’m most
grateful to you. Why? Because you always quietly took care of me.
You’ve never hurt me, or made me feel like it was a burden. To me, you
were always my biggest background.”

He asks why she’s talking in the past tense. She quickly corrects
herself, “No, it’s past, present and future. Oppa you need to protect
me. Don’t find a girlfriend. If you find a girlfriend and stop paying
attention to me, I’ll be mad.”



Jae-min smiles, “That’s a really selfish thing to say.” Seo-yeon:
“That’s right. I’m selfish. I’m going to be selfish.” She lets out a
heavy, shaky sigh.

These two kill me. I don’t know if I’ve ever watched a drama where I
cared LESS about the romantic relationship than I do about the oppa one,
but damn.

He walks her home and watches her go up with a heavy heart. He gets a
text from Ji-hyung, naming Seo-yeon’s doctor and his appointment with
him tomorrow at 3. He calls and Ji-hyung totally lies that he’ll hear it
from the doc tomorrow anyway, so Jae-min should just tell him now.



Urg, I’m so torn between wanting him to know but not wanting to give
him the satisfaction of knowing. He finally railroads Jae-min into
coughing up the truth, after swearing to keep it a secret from Seo-yeon.
“It’s Alzheimer’s.”

Stunned, Ji-hyung goes through the same process of denial, wondering
how it could be possible in someone so young, if maybe she was
misdiagnosed. But no, Jae-min’s been down that road already, and
researched doctors to know that hers is a well-respected one in his
field. According to the doctor, she’s had it for about two years now
(which would explain the long-term use of painkillers without an end to
the headaches).

Jae-min tells him to just think of it as Seo-yeon’s fate, and not to
feel guilt over it. “Do you see now why I said there’s nothing you can
do?” He points out that Ji-hyung’s a week away from his wedding. Ugh.
Jae-min asks him to keep his promise and not get involved.



At home, Moon-kwon puts on a brave face and promises to deal with the
part-time job situation himself, rather than have Seo-yeon get
involved. He panics for a moment when she struggles to remember the word
for cereal as they talk about what to eat for breakfast. Both of them
lurch for a moment, but then she finds the word.

He worries under his breath about her drinking, but it comes out loud
enough for her to hear. He covers it up by saying that he’s just
worried that it’ll be hard on her in the morning, but she smiles it off
and says to worry about himself.

Ji-hyung sits staring blankly, as it starts to sink in. He flashes
back to a happy moment in bed, when he had lied about not being
ticklish. She insisted on testing it to be sure, when he caved and
admitted to lying about it.



She wondered why on earth he’d lie about that, and he says it was to
appear impressive in her eyes. She in turn tells him that when she was
young she had an outy bellybutton, but it just changed one day, and now
when she gives a push, she can turn it back into an outy. He totally
falls for it and she laughs, wondering who’d fall for something so dumb.

It leads him to another memory, of the time they ran into each other
at an art gallery, the first time they had seen each other in over eight
years. He had returned from studying abroad, and it was long enough of a
separation for them to not recognize each other right away.



He points out that they saw each other three years ago, when he came
in to see Jae-min, which she had forgotten. He marvels at how she looks
the same, and notices that she doesn’t put sugar in her coffee. “Because
they say it’s bad for you. I have to live a long time.”

She asks about his fiancée, and when he’s getting married. He says in
about a year… and as they have coffee, he asks her to lunch. And then
as they have lunch, he asks her to dinner.



After dinner they walk along the river, holding hands. Ji-hyung:
“What is this feeling? As if… since ages ago, since before I was born,
since a thousand years before… I’ve been waiting for today.”

She tells him for her it’s déjà vu. She doesn’t believe in past
lives, but she has the feeling that they’ve been here before, just like
this, maybe in memory, maybe in dreams. He adds a vote to the past lives
theory.

Back in the present, he weeps.



The next day he heads out of the hospital and has another memory, of
Seo-yeon singing him happy birthday. He kisses her before she can finish
the song and she sighs that she’d like to die right then and there.

What a heartbreaking thing to remember – something she said to mean
how happy she was, but now just ringing in his ears tragically.

Seo-yeon spends the day at work in good spirits, until she gets a
call at her desk. It’s Ji-hyung, waiting for her downstairs. She braces
herself and meets him, repeating herself curtly that she’s fine and he
needn’t do this.



But he launches straight into it, telling her that he made an
appointment with a new doctor, that they’re going to get a second
opinion, that she needs to start treatment. She looks up at him in
shock. “How? How do you know?”

He tells her that he found out from Jae-min. “Oppa? How? How does he know?” Ohgod ohgod ohgod ohgod….

Ji-hyung and Jae-min sit across the table from her, side by side. She
buries her head in her hands, balled up as fists the entire time.



Finally she speaks, without looking up at either of them. She insists
that she’s not a patient, not until she says she is. She’s fine.
Jae-min agrees then that it’s possible if she gets reexamined…

But she cuts him off that she found the best doctor, and he should
fold that last bit of hope. Ji-hyung tries to chime in but she cuts him
off coldly, in jondae, not to concern himself with it.

She tells Jae-min not to concern himself with it either, and he bites
back, “How can you say something like that?!” She asks what he can do
about it, and he tells her that there’s ways to treat it, to slow it, to
wait till there’s a cure.



Seo-yeon: “Oppa, rather than growing old and stupid, I want to hurry,
hurry, and end it.” She tells him that she has no intention of becoming
a useless burden to the people around her, just sucking up their pity.

Ji-hyung tells her that it’s different, case by case. She could have
ten years, maybe more. Seo-yeon: “What use is that? If I live a long
long time as an empty shell, getting into trouble, shaving precious time
from precious people – will I be immortalized forever?”

Ji-hyung: “Do you want to be dragged there, or do you want to go
willingly?” Seo-yeon: “Stop pretending to be the good guy and get the
hell out.”

She throws his concern right back in his face, asking if he wants to
drag her to the hospital so she can hear the same diagnosis all over
again, so he can sigh and say he did all he could, and feel good about
it? “My problem is so big, that I don’t have time to do that for you.”



Ooof. There’s just something so fierce and raw about her pride even in a situation like this – it just resonates with me.

She gets up to go, and Ji-hyung blocks her path. She tells him that
she’s perfectly fine, and rattles off all the things she’s handling
right now, at work, in her life, how she’s perfectly normal.

Ji-hyung says that maybe it means she’s really fine, so if they see
another doctor… But she pleads them not to make her hear it again. If
she hears that diagnosis one more time, she can’t ignore it, can’t deny
it. She’s scared she’ll just give up and collapse.



She looks over at Jae-min, “Until I got into really big trouble, I
didn’t want anyone to know. My pride… it hurts a lot.” She walks past
him to the door, but falters as soon as she reaches the handle. She
crouches down, unable to stand.

The guys get up and Ji-hyung rushes to her side. She leans on him and
clutches his arm, but she turns to Jae-min. Trembling, “Oppa, oppa,
take me home.”



He comes over and picks her up out of Ji-hyung’s grasp, and she hugs
him for dear life, wailing like a child. She cries into his shoulder, as
Ji-hyung stands aside and cries silently. I can’t even see them through
my tears.

Ji-hyung watches silently from the sidelines, unable to do anything
for her, as Jae-min takes her to the car, puts on her seatbelt, and
drives her away.



Over at Ji-hyung’s house, the moms-in-law meet up, and despite my
hatred for this world and all its ridiculousness, I do love these two
moms and their hilarious conversations. Today Ji-hyung’s mom gripes
about her friend’s over-shortening of words, which is totally a gripe I
share about Korean slang and its obsession with senseless compounding
and shortening till words are no longer words, and everything is an
acronym.

Hyang-gi’s mom in turn wonders if she ought to buy Ji-hyung a new
car. Mom says no, that’s silly, so then she asks, “Do you want a new
car?” She asks what the obsession with cars is, and she admits that a
friend of hers married off her daughter with five new cars. Ji-hyung’s
mom: “Did she have two heads?” Hahaha.

Hyang-gi’s mom goes so far as to worry about Ji-hyung and his, er,
reproductive health, making everyone else cringe at her boundary issues.



Jae-min drops Seo-yeon off at home, and she insists that she’s fine
and back to her normal self. She tells him that she doesn’t want Aunt
and Uncle to worry, or to have Unni clucking at her, so to wait until
after she’s lost her mind to tell them. He says he understands and
promises to do so.

He calls Moon-kwon to tell him what’s happened, and he runs home with
lightning speed, crying the whole way. He arrives out of breath and
struggles to tamp down his tears before bracing himself and knocking on
her door.

There’s no answer so he opens it cautiously. She lashes out at him,
furious that he went through her things, that he told Jae-min. She asks
how he could spill that secret so easily. Trembling, he admits the
truth:

Moon-kwon: Because it was too big for me to handle! Because I was so scared!
Seo-yeon: So what are you going to do about it? Are you
going to be sick in my place? Are you going to swap my head for yours?
Can you do that?!
Moon-kwon: If that’s something I could do, I’d do it right now! If it meant that you could live, I’d jump off this roof right now!
Seo-yeon: You say something stupid like that one more time! Do you want to be beaten?!
Moon-kwon: How long did you think you could hide it?
What is there to hide? Am I a stranger? If you’re hurting then I have to
be hurting with you. Noona, if I were hurting, would you just be
whistling and pretending not to know?
Seo-yeon: I’m not… ready yet. I can’t acknowledge it.

She refuses to face it, the dirty rotten luck of a girl abandoned by
both her parents. He says that Dad didn’t abandon them, but she bites
back that dying that young is the same thing as abandoning them. (Which
means this is what she feels about leaving Moon-kwon behind, of course.)

He pleads with her to start taking her meds, but she ignores him,
zooming past to change the subject and order food. She asks for her
phone and he has to tell her that she left her purse at work, and that
Jae-min is having it sent over by courier.

She flinches at the slip and then asks for his phone then, trying her damnedest to get past this moment and this conversation.



Ji-hyung calls Jae-min to check in, worrying endlessly with no
outlet. He asks for Seo-yeon’s number, “just to have it,” but Jae-min
tells him to back off from here on out.

He looks over the city at night, remembering Seo-yeon telling him
that she loved him over and over, and the first moment when she knew,
the day they first met. In voiceover, Seo-yeon: “Since the day I met
you, I was zapped like lightning. Why, I wonder? You weren’t even that
impressive. Why, I wonder?”




COMMENTS

Every time I’m more and more impressed by Su Ae. Seo-yeon’s
prickliness could be extremely off-putting if she weren’t playing it all
with such a deep undercurrent of vulnerability and sadness. You can see
it on her face – the mask of denial and strength that she’s so desperately trying to keep up, everything she’s feeling underneath the words that come out of her mouth.

It makes her character so three-dimensional for me, because real
people don’t say what they mean. They coat it, in pride, in anger, in
misplaced blame. I’d be the same way, clinging uselessly to pride and
denial because it’s safe, it’s what I know. I love that she doesn’t
sugarcoat things for other people—it’s for HER, because she can’t face
losing control of her life. That feels so utterly real that it’s kind of
gut-wrenching to watch her falter.

The brothers continue to be the real heroes of the piece so far, but
we do get our first glimpse of Ji-hyung’s transformation, just on the
brink. He has yet to actually act – to put his money where his mouth is,
so to speak – but the courage seems to be rising. I’m just glad that
this drama dispenses with the secret-keeping, and that people just find
out what they need to know swiftly, refusing to let them live in the
safety of denial. It’s like the world or Fate pushes everyone out of
complacency, trauma be damned. It sucks for them, but it’s awesome for
us.

Structurally, I love that the romance plays out in the past. Somehow
keeping it trapped there, only in memory, is maybe the most tragic thing
of all. They play out like bubbles of time that can’t help but be
tinged with sadness, no matter how happy they are in the moment, because
it’s already gone. That inside-out feeling is a nice effect because it
puts them on the outside, looking in on something that is no longer
there. I don’t know why, but that kind of sadness gets to me more than
two people breaking down and crying over each other. It’s like how
insisting that you’re not going to think about someone is proof that
you’re currently thinking about them – the fact that they exist in
memory is proof that they are in the past.