all the pretty words for you

table of contents

• FIRST: idolverse purinz
• IF WE NEVER TRY: artist/teacher 2eun
• NAN CHUN: modern yubinsuyeon

first



“Don’t worry, I’m not that close to Sakura unnie,” Chaewon said clinically, toweling off her long dark hair after stepping out of the bathroom. Her legs were still dripping wet, not that Yunjin was looking. “You’re not that far behind.”

“How did you know I was worried?” Yunjin asked, already in sweats, cross-legged on her twin bed. She hadn’t said anything out loud since Chaewon had gone to shower.

“I can smell it,” Chaewon said. Yunjin believed her. “Anyway, you just have to pretend until you get close. Then you rewrite history by telling them the truth later - that you never were, and now you are.”

It felt unfair to Yunjin that Chaewon was in the position to tell her these things, even if it was useful advice. When she imagined debuting in a girl group, the ideal was always that it’d be a shared experience. Everyone’s first time. And it seemed easy for someone who was ahead to pretend the gap wasn’t as large as it was.

“Well, we could go out and do something fun, and try to get close first?”

Chaewon gave her a long look. “It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said.

“I’m just naive,” Yunjin supplied. Chaewon brushed her hair back in front of the mirror, almost like one of their instructors, who never bothered telling them they were right when the answer seemed painfully obvious already.

“Well, it’s not always a bad thing,” Chaewon conceded. “You just won’t always be as comfortable as you want to, and you have to be okay with that.”

“You’ve always seemed really closed off to me, unnie,” Yunjin said.

Chaewon’s head snapped backwards to turn towards her. “You haven’t known me that long,” she responded, but the way Yunjin’s expression changed made it clear she had betrayed herself reacting that way. The scales had tipped. Yunjin was smiling.

“You’re afraid to be vulnerable,” she observed.

“Knowing I am is a strength,” Chaewon said, stepping closer to the edge of the bed. Yunjin could see into her eyes and again, she believed her.

“Have you ever kissed someone before?” Yunjin asked.

“What kind of question is that supposed to be,” Chaewon said, answering the question for her. Yunjin answered that rhetorical question with an action instead, tilting her head up and pulling Chaewon in, closing her eyes, until Chaewon closed hers too.

“I guess there’s one way my American values have given me the advantage,” Yunjin said, satisfied.



if we never try



Naeun joins Eunji in front of the sculpture after 7:00pm, her advisor having left upon congratulating her on a successful opening.

Eunji stares up at the figure, ponytail brushing the nape of her own neck. She must have come straight from work. Her briefcase handle is worn where she’s holding it with both hands. Naeun wonders why she hasn’t replaced it yet. Because it’s Eunji, she thinks, and leaves it at that.

“It's very pretty, Naeun-ah,” Eunji says. Naeun simply stands by her side, smiles lightly. Her red heels, on uneven ground, a centimeter taller than Eunji’s black ones. “What does it mean?”

“Did you read the inscription?”

“I did,” Eunji says, “but it’s you, so I have to ask.”

“It’s a balance,” Naeun says, viewing her own work for the thousandth time, always from a different angle. “Isn’t life always about balance?”

“You’re very good at it,” Eunji tells her, turning to face Naeun. In her peripheral vision Eunji’s delicate pearl earrings look beautiful in the soft light. “You always have been.”

“I’m glad.”

Eunji is still looking at her, but Naeun can’t look back, her focus stuck on her own piece, it never feeling complete even after declaring it’s done, finally. She’d texted Eunji the night she wanted to say it. <No more>, she said, and Eunji instantly understood and texted back, <We’re going out for drinks, so leave the studio> and <You’re dead if you pick up another tool> which would have been true regardless of Eunji’s capacity to kill, because there was nothing left of her at that point. I’m lifeless, Naeun had said when Eunji picked her up at the doorstep. I know, Eunji said. Get in the car.

In theory Naeun could have taken that back. Telling Eunji she was done with her submission was in no way binding. But Eunji was the only one who could hold her to it, which was what she wanted. Of course Eunji didn’t have to stare at the alleged finished product every day until the exhibition opened, didn’t have to scrutinize it for mistakes, contemplate everything she could have done differently. All she had to do was make Naeun forget she would have to.

“I have a life outside of work and school, right?” she’d desperately cried to Eunji during the peak of her stress, a rhetorical question only because she was afraid of the answer. It might have been the first time she’d asked that, but it was probably the fiftieth time Eunji had listened to her and said she was doing just fine. Eunji always made time for her even though it felt like all Naeun could pay her back with was small paintings for her classroom, done in between hastily completed assignments and freelancing. But Eunji never had the sharp words for her and boisterous laugh she let out around Bomi, which felt awful, despite the fact that Eunji was kinder to her than any of their other friends.

“What were you trying to balance when you made this?” Eunji asks. The easy answer for Naeun to give when strangers, classmates, acquaintances, and even mentors ask this question is the balance between work and the self. But Eunji knows that, and knows her too well to not see past the surface.

“I was thinking about the tipping point,” Naeun says. “Sometimes balance is so precarious that one move sends you entirely to the other side. It’s like valuing what you already have, versus suddenly wanting so much more that you’d risk anything to have it.”

“I’d never thought of you as materialistic,” Eunji says. “You’ve never once stopped to look at the lottery numbers.” She almost says it so seriously Naeun has to laugh.

“No, not like that.”

“Then like what?”

Naeun suddenly remembered what she really meant to say the night she stopped working on her sculpture. It’s not enough, she’d thought. This isn’t fulfilling enough anymore. I—

But she’d gotten a grip before she could send something she really couldn’t take back, stabilized herself. It is enough, for now. And next time I can ask myself for more.

“I’m afraid to want and to love,” Naeun says to Eunji, the setting sun filtering in through the glass windows and bathing them in the light.

Eunji smiles, because sometimes the simplest answer is the best one. “Don’t be.”

And once again what she has isn’t enough anymore. “Eunji-unnie—”