Life like a K-Drama’s Final Episode

I wish life was like that 16th episode of kdramas. Wouldn’t you love it when everything with an open end comes to a close leaving our hearts filled with happiness? Because now, we no longer need to wonder oh..will things finally fall into place? will we ever understand why things happened the way they did? We will finally get answers to long standing mysteries that will make us go ohhh...this was it. Throughout the episode, we see a todo list of unresolved feelings, unanswered questions and misunderstandings, one by one is struck off, so we can take that burden off our heart too. In the end, nothing beats it, when it comes to watching all our favourite characters brimming with happiness and when everyone has figured it all out. It all leads to the scenes slowly dimming out, with the words ‘they lived happily ever after’ flashing on our screen .

But life can never stay in its 16th episode forever because eventually, we have to bid our goodbyes even to this bliss and start afresh. In our life, we have to have our fair share of Episode 1s before we make it to our sweet 16s. In these segments, nothing comes easy, we meet tons of new characters and make it to new places, which makes it all exhausting. No matter how hard it is to let go of that comfortable sea side restaurant and familiar people who became a part of your life, it is now time to spend time in that bustling city, meet your new coworkers and start new things you found daunting once. You wince at the fact that it’s gonna take you a good while before you get used to it all. To make matters worse, you find yourselves comparing it to the comfort of your old life so much that you have to remind yourself that you once struggled to understand those old phases too and how long it took before they slowly became your comfort. No matter how awkward and unfamiliar it feels, you still have to go through your share of Episode 1s before you finally learn your way around and slowly begin to belong there.

If we move past those painfully boring Episode 1s, you will discover beautiful Episode 8s in your life. This part feels like cherry blossoms and picnics. You finally grow attached to the people around you, the new place you live in and the life you slowly built there. Everything that gave you anxiety during your Episode 1s finally comes around and embraces you like a warm hug. Even though you don’t fully understand why, you just like it the way IT IS, because your attachment towards it goes beyond your basic understanding of comfort. It is something new yet something you have given place in your heart not because you have resigned to fate but because you genuinely like it for what it is. You feel happy and giddy all the time and feel like you have finally found your place, the people and routines that slowly became your comfort; and you want time to freeze here because it took you this long to finally find happiness here.

But when all seems to be going perfect, you notice a few mismatches. You enter the infamous Episode 13s where everything starts to make sense at the same time it doesn’t. You understand that no matter how much you liked it for the way it is, sometimes it becomes hard to keep up without explanations. You overlooked a few things that bothered you, made a few adjustments all because you wanted to avoid conflict and settle into this new place. But you realize that you rushed through everything just to settle quickly, avoid conflict and escape the discomfort Episode 1s gave. But the faster life rushed from Episode 1s to Episode 8s, the harder Episode 13s hit. Because now you realize there were way too many feelings left unchecked, way too many moments where you stayed silent when you should have spoken up and far too many feelings left hurt because of it. It feels like you are back to square one but now that you know this place and actually started to like the life you built there, it hurts in a way you can’t simply ignore and move on from. You can’t pretend things are fine when they actually aren’t because that only delays the Episode 16s of your life. So you finally gather the courage to face it. You confront the things you kept avoiding, acknowledge what went wrong and finally try to make peace with it all. It was just as difficult as the Episode 1s, but what unfolds afterward is something beautiful you never expected. Before Episode 16s, we have the unsung 14s and 15s where we finally get to see the other side of the story. When you once liked it without fully understanding it, it somehow becomes even sweeter to finally understand WHY it became the way it is. And somehow, that only makes you love it even more. Now finally you love it for how it makes YOU FEEL on top of what it is.

This leads us to the happy Episode 16. Now we no longer need to wonder oh..will everything finally make sense? Because now, a todo list of things left unsaid, unresolved feelings and unanswered questions are all struck off, finally giving us the happily ever after we longed for.

But it still leaves us feeling bittersweet in a way we cannot explain when it is finally time to say goodbye to all the characters, as always. Because like how you said to yourself before starting all this, life can never stay in its 16th episode forever and eventually, we have to bid goodbye and start afresh. We promise ourselves we will revisit them someday, but deep down we know that is not something we can truly guarantee. That’s the fleeting beauty of temporary things. For a while, a really good while, you lived in the city as one of them, laughed with them, cried with them and tried too hard to reason with everything while still understanding why things unfolded the way they did. And now it is finally time for you to say goodbye to them. Move on and start a new journey afresh.

You might be wondering: If life is all really just a k-drama then when will my 16th episode arrive? The answer is well life is for sure unpredictable. Life doesn’t give every phase the same happy 16-episode K-drama ending. Sometimes it’s an unfinished thriller hanging at just 8 episodes, sometimes it’s a melancholy drama with a sad ending, sometimes it has a poorly written romance in it and sometimes none at all. But somehow, none of this changes the fact that these experiences make who you are today… after all, we are all pieces of what we love and what we go through.