Avenor (n) – The desire that memory could flow backwards.

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Golden rays of morning light peeked through the cracks of a bedroom curtain, casting circle-like splatters onto a small figure who was wrapped like a cocoon. With a blanket pulled up to her chin, she listened to the sound of life around her. Immediately, she could make out impatient scratching noises at her door made by her telepathic dogs – Bok-sun, Bok-shil, and Bok-man. Downstairs, she could hear the sizzling of a pan as her mother prepared the necessary nutrients that would fuel her through the day. If she really strained her ears, she could hear the distant screeching of a bike as the mailman delivered newspapers and made small talk with the neighbors. Almost on cue, the alarm clock on her nightstand sprang into action.

If there was one thing Choi Yoojung hated more than waking up to the sound of her alarm clock on a weekday, it would have to be waking up to the sound of her alarm on the first day of school. Make no mistake – Yoojung is a self-proclaimed cheerful, sociable, and cute but powerful girl. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy the excitement of exploring a new campus, the chattering of potential new friends, or all the new clubs that she could be involved in. Rather, she is slow to open up to strangers, and her self-proclaimed traits only want to make an appearance once she is more familiarized with others. While Yoojung has many friends, none were attending the high school that she would be calling home for the next few years. For the first time in a long time, she would be alone in a sea of unfamiliar faces and endless possibilities. What if she embarrassed herself? What if no one liked her? What if she never found new people to connect with, a wallflower yearning to bloom? These insecurities plagued Yoojung’s mind as a swift arm shot out from the blanket to put the alarm (and herself) out of misery, her eyes still glued to the ceiling.

“Yoojung ah,” A soft knock came from her door before it swung open, “you don’t want to be late for this special day.”

“I know, appa~” Yoojung muttered under the weight of her dogs as they took this opportunity to trample all over her bed and swallow her whole.

Slowly, she untangled herself from her sheets and headed to the bathroom to prepare herself. Yoojung made sure that her hair was straightened, her fringe properly curled, and the lip gloss her mother gifted her last Christmas evenly spread across her lips (light pink, but with a hint of red to indicate a sophistication that Yoojung thought she had).

As Yoojung grabbed her school bag from her chair, her eyes lingered for a fraction longer on the contents of a plain, wooden frame sitting neatly on her desk. Two individuals in a field of sunflowers on an early September morning smiled back at her. An older man was squatting down with his arms around a younger girl who couldn’t have been more than six years of age. Yoojung had spent the summer with her grandparents that year, and after sharing all her insecurities about starting primary school, her grandfather had promised a surprise to ease her anxieties. Yoojung still remembers falling asleep during the ride there. She remembers her grandfather draping his jacket over her shoulders and how she shifted uncomfortably after her legs became weary from standing for too long.

“Patience, my child,” her grandfather had said, “With patience comes good things.”

As if on cue, the sun bloomed over the horizon, golden petals stretching outwards into the blue sky and illuminating every corner of a sunflower field. To this day, Yoojung believes that there are no words that could have described how awestruck she was to see the sky fill with shades of peach and rose as rows of sunflowers stretched beyond what her eyes could capture, symbolizing hope and the start of a new beginning. When her parents came to pick her up at the end of the summer, her grandfather had pressed the photo they took that morning into the palm of her tiny hands.

“My little sunflower,” he had called her, “you were bo