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I was not glued to the five boys anymore. I was not recording songs anymore. I was not under the LA palm trees anymore. And, most cruelly, I could not help myself with Martin's production and writing skills anymore.
We were all so busy preparing our debuts that we barely had time to breathe, let alone see each other. The first week back, we had all gone to grab dinner together, all six of us squeezed into a booth at a samgyeopsal place near the company building, the kind of dinner where everyone laughs too loud because they are trying not to acknowledge that something has shifted. It felt really nice. But different.
In the third week, I drank matcha with Keonho and Juhoon. It was brief. We all had somewhere to be.
We passed by each other in the corridors sometimes. It was polite. Warm, but polite, the kind of warm that aches a little.
All I had left of them was the ridiculous pictures James had taken on my phone during some tired night I barely remembered, the mobile game Keonho and Hyeon had bullied me into downloading still eating up storage on my home screen, Juhoon's pack of bandaids from a random dance practice where I had tripped over my own feet and refused to admit it hurt, and Martin's hoodie he had lent me one night on the rooftop when the wind had picked up and neither of us had wanted to go back inside yet and all of the notes he had written on my notebook instead of his.
Mrs Kim told me we would be able to meet often again once we got closer to debut.
We were supposed to debut around the same time, a bit less than two years from now. I didn't fully understand why I still had to wait so long since I had completed my EP in LA, but truthfully, I had already started rethinking all of my songs. So maybe the timeline made more sense than I wanted to admit.
After five months, I received a text.
I almost missed it. My phone had been living face-down on my desk during late-night lyric sessions, and I had gotten used to the silence.
Martin [10:47pm]: hey, is this Y/N? got your number from the managers. hope that's okay
Martin [10:47pm]: i'm kind of stuck on something and i was wondering if you'd be up to help. musically speaking
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary.
Y/N [10:51pm]: it's me. and yeah that's okay
Y/N [10:51pm]: what are you stuck on
Martin [10:53pm]: the bridge of this one track. it keeps resolving too early and it's driving me insane
Martin [10:53pm]: like it lands but it doesn't LAND you know
Y/N [10:54pm]: i know exactly what you mean
Y/N [10:54pm]: send it
Martin [10:55pm]: just like that? no "oh martin it's almost 11pm"
Y/N [10:55pm]: you know I never sleep this early
Martin [10:56pm]: ik
Martin [10:56pm]: okay sending
So, five months after LA, five months of me working on yet another round of new songs, five months of practicing choreos from sunset until dawn, five months of barely being able to meet the guys, Martin and I started meeting again.
Just like we used to on the rooftop, except now it was practice room B when everyone else had gone home, or the small café near the company building that nobody from the industry seemed to frequent, or the corner booth at the convenience store where we would spread his laptop and my notebooks across the table and pretend we were not taking up too much space.
"Okay, but be honest," Martin said one evening, spinning a mechanical pencil between his fingers. "Do you think wide-leg jeans are actually coming back, or is it just the internet lying to us again?"
I looked up from the chord progression I was annotating. "They never left. That's the thing about the internet, it rediscovers things and acts like it invented them."
"Deep."
"I'm just talking about trousers, Martin."
"No, you were being a philosopher, and you know it."
I threw a sugar packet at him. He caught it without looking.
"Have you watched Stranger Things?" he asked another time, completely unprompted, in the middle of what was supposed to be a focused production session.
"I started it."
"And?"
"It made me feel crazy nostalgia– and normal."
He pointed at me like I had said something profound. "EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I said, and Juhoon told me I was being dramatic."
"You are being dramatic. But you're also right."
"Okay, I need to tell you something embarrassing," he said once, not looking up from the keyboard.
"Okay."
"I used to be terrified of pigeons. Like genuinely. Not as a kid, until I was fifteen."
I put my pen down. "Martin."
"I know."
"Fifteen."
"I said I know."
"There are pigeons outside this window right now."
"I'm aware. I've grown."
“you were fifteen like… yesterday”
The conversations never really had a subject. They just had us.
Summer, 2024
The news hit on a random practice day for me, the way most things that quietly knock the air out of you tend to do.
In March, another girl group. Another debut. Another HYBE label, another set of faces the internet would immediately begin to dissect and rank and project entire futures onto.
I had sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after reading the announcement.
It wasn't jealousy exactly. It was something more tangled than that, something that had FOMO's shape but guilt's weight. Because part of me was relieved it wasn't me. Not yet. And that relief immediately made me feel terrible.
I thought about NewJeans a lot that summer.
I had been a fan since they debuted, even before that. I had their songs on my sleep playlists. I had rewatched the Attention music video enough times that I could map every camera angle from memory. And now I was watching the news cycle churn through stories about mistreatment, about contract disputes, about girls who had debuted so young and had worked so hard and were now fighting battles that had nothing to do with music.
It was heavy in a specific way that was hard to explain to anyone who wasn't inside it.
Because I was at BIGHIT. And my conditions were genuinely good, I had a real room now, real meals, a team that checked in on me, a debut timeline that was demanding but not cruel enough to blame anyone. Mrs Kim fought for my rest days with an energy that I found both touching and slightly terrifying. I was tired, but the kind of tired that came from working hard toward something real, not from being ground down into nothing.
And somehow that made it worse to watch. Not better.
"You're doing that thing," Martin said one afternoon. We were sitting on the floor of practice room B, backs against the mirrored wall, a half-eaten convenience store lunch between us.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet but your face is very loud."
I pulled my knees to my chest. "I was thinking about NewJeans."
He was quiet for a moment. He always let things land before responding. I had noticed that about him early on. "Yeah," he said. "Me too, lately."
"I feel guilty," I admitted. "Which I know is not a rational thing to feel. But I do."
"For being here and being okay?"
"For being here and being okay while they're not."
Martin turned his head to look at me. "You didn't cause what happened to them."
"I know that."
"And you being okay doesn't mean they're less not-okay. That's not how it works."
"I know that too." I picked at the edge of my sleeve. "I just keep thinking about how this industry can be the same thing and completely different things at the same time. Same building sometimes, almost. And someone gets crushed and someone gets looked after and it's just, it's luck, partially. And that's terrifying."
Martin didn't try to fix it. He just nodded, and eventually he reached over and stole one of my remaining tteok and I let him, and we sat there in the particular silence of people who understand that some things don't need a resolution.
Through Martin, I found my way back to the others more steadily.
It was never formal. It was never a scheduled thing. It was just, one evening I showed up to help Martin with a track and Hyeon was already there, headphones around his neck, debating the snare sound with the kind of intensity most people reserved for life-or-death decisions. And then it was natural for us all to end up getting ramen at midnight. And then it became a thing.
Juhoon had developed an entire, extremely specific opinion on which convenience store onigiris were worth eating and which were a moral failing, and he shared this opinion freely and at length. I listened to every word like it was important, because with Juhoon it always was in some sideways sense.
Keonho taught me a card game that I was fairly certain he had partially invented and was making up rules for in real time. I lost every round and he was insufferably gracious about it.
James, who had apparently decided at some point in the previous five months that I was his personal photography subject, documented a disproportionate number of moments where I had food on my face or was mid-blink. "These are artistic," he told me, very seriously. "You just don't understand the vision yet."
Seonghyeon was quieter about it, but he made space in the specific way quiet people do, moved over without being asked, remembered things, appeared in doorways at the right moments with an extra coffee or an extra minute of patience.
There were evenings when someone would float the idea of going out, just out, no destination, just the city at whatever hour it happened to be, and, somehow it would become all six of us slipping out of our respective buildings in ones and twos, reconvening at the park down the street with the broken fountain that had never been fixed, sitting on the benches or the grass while Seoul did what Seoul does at night: hummed and glittered and kept moving, indifferent and beautiful.
Those nights had a texture I didn't have a word for yet. I kept thinking I should write it down before it became something I only half-remembered.
Martin and I usually ended up walking slightly ahead of the others, or slightly behind, it was never planned, it just happened, some gravitational thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once, on one of those nights, the park quiet around us, the others' voices a comfortable distance back.
"The EP," I said. Which was true and also only half of the truth.
"Which part."
"The part I still haven't figured out how to write."
He glanced at me sideways. The city light caught the edge of his face. "What's it about?"
I thought for a moment. "Something that's happening while it's happening. Before you know what to call it."
He looked ahead again. "Those are the hardest ones."
"Yeah."
"Also usually the best ones."
I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything else. We kept walking.
December, 2024
We all moved to new dorms.
The building was newer, quieter, better ventilated, the kind of place where the elevators actually worked and the hot water didn't give up on you mid-shower. The boys moved into a large unit together: five of them, one sprawling common space that I already knew would devolve into comfortable chaos within a week. Mrs Kim and I moved into the unit next door.
Literally next door. Same floor, ten feet of hallway between our front doors.
When I realized, standing in the corridor with a moving box in my arms, I just looked at Martin.
He looked back at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.
"Neighbors," he said.
"Neighbors," I confirmed.
From inside the boys' unit, Keonho's voice: "IS THAT Y/N? Y/N ARE YOU NEXT DOOR?"
"YES," I called back.
A sound that could only be described as celebration.
Mrs Kim appeared behind me, took one look at the situation, and said, with the weary composure of someone who had signed up for exactly this, "I'm installing a second lock."
January 13th, 2025
I woke up to my phone vibrating itself off my nightstand.
I caught it before it hit the floor, squinted at the screen.
Seventeen messages. Most of them in the group chat, which had been renamed — overnight, without my input to 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂.
Keonho [00:00]: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE TWO GREATEST PEOPLE WE KNOW
James [00:01]: simultaneously born on the same day. statistically unlikely. clearly fate
Juhoon [00:01]: happy birthday Y/N and hyeon 🤍
Hyeon [00:02]: This is the only day of the year I'll accept being grouped with someone else
Hyeon [00:02]: happy birthday Y/N
Martin [00:00]: happy birthday
Martin [00:00]: (i set an alarm to be first. keonho ruined it)
I was smiling before I was fully awake.
I padded out into the kitchen, where Mrs Kim had, impossibly, at six in the morning, already put a small cake on the counter. Single candle. The light blue kind.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I know," she said, and handed me a fork.
The actual birthday gathering happened that evening, squeezed into the boys' common room because it was bigger, and because no one asked, it just became understood that that was where we were going. Keonho had made a playlist. Juhoon had acquired an unreasonable amount of snacks through means he declined to explain. James had printed, actually printed, on paper, a picture from LA, the one of all six of us on the rooftop, the city stretched out behind us, everyone laughing at something just off frame.
He framed it.
I had to look away for a second.
Seonghyeon and I ended up on the balcony at some point past midnight, cups of something warm, the city below us doing its usual thing.
"Another year, nuna" he said.
"Shut uppp" I answered while hitting him softly.
A pause,
He glanced at me. "You good?"
I thought about it honestly. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."
He nodded, like that was enough. It was.
March, 2025
It was Keonho who saw it first. He burst into the corridor between our two units at eleven in the morning, phone outstretched, expression oscillating between alarm and delight.
"You're on Dispatch."
I took the phone.
There I was: grainy but unmistakably me, photographed outside a studio building, braids loose the way I always wore them lately, bright blue mask, the oversized jacket I had thrifted from a market two months ago.
HYBE's New Mystery Girl? Trainees spotted near Bighit building — a new girl group in the works?
The comments were already running wild. There was a thread about the braids. An entire thread. Someone had started selling similar masks in that shade of blue on a craft site. A fashion account had made a post titled Who is the Girl in the Blue Mask? with forty thousand likes.
I read it twice.
"Say something," Keonho said.
"I created a trend," I said slowly, "for a face covering."
"You really did."
I handed his phone back. I felt very calm and very strange at the same time. "Okay," I said. "Okay."
Mrs Kim called me within the hour. She was composed, efficient, had already spoken with the PR team. Nothing to confirm, nothing to deny, let the mystery sit, it would only build anticipation.
I sat on my bed after the call and thought: this is actually starting.
The EP
The songs I had made in LA were good. I still believed that. But I was a different person in a room than I had been on that rooftop, and some of them didn't fit right anymore.
Three songs stayed. Four were new.
Seven in total.
The thread that ran through all of them was something I had a hard time naming until I was almost finished: it was about interior space. About what it feels like to be alone inside yourself, not only as an absence of people. About the peace you find there if you're lucky, about luckiness itself and the creativity that lives there if you're paying attention. About loving what made you strange before the world had a chance to weigh in.
And underneath all of it: something astronomical. Not just metaphorically, literally. Stars kept appearing in my lyrics, not as clichés but as coordinates, as distances, as the specific comfort of looking at something unreachably far away and feeling less alone rather than more.
I played the seven songs back to back for the first time alone in my room one night and thought: yes. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to say.
I texted Martin immediately.
Y/N [01:14am]: i think i finished it
Martin [01:16am]: the EP?
Y/N [01:16am]: duhh
Martin [01:17am]: ok twin calm down
Martin [01:17am]: can i hear it
Y/N [01:17am]: tomorrow
Martin [01:17am]: why not now
Y/N [01:18am]: because it's 1am and i want to sit with it for one night first
Martin [01:19am]: …okay. that makes sense ig
Martin [01:19am]: proud of you by the way
I put my phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Late May, 2025
The choreography sessions had shifted into something more precise, less exploration, more architecture. Every eight-count had a reason now. Every transition was being tested and retested until it held.
It was the boys who had the idea first: shoot a self-made version of your MV vision before production began. Nothing formal, just phones, a camera one of them had borrowed, natural locations, a day blocked off. It was for the directors, mostly. A mood reference.
"We should do the same for yours," Martin said, after showing me their rough cut one evening. It was genuinely stunning, all five of them in an empty parking garage at golden hour, the framing instinctive and strange and completely right.
"I don't have a film team."
"You have us."
I looked around the room. Keonho was already nodding with the energy of someone who had decided yes before the sentence was finished. James had picked up his camera. Juhoon was looking at me with quiet patience, which with Juhoon meant he had also already decided.
Seonghyeon just shrugged in his particular way that meant: obviously, when do we start.
"Okay," I said. "But I'm directing."
"Obviously," said Martin.
We spent a Saturday in late May across three locations: the rooftop of a building Keonho knew someone who knew someone who could get us access to, a train station at the specific hour when the light came through the far windows sideways, and a field just outside the city at dusk where the sky did something I had been hoping for but hadn't been sure I could count on.
James filmed. The others helped with light, with holding things, with keeping the energy up through the fifteenth take of a single shot. Martin sat beside me during playback and pointed at the exact frames where something had worked and said there, that one with the certainty of someone whose eye I had learned to trust completely.
By the time we watched the rough cut that night on someone's laptop, all six of us crowded around a too-small screen, I felt something shift into place.
I was not glued to the five boys anymore. I was not recording songs anymore. I was not under the LA palm trees anymore. And, most cruelly, I could not help myself with Martin's production and writing skills anymore.
We were all so busy preparing our debuts that we barely had time to breathe, let alone see each other. The first week back, we had all gone to grab dinner together, all six of us squeezed into a booth at a samgyeopsal place near the company building, the kind of dinner where everyone laughs too loud because they are trying not to acknowledge that something has shifted. It felt really nice. But different.
In the third week, I drank matcha with Keonho and Juhoon. It was brief. We all had somewhere to be.
We passed by each other in the corridors sometimes. It was polite. Warm, but polite, the kind of warm that aches a little.
All I had left of them was the ridiculous pictures James had taken on my phone during some tired night I barely remembered, the mobile game Keonho and Hyeon had bullied me into downloading still eating up storage on my home screen, Juhoon's pack of bandaids from a random dance practice where I had tripped over my own feet and refused to admit it hurt, and Martin's hoodie he had lent me one night on the rooftop when the wind had picked up and neither of us had wanted to go back inside yet and all of the notes he had written on my notebook instead of his.
Mrs Kim told me we would be able to meet often again once we got closer to debut.
We were supposed to debut around the same time, a bit less than two years from now. I didn't fully understand why I still had to wait so long since I had completed my EP in LA, but truthfully, I had already started rethinking all of my songs. So maybe the timeline made more sense than I wanted to admit.
After five months, I received a text.
I almost missed it. My phone had been living face-down on my desk during late-night lyric sessions, and I had gotten used to the silence.
Martin [10:47pm]: hey, is this Y/N? got your number from the managers. hope that's okay
Martin [10:47pm]: i'm kind of stuck on something and i was wondering if you'd be up to help. musically speaking
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary.
Y/N [10:51pm]: it's me. and yeah that's okay
Y/N [10:51pm]: what are you stuck on
Martin [10:53pm]: the bridge of this one track. it keeps resolving too early and it's driving me insane
Martin [10:53pm]: like it lands but it doesn't LAND you know
Y/N [10:54pm]: i know exactly what you mean
Y/N [10:54pm]: send it
Martin [10:55pm]: just like that? no "oh martin it's almost 11pm"
Y/N [10:55pm]: you know I never sleep this early
Martin [10:56pm]: ik
Martin [10:56pm]: okay sending
So, five months after LA, five months of me working on yet another round of new songs, five months of practicing choreos from sunset until dawn, five months of barely being able to meet the guys, Martin and I started meeting again.
Just like we used to on the rooftop, except now it was practice room B when everyone else had gone home, or the small café near the company building that nobody from the industry seemed to frequent, or the corner booth at the convenience store where we would spread his laptop and my notebooks across the table and pretend we were not taking up too much space.
"Okay, but be honest," Martin said one evening, spinning a mechanical pencil between his fingers. "Do you think wide-leg jeans are actually coming back, or is it just the internet lying to us again?"
I looked up from the chord progression I was annotating. "They never left. That's the thing about the internet, it rediscovers things and acts like it invented them."
"Deep."
"I'm just talking about trousers, Martin."
"No, you were being a philosopher, and you know it."
I threw a sugar packet at him. He caught it without looking.
"Have you watched Stranger Things?" he asked another time, completely unprompted, in the middle of what was supposed to be a focused production session.
"I started it."
"And?"
"It made me feel crazy nostalgia– and normal."
He pointed at me like I had said something profound. "EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I said, and Juhoon told me I was being dramatic."
"You are being dramatic. But you're also right."
"Okay, I need to tell you something embarrassing," he said once, not looking up from the keyboard.
"Okay."
"I used to be terrified of pigeons. Like genuinely. Not as a kid, until I was fifteen."
I put my pen down. "Martin."
"I know."
"Fifteen."
"I said I know."
"There are pigeons outside this window right now."
"I'm aware. I've grown."
“you were fifteen like… yesterday”
The conversations never really had a subject. They just had us.
Summer, 2024
The news hit on a random practice day for me, the way most things that quietly knock the air out of you tend to do.
In March, another girl group. Another debut. Another HYBE label, another set of faces the internet would immediately begin to dissect and rank and project entire futures onto.
I had sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after reading the announcement.
It wasn't jealousy exactly. It was something more tangled than that, something that had FOMO's shape but guilt's weight. Because part of me was relieved it wasn't me. Not yet. And that relief immediately made me feel terrible.
I thought about NewJeans a lot that summer.
I had been a fan since they debuted, even before that. I had their songs on my sleep playlists. I had rewatched the Attention music video enough times that I could map every camera angle from memory. And now I was watching the news cycle churn through stories about mistreatment, about contract disputes, about girls who had debuted so young and had worked so hard and were now fighting battles that had nothing to do with music.
It was heavy in a specific way that was hard to explain to anyone who wasn't inside it.
Because I was at BIGHIT. And my conditions were genuinely good, I had a real room now, real meals, a team that checked in on me, a debut timeline that was demanding but not cruel enough to blame anyone. Mrs Kim fought for my rest days with an energy that I found both touching and slightly terrifying. I was tired, but the kind of tired that came from working hard toward something real, not from being ground down into nothing.
And somehow that made it worse to watch. Not better.
"You're doing that thing," Martin said one afternoon. We were sitting on the floor of practice room B, backs against the mirrored wall, a half-eaten convenience store lunch between us.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet but your face is very loud."
I pulled my knees to my chest. "I was thinking about NewJeans."
He was quiet for a moment. He always let things land before responding. I had noticed that about him early on. "Yeah," he said. "Me too, lately."
"I feel guilty," I admitted. "Which I know is not a rational thing to feel. But I do."
"For being here and being okay?"
"For being here and being okay while they're not."
Martin turned his head to look at me. "You didn't cause what happened to them."
"I know that."
"And you being okay doesn't mean they're less not-okay. That's not how it works."
"I know that too." I picked at the edge of my sleeve. "I just keep thinking about how this industry can be the same thing and completely different things at the same time. Same building sometimes, almost. And someone gets crushed and someone gets looked after and it's just, it's luck, partially. And that's terrifying."
Martin didn't try to fix it. He just nodded, and eventually he reached over and stole one of my remaining tteok and I let him, and we sat there in the particular silence of people who understand that some things don't need a resolution.
Through Martin, I found my way back to the others more steadily.
It was never formal. It was never a scheduled thing. It was just, one evening I showed up to help Martin with a track and Hyeon was already there, headphones around his neck, debating the snare sound with the kind of intensity most people reserved for life-or-death decisions. And then it was natural for us all to end up getting ramen at midnight. And then it became a thing.
Juhoon had developed an entire, extremely specific opinion on which convenience store onigiris were worth eating and which were a moral failing, and he shared this opinion freely and at length. I listened to every word like it was important, because with Juhoon it always was in some sideways sense.
Keonho taught me a card game that I was fairly certain he had partially invented and was making up rules for in real time. I lost every round and he was insufferably gracious about it.
James, who had apparently decided at some point in the previous five months that I was his personal photography subject, documented a disproportionate number of moments where I had food on my face or was mid-blink. "These are artistic," he told me, very seriously. "You just don't understand the vision yet."
Seonghyeon was quieter about it, but he made space in the specific way quiet people do, moved over without being asked, remembered things, appeared in doorways at the right moments with an extra coffee or an extra minute of patience.
There were evenings when someone would float the idea of going out, just out, no destination, just the city at whatever hour it happened to be, and, somehow it would become all six of us slipping out of our respective buildings in ones and twos, reconvening at the park down the street with the broken fountain that had never been fixed, sitting on the benches or the grass while Seoul did what Seoul does at night: hummed and glittered and kept moving, indifferent and beautiful.
Those nights had a texture I didn't have a word for yet. I kept thinking I should write it down before it became something I only half-remembered.
Martin and I usually ended up walking slightly ahead of the others, or slightly behind, it was never planned, it just happened, some gravitational thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once, on one of those nights, the park quiet around us, the others' voices a comfortable distance back.
"The EP," I said. Which was true and also only half of the truth.
"Which part."
"The part I still haven't figured out how to write."
He glanced at me sideways. The city light caught the edge of his face. "What's it about?"
I thought for a moment. "Something that's happening while it's happening. Before you know what to call it."
He looked ahead again. "Those are the hardest ones."
"Yeah."
"Also usually the best ones."
I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything else. We kept walking.
December, 2024
We all moved to new dorms.
The building was newer, quieter, better ventilated, the kind of place where the elevators actually worked and the hot water didn't give up on you mid-shower. The boys moved into a large unit together: five of them, one sprawling common space that I already knew would devolve into comfortable chaos within a week. Mrs Kim and I moved into the unit next door.
Literally next door. Same floor, ten feet of hallway between our front doors.
When I realized, standing in the corridor with a moving box in my arms, I just looked at Martin.
He looked back at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.
"Neighbors," he said.
"Neighbors," I confirmed.
From inside the boys' unit, Keonho's voice: "IS THAT Y/N? Y/N ARE YOU NEXT DOOR?"
"YES," I called back.
A sound that could only be described as celebration.
Mrs Kim appeared behind me, took one look at the situation, and said, with the weary composure of someone who had signed up for exactly this, "I'm installing a second lock."
January 13th, 2025
I woke up to my phone vibrating itself off my nightstand.
I caught it before it hit the floor, squinted at the screen.
Seventeen messages. Most of them in the group chat, which had been renamed — overnight, without my input to 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂.
Keonho [00:00]: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE TWO GREATEST PEOPLE WE KNOW
James [00:01]: simultaneously born on the same day. statistically unlikely. clearly fate
Juhoon [00:01]: happy birthday Y/N and hyeon 🤍
Hyeon [00:02]: This is the only day of the year I'll accept being grouped with someone else
Hyeon [00:02]: happy birthday Y/N
Martin [00:00]: happy birthday
Martin [00:00]: (i set an alarm to be first. keonho ruined it)
I was smiling before I was fully awake.
I padded out into the kitchen, where Mrs Kim had, impossibly, at six in the morning, already put a small cake on the counter. Single candle. The light blue kind.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I know," she said, and handed me a fork.
The actual birthday gathering happened that evening, squeezed into the boys' common room because it was bigger, and because no one asked, it just became understood that that was where we were going. Keonho had made a playlist. Juhoon had acquired an unreasonable amount of snacks through means he declined to explain. James had printed, actually printed, on paper, a picture from LA, the one of all six of us on the rooftop, the city stretched out behind us, everyone laughing at something just off frame.
He framed it.
I had to look away for a second.
Seonghyeon and I ended up on the balcony at some point past midnight, cups of something warm, the city below us doing its usual thing.
"Another year, nuna" he said.
"Shut uppp" I answered while hitting him softly.
A pause,
He glanced at me. "You good?"
I thought about it honestly. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."
He nodded, like that was enough. It was.
March, 2025
It was Keonho who saw it first. He burst into the corridor between our two units at eleven in the morning, phone outstretched, expression oscillating between alarm and delight.
"You're on Dispatch."
I took the phone.
There I was: grainy but unmistakably me, photographed outside a studio building, braids loose the way I always wore them lately, bright blue mask, the oversized jacket I had thrifted from a market two months ago.
HYBE's New Mystery Girl? Trainees spotted near Bighit building — a new girl group in the works?
The comments were already running wild. There was a thread about the braids. An entire thread. Someone had started selling similar masks in that shade of blue on a craft site. A fashion account had made a post titled Who is the Girl in the Blue Mask? with forty thousand likes.
I read it twice.
"Say something," Keonho said.
"I created a trend," I said slowly, "for a face covering."
"You really did."
I handed his phone back. I felt very calm and very strange at the same time. "Okay," I said. "Okay."
Mrs Kim called me within the hour. She was composed, efficient, had already spoken with the PR team. Nothing to confirm, nothing to deny, let the mystery sit, it would only build anticipation.
I sat on my bed after the call and thought: this is actually starting.
The EP
The songs I had made in LA were good. I still believed that. But I was a different person in a room than I had been on that rooftop, and some of them didn't fit right anymore.
Three songs stayed. Four were new.
Seven in total.
The thread that ran through all of them was something I had a hard time naming until I was almost finished: it was about interior space. About what it feels like to be alone inside yourself, not only as an absence of people. About the peace you find there if you're lucky, about luckiness itself and the creativity that lives there if you're paying attention. About loving what made you strange before the world had a chance to weigh in.
And underneath all of it: something astronomical. Not just metaphorically, literally. Stars kept appearing in my lyrics, not as clichés but as coordinates, as distances, as the specific comfort of looking at something unreachably far away and feeling less alone rather than more.
I played the seven songs back to back for the first time alone in my room one night and thought: yes. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to say.
I texted Martin immediately.
Y/N [01:14am]: i think i finished it
Martin [01:16am]: the EP?
Y/N [01:16am]: duhh
Martin [01:17am]: ok twin calm down
Martin [01:17am]: can i hear it
Y/N [01:17am]: tomorrow
Martin [01:17am]: why not now
Y/N [01:18am]: because it's 1am and i want to sit with it for one night first
Martin [01:19am]: …okay. that makes sense ig
Martin [01:19am]: proud of you by the way
I put my phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Late May, 2025
The choreography sessions had shifted into something more precise, less exploration, more architecture. Every eight-count had a reason now. Every transition was being tested and retested until it held.
It was the boys who had the idea first: shoot a self-made version of your MV vision before production began. Nothing formal, just phones, a camera one of them had borrowed, natural locations, a day blocked off. It was for the directors, mostly. A mood reference.
"We should do the same for yours," Martin said, after showing me their rough cut one evening. It was genuinely stunning, all five of them in an empty parking garage at golden hour, the framing instinctive and strange and completely right.
"I don't have a film team."
"You have us."
I looked around the room. Keonho was already nodding with the energy of someone who had decided yes before the sentence was finished. James had picked up his camera. Juhoon was looking at me with quiet patience, which with Juhoon meant he had also already decided.
Seonghyeon just shrugged in his particular way that meant: obviously, when do we start.
"Okay," I said. "But I'm directing."
"Obviously," said Martin.
We spent a Saturday in late May across three locations: the rooftop of a building Keonho knew someone who knew someone who could get us access to, a train station at the specific hour when the light came through the far windows sideways, and a field just outside the city at dusk where the sky did something I had been hoping for but hadn't been sure I could count on.
James filmed. The others helped with light, with holding things, with keeping the energy up through the fifteenth take of a single shot. Martin sat beside me during playback and pointed at the exact frames where something had worked and said there, that one with the certainty of someone whose eye I had learned to trust completely.
By the time we watched the rough cut that night on someone's laptop, all six of us crowded around a too-small screen, I felt something shift into place.
I was not glued to the five boys anymore. I was not recording songs anymore. I was not under the LA palm trees anymore. And, most cruelly, I could not help myself with Martin's production and writing skills anymore.
We were all so busy preparing our debuts that we barely had time to breathe, let alone see each other. The first week back, we had all gone to grab dinner together, all six of us squeezed into a booth at a samgyeopsal place near the company building, the kind of dinner where everyone laughs too loud because they are trying not to acknowledge that something has shifted. It felt really nice. But different.
In the third week, I drank matcha with Keonho and Juhoon. It was brief. We all had somewhere to be.
We passed by each other in the corridors sometimes. It was polite. Warm, but polite, the kind of warm that aches a little.
All I had left of them was the ridiculous pictures James had taken on my phone during some tired night I barely remembered, the mobile game Keonho and Hyeon had bullied me into downloading still eating up storage on my home screen, Juhoon's pack of bandaids from a random dance practice where I had tripped over my own feet and refused to admit it hurt, and Martin's hoodie he had lent me one night on the rooftop when the wind had picked up and neither of us had wanted to go back inside yet and all of the notes he had written on my notebook instead of his.
Mrs Kim told me we would be able to meet often again once we got closer to debut.
We were supposed to debut around the same time, a bit less than two years from now. I didn't fully understand why I still had to wait so long since I had completed my EP in LA, but truthfully, I had already started rethinking all of my songs. So maybe the timeline made more sense than I wanted to admit.
After five months, I received a text.
I almost missed it. My phone had been living face-down on my desk during late-night lyric sessions, and I had gotten used to the silence.
Martin [10:47pm]: hey, is this Y/N? got your number from the managers. hope that's okay
Martin [10:47pm]: i'm kind of stuck on something and i was wondering if you'd be up to help. musically speaking
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary.
Y/N [10:51pm]: it's me. and yeah that's okay
Y/N [10:51pm]: what are you stuck on
Martin [10:53pm]: the bridge of this one track. it keeps resolving too early and it's driving me insane
Martin [10:53pm]: like it lands but it doesn't LAND you know
Y/N [10:54pm]: i know exactly what you mean
Y/N [10:54pm]: send it
Martin [10:55pm]: just like that? no "oh martin it's almost 11pm"
Y/N [10:55pm]: you know I never sleep this early
Martin [10:56pm]: ik
Martin [10:56pm]: okay sending
So, five months after LA, five months of me working on yet another round of new songs, five months of practicing choreos from sunset until dawn, five months of barely being able to meet the guys, Martin and I started meeting again.
Just like we used to on the rooftop, except now it was practice room B when everyone else had gone home, or the small café near the company building that nobody from the industry seemed to frequent, or the corner booth at the convenience store where we would spread his laptop and my notebooks across the table and pretend we were not taking up too much space.
"Okay, but be honest," Martin said one evening, spinning a mechanical pencil between his fingers. "Do you think wide-leg jeans are actually coming back, or is it just the internet lying to us again?"
I looked up from the chord progression I was annotating. "They never left. That's the thing about the internet, it rediscovers things and acts like it invented them."
"Deep."
"I'm just talking about trousers, Martin."
"No, you were being a philosopher, and you know it."
I threw a sugar packet at him. He caught it without looking.
"Have you watched Stranger Things?" he asked another time, completely unprompted, in the middle of what was supposed to be a focused production session.
"I started it."
"And?"
"It made me feel crazy nostalgia– and normal."
He pointed at me like I had said something profound. "EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I said, and Juhoon told me I was being dramatic."
"You are being dramatic. But you're also right."
"Okay, I need to tell you something embarrassing," he said once, not looking up from the keyboard.
"Okay."
"I used to be terrified of pigeons. Like genuinely. Not as a kid, until I was fifteen."
I put my pen down. "Martin."
"I know."
"Fifteen."
"I said I know."
"There are pigeons outside this window right now."
"I'm aware. I've grown."
“you were fifteen like… yesterday”
The conversations never really had a subject. They just had us.
Summer, 2024
The news hit on a random practice day for me, the way most things that quietly knock the air out of you tend to do.
In March, another girl group. Another debut. Another HYBE label, another set of faces the internet would immediately begin to dissect and rank and project entire futures onto.
I had sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after reading the announcement.
It wasn't jealousy exactly. It was something more tangled than that, something that had FOMO's shape but guilt's weight. Because part of me was relieved it wasn't me. Not yet. And that relief immediately made me feel terrible.
I thought about NewJeans a lot that summer.
I had been a fan since they debuted, even before that. I had their songs on my sleep playlists. I had rewatched the Attention music video enough times that I could map every camera angle from memory. And now I was watching the news cycle churn through stories about mistreatment, about contract disputes, about girls who had debuted so young and had worked so hard and were now fighting battles that had nothing to do with music.
It was heavy in a specific way that was hard to explain to anyone who wasn't inside it.
Because I was at BIGHIT. And my conditions were genuinely good, I had a real room now, real meals, a team that checked in on me, a debut timeline that was demanding but not cruel enough to blame anyone. Mrs Kim fought for my rest days with an energy that I found both touching and slightly terrifying. I was tired, but the kind of tired that came from working hard toward something real, not from being ground down into nothing.
And somehow that made it worse to watch. Not better.
"You're doing that thing," Martin said one afternoon. We were sitting on the floor of practice room B, backs against the mirrored wall, a half-eaten convenience store lunch between us.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet but your face is very loud."
I pulled my knees to my chest. "I was thinking about NewJeans."
He was quiet for a moment. He always let things land before responding. I had noticed that about him early on. "Yeah," he said. "Me too, lately."
"I feel guilty," I admitted. "Which I know is not a rational thing to feel. But I do."
"For being here and being okay?"
"For being here and being okay while they're not."
Martin turned his head to look at me. "You didn't cause what happened to them."
"I know that."
"And you being okay doesn't mean they're less not-okay. That's not how it works."
"I know that too." I picked at the edge of my sleeve. "I just keep thinking about how this industry can be the same thing and completely different things at the same time. Same building sometimes, almost. And someone gets crushed and someone gets looked after and it's just, it's luck, partially. And that's terrifying."
Martin didn't try to fix it. He just nodded, and eventually he reached over and stole one of my remaining tteok and I let him, and we sat there in the particular silence of people who understand that some things don't need a resolution.
Through Martin, I found my way back to the others more steadily.
It was never formal. It was never a scheduled thing. It was just, one evening I showed up to help Martin with a track and Hyeon was already there, headphones around his neck, debating the snare sound with the kind of intensity most people reserved for life-or-death decisions. And then it was natural for us all to end up getting ramen at midnight. And then it became a thing.
Juhoon had developed an entire, extremely specific opinion on which convenience store onigiris were worth eating and which were a moral failing, and he shared this opinion freely and at length. I listened to every word like it was important, because with Juhoon it always was in some sideways sense.
Keonho taught me a card game that I was fairly certain he had partially invented and was making up rules for in real time. I lost every round and he was insufferably gracious about it.
James, who had apparently decided at some point in the previous five months that I was his personal photography subject, documented a disproportionate number of moments where I had food on my face or was mid-blink. "These are artistic," he told me, very seriously. "You just don't understand the vision yet."
Seonghyeon was quieter about it, but he made space in the specific way quiet people do, moved over without being asked, remembered things, appeared in doorways at the right moments with an extra coffee or an extra minute of patience.
There were evenings when someone would float the idea of going out, just out, no destination, just the city at whatever hour it happened to be, and, somehow it would become all six of us slipping out of our respective buildings in ones and twos, reconvening at the park down the street with the broken fountain that had never been fixed, sitting on the benches or the grass while Seoul did what Seoul does at night: hummed and glittered and kept moving, indifferent and beautiful.
Those nights had a texture I didn't have a word for yet. I kept thinking I should write it down before it became something I only half-remembered.
Martin and I usually ended up walking slightly ahead of the others, or slightly behind, it was never planned, it just happened, some gravitational thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once, on one of those nights, the park quiet around us, the others' voices a comfortable distance back.
"The EP," I said. Which was true and also only half of the truth.
"Which part."
"The part I still haven't figured out how to write."
He glanced at me sideways. The city light caught the edge of his face. "What's it about?"
I thought for a moment. "Something that's happening while it's happening. Before you know what to call it."
He looked ahead again. "Those are the hardest ones."
"Yeah."
"Also usually the best ones."
I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything else. We kept walking.
December, 2024
We all moved to new dorms.
The building was newer, quieter, better ventilated, the kind of place where the elevators actually worked and the hot water didn't give up on you mid-shower. The boys moved into a large unit together: five of them, one sprawling common space that I already knew would devolve into comfortable chaos within a week. Mrs Kim and I moved into the unit next door.
Literally next door. Same floor, ten feet of hallway between our front doors.
When I realized, standing in the corridor with a moving box in my arms, I just looked at Martin.
He looked back at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.
"Neighbors," he said.
"Neighbors," I confirmed.
From inside the boys' unit, Keonho's voice: "IS THAT Y/N? Y/N ARE YOU NEXT DOOR?"
"YES," I called back.
A sound that could only be described as celebration.
Mrs Kim appeared behind me, took one look at the situation, and said, with the weary composure of someone who had signed up for exactly this, "I'm installing a second lock."
January 13th, 2025
I woke up to my phone vibrating itself off my nightstand.
I caught it before it hit the floor, squinted at the screen.
Seventeen messages. Most of them in the group chat, which had been renamed — overnight, without my input to 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂.
Keonho [00:00]: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE TWO GREATEST PEOPLE WE KNOW
James [00:01]: simultaneously born on the same day. statistically unlikely. clearly fate
Juhoon [00:01]: happy birthday Y/N and hyeon 🤍
Hyeon [00:02]: This is the only day of the year I'll accept being grouped with someone else
Hyeon [00:02]: happy birthday Y/N
Martin [00:00]: happy birthday
Martin [00:00]: (i set an alarm to be first. keonho ruined it)
I was smiling before I was fully awake.
I padded out into the kitchen, where Mrs Kim had, impossibly, at six in the morning, already put a small cake on the counter. Single candle. The light blue kind.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I know," she said, and handed me a fork.
The actual birthday gathering happened that evening, squeezed into the boys' common room because it was bigger, and because no one asked, it just became understood that that was where we were going. Keonho had made a playlist. Juhoon had acquired an unreasonable amount of snacks through means he declined to explain. James had printed, actually printed, on paper, a picture from LA, the one of all six of us on the rooftop, the city stretched out behind us, everyone laughing at something just off frame.
He framed it.
I had to look away for a second.
Seonghyeon and I ended up on the balcony at some point past midnight, cups of something warm, the city below us doing its usual thing.
"Another year, nuna" he said.
"Shut uppp" I answered while hitting him softly.
A pause,
He glanced at me. "You good?"
I thought about it honestly. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."
He nodded, like that was enough. It was.
March, 2025
It was Keonho who saw it first. He burst into the corridor between our two units at eleven in the morning, phone outstretched, expression oscillating between alarm and delight.
"You're on Dispatch."
I took the phone.
There I was: grainy but unmistakably me, photographed outside a studio building, braids loose the way I always wore them lately, bright blue mask, the oversized jacket I had thrifted from a market two months ago.
HYBE's New Mystery Girl? Trainees spotted near Bighit building — a new girl group in the works?
The comments were already running wild. There was a thread about the braids. An entire thread. Someone had started selling similar masks in that shade of blue on a craft site. A fashion account had made a post titled Who is the Girl in the Blue Mask? with forty thousand likes.
I read it twice.
"Say something," Keonho said.
"I created a trend," I said slowly, "for a face covering."
"You really did."
I handed his phone back. I felt very calm and very strange at the same time. "Okay," I said. "Okay."
Mrs Kim called me within the hour. She was composed, efficient, had already spoken with the PR team. Nothing to confirm, nothing to deny, let the mystery sit, it would only build anticipation.
I sat on my bed after the call and thought: this is actually starting.
The EP
The songs I had made in LA were good. I still believed that. But I was a different person in a room than I had been on that rooftop, and some of them didn't fit right anymore.
Three songs stayed. Four were new.
Seven in total.
The thread that ran through all of them was something I had a hard time naming until I was almost finished: it was about interior space. About what it feels like to be alone inside yourself, not only as an absence of people. About the peace you find there if you're lucky, about luckiness itself and the creativity that lives there if you're paying attention. About loving what made you strange before the world had a chance to weigh in.
And underneath all of it: something astronomical. Not just metaphorically, literally. Stars kept appearing in my lyrics, not as clichés but as coordinates, as distances, as the specific comfort of looking at something unreachably far away and feeling less alone rather than more.
I played the seven songs back to back for the first time alone in my room one night and thought: yes. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to say.
I texted Martin immediately.
Y/N [01:14am]: i think i finished it
Martin [01:16am]: the EP?
Y/N [01:16am]: duhh
Martin [01:17am]: ok twin calm down
Martin [01:17am]: can i hear it
Y/N [01:17am]: tomorrow
Martin [01:17am]: why not now
Y/N [01:18am]: because it's 1am and i want to sit with it for one night first
Martin [01:19am]: …okay. that makes sense ig
Martin [01:19am]: proud of you by the way
I put my phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Late May, 2025
The choreography sessions had shifted into something more precise, less exploration, more architecture. Every eight-count had a reason now. Every transition was being tested and retested until it held.
It was the boys who had the idea first: shoot a self-made version of your MV vision before production began. Nothing formal, just phones, a camera one of them had borrowed, natural locations, a day blocked off. It was for the directors, mostly. A mood reference.
"We should do the same for yours," Martin said, after showing me their rough cut one evening. It was genuinely stunning, all five of them in an empty parking garage at golden hour, the framing instinctive and strange and completely right.
"I don't have a film team."
"You have us."
I looked around the room. Keonho was already nodding with the energy of someone who had decided yes before the sentence was finished. James had picked up his camera. Juhoon was looking at me with quiet patience, which with Juhoon meant he had also already decided.
Seonghyeon just shrugged in his particular way that meant: obviously, when do we start.
"Okay," I said. "But I'm directing."
"Obviously," said Martin.
We spent a Saturday in late May across three locations: the rooftop of a building Keonho knew someone who knew someone who could get us access to, a train station at the specific hour when the light came through the far windows sideways, and a field just outside the city at dusk where the sky did something I had been hoping for but hadn't been sure I could count on.
James filmed. The others helped with light, with holding things, with keeping the energy up through the fifteenth take of a single shot. Martin sat beside me during playback and pointed at the exact frames where something had worked and said there, that one with the certainty of someone whose eye I had learned to trust completely.
By the time we watched the rough cut that night on someone's laptop, all six of us crowded around a too-small screen, I felt something shift into place.
I was not glued to the five boys anymore. I was not recording songs anymore. I was not under the LA palm trees anymore. And, most cruelly, I could not help myself with Martin's production and writing skills anymore.
We were all so busy preparing our debuts that we barely had time to breathe, let alone see each other. The first week back, we had all gone to grab dinner together, all six of us squeezed into a booth at a samgyeopsal place near the company building, the kind of dinner where everyone laughs too loud because they are trying not to acknowledge that something has shifted. It felt really nice. But different.
In the third week, I drank matcha with Keonho and Juhoon. It was brief. We all had somewhere to be.
We passed by each other in the corridors sometimes. It was polite. Warm, but polite, the kind of warm that aches a little.
All I had left of them was the ridiculous pictures James had taken on my phone during some tired night I barely remembered, the mobile game Keonho and Hyeon had bullied me into downloading still eating up storage on my home screen, Juhoon's pack of bandaids from a random dance practice where I had tripped over my own feet and refused to admit it hurt, and Martin's hoodie he had lent me one night on the rooftop when the wind had picked up and neither of us had wanted to go back inside yet and all of the notes he had written on my notebook instead of his.
Mrs Kim told me we would be able to meet often again once we got closer to debut.
We were supposed to debut around the same time, a bit less than two years from now. I didn't fully understand why I still had to wait so long since I had completed my EP in LA, but truthfully, I had already started rethinking all of my songs. So maybe the timeline made more sense than I wanted to admit.
After five months, I received a text.
I almost missed it. My phone had been living face-down on my desk during late-night lyric sessions, and I had gotten used to the silence.
Martin [10:47pm]: hey, is this Y/N? got your number from the managers. hope that's okay
Martin [10:47pm]: i'm kind of stuck on something and i was wondering if you'd be up to help. musically speaking
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary.
Y/N [10:51pm]: it's me. and yeah that's okay
Y/N [10:51pm]: what are you stuck on
Martin [10:53pm]: the bridge of this one track. it keeps resolving too early and it's driving me insane
Martin [10:53pm]: like it lands but it doesn't LAND you know
Y/N [10:54pm]: i know exactly what you mean
Y/N [10:54pm]: send it
Martin [10:55pm]: just like that? no "oh martin it's almost 11pm"
Y/N [10:55pm]: you know I never sleep this early
Martin [10:56pm]: ik
Martin [10:56pm]: okay sending
So, five months after LA, five months of me working on yet another round of new songs, five months of practicing choreos from sunset until dawn, five months of barely being able to meet the guys, Martin and I started meeting again.
Just like we used to on the rooftop, except now it was practice room B when everyone else had gone home, or the small café near the company building that nobody from the industry seemed to frequent, or the corner booth at the convenience store where we would spread his laptop and my notebooks across the table and pretend we were not taking up too much space.
"Okay, but be honest," Martin said one evening, spinning a mechanical pencil between his fingers. "Do you think wide-leg jeans are actually coming back, or is it just the internet lying to us again?"
I looked up from the chord progression I was annotating. "They never left. That's the thing about the internet, it rediscovers things and acts like it invented them."
"Deep."
"I'm just talking about trousers, Martin."
"No, you were being a philosopher, and you know it."
I threw a sugar packet at him. He caught it without looking.
"Have you watched Stranger Things?" he asked another time, completely unprompted, in the middle of what was supposed to be a focused production session.
"I started it."
"And?"
"It made me feel crazy nostalgia– and normal."
He pointed at me like I had said something profound. "EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I said, and Juhoon told me I was being dramatic."
"You are being dramatic. But you're also right."
"Okay, I need to tell you something embarrassing," he said once, not looking up from the keyboard.
"Okay."
"I used to be terrified of pigeons. Like genuinely. Not as a kid, until I was fifteen."
I put my pen down. "Martin."
"I know."
"Fifteen."
"I said I know."
"There are pigeons outside this window right now."
"I'm aware. I've grown."
“you were fifteen like… yesterday”
The conversations never really had a subject. They just had us.
Summer, 2024
The news hit on a random practice day for me, the way most things that quietly knock the air out of you tend to do.
In March, another girl group. Another debut. Another HYBE label, another set of faces the internet would immediately begin to dissect and rank and project entire futures onto.
I had sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after reading the announcement.
It wasn't jealousy exactly. It was something more tangled than that, something that had FOMO's shape but guilt's weight. Because part of me was relieved it wasn't me. Not yet. And that relief immediately made me feel terrible.
I thought about NewJeans a lot that summer.
I had been a fan since they debuted, even before that. I had their songs on my sleep playlists. I had rewatched the Attention music video enough times that I could map every camera angle from memory. And now I was watching the news cycle churn through stories about mistreatment, about contract disputes, about girls who had debuted so young and had worked so hard and were now fighting battles that had nothing to do with music.
It was heavy in a specific way that was hard to explain to anyone who wasn't inside it.
Because I was at BIGHIT. And my conditions were genuinely good, I had a real room now, real meals, a team that checked in on me, a debut timeline that was demanding but not cruel enough to blame anyone. Mrs Kim fought for my rest days with an energy that I found both touching and slightly terrifying. I was tired, but the kind of tired that came from working hard toward something real, not from being ground down into nothing.
And somehow that made it worse to watch. Not better.
"You're doing that thing," Martin said one afternoon. We were sitting on the floor of practice room B, backs against the mirrored wall, a half-eaten convenience store lunch between us.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet but your face is very loud."
I pulled my knees to my chest. "I was thinking about NewJeans."
He was quiet for a moment. He always let things land before responding. I had noticed that about him early on. "Yeah," he said. "Me too, lately."
"I feel guilty," I admitted. "Which I know is not a rational thing to feel. But I do."
"For being here and being okay?"
"For being here and being okay while they're not."
Martin turned his head to look at me. "You didn't cause what happened to them."
"I know that."
"And you being okay doesn't mean they're less not-okay. That's not how it works."
"I know that too." I picked at the edge of my sleeve. "I just keep thinking about how this industry can be the same thing and completely different things at the same time. Same building sometimes, almost. And someone gets crushed and someone gets looked after and it's just, it's luck, partially. And that's terrifying."
Martin didn't try to fix it. He just nodded, and eventually he reached over and stole one of my remaining tteok and I let him, and we sat there in the particular silence of people who understand that some things don't need a resolution.
Through Martin, I found my way back to the others more steadily.
It was never formal. It was never a scheduled thing. It was just, one evening I showed up to help Martin with a track and Hyeon was already there, headphones around his neck, debating the snare sound with the kind of intensity most people reserved for life-or-death decisions. And then it was natural for us all to end up getting ramen at midnight. And then it became a thing.
Juhoon had developed an entire, extremely specific opinion on which convenience store onigiris were worth eating and which were a moral failing, and he shared this opinion freely and at length. I listened to every word like it was important, because with Juhoon it always was in some sideways sense.
Keonho taught me a card game that I was fairly certain he had partially invented and was making up rules for in real time. I lost every round and he was insufferably gracious about it.
James, who had apparently decided at some point in the previous five months that I was his personal photography subject, documented a disproportionate number of moments where I had food on my face or was mid-blink. "These are artistic," he told me, very seriously. "You just don't understand the vision yet."
Seonghyeon was quieter about it, but he made space in the specific way quiet people do, moved over without being asked, remembered things, appeared in doorways at the right moments with an extra coffee or an extra minute of patience.
There were evenings when someone would float the idea of going out, just out, no destination, just the city at whatever hour it happened to be, and, somehow it would become all six of us slipping out of our respective buildings in ones and twos, reconvening at the park down the street with the broken fountain that had never been fixed, sitting on the benches or the grass while Seoul did what Seoul does at night: hummed and glittered and kept moving, indifferent and beautiful.
Those nights had a texture I didn't have a word for yet. I kept thinking I should write it down before it became something I only half-remembered.
Martin and I usually ended up walking slightly ahead of the others, or slightly behind, it was never planned, it just happened, some gravitational thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once, on one of those nights, the park quiet around us, the others' voices a comfortable distance back.
"The EP," I said. Which was true and also only half of the truth.
"Which part."
"The part I still haven't figured out how to write."
He glanced at me sideways. The city light caught the edge of his face. "What's it about?"
I thought for a moment. "Something that's happening while it's happening. Before you know what to call it."
He looked ahead again. "Those are the hardest ones."
"Yeah."
"Also usually the best ones."
I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything else. We kept walking.
December, 2024
We all moved to new dorms.
The building was newer, quieter, better ventilated, the kind of place where the elevators actually worked and the hot water didn't give up on you mid-shower. The boys moved into a large unit together: five of them, one sprawling common space that I already knew would devolve into comfortable chaos within a week. Mrs Kim and I moved into the unit next door.
Literally next door. Same floor, ten feet of hallway between our front doors.
When I realized, standing in the corridor with a moving box in my arms, I just looked at Martin.
He looked back at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.
"Neighbors," he said.
"Neighbors," I confirmed.
From inside the boys' unit, Keonho's voice: "IS THAT Y/N? Y/N ARE YOU NEXT DOOR?"
"YES," I called back.
A sound that could only be described as celebration.
Mrs Kim appeared behind me, took one look at the situation, and said, with the weary composure of someone who had signed up for exactly this, "I'm installing a second lock."
January 13th, 2025
I woke up to my phone vibrating itself off my nightstand.
I caught it before it hit the floor, squinted at the screen.
Seventeen messages. Most of them in the group chat, which had been renamed — overnight, without my input to 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂.
Keonho [00:00]: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE TWO GREATEST PEOPLE WE KNOW
James [00:01]: simultaneously born on the same day. statistically unlikely. clearly fate
Juhoon [00:01]: happy birthday Y/N and hyeon 🤍
Hyeon [00:02]: This is the only day of the year I'll accept being grouped with someone else
Hyeon [00:02]: happy birthday Y/N
Martin [00:00]: happy birthday
Martin [00:00]: (i set an alarm to be first. keonho ruined it)
I was smiling before I was fully awake.
I padded out into the kitchen, where Mrs Kim had, impossibly, at six in the morning, already put a small cake on the counter. Single candle. The light blue kind.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I know," she said, and handed me a fork.
The actual birthday gathering happened that evening, squeezed into the boys' common room because it was bigger, and because no one asked, it just became understood that that was where we were going. Keonho had made a playlist. Juhoon had acquired an unreasonable amount of snacks through means he declined to explain. James had printed, actually printed, on paper, a picture from LA, the one of all six of us on the rooftop, the city stretched out behind us, everyone laughing at something just off frame.
He framed it.
I had to look away for a second.
Seonghyeon and I ended up on the balcony at some point past midnight, cups of something warm, the city below us doing its usual thing.
"Another year, nuna" he said.
"Shut uppp" I answered while hitting him softly.
A pause,
He glanced at me. "You good?"
I thought about it honestly. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."
He nodded, like that was enough. It was.
March, 2025
It was Keonho who saw it first. He burst into the corridor between our two units at eleven in the morning, phone outstretched, expression oscillating between alarm and delight.
"You're on Dispatch."
I took the phone.
There I was: grainy but unmistakably me, photographed outside a studio building, braids loose the way I always wore them lately, bright blue mask, the oversized jacket I had thrifted from a market two months ago.
HYBE's New Mystery Girl? Trainees spotted near Bighit building — a new girl group in the works?
The comments were already running wild. There was a thread about the braids. An entire thread. Someone had started selling similar masks in that shade of blue on a craft site. A fashion account had made a post titled Who is the Girl in the Blue Mask? with forty thousand likes.
I read it twice.
"Say something," Keonho said.
"I created a trend," I said slowly, "for a face covering."
"You really did."
I handed his phone back. I felt very calm and very strange at the same time. "Okay," I said. "Okay."
Mrs Kim called me within the hour. She was composed, efficient, had already spoken with the PR team. Nothing to confirm, nothing to deny, let the mystery sit, it would only build anticipation.
I sat on my bed after the call and thought: this is actually starting.
The EP
The songs I had made in LA were good. I still believed that. But I was a different person in a room than I had been on that rooftop, and some of them didn't fit right anymore.
Three songs stayed. Four were new.
Seven in total.
The thread that ran through all of them was something I had a hard time naming until I was almost finished: it was about interior space. About what it feels like to be alone inside yourself, not only as an absence of people. About the peace you find there if you're lucky, about luckiness itself and the creativity that lives there if you're paying attention. About loving what made you strange before the world had a chance to weigh in.
And underneath all of it: something astronomical. Not just metaphorically, literally. Stars kept appearing in my lyrics, not as clichés but as coordinates, as distances, as the specific comfort of looking at something unreachably far away and feeling less alone rather than more.
I played the seven songs back to back for the first time alone in my room one night and thought: yes. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to say.
I texted Martin immediately.
Y/N [01:14am]: i think i finished it
Martin [01:16am]: the EP?
Y/N [01:16am]: duhh
Martin [01:17am]: ok twin calm down
Martin [01:17am]: can i hear it
Y/N [01:17am]: tomorrow
Martin [01:17am]: why not now
Y/N [01:18am]: because it's 1am and i want to sit with it for one night first
Martin [01:19am]: …okay. that makes sense ig
Martin [01:19am]: proud of you by the way
I put my phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Late May, 2025
The choreography sessions had shifted into something more precise, less exploration, more architecture. Every eight-count had a reason now. Every transition was being tested and retested until it held.
It was the boys who had the idea first: shoot a self-made version of your MV vision before production began. Nothing formal, just phones, a camera one of them had borrowed, natural locations, a day blocked off. It was for the directors, mostly. A mood reference.
"We should do the same for yours," Martin said, after showing me their rough cut one evening. It was genuinely stunning, all five of them in an empty parking garage at golden hour, the framing instinctive and strange and completely right.
"I don't have a film team."
"You have us."
I looked around the room. Keonho was already nodding with the energy of someone who had decided yes before the sentence was finished. James had picked up his camera. Juhoon was looking at me with quiet patience, which with Juhoon meant he had also already decided.
Seonghyeon just shrugged in his particular way that meant: obviously, when do we start.
"Okay," I said. "But I'm directing."
"Obviously," said Martin.
We spent a Saturday in late May across three locations: the rooftop of a building Keonho knew someone who knew someone who could get us access to, a train station at the specific hour when the light came through the far windows sideways, and a field just outside the city at dusk where the sky did something I had been hoping for but hadn't been sure I could count on.
James filmed. The others helped with light, with holding things, with keeping the energy up through the fifteenth take of a single shot. Martin sat beside me during playback and pointed at the exact frames where something had worked and said there, that one with the certainty of someone whose eye I had learned to trust completely.
By the time we watched the rough cut that night on someone's laptop, all six of us crowded around a too-small screen, I felt something shift into place.
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I was not glued to the five boys anymore. I was not recording songs anymore. I was not under the LA palm trees anymore. And, most cruelly, I could not help myself with Martin's production and writing skills anymore.
We were all so busy preparing our debuts that we barely had time to breathe, let alone see each other. The first week back, we had all gone to grab dinner together, all six of us squeezed into a booth at a samgyeopsal place near the company building, the kind of dinner where everyone laughs too loud because they are trying not to acknowledge that something has shifted. It felt really nice. But different.
In the third week, I drank matcha with Keonho and Juhoon. It was brief. We all had somewhere to be.
We passed by each other in the corridors sometimes. It was polite. Warm, but polite, the kind of warm that aches a little.
All I had left of them was the ridiculous pictures James had taken on my phone during some tired night I barely remembered, the mobile game Keonho and Hyeon had bullied me into downloading still eating up storage on my home screen, Juhoon's pack of bandaids from a random dance practice where I had tripped over my own feet and refused to admit it hurt, and Martin's hoodie he had lent me one night on the rooftop when the wind had picked up and neither of us had wanted to go back inside yet and all of the notes he had written on my notebook instead of his.
Mrs Kim told me we would be able to meet often again once we got closer to debut.
We were supposed to debut around the same time, a bit less than two years from now. I didn't fully understand why I still had to wait so long since I had completed my EP in LA, but truthfully, I had already started rethinking all of my songs. So maybe the timeline made more sense than I wanted to admit.
After five months, I received a text.
I almost missed it. My phone had been living face-down on my desk during late-night lyric sessions, and I had gotten used to the silence.
Martin [10:47pm]: hey, is this Y/N? got your number from the managers. hope that's okay
Martin [10:47pm]: i'm kind of stuck on something and i was wondering if you'd be up to help. musically speaking
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary.
Y/N [10:51pm]: it's me. and yeah that's okay
Y/N [10:51pm]: what are you stuck on
Martin [10:53pm]: the bridge of this one track. it keeps resolving too early and it's driving me insane
Martin [10:53pm]: like it lands but it doesn't LAND you know
Y/N [10:54pm]: i know exactly what you mean
Y/N [10:54pm]: send it
Martin [10:55pm]: just like that? no "oh martin it's almost 11pm"
Y/N [10:55pm]: you know I never sleep this early
Martin [10:56pm]: ik
Martin [10:56pm]: okay sending
So, five months after LA, five months of me working on yet another round of new songs, five months of practicing choreos from sunset until dawn, five months of barely being able to meet the guys, Martin and I started meeting again.
Just like we used to on the rooftop, except now it was practice room B when everyone else had gone home, or the small café near the company building that nobody from the industry seemed to frequent, or the corner booth at the convenience store where we would spread his laptop and my notebooks across the table and pretend we were not taking up too much space.
"Okay, but be honest," Martin said one evening, spinning a mechanical pencil between his fingers. "Do you think wide-leg jeans are actually coming back, or is it just the internet lying to us again?"
I looked up from the chord progression I was annotating. "They never left. That's the thing about the internet, it rediscovers things and acts like it invented them."
"Deep."
"I'm just talking about trousers, Martin."
"No, you were being a philosopher, and you know it."
I threw a sugar packet at him. He caught it without looking.
"Have you watched Stranger Things?" he asked another time, completely unprompted, in the middle of what was supposed to be a focused production session.
"I started it."
"And?"
"It made me feel crazy nostalgia– and normal."
He pointed at me like I had said something profound. "EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I said, and Juhoon told me I was being dramatic."
"You are being dramatic. But you're also right."
"Okay, I need to tell you something embarrassing," he said once, not looking up from the keyboard.
"Okay."
"I used to be terrified of pigeons. Like genuinely. Not as a kid, until I was fifteen."
I put my pen down. "Martin."
"I know."
"Fifteen."
"I said I know."
"There are pigeons outside this window right now."
"I'm aware. I've grown."
“you were fifteen like… yesterday”
The conversations never really had a subject. They just had us.
Summer, 2024
The news hit on a random practice day for me, the way most things that quietly knock the air out of you tend to do.
In March, another girl group. Another debut. Another HYBE label, another set of faces the internet would immediately begin to dissect and rank and project entire futures onto.
I had sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after reading the announcement.
It wasn't jealousy exactly. It was something more tangled than that, something that had FOMO's shape but guilt's weight. Because part of me was relieved it wasn't me. Not yet. And that relief immediately made me feel terrible.
I thought about NewJeans a lot that summer.
I had been a fan since they debuted, even before that. I had their songs on my sleep playlists. I had rewatched the Attention music video enough times that I could map every camera angle from memory. And now I was watching the news cycle churn through stories about mistreatment, about contract disputes, about girls who had debuted so young and had worked so hard and were now fighting battles that had nothing to do with music.
It was heavy in a specific way that was hard to explain to anyone who wasn't inside it.
Because I was at BIGHIT. And my conditions were genuinely good, I had a real room now, real meals, a team that checked in on me, a debut timeline that was demanding but not cruel enough to blame anyone. Mrs Kim fought for my rest days with an energy that I found both touching and slightly terrifying. I was tired, but the kind of tired that came from working hard toward something real, not from being ground down into nothing.
And somehow that made it worse to watch. Not better.
"You're doing that thing," Martin said one afternoon. We were sitting on the floor of practice room B, backs against the mirrored wall, a half-eaten convenience store lunch between us.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet but your face is very loud."
I pulled my knees to my chest. "I was thinking about NewJeans."
He was quiet for a moment. He always let things land before responding. I had noticed that about him early on. "Yeah," he said. "Me too, lately."
"I feel guilty," I admitted. "Which I know is not a rational thing to feel. But I do."
"For being here and being okay?"
"For being here and being okay while they're not."
Martin turned his head to look at me. "You didn't cause what happened to them."
"I know that."
"And you being okay doesn't mean they're less not-okay. That's not how it works."
"I know that too." I picked at the edge of my sleeve. "I just keep thinking about how this industry can be the same thing and completely different things at the same time. Same building sometimes, almost. And someone gets crushed and someone gets looked after and it's just, it's luck, partially. And that's terrifying."
Martin didn't try to fix it. He just nodded, and eventually he reached over and stole one of my remaining tteok and I let him, and we sat there in the particular silence of people who understand that some things don't need a resolution.
Through Martin, I found my way back to the others more steadily.
It was never formal. It was never a scheduled thing. It was just, one evening I showed up to help Martin with a track and Hyeon was already there, headphones around his neck, debating the snare sound with the kind of intensity most people reserved for life-or-death decisions. And then it was natural for us all to end up getting ramen at midnight. And then it became a thing.
Juhoon had developed an entire, extremely specific opinion on which convenience store onigiris were worth eating and which were a moral failing, and he shared this opinion freely and at length. I listened to every word like it was important, because with Juhoon it always was in some sideways sense.
Keonho taught me a card game that I was fairly certain he had partially invented and was making up rules for in real time. I lost every round and he was insufferably gracious about it.
James, who had apparently decided at some point in the previous five months that I was his personal photography subject, documented a disproportionate number of moments where I had food on my face or was mid-blink. "These are artistic," he told me, very seriously. "You just don't understand the vision yet."
Seonghyeon was quieter about it, but he made space in the specific way quiet people do, moved over without being asked, remembered things, appeared in doorways at the right moments with an extra coffee or an extra minute of patience.
There were evenings when someone would float the idea of going out, just out, no destination, just the city at whatever hour it happened to be, and, somehow it would become all six of us slipping out of our respective buildings in ones and twos, reconvening at the park down the street with the broken fountain that had never been fixed, sitting on the benches or the grass while Seoul did what Seoul does at night: hummed and glittered and kept moving, indifferent and beautiful.
Those nights had a texture I didn't have a word for yet. I kept thinking I should write it down before it became something I only half-remembered.
Martin and I usually ended up walking slightly ahead of the others, or slightly behind, it was never planned, it just happened, some gravitational thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once, on one of those nights, the park quiet around us, the others' voices a comfortable distance back.
"The EP," I said. Which was true and also only half of the truth.
"Which part."
"The part I still haven't figured out how to write."
He glanced at me sideways. The city light caught the edge of his face. "What's it about?"
I thought for a moment. "Something that's happening while it's happening. Before you know what to call it."
He looked ahead again. "Those are the hardest ones."
"Yeah."
"Also usually the best ones."
I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything else. We kept walking.
December, 2024
We all moved to new dorms.
The building was newer, quieter, better ventilated, the kind of place where the elevators actually worked and the hot water didn't give up on you mid-shower. The boys moved into a large unit together: five of them, one sprawling common space that I already knew would devolve into comfortable chaos within a week. Mrs Kim and I moved into the unit next door.
Literally next door. Same floor, ten feet of hallway between our front doors.
When I realized, standing in the corridor with a moving box in my arms, I just looked at Martin.
He looked back at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.
"Neighbors," he said.
"Neighbors," I confirmed.
From inside the boys' unit, Keonho's voice: "IS THAT Y/N? Y/N ARE YOU NEXT DOOR?"
"YES," I called back.
A sound that could only be described as celebration.
Mrs Kim appeared behind me, took one look at the situation, and said, with the weary composure of someone who had signed up for exactly this, "I'm installing a second lock."
January 13th, 2025
I woke up to my phone vibrating itself off my nightstand.
I caught it before it hit the floor, squinted at the screen.
Seventeen messages. Most of them in the group chat, which had been renamed — overnight, without my input to 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂.
Keonho [00:00]: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE TWO GREATEST PEOPLE WE KNOW
James [00:01]: simultaneously born on the same day. statistically unlikely. clearly fate
Juhoon [00:01]: happy birthday Y/N and hyeon 🤍
Hyeon [00:02]: This is the only day of the year I'll accept being grouped with someone else
Hyeon [00:02]: happy birthday Y/N
Martin [00:00]: happy birthday
Martin [00:00]: (i set an alarm to be first. keonho ruined it)
I was smiling before I was fully awake.
I padded out into the kitchen, where Mrs Kim had, impossibly, at six in the morning, already put a small cake on the counter. Single candle. The light blue kind.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I know," she said, and handed me a fork.
The actual birthday gathering happened that evening, squeezed into the boys' common room because it was bigger, and because no one asked, it just became understood that that was where we were going. Keonho had made a playlist. Juhoon had acquired an unreasonable amount of snacks through means he declined to explain. James had printed, actually printed, on paper, a picture from LA, the one of all six of us on the rooftop, the city stretched out behind us, everyone laughing at something just off frame.
He framed it.
I had to look away for a second.
Seonghyeon and I ended up on the balcony at some point past midnight, cups of something warm, the city below us doing its usual thing.
"Another year, nuna" he said.
"Shut uppp" I answered while hitting him softly.
A pause,
He glanced at me. "You good?"
I thought about it honestly. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."
He nodded, like that was enough. It was.
March, 2025
It was Keonho who saw it first. He burst into the corridor between our two units at eleven in the morning, phone outstretched, expression oscillating between alarm and delight.
"You're on Dispatch."
I took the phone.
There I was: grainy but unmistakably me, photographed outside a studio building, braids loose the way I always wore them lately, bright blue mask, the oversized jacket I had thrifted from a market two months ago.
HYBE's New Mystery Girl? Trainees spotted near Bighit building — a new girl group in the works?
The comments were already running wild. There was a thread about the braids. An entire thread. Someone had started selling similar masks in that shade of blue on a craft site. A fashion account had made a post titled Who is the Girl in the Blue Mask? with forty thousand likes.
I read it twice.
"Say something," Keonho said.
"I created a trend," I said slowly, "for a face covering."
"You really did."
I handed his phone back. I felt very calm and very strange at the same time. "Okay," I said. "Okay."
Mrs Kim called me within the hour. She was composed, efficient, had already spoken with the PR team. Nothing to confirm, nothing to deny, let the mystery sit, it would only build anticipation.
I sat on my bed after the call and thought: this is actually starting.
The EP
The songs I had made in LA were good. I still believed that. But I was a different person in a room than I had been on that rooftop, and some of them didn't fit right anymore.
Three songs stayed. Four were new.
Seven in total.
The thread that ran through all of them was something I had a hard time naming until I was almost finished: it was about interior space. About what it feels like to be alone inside yourself, not only as an absence of people. About the peace you find there if you're lucky, about luckiness itself and the creativity that lives there if you're paying attention. About loving what made you strange before the world had a chance to weigh in.
And underneath all of it: something astronomical. Not just metaphorically, literally. Stars kept appearing in my lyrics, not as clichés but as coordinates, as distances, as the specific comfort of looking at something unreachably far away and feeling less alone rather than more.
I played the seven songs back to back for the first time alone in my room one night and thought: yes. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to say.
I texted Martin immediately.
Y/N [01:14am]: i think i finished it
Martin [01:16am]: the EP?
Y/N [01:16am]: duhh
Martin [01:17am]: ok twin calm down
Martin [01:17am]: can i hear it
Y/N [01:17am]: tomorrow
Martin [01:17am]: why not now
Y/N [01:18am]: because it's 1am and i want to sit with it for one night first
Martin [01:19am]: …okay. that makes sense ig
Martin [01:19am]: proud of you by the way
I put my phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Late May, 2025
The choreography sessions had shifted into something more precise, less exploration, more architecture. Every eight-count had a reason now. Every transition was being tested and retested until it held.
It was the boys who had the idea first: shoot a self-made version of your MV vision before production began. Nothing formal, just phones, a camera one of them had borrowed, natural locations, a day blocked off. It was for the directors, mostly. A mood reference.
"We should do the same for yours," Martin said, after showing me their rough cut one evening. It was genuinely stunning, all five of them in an empty parking garage at golden hour, the framing instinctive and strange and completely right.
"I don't have a film team."
"You have us."
I looked around the room. Keonho was already nodding with the energy of someone who had decided yes before the sentence was finished. James had picked up his camera. Juhoon was looking at me with quiet patience, which with Juhoon meant he had also already decided.
Seonghyeon just shrugged in his particular way that meant: obviously, when do we start.
"Okay," I said. "But I'm directing."
"Obviously," said Martin.
We spent a Saturday in late May across three locations: the rooftop of a building Keonho knew someone who knew someone who could get us access to, a train station at the specific hour when the light came through the far windows sideways, and a field just outside the city at dusk where the sky did something I had been hoping for but hadn't been sure I could count on.
James filmed. The others helped with light, with holding things, with keeping the energy up through the fifteenth take of a single shot. Martin sat beside me during playback and pointed at the exact frames where something had worked and said there, that one with the certainty of someone whose eye I had learned to trust completely.
By the time we watched the rough cut that night on someone's laptop, all six of us crowded around a too-small screen, I felt something shift into place.
I was not glued to the five boys anymore. I was not recording songs anymore. I was not under the LA palm trees anymore. And, most cruelly, I could not help myself with Martin's production and writing skills anymore.
We were all so busy preparing our debuts that we barely had time to breathe, let alone see each other. The first week back, we had all gone to grab dinner together, all six of us squeezed into a booth at a samgyeopsal place near the company building, the kind of dinner where everyone laughs too loud because they are trying not to acknowledge that something has shifted. It felt really nice. But different.
In the third week, I drank matcha with Keonho and Juhoon. It was brief. We all had somewhere to be.
We passed by each other in the corridors sometimes. It was polite. Warm, but polite, the kind of warm that aches a little.
All I had left of them was the ridiculous pictures James had taken on my phone during some tired night I barely remembered, the mobile game Keonho and Hyeon had bullied me into downloading still eating up storage on my home screen, Juhoon's pack of bandaids from a random dance practice where I had tripped over my own feet and refused to admit it hurt, and Martin's hoodie he had lent me one night on the rooftop when the wind had picked up and neither of us had wanted to go back inside yet and all of the notes he had written on my notebook instead of his.
Mrs Kim told me we would be able to meet often again once we got closer to debut.
We were supposed to debut around the same time, a bit less than two years from now. I didn't fully understand why I still had to wait so long since I had completed my EP in LA, but truthfully, I had already started rethinking all of my songs. So maybe the timeline made more sense than I wanted to admit.
After five months, I received a text.
I almost missed it. My phone had been living face-down on my desk during late-night lyric sessions, and I had gotten used to the silence.
Martin [10:47pm]: hey, is this Y/N? got your number from the managers. hope that's okay
Martin [10:47pm]: i'm kind of stuck on something and i was wondering if you'd be up to help. musically speaking
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary.
Y/N [10:51pm]: it's me. and yeah that's okay
Y/N [10:51pm]: what are you stuck on
Martin [10:53pm]: the bridge of this one track. it keeps resolving too early and it's driving me insane
Martin [10:53pm]: like it lands but it doesn't LAND you know
Y/N [10:54pm]: i know exactly what you mean
Y/N [10:54pm]: send it
Martin [10:55pm]: just like that? no "oh martin it's almost 11pm"
Y/N [10:55pm]: you know I never sleep this early
Martin [10:56pm]: ik
Martin [10:56pm]: okay sending
So, five months after LA, five months of me working on yet another round of new songs, five months of practicing choreos from sunset until dawn, five months of barely being able to meet the guys, Martin and I started meeting again.
Just like we used to on the rooftop, except now it was practice room B when everyone else had gone home, or the small café near the company building that nobody from the industry seemed to frequent, or the corner booth at the convenience store where we would spread his laptop and my notebooks across the table and pretend we were not taking up too much space.
"Okay, but be honest," Martin said one evening, spinning a mechanical pencil between his fingers. "Do you think wide-leg jeans are actually coming back, or is it just the internet lying to us again?"
I looked up from the chord progression I was annotating. "They never left. That's the thing about the internet, it rediscovers things and acts like it invented them."
"Deep."
"I'm just talking about trousers, Martin."
"No, you were being a philosopher, and you know it."
I threw a sugar packet at him. He caught it without looking.
"Have you watched Stranger Things?" he asked another time, completely unprompted, in the middle of what was supposed to be a focused production session.
"I started it."
"And?"
"It made me feel crazy nostalgia– and normal."
He pointed at me like I had said something profound. "EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I said, and Juhoon told me I was being dramatic."
"You are being dramatic. But you're also right."
"Okay, I need to tell you something embarrassing," he said once, not looking up from the keyboard.
"Okay."
"I used to be terrified of pigeons. Like genuinely. Not as a kid, until I was fifteen."
I put my pen down. "Martin."
"I know."
"Fifteen."
"I said I know."
"There are pigeons outside this window right now."
"I'm aware. I've grown."
“you were fifteen like… yesterday”
The conversations never really had a subject. They just had us.
Summer, 2024
The news hit on a random practice day for me, the way most things that quietly knock the air out of you tend to do.
In March, another girl group. Another debut. Another HYBE label, another set of faces the internet would immediately begin to dissect and rank and project entire futures onto.
I had sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after reading the announcement.
It wasn't jealousy exactly. It was something more tangled than that, something that had FOMO's shape but guilt's weight. Because part of me was relieved it wasn't me. Not yet. And that relief immediately made me feel terrible.
I thought about NewJeans a lot that summer.
I had been a fan since they debuted, even before that. I had their songs on my sleep playlists. I had rewatched the Attention music video enough times that I could map every camera angle from memory. And now I was watching the news cycle churn through stories about mistreatment, about contract disputes, about girls who had debuted so young and had worked so hard and were now fighting battles that had nothing to do with music.
It was heavy in a specific way that was hard to explain to anyone who wasn't inside it.
Because I was at BIGHIT. And my conditions were genuinely good, I had a real room now, real meals, a team that checked in on me, a debut timeline that was demanding but not cruel enough to blame anyone. Mrs Kim fought for my rest days with an energy that I found both touching and slightly terrifying. I was tired, but the kind of tired that came from working hard toward something real, not from being ground down into nothing.
And somehow that made it worse to watch. Not better.
"You're doing that thing," Martin said one afternoon. We were sitting on the floor of practice room B, backs against the mirrored wall, a half-eaten convenience store lunch between us.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet but your face is very loud."
I pulled my knees to my chest. "I was thinking about NewJeans."
He was quiet for a moment. He always let things land before responding. I had noticed that about him early on. "Yeah," he said. "Me too, lately."
"I feel guilty," I admitted. "Which I know is not a rational thing to feel. But I do."
"For being here and being okay?"
"For being here and being okay while they're not."
Martin turned his head to look at me. "You didn't cause what happened to them."
"I know that."
"And you being okay doesn't mean they're less not-okay. That's not how it works."
"I know that too." I picked at the edge of my sleeve. "I just keep thinking about how this industry can be the same thing and completely different things at the same time. Same building sometimes, almost. And someone gets crushed and someone gets looked after and it's just, it's luck, partially. And that's terrifying."
Martin didn't try to fix it. He just nodded, and eventually he reached over and stole one of my remaining tteok and I let him, and we sat there in the particular silence of people who understand that some things don't need a resolution.
Through Martin, I found my way back to the others more steadily.
It was never formal. It was never a scheduled thing. It was just, one evening I showed up to help Martin with a track and Hyeon was already there, headphones around his neck, debating the snare sound with the kind of intensity most people reserved for life-or-death decisions. And then it was natural for us all to end up getting ramen at midnight. And then it became a thing.
Juhoon had developed an entire, extremely specific opinion on which convenience store onigiris were worth eating and which were a moral failing, and he shared this opinion freely and at length. I listened to every word like it was important, because with Juhoon it always was in some sideways sense.
Keonho taught me a card game that I was fairly certain he had partially invented and was making up rules for in real time. I lost every round and he was insufferably gracious about it.
James, who had apparently decided at some point in the previous five months that I was his personal photography subject, documented a disproportionate number of moments where I had food on my face or was mid-blink. "These are artistic," he told me, very seriously. "You just don't understand the vision yet."
Seonghyeon was quieter about it, but he made space in the specific way quiet people do, moved over without being asked, remembered things, appeared in doorways at the right moments with an extra coffee or an extra minute of patience.
There were evenings when someone would float the idea of going out, just out, no destination, just the city at whatever hour it happened to be, and, somehow it would become all six of us slipping out of our respective buildings in ones and twos, reconvening at the park down the street with the broken fountain that had never been fixed, sitting on the benches or the grass while Seoul did what Seoul does at night: hummed and glittered and kept moving, indifferent and beautiful.
Those nights had a texture I didn't have a word for yet. I kept thinking I should write it down before it became something I only half-remembered.
Martin and I usually ended up walking slightly ahead of the others, or slightly behind, it was never planned, it just happened, some gravitational thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once, on one of those nights, the park quiet around us, the others' voices a comfortable distance back.
"The EP," I said. Which was true and also only half of the truth.
"Which part."
"The part I still haven't figured out how to write."
He glanced at me sideways. The city light caught the edge of his face. "What's it about?"
I thought for a moment. "Something that's happening while it's happening. Before you know what to call it."
He looked ahead again. "Those are the hardest ones."
"Yeah."
"Also usually the best ones."
I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything else. We kept walking.
December, 2024
We all moved to new dorms.
The building was newer, quieter, better ventilated, the kind of place where the elevators actually worked and the hot water didn't give up on you mid-shower. The boys moved into a large unit together: five of them, one sprawling common space that I already knew would devolve into comfortable chaos within a week. Mrs Kim and I moved into the unit next door.
Literally next door. Same floor, ten feet of hallway between our front doors.
When I realized, standing in the corridor with a moving box in my arms, I just looked at Martin.
He looked back at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.
"Neighbors," he said.
"Neighbors," I confirmed.
From inside the boys' unit, Keonho's voice: "IS THAT Y/N? Y/N ARE YOU NEXT DOOR?"
"YES," I called back.
A sound that could only be described as celebration.
Mrs Kim appeared behind me, took one look at the situation, and said, with the weary composure of someone who had signed up for exactly this, "I'm installing a second lock."
January 13th, 2025
I woke up to my phone vibrating itself off my nightstand.
I caught it before it hit the floor, squinted at the screen.
Seventeen messages. Most of them in the group chat, which had been renamed — overnight, without my input to 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂.
Keonho [00:00]: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE TWO GREATEST PEOPLE WE KNOW
James [00:01]: simultaneously born on the same day. statistically unlikely. clearly fate
Juhoon [00:01]: happy birthday Y/N and hyeon 🤍
Hyeon [00:02]: This is the only day of the year I'll accept being grouped with someone else
Hyeon [00:02]: happy birthday Y/N
Martin [00:00]: happy birthday
Martin [00:00]: (i set an alarm to be first. keonho ruined it)
I was smiling before I was fully awake.
I padded out into the kitchen, where Mrs Kim had, impossibly, at six in the morning, already put a small cake on the counter. Single candle. The light blue kind.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I know," she said, and handed me a fork.
The actual birthday gathering happened that evening, squeezed into the boys' common room because it was bigger, and because no one asked, it just became understood that that was where we were going. Keonho had made a playlist. Juhoon had acquired an unreasonable amount of snacks through means he declined to explain. James had printed, actually printed, on paper, a picture from LA, the one of all six of us on the rooftop, the city stretched out behind us, everyone laughing at something just off frame.
He framed it.
I had to look away for a second.
Seonghyeon and I ended up on the balcony at some point past midnight, cups of something warm, the city below us doing its usual thing.
"Another year, nuna" he said.
"Shut uppp" I answered while hitting him softly.
A pause,
He glanced at me. "You good?"
I thought about it honestly. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."
He nodded, like that was enough. It was.
March, 2025
It was Keonho who saw it first. He burst into the corridor between our two units at eleven in the morning, phone outstretched, expression oscillating between alarm and delight.
"You're on Dispatch."
I took the phone.
There I was: grainy but unmistakably me, photographed outside a studio building, braids loose the way I always wore them lately, bright blue mask, the oversized jacket I had thrifted from a market two months ago.
HYBE's New Mystery Girl? Trainees spotted near Bighit building — a new girl group in the works?
The comments were already running wild. There was a thread about the braids. An entire thread. Someone had started selling similar masks in that shade of blue on a craft site. A fashion account had made a post titled Who is the Girl in the Blue Mask? with forty thousand likes.
I read it twice.
"Say something," Keonho said.
"I created a trend," I said slowly, "for a face covering."
"You really did."
I handed his phone back. I felt very calm and very strange at the same time. "Okay," I said. "Okay."
Mrs Kim called me within the hour. She was composed, efficient, had already spoken with the PR team. Nothing to confirm, nothing to deny, let the mystery sit, it would only build anticipation.
I sat on my bed after the call and thought: this is actually starting.
The EP
The songs I had made in LA were good. I still believed that. But I was a different person in a room than I had been on that rooftop, and some of them didn't fit right anymore.
Three songs stayed. Four were new.
Seven in total.
The thread that ran through all of them was something I had a hard time naming until I was almost finished: it was about interior space. About what it feels like to be alone inside yourself, not only as an absence of people. About the peace you find there if you're lucky, about luckiness itself and the creativity that lives there if you're paying attention. About loving what made you strange before the world had a chance to weigh in.
And underneath all of it: something astronomical. Not just metaphorically, literally. Stars kept appearing in my lyrics, not as clichés but as coordinates, as distances, as the specific comfort of looking at something unreachably far away and feeling less alone rather than more.
I played the seven songs back to back for the first time alone in my room one night and thought: yes. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to say.
I texted Martin immediately.
Y/N [01:14am]: i think i finished it
Martin [01:16am]: the EP?
Y/N [01:16am]: duhh
Martin [01:17am]: ok twin calm down
Martin [01:17am]: can i hear it
Y/N [01:17am]: tomorrow
Martin [01:17am]: why not now
Y/N [01:18am]: because it's 1am and i want to sit with it for one night first
Martin [01:19am]: …okay. that makes sense ig
Martin [01:19am]: proud of you by the way
I put my phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Late May, 2025
The choreography sessions had shifted into something more precise, less exploration, more architecture. Every eight-count had a reason now. Every transition was being tested and retested until it held.
It was the boys who had the idea first: shoot a self-made version of your MV vision before production began. Nothing formal, just phones, a camera one of them had borrowed, natural locations, a day blocked off. It was for the directors, mostly. A mood reference.
"We should do the same for yours," Martin said, after showing me their rough cut one evening. It was genuinely stunning, all five of them in an empty parking garage at golden hour, the framing instinctive and strange and completely right.
"I don't have a film team."
"You have us."
I looked around the room. Keonho was already nodding with the energy of someone who had decided yes before the sentence was finished. James had picked up his camera. Juhoon was looking at me with quiet patience, which with Juhoon meant he had also already decided.
Seonghyeon just shrugged in his particular way that meant: obviously, when do we start.
"Okay," I said. "But I'm directing."
"Obviously," said Martin.
We spent a Saturday in late May across three locations: the rooftop of a building Keonho knew someone who knew someone who could get us access to, a train station at the specific hour when the light came through the far windows sideways, and a field just outside the city at dusk where the sky did something I had been hoping for but hadn't been sure I could count on.
James filmed. The others helped with light, with holding things, with keeping the energy up through the fifteenth take of a single shot. Martin sat beside me during playback and pointed at the exact frames where something had worked and said there, that one with the certainty of someone whose eye I had learned to trust completely.
By the time we watched the rough cut that night on someone's laptop, all six of us crowded around a too-small screen, I felt something shift into place.
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I slept for four hours and woke up feeling like a new person.
I don't fully understand it at first. I lie there in the early LA light waiting for the anxiety to arrive. The first-day-at-the-studio anxiety that I have been anticipating for two years, that I fully expected to hit me the moment I opened my eyes. It doesn't come. I feel still. Genuinely, quietly still, in a way that has nothing to do with being half asleep.
This is not normal for me. I should say that clearly. I am the kind of person who stress-cleans at midnight before important days, who runs through worst-case scenarios the way other people count sheep, who has been known to wake up at 3am before evaluations just to run the choreography in her head one more time. The anxiety is usually the first thing. It has always been the first thing.
But this morning it isn't there. And in its place is something I don't have a precise word for, something warm and settled.
I always dream a lot. Tonight, I dreamed a lot for a four-hour-long night. Good dreams, the kind that leave something behind when you wake up, a warmth you can't quite locate the source of. At one point, I was performing in outer space in front of an alien audience that was, for some reason, very critical of my stage presence. I woke up before I found out how it went, but I woke up smiling.
I lie there for another minute, just noticing the feeling. The sun is coming through the curtains at a low angle. Somewhere down the corridor, I can hear the house starting to stir. And I feel fine. More than fine. Ready.
I don't stop to think about why. I just get up.
I do my skincare, leave my hair down, and pull on my favourite low-rise flare jeans — black, slightly worn in at the knees, my Chrome Hearts UGGs, and a loose blue t-shirt. No makeup today. Today feels like the kind of day you want to arrive at as yourself, no additional layers.
Downstairs, the kitchen is already occupied.
Seonghyeon is at the counter making toast with the focused energy of someone who takes breakfast seriously, and Keonho is sitting on the kitchen island eating cereal directly from the box.
"You can't eat it like that," Seonghyeon says, without turning around.
"I don’t care" Keonho says.
"There's milk right there."
"I know where the milk is."
I open the fridge and look for the orange juice I saw yesterday. "Good morning."
"Morning," they both say, at the same time, in the same flat tone. It is very funny and neither of them reacts to it.
I find the juice and pour a glass. Seonghyeon slides a piece of toast toward me across the counter without being asked, which is such a quiet and considered thing to do that I almost mention it. I don't. I just take it.
"Are you nervous?" Keonho asks me. He has abandoned the cereal box and is now looking at me with the direct attention he seems to give most things.
"A little," I say. "Are you?"
He thinks about it genuinely. "Yes."
Seonghyeon turns around and leans against the counter. "I've been nervous since I woke up," he says, in the tone of someone making a factual report.
I look at both of them. Two of the quietest people in the house, sitting in the kitchen at 7am admitting to being nervous about the same thing I am nervous about, in the specific way that quiet people admit things, plainly, without drama, like it would be more exhausting to pretend otherwise.
"Me too," I say. And it is true, technically. There is a small flutter of nerves somewhere underneath everything else. But it is small. Smaller than it has any right to be, given what today is.
I don't examine that too closely. I just eat my toast.
The studio is in a building that does not look like much from the outside, which I have noticed is always the case with the ones that matter. Inside, it is a different world, low light, good speakers, the particular air of a space that has absorbed a lot of sound over the years and held onto something of it.
We are introduced to the team: producers and sound engineers who between them have shaped some of the most specific, inventive records to come out of the last few years. People whose work I know by ear before I know their names. I keep my reaction contained and professional and immediately text Mrs Kim about it from the bathroom because I need to tell someone.
The plan is that the boys work in Studio A for the morning while I start in Studio B with my own producer session. We will overlap in the afternoon, sharing the space and the team.
I walk into Studio B and sit down at the production desk and look at the boards and think: this is real. This is actually happening.
Then I open my notebook and get to work.
The morning disappears.
That is the only way I can describe it. Time moves differently in a studio, or rather, it stops moving the way it normally does and starts moving according to the music instead, which means an hour can feel like ten minutes or ten minutes can feel like an hour, and there is no reliable way to track either. We are working on the two songs I have been developing the most since training, pulling them apart and rebuilding them with proper production, real instrumentation, and a sound that is finally as big as the idea behind it.
By midday, I am in the booth.
I do not notice the door opening.
The first take is a warmup, finding the room, finding where my voice sits in the mix. The second take is better. By the third, I am inside the song properly, not thinking about the notes anymore, just living in the feeling the song was built around, that specific loneliness that is also somehow full, the one I have been trying to articulate since I was a little kid in a city that did not know my name yet.
I don't notice how much time is passing. I don't notice the door opening again. I don't notice the two people who slip quietly into the back of the room while I am mid-take, because I am not thinking about anything except the song.
When I finally come out of the booth to check the playback, that is when I see them.
Juhoon is leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who has been quietly impressed for a while and is deciding whether to say so. Martin is beside him, closer to the glass, and he is not leaning against anything. He is just standing. Watching the booth with a stillness that is different from his usual energy, focused, almost careful, like he is trying not to disturb something.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"A while," Juhoon says, at the same time Martin says "not long," and then they look at each other.
I look at Martin. He has the expression of someone whose face has slightly betrayed him and who is hoping no one noticed. I do not say anything about it.
"We came to see if you wanted lunch," Juhoon says.
"I'm okay," I say. "I don't want to stop."
Juhoon nods like he already knew this was the answer. Martin is still looking at the booth, then catches himself and looks at his phone instead.
"We'll bring you something back," Juhoon says.
"You really don't have to—"
"We're bringing you something back," Martin says. It comes out more earnest than decisive, like he has just made a personal commitment and is slightly surprised by it. He clears his throat. "What do you want?"
They bring back a sandwich and a coffee and leave them on the desk without interrupting the session. I eat between takes without really tasting it, which is the correct way to eat when you are in the middle of something.
The afternoon runs long. Nobody wants to stop, and the producers are patient enough to let the work keep going for as long as it needs to. By the time the staff tells us it is time to leave, I have a verse and a chorus that feel genuinely finished, not demo-finished, not almost-there, but done. Real. Two years of working toward a sound, and today it finally has a shape I can hold.
In the car on the way back, I put my headphones on and listen to the rough mixes on repeat and do not speak to anyone, and Mrs Kim lets me, because she understands.
From the front seat I can hear fragments of the boys' conversation, something about a chorus that isn't resolving, a structural problem they couldn't crack in the afternoon session. James sounds frustrated in the controlled way of someone who does not want to seem frustrated. The EP is going to take longer than planned. I file this away without really thinking about it yet.
What I have not mentioned yet, what I keep forgetting to mention because it has become so constant that it recedes into the background, is the camera.
There has been a camera crew with us since the airport in Seoul. A small team, four or five people, mostly unobtrusive, mostly staying on the edges of things. They are documenting the process; a pre-debut record of all of us working toward our first releases, something that will exist as content somewhere down the line. I have gotten used to them faster than I expected. You forget the camera is there, mostly. And then occasionally you remember, and you wonder which moments they are keeping.
Back at the house, someone orders In-N-Out.
We end up spread across the living room, on the couch, on the floor, in the armchairs, with paper bags and wrappers, and the particular chaos of six people eating fast food in a shared space for the first time. The camera crew is there in the corner, capturing whatever this is.
"Okay, serious question," James says, holding up a fry. "Animal style or regular."
"Animal style," I say.
"Obviously animal style," Juhoon says.
Keonho looks between us. "What's animal style?"
The reaction to this is immediate and collective. James sets his burger down with the gravity of someone about to deliver important news. Seonghyeon turns to look at Keonho with an expression of genuine concern. Martin points at Keonho's wrapper.
"What did you order?"
"Just a regular burger?"
"You are in Los Angeles," James says, "at an In-N-Out, and you ordered a regular burger."
"I didn't know—"
"We're fixing this," Martin says, and is already on his feet going back to the bag to check for extras.
There are not, which leads to a ten-minute negotiation about who will sacrifice part of their animal style order for Keonho's education, during which Keonho maintains he is completely fine and everyone ignores him. It is the funniest thing I have seen in recent memory. I am crying a little by the end of it. So is Juhoon. The camera, I notice, is absolutely getting this.
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, James looks between me and Martin; Martin who is currently trying to explain the concept of secret sauce with the intensity of someone teaching a university seminar, and says, unprompted:
"You know what's weird? You two are literally the same person."
Martin stops mid-sentence. I look up.
"The way you both went feral about the studio today," James continues, gesturing vaguely between us. "And you both ordered the complicated thing at lunch yesterday and then stared at it when it arrived—"
"I wasn't sure what it was going to look like," Martin says.
"Me neither," I say.
James points at us. "See."
"That's two things," Martin says.
"It's a pattern," Juhoon says mildly, from the armchair. He has the expression of someone confirming something he noticed a while ago.
"We're not the same," I say. "I'm cooler."
Martin turns to look at me with an expression of profound disagreement that he seems to be deciding whether to voice. He decides against it, but only barely.
Keonho, who has been quietly observing all of this, says: "What's your nickname? You call Mrs Kim unnie sometimes by accident."
"I don't have a nickname," I say, which is not entirely true.
"You do," Mrs Kim says from the kitchen doorway, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this to come up. "Her family calls her Nini."
"Nini," James repeats, like he is trying it out.
"From Eunha," I say. "It means galaxy. My grandmother started it."
There is a brief silence in which everyone seems to find this information fitting in a way they cannot quite articulate.
"Mars," Seonghyeon says suddenly.
We all look at him.
"That's Martin's nickname," he clarifies. "From when we were trainees."
"Mars and Nini," James says slowly. He looks between us with an expression of deep satisfaction. "Galaxy and planet. I'm just saying."
"You're not just saying anything," Martin says. "You're saying something specific and I'd like you to stop."
James smiles and eats his fry. Juhoon is very carefully not reacting, which is its own kind of reaction. I look down at my food and decide that the best response is no response.
But I am aware, in some small corner of my mind, of the word galaxy. And a planet. And the fact that I have been going up to the roof every night to look at the stars and coming back feeling like myself again, and that I have not been going alone.
I don't follow that thought anywhere. I just eat my burger.
The walk happens by accident, almost.
We are still in the living room, wrappers cleared away, when Juhoon mentions that the light outside looks good right now. Someone says we should go out. The managers check the time, deliberate briefly, and tell us we can go; just the six of us, no staff, back before 10pm.
The evening is warm and dry and smells like cut grass and car exhaust in a combination that is specific to LA in a way I had forgotten. We walk without any particular direction, staying on the residential streets near the house, the light going gold and then orange as the sun drops.
James leads, which seems to be a natural state of affairs. Keonho and Seonghyeon fall into step together, talking quietly. Juhoon walks beside me for a while and we have one of those conversations that covers a lot of ground without covering any particular topic — his family, my theory about why certain songs feel like specific colors, a TV show we both apparently watched in middle school without knowing it. He is easy in a way that requires nothing from you, which is the best kind of easy.
At one point the group spreads out and I end up a few steps ahead with Martin, which happens without either of us arranging it.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"About today?"
"About all of it. The first day."
I think about it for a real moment. The studio, the booth, the rough mixes on the car ride home. The feeling in my chest when something finally sounds the way it was supposed to.
"Like I've been waiting so long that I forgot what it would actually feel like," I say. "And then it felt exactly like I thought it would. Which almost never happens."
He nods slowly. He is quiet for a moment in a way that doesn't feel empty.
"Same," he says. Then, after a beat: "Except the chorus. The chorus is still wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't figure out why."
"Tell me the structure."
He does. We talk about it for the rest of the walk, our voices low, while the others drift ahead or fall behind. By the time we reach the gas station on the corner, I have two suggestions, neither of which is the answer, but both of which might point toward it. He listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, slightly leaning forward, like the information might try to leave before he catches all of it.
The gas station stop becomes a full expedition, as these things do. Ice cream from the freezer section. A bag of fruit that Seonghyeon selects with his usual precision. Chips that James holds up for group approval. Martin spends an unreasonable amount of time choosing between two ice cream options that appear identical to me, picks one, takes two steps, and turns back to get the other one.
"Mars," Keonho says.
"I know what I'm doing," Martin says.
We eat on the walk home, all six of us spread across the pavement, the streetlights coming on one by one as the last of the light goes out of the sky.
We are back by 9:47pm. I note this with satisfaction.
The house settles into its usual quiet. I hear Mr Choi's round of the corridor, the doors closing one by one, his footsteps going back downstairs.
Not ten minutes later: Keonho's door, then Seonghyeon's. The particular sound of two people trying to be quiet, which is always louder than ordinary quiet. Gaming, almost certainly.
James had mentioned a movie. Juhoon is, I suspect, genuinely asleep.
I am sitting on my bed rereading last night's roof notes when someone knocks on my door. One knock, quiet.
I already know.
Martin is in the corridor in sweats and his worn-in t-shirt, holding his notebook. He glances down the hall toward Mr Choi's room, then tilts his head toward the staircase with the slightly conspiratorial energy of someone who is taking this covert operation very seriously.
I grab my laptop and follow him.
The roof is the same — same sofa, same city, same stars doing their limited best above the light pollution. But it has stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a place. Our chairs are in the same positions we left them last night. The city below has settled into its nighttime register, quieter and warmer-toned.
We sit. He opens his notebook. I open mine.
"The chorus," I say.
"The chorus," he agrees, grimly.
"Okay. Play the beat."
He pulls out his phone and plays the rough recording from the afternoon session — him humming the melody over the chord progression, the shape of it clear even in its unfinished state. I listen twice. The second time I close my eyes.
"The problem," I say, "is that it's asking a question."
He looks at me.
"The verses are declarative. They're saying something. But the chorus keeps going up at the end like it's uncertain. Like it's checking whether it's allowed to feel what it's feeling."
Martin is very still for a moment. Then he writes something in his notebook, crosses it out, writes it again differently.
"So it needs to land," he says. "Not question. State."
"Commit to it. Go"
He nods slowly. He is already somewhere else, working through it internally, and I recognise this because I do the same thing, go quiet and inward when something is almost resolved, like speaking might disturb the last piece settling into place.
I open my own notebook and work on one of my remaining songs while he thinks. The roof is comfortable in the specific way that shared silence is comfortable, not awkward, not requiring anything. The kind of quiet you can only be in with someone you have stopped performing for.
After maybe twenty minutes he looks up.
"What if it goes—" and he hums something, a variation, the same melody but landing differently, grounded now, the upward question turned into a statement that plants itself and stays.
I look at him. "That's it."
He writes it down fast, like he is worried it will leave. "Yeah?"
"That's completely it. That's the whole chorus."
He leans back in his chair and exhales and looks at the sky with the expression of someone who has just put down something heavy they have been carrying all day.
"Thank you," he says, to the sky as much as to me.
"You got there yourself," I say.
"You pointed at the door."
I smile and look back at my notebook. We work for another hour, passing ideas back and forth the way we have started to do, loosely, without ownership, whatever serves the song. He has good instincts for when something needs more space and when it needs less. I have better instincts for when a lyric is hiding from what it actually means. Together, the work moves faster than it does alone, which is something I have been thinking about more than I expected.
At some point, without planning to, we end up talking.
About the EP. About what we want it to say and whether it's saying it yet. About the pressure of debuting and the stranger pressure of wanting it so badly for so long that you sometimes forget to notice when it's actually happening. He talks about music the way he talks about everything he cares about, with too much of himself in it, slightly unguarded, not particularly concerned with seeming cool about it. I find it easy to be around. It requires me to be the same way, which is not something I am with most people, and I am starting to notice that I don't have to decide to be that way with him. It just happens.
"Can I ask you something?" he says at some point.
"Yes."
"This morning. You didn't seem nervous. And I know because Juhoon told be that you're—" he pauses, choosing the word. "A lot. Before big things."
I look at him. "Juhoon said I'm a lot?"
"He said you care deeply and it manifests physically," Martin says, with the careful delivery of someone quoting diplomatically. "His words."
I consider this. It is accurate. I have made myself sick before evaluations. I have cried in bathroom stalls before performances that went completely fine. The anxiety is as much a part of my process as the work itself, most of the time.
"I don't know," I say, which is not entirely true. "I just woke up feeling okay."
Martin nods. He doesn't push it. He just looks out at the city for a moment with an expression I can't fully read, and then looks back at his notebook.
"Good," he says simply. "You deserved a good day."
I don't say anything back. I just look at the stars for a moment, what few of them are visible above the city lights, and feel the same warmth I woke up with this morning, still there, still inexplicably present.
I don't follow it anywhere. I just let it stay.
The next three weeks move the way good time moves — fast enough that you notice it going, slow enough that you collect things.
By the end of the first week, it is clear that the boys' EP is going to take longer than the trip allows. The songs are good, genuinely, structurally good. But, they are not finished, and finishing them correctly is going to require time that LA cannot fully provide. James takes this harder than the others and processes it by working longer hours and saying less, which is the opposite of his usual mode. Juhoon is philosophical about it. Keonho and Seonghyeon are frustrated in the quiet, private way they tend to do most things. Martin goes through two days of working on the same song for twelve hours a day and not talking much, which I recognise as the behaviour of someone who is trying to outwork a problem that isn't actually about the work.
I help where I can. Sometimes this means going to Studio A when my own session has a natural break and sitting in on their playbacks, listening for what is and isn't working. Sometimes it means being another set of ears on a lyric that someone is too close to. Sometimes it just means being in the room, which turns out to matter more than I would have predicted.
The first time I stop a recording session mid-take and walk across the hall to help James untangle a bridge structure, Mrs Kim raises an eyebrow when I come back.
"Your session—"
"It's okay," I say. "His was stuck."
She looks at me for a moment. Then she nods and doesn't say anything else.
I do this more than once. More than several times. The producers in Studio B start building extra buffer into my schedule to account for it, which I find out later and feel slightly embarrassed about, and also grateful for.
There is a morning when Juhoon and I arrive at the studio before anyone else and spend an hour at the piano going through a melody he has been developing. He plays something so simple and so right that I stop and just listen, and he notices and stops playing too, and we sit in the quiet of the empty studio for a moment.
"I think this one's for you," he says.
I don't argue. I think he's right.
There is a dance class in the second week with a choreographer who does not believe in anything at half effort. By the end of it we are all on the floor in various states of dissolution. Keonho and Seonghyeon are still going, somehow, running the hardest combination again from the top. The rest of us watch them with the specific admiration of people who are too tired to feel competitive. Martin is flat on his back beside me, staring at the ceiling.
"I think my legs are gone," he says.
"They're still there," I say.
"Emotionally they're gone."
From the floor, I can see James pointing at us from across the room and saying something to Juhoon. Juhoon shakes his head but he is smiling. I decide not to ask.
There is an afternoon in the third week when a song I have been working on for days refuses to resolve. The bridge keeps collapsing, something is wrong with the emotional logic, and I know what the problem is but I cannot fix it, and the not-fixing is starting to feel personal. I am at the production desk with my head in my hands when the lead producer pulls up a chair.
"Tell me what the song is about," he says. "Not the concept. What it's actually about."
And I tell him. And he listens. And then he says: it's not a bridge problem. The verse is lying about something.
He is completely right. I rework the verse in twenty minutes and the bridge resolves immediately, and I sit back and feel the particular relief of a thing that has been wrong finally becoming right.
There is an evening when Mrs Kim and I walk to a small Korean place three blocks from the house, just the two of us, and talk about nothing important, her friends' ongoing drama, a show we have been watching, something funny that happened on set. She calls me Nini once, by accident, and then looks at me.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything," I say.
There is a night when James knocks on everyone's doors at 11pm because he cannot get a chorus right and needs external ears. We end up in the living room in various states of half-readiness, going back and forth for two hours, until Seonghyeon, who has said very little, quietly suggests moving the second line to the top. The room goes still while James tries it in his head. Then he points at Seonghyeon and says that's it. Seonghyeon goes back to his tea like nothing happened.
By the end of the third week, I finish my EP.
Five songs. A complete, sequenced, produced body of work that did not exist a month ago. I play the full rough cut for the production team and Mrs Kim and Mr Choi in a small listening session that I have been trying not to think of as a listening session because the word makes me too nervous to function.
When it finishes nobody speaks for a second.
Then the lead producer leans back in his chair and says, quietly: okay. This is something.
I keep my face neutral until I get to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror for a long moment. Then I smile so big it almost hurts.
When I come back out, the boys are in the corridor, all five of them, which means someone texted the others and they came. James hugs me immediately and lifts me slightly off the ground, which I was not prepared for. Juhoon is smiling in that warm, unhurried way of his. Keonho and Seonghyeon offer quiet, genuine congratulations. Martin is at the back of the group and when I look at him he is already looking at me with an expression that is open and uncomplicated and proud in a way that is somehow different from the others', though I could not explain exactly how.
"Told you," he says.
"You didn't tell me anything," I say.
"I told you on the roof," he says, and then catches himself, glances at the others, and clears his throat. "I mean. Generally. I told you generally it was good."
James looks between us. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," Martin and I say, at the same time.
James closes his mouth. He is smiling though. They are all smiling, actually, in the specific way of people who have collectively noticed something and made a silent agreement not to say it out loud.
Not yet.
Last night in LA.
The boys' EP is not finished. This is a known fact by now, accepted if not entirely comfortable. They will finish it back in Seoul, in their own studio time, and the debut timeline shifts accordingly. It is the right call, better to take the time and do it right, but it sits heavily on a few of them, and the last day has a particular weight to it.
We order food again. We sit in the living room one more time, in our usual positions, and it is quieter than usual. Not sad exactly. More like the specific feeling of an ending that was also, mostly, a good thing.
After a while the others drift off to pack or sleep or both. The house settles. The corridor goes dark.
I am almost finished packing when I hear one knock at my door.
I already know.
The roof is cooler tonight, the marine layer coming in off the ocean, the city lights slightly blurred at the edges. I pull my hoodie tighter. Martin is already in his chair when I get there, notebook open, but he is not writing. He is just looking at the sky.
I sit down.
For a while neither of us says anything, which by now is one of the most comfortable silences I know.
"Last night," he says eventually.
"Last night," I agree.
He is quiet again. Then: "I'm not done."
"I know."
"The EP. It's not—" he stops. Looks at his hands. "I know it needs more time. I know that's the right call. It just feels like—"
"Like you're leaving something unfinished."
He looks at me. "Yeah."
"It's not unfinished," I say. "It's in progress. Those are different things."
He considers this. "That's what I said to you about the chord progression. 'I knew what it wanted to be.'"
"I know. I've been thinking about that."
He looks at me again, and this time the look stays a little longer than it needs to. Not long. Just slightly longer than conversational. Like something is being considered and then very carefully not acted on.
He looks back at the sky.
"You finished yours," he says. Quieter now.
"I had help," I say. "I had good nights."
A pause.
"Me too," he says.
The city hums below us. The stars do what they can above the light. We sit there for a while longer, notebooks closed, not writing, not really talking — just existing in the same space the way we have done every night for a month, as if this was always going to be the shape of things.
At some point I check my phone. Past 1am. Flight at 7.
"We should sleep," I say.
"Yeah." He doesn't move immediately. Then he closes his notebook, stands, and stretches in the slightly awkward way he does everything, too much, then correcting. He picks up his things.
He looks at me one more time before we go back down.
"Hey Nini," he says. It is the first time he has used the nickname. He says it like he has been deciding whether to for a while.
I look up at him.
"You're really good," he says. "At all of it. I just— I wanted to say that. While we're still here."
I don't say anything for a moment. The warmth from the first morning is back, the same one I woke up with on the first day and couldn't explain. I think I am starting to understand where it comes from. I'm not going to say so.
"Get some sleep, Mars," I say.
He laughs once, quietly, and goes down the stairs.
I stay on the roof for another minute, looking at the sky.
Then I go back to my room and finish packing, and I am smiling the whole time, and I don't try to stop.
I slept for four hours and woke up feeling like a new person.
I don't fully understand it at first. I lie there in the early LA light waiting for the anxiety to arrive. The first-day-at-the-studio anxiety that I have been anticipating for two years, that I fully expected to hit me the moment I opened my eyes. It doesn't come. I feel still. Genuinely, quietly still, in a way that has nothing to do with being half asleep.
This is not normal for me. I should say that clearly. I am the kind of person who stress-cleans at midnight before important days, who runs through worst-case scenarios the way other people count sheep, who has been known to wake up at 3am before evaluations just to run the choreography in her head one more time. The anxiety is usually the first thing. It has always been the first thing.
But this morning it isn't there. And in its place is something I don't have a precise word for, something warm and settled.
I always dream a lot. Tonight, I dreamed a lot for a four-hour-long night. Good dreams, the kind that leave something behind when you wake up, a warmth you can't quite locate the source of. At one point, I was performing in outer space in front of an alien audience that was, for some reason, very critical of my stage presence. I woke up before I found out how it went, but I woke up smiling.
I lie there for another minute, just noticing the feeling. The sun is coming through the curtains at a low angle. Somewhere down the corridor, I can hear the house starting to stir. And I feel fine. More than fine. Ready.
I don't stop to think about why. I just get up.
I do my skincare, leave my hair down, and pull on my favourite low-rise flare jeans — black, slightly worn in at the knees, my Chrome Hearts UGGs, and a loose blue t-shirt. No makeup today. Today feels like the kind of day you want to arrive at as yourself, no additional layers.
Downstairs, the kitchen is already occupied.
Seonghyeon is at the counter making toast with the focused energy of someone who takes breakfast seriously, and Keonho is sitting on the kitchen island eating cereal directly from the box.
"You can't eat it like that," Seonghyeon says, without turning around.
"I don’t care" Keonho says.
"There's milk right there."
"I know where the milk is."
I open the fridge and look for the orange juice I saw yesterday. "Good morning."
"Morning," they both say, at the same time, in the same flat tone. It is very funny and neither of them reacts to it.
I find the juice and pour a glass. Seonghyeon slides a piece of toast toward me across the counter without being asked, which is such a quiet and considered thing to do that I almost mention it. I don't. I just take it.
"Are you nervous?" Keonho asks me. He has abandoned the cereal box and is now looking at me with the direct attention he seems to give most things.
"A little," I say. "Are you?"
He thinks about it genuinely. "Yes."
Seonghyeon turns around and leans against the counter. "I've been nervous since I woke up," he says, in the tone of someone making a factual report.
I look at both of them. Two of the quietest people in the house, sitting in the kitchen at 7am admitting to being nervous about the same thing I am nervous about, in the specific way that quiet people admit things, plainly, without drama, like it would be more exhausting to pretend otherwise.
"Me too," I say. And it is true, technically. There is a small flutter of nerves somewhere underneath everything else. But it is small. Smaller than it has any right to be, given what today is.
I don't examine that too closely. I just eat my toast.
The studio is in a building that does not look like much from the outside, which I have noticed is always the case with the ones that matter. Inside, it is a different world, low light, good speakers, the particular air of a space that has absorbed a lot of sound over the years and held onto something of it.
We are introduced to the team: producers and sound engineers who between them have shaped some of the most specific, inventive records to come out of the last few years. People whose work I know by ear before I know their names. I keep my reaction contained and professional and immediately text Mrs Kim about it from the bathroom because I need to tell someone.
The plan is that the boys work in Studio A for the morning while I start in Studio B with my own producer session. We will overlap in the afternoon, sharing the space and the team.
I walk into Studio B and sit down at the production desk and look at the boards and think: this is real. This is actually happening.
Then I open my notebook and get to work.
The morning disappears.
That is the only way I can describe it. Time moves differently in a studio, or rather, it stops moving the way it normally does and starts moving according to the music instead, which means an hour can feel like ten minutes or ten minutes can feel like an hour, and there is no reliable way to track either. We are working on the two songs I have been developing the most since training, pulling them apart and rebuilding them with proper production, real instrumentation, and a sound that is finally as big as the idea behind it.
By midday, I am in the booth.
I do not notice the door opening.
The first take is a warmup, finding the room, finding where my voice sits in the mix. The second take is better. By the third, I am inside the song properly, not thinking about the notes anymore, just living in the feeling the song was built around, that specific loneliness that is also somehow full, the one I have been trying to articulate since I was a little kid in a city that did not know my name yet.
I don't notice how much time is passing. I don't notice the door opening again. I don't notice the two people who slip quietly into the back of the room while I am mid-take, because I am not thinking about anything except the song.
When I finally come out of the booth to check the playback, that is when I see them.
Juhoon is leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who has been quietly impressed for a while and is deciding whether to say so. Martin is beside him, closer to the glass, and he is not leaning against anything. He is just standing. Watching the booth with a stillness that is different from his usual energy, focused, almost careful, like he is trying not to disturb something.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"A while," Juhoon says, at the same time Martin says "not long," and then they look at each other.
I look at Martin. He has the expression of someone whose face has slightly betrayed him and who is hoping no one noticed. I do not say anything about it.
"We came to see if you wanted lunch," Juhoon says.
"I'm okay," I say. "I don't want to stop."
Juhoon nods like he already knew this was the answer. Martin is still looking at the booth, then catches himself and looks at his phone instead.
"We'll bring you something back," Juhoon says.
"You really don't have to—"
"We're bringing you something back," Martin says. It comes out more earnest than decisive, like he has just made a personal commitment and is slightly surprised by it. He clears his throat. "What do you want?"
They bring back a sandwich and a coffee and leave them on the desk without interrupting the session. I eat between takes without really tasting it, which is the correct way to eat when you are in the middle of something.
The afternoon runs long. Nobody wants to stop, and the producers are patient enough to let the work keep going for as long as it needs to. By the time the staff tells us it is time to leave, I have a verse and a chorus that feel genuinely finished, not demo-finished, not almost-there, but done. Real. Two years of working toward a sound, and today it finally has a shape I can hold.
In the car on the way back, I put my headphones on and listen to the rough mixes on repeat and do not speak to anyone, and Mrs Kim lets me, because she understands.
From the front seat I can hear fragments of the boys' conversation, something about a chorus that isn't resolving, a structural problem they couldn't crack in the afternoon session. James sounds frustrated in the controlled way of someone who does not want to seem frustrated. The EP is going to take longer than planned. I file this away without really thinking about it yet.
What I have not mentioned yet, what I keep forgetting to mention because it has become so constant that it recedes into the background, is the camera.
There has been a camera crew with us since the airport in Seoul. A small team, four or five people, mostly unobtrusive, mostly staying on the edges of things. They are documenting the process; a pre-debut record of all of us working toward our first releases, something that will exist as content somewhere down the line. I have gotten used to them faster than I expected. You forget the camera is there, mostly. And then occasionally you remember, and you wonder which moments they are keeping.
Back at the house, someone orders In-N-Out.
We end up spread across the living room, on the couch, on the floor, in the armchairs, with paper bags and wrappers, and the particular chaos of six people eating fast food in a shared space for the first time. The camera crew is there in the corner, capturing whatever this is.
"Okay, serious question," James says, holding up a fry. "Animal style or regular."
"Animal style," I say.
"Obviously animal style," Juhoon says.
Keonho looks between us. "What's animal style?"
The reaction to this is immediate and collective. James sets his burger down with the gravity of someone about to deliver important news. Seonghyeon turns to look at Keonho with an expression of genuine concern. Martin points at Keonho's wrapper.
"What did you order?"
"Just a regular burger?"
"You are in Los Angeles," James says, "at an In-N-Out, and you ordered a regular burger."
"I didn't know—"
"We're fixing this," Martin says, and is already on his feet going back to the bag to check for extras.
There are not, which leads to a ten-minute negotiation about who will sacrifice part of their animal style order for Keonho's education, during which Keonho maintains he is completely fine and everyone ignores him. It is the funniest thing I have seen in recent memory. I am crying a little by the end of it. So is Juhoon. The camera, I notice, is absolutely getting this.
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, James looks between me and Martin; Martin who is currently trying to explain the concept of secret sauce with the intensity of someone teaching a university seminar, and says, unprompted:
"You know what's weird? You two are literally the same person."
Martin stops mid-sentence. I look up.
"The way you both went feral about the studio today," James continues, gesturing vaguely between us. "And you both ordered the complicated thing at lunch yesterday and then stared at it when it arrived—"
"I wasn't sure what it was going to look like," Martin says.
"Me neither," I say.
James points at us. "See."
"That's two things," Martin says.
"It's a pattern," Juhoon says mildly, from the armchair. He has the expression of someone confirming something he noticed a while ago.
"We're not the same," I say. "I'm cooler."
Martin turns to look at me with an expression of profound disagreement that he seems to be deciding whether to voice. He decides against it, but only barely.
Keonho, who has been quietly observing all of this, says: "What's your nickname? You call Mrs Kim unnie sometimes by accident."
"I don't have a nickname," I say, which is not entirely true.
"You do," Mrs Kim says from the kitchen doorway, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this to come up. "Her family calls her Nini."
"Nini," James repeats, like he is trying it out.
"From Eunha," I say. "It means galaxy. My grandmother started it."
There is a brief silence in which everyone seems to find this information fitting in a way they cannot quite articulate.
"Mars," Seonghyeon says suddenly.
We all look at him.
"That's Martin's nickname," he clarifies. "From when we were trainees."
"Mars and Nini," James says slowly. He looks between us with an expression of deep satisfaction. "Galaxy and planet. I'm just saying."
"You're not just saying anything," Martin says. "You're saying something specific and I'd like you to stop."
James smiles and eats his fry. Juhoon is very carefully not reacting, which is its own kind of reaction. I look down at my food and decide that the best response is no response.
But I am aware, in some small corner of my mind, of the word galaxy. And a planet. And the fact that I have been going up to the roof every night to look at the stars and coming back feeling like myself again, and that I have not been going alone.
I don't follow that thought anywhere. I just eat my burger.
The walk happens by accident, almost.
We are still in the living room, wrappers cleared away, when Juhoon mentions that the light outside looks good right now. Someone says we should go out. The managers check the time, deliberate briefly, and tell us we can go; just the six of us, no staff, back before 10pm.
The evening is warm and dry and smells like cut grass and car exhaust in a combination that is specific to LA in a way I had forgotten. We walk without any particular direction, staying on the residential streets near the house, the light going gold and then orange as the sun drops.
James leads, which seems to be a natural state of affairs. Keonho and Seonghyeon fall into step together, talking quietly. Juhoon walks beside me for a while and we have one of those conversations that covers a lot of ground without covering any particular topic — his family, my theory about why certain songs feel like specific colors, a TV show we both apparently watched in middle school without knowing it. He is easy in a way that requires nothing from you, which is the best kind of easy.
At one point the group spreads out and I end up a few steps ahead with Martin, which happens without either of us arranging it.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"About today?"
"About all of it. The first day."
I think about it for a real moment. The studio, the booth, the rough mixes on the car ride home. The feeling in my chest when something finally sounds the way it was supposed to.
"Like I've been waiting so long that I forgot what it would actually feel like," I say. "And then it felt exactly like I thought it would. Which almost never happens."
He nods slowly. He is quiet for a moment in a way that doesn't feel empty.
"Same," he says. Then, after a beat: "Except the chorus. The chorus is still wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't figure out why."
"Tell me the structure."
He does. We talk about it for the rest of the walk, our voices low, while the others drift ahead or fall behind. By the time we reach the gas station on the corner, I have two suggestions, neither of which is the answer, but both of which might point toward it. He listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, slightly leaning forward, like the information might try to leave before he catches all of it.
The gas station stop becomes a full expedition, as these things do. Ice cream from the freezer section. A bag of fruit that Seonghyeon selects with his usual precision. Chips that James holds up for group approval. Martin spends an unreasonable amount of time choosing between two ice cream options that appear identical to me, picks one, takes two steps, and turns back to get the other one.
"Mars," Keonho says.
"I know what I'm doing," Martin says.
We eat on the walk home, all six of us spread across the pavement, the streetlights coming on one by one as the last of the light goes out of the sky.
We are back by 9:47pm. I note this with satisfaction.
The house settles into its usual quiet. I hear Mr Choi's round of the corridor, the doors closing one by one, his footsteps going back downstairs.
Not ten minutes later: Keonho's door, then Seonghyeon's. The particular sound of two people trying to be quiet, which is always louder than ordinary quiet. Gaming, almost certainly.
James had mentioned a movie. Juhoon is, I suspect, genuinely asleep.
I am sitting on my bed rereading last night's roof notes when someone knocks on my door. One knock, quiet.
I already know.
Martin is in the corridor in sweats and his worn-in t-shirt, holding his notebook. He glances down the hall toward Mr Choi's room, then tilts his head toward the staircase with the slightly conspiratorial energy of someone who is taking this covert operation very seriously.
I grab my laptop and follow him.
The roof is the same — same sofa, same city, same stars doing their limited best above the light pollution. But it has stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a place. Our chairs are in the same positions we left them last night. The city below has settled into its nighttime register, quieter and warmer-toned.
We sit. He opens his notebook. I open mine.
"The chorus," I say.
"The chorus," he agrees, grimly.
"Okay. Play the beat."
He pulls out his phone and plays the rough recording from the afternoon session — him humming the melody over the chord progression, the shape of it clear even in its unfinished state. I listen twice. The second time I close my eyes.
"The problem," I say, "is that it's asking a question."
He looks at me.
"The verses are declarative. They're saying something. But the chorus keeps going up at the end like it's uncertain. Like it's checking whether it's allowed to feel what it's feeling."
Martin is very still for a moment. Then he writes something in his notebook, crosses it out, writes it again differently.
"So it needs to land," he says. "Not question. State."
"Commit to it. Go"
He nods slowly. He is already somewhere else, working through it internally, and I recognise this because I do the same thing, go quiet and inward when something is almost resolved, like speaking might disturb the last piece settling into place.
I open my own notebook and work on one of my remaining songs while he thinks. The roof is comfortable in the specific way that shared silence is comfortable, not awkward, not requiring anything. The kind of quiet you can only be in with someone you have stopped performing for.
After maybe twenty minutes he looks up.
"What if it goes—" and he hums something, a variation, the same melody but landing differently, grounded now, the upward question turned into a statement that plants itself and stays.
I look at him. "That's it."
He writes it down fast, like he is worried it will leave. "Yeah?"
"That's completely it. That's the whole chorus."
He leans back in his chair and exhales and looks at the sky with the expression of someone who has just put down something heavy they have been carrying all day.
"Thank you," he says, to the sky as much as to me.
"You got there yourself," I say.
"You pointed at the door."
I smile and look back at my notebook. We work for another hour, passing ideas back and forth the way we have started to do, loosely, without ownership, whatever serves the song. He has good instincts for when something needs more space and when it needs less. I have better instincts for when a lyric is hiding from what it actually means. Together, the work moves faster than it does alone, which is something I have been thinking about more than I expected.
At some point, without planning to, we end up talking.
About the EP. About what we want it to say and whether it's saying it yet. About the pressure of debuting and the stranger pressure of wanting it so badly for so long that you sometimes forget to notice when it's actually happening. He talks about music the way he talks about everything he cares about, with too much of himself in it, slightly unguarded, not particularly concerned with seeming cool about it. I find it easy to be around. It requires me to be the same way, which is not something I am with most people, and I am starting to notice that I don't have to decide to be that way with him. It just happens.
"Can I ask you something?" he says at some point.
"Yes."
"This morning. You didn't seem nervous. And I know because Juhoon told be that you're—" he pauses, choosing the word. "A lot. Before big things."
I look at him. "Juhoon said I'm a lot?"
"He said you care deeply and it manifests physically," Martin says, with the careful delivery of someone quoting diplomatically. "His words."
I consider this. It is accurate. I have made myself sick before evaluations. I have cried in bathroom stalls before performances that went completely fine. The anxiety is as much a part of my process as the work itself, most of the time.
"I don't know," I say, which is not entirely true. "I just woke up feeling okay."
Martin nods. He doesn't push it. He just looks out at the city for a moment with an expression I can't fully read, and then looks back at his notebook.
"Good," he says simply. "You deserved a good day."
I don't say anything back. I just look at the stars for a moment, what few of them are visible above the city lights, and feel the same warmth I woke up with this morning, still there, still inexplicably present.
I don't follow it anywhere. I just let it stay.
The next three weeks move the way good time moves — fast enough that you notice it going, slow enough that you collect things.
By the end of the first week, it is clear that the boys' EP is going to take longer than the trip allows. The songs are good, genuinely, structurally good. But, they are not finished, and finishing them correctly is going to require time that LA cannot fully provide. James takes this harder than the others and processes it by working longer hours and saying less, which is the opposite of his usual mode. Juhoon is philosophical about it. Keonho and Seonghyeon are frustrated in the quiet, private way they tend to do most things. Martin goes through two days of working on the same song for twelve hours a day and not talking much, which I recognise as the behaviour of someone who is trying to outwork a problem that isn't actually about the work.
I help where I can. Sometimes this means going to Studio A when my own session has a natural break and sitting in on their playbacks, listening for what is and isn't working. Sometimes it means being another set of ears on a lyric that someone is too close to. Sometimes it just means being in the room, which turns out to matter more than I would have predicted.
The first time I stop a recording session mid-take and walk across the hall to help James untangle a bridge structure, Mrs Kim raises an eyebrow when I come back.
"Your session—"
"It's okay," I say. "His was stuck."
She looks at me for a moment. Then she nods and doesn't say anything else.
I do this more than once. More than several times. The producers in Studio B start building extra buffer into my schedule to account for it, which I find out later and feel slightly embarrassed about, and also grateful for.
There is a morning when Juhoon and I arrive at the studio before anyone else and spend an hour at the piano going through a melody he has been developing. He plays something so simple and so right that I stop and just listen, and he notices and stops playing too, and we sit in the quiet of the empty studio for a moment.
"I think this one's for you," he says.
I don't argue. I think he's right.
There is a dance class in the second week with a choreographer who does not believe in anything at half effort. By the end of it we are all on the floor in various states of dissolution. Keonho and Seonghyeon are still going, somehow, running the hardest combination again from the top. The rest of us watch them with the specific admiration of people who are too tired to feel competitive. Martin is flat on his back beside me, staring at the ceiling.
"I think my legs are gone," he says.
"They're still there," I say.
"Emotionally they're gone."
From the floor, I can see James pointing at us from across the room and saying something to Juhoon. Juhoon shakes his head but he is smiling. I decide not to ask.
There is an afternoon in the third week when a song I have been working on for days refuses to resolve. The bridge keeps collapsing, something is wrong with the emotional logic, and I know what the problem is but I cannot fix it, and the not-fixing is starting to feel personal. I am at the production desk with my head in my hands when the lead producer pulls up a chair.
"Tell me what the song is about," he says. "Not the concept. What it's actually about."
And I tell him. And he listens. And then he says: it's not a bridge problem. The verse is lying about something.
He is completely right. I rework the verse in twenty minutes and the bridge resolves immediately, and I sit back and feel the particular relief of a thing that has been wrong finally becoming right.
There is an evening when Mrs Kim and I walk to a small Korean place three blocks from the house, just the two of us, and talk about nothing important, her friends' ongoing drama, a show we have been watching, something funny that happened on set. She calls me Nini once, by accident, and then looks at me.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything," I say.
There is a night when James knocks on everyone's doors at 11pm because he cannot get a chorus right and needs external ears. We end up in the living room in various states of half-readiness, going back and forth for two hours, until Seonghyeon, who has said very little, quietly suggests moving the second line to the top. The room goes still while James tries it in his head. Then he points at Seonghyeon and says that's it. Seonghyeon goes back to his tea like nothing happened.
By the end of the third week, I finish my EP.
Five songs. A complete, sequenced, produced body of work that did not exist a month ago. I play the full rough cut for the production team and Mrs Kim and Mr Choi in a small listening session that I have been trying not to think of as a listening session because the word makes me too nervous to function.
When it finishes nobody speaks for a second.
Then the lead producer leans back in his chair and says, quietly: okay. This is something.
I keep my face neutral until I get to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror for a long moment. Then I smile so big it almost hurts.
When I come back out, the boys are in the corridor, all five of them, which means someone texted the others and they came. James hugs me immediately and lifts me slightly off the ground, which I was not prepared for. Juhoon is smiling in that warm, unhurried way of his. Keonho and Seonghyeon offer quiet, genuine congratulations. Martin is at the back of the group and when I look at him he is already looking at me with an expression that is open and uncomplicated and proud in a way that is somehow different from the others', though I could not explain exactly how.
"Told you," he says.
"You didn't tell me anything," I say.
"I told you on the roof," he says, and then catches himself, glances at the others, and clears his throat. "I mean. Generally. I told you generally it was good."
James looks between us. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," Martin and I say, at the same time.
James closes his mouth. He is smiling though. They are all smiling, actually, in the specific way of people who have collectively noticed something and made a silent agreement not to say it out loud.
Not yet.
Last night in LA.
The boys' EP is not finished. This is a known fact by now, accepted if not entirely comfortable. They will finish it back in Seoul, in their own studio time, and the debut timeline shifts accordingly. It is the right call, better to take the time and do it right, but it sits heavily on a few of them, and the last day has a particular weight to it.
We order food again. We sit in the living room one more time, in our usual positions, and it is quieter than usual. Not sad exactly. More like the specific feeling of an ending that was also, mostly, a good thing.
After a while the others drift off to pack or sleep or both. The house settles. The corridor goes dark.
I am almost finished packing when I hear one knock at my door.
I already know.
The roof is cooler tonight, the marine layer coming in off the ocean, the city lights slightly blurred at the edges. I pull my hoodie tighter. Martin is already in his chair when I get there, notebook open, but he is not writing. He is just looking at the sky.
I sit down.
For a while neither of us says anything, which by now is one of the most comfortable silences I know.
"Last night," he says eventually.
"Last night," I agree.
He is quiet again. Then: "I'm not done."
"I know."
"The EP. It's not—" he stops. Looks at his hands. "I know it needs more time. I know that's the right call. It just feels like—"
"Like you're leaving something unfinished."
He looks at me. "Yeah."
"It's not unfinished," I say. "It's in progress. Those are different things."
He considers this. "That's what I said to you about the chord progression. 'I knew what it wanted to be.'"
"I know. I've been thinking about that."
He looks at me again, and this time the look stays a little longer than it needs to. Not long. Just slightly longer than conversational. Like something is being considered and then very carefully not acted on.
He looks back at the sky.
"You finished yours," he says. Quieter now.
"I had help," I say. "I had good nights."
A pause.
"Me too," he says.
The city hums below us. The stars do what they can above the light. We sit there for a while longer, notebooks closed, not writing, not really talking — just existing in the same space the way we have done every night for a month, as if this was always going to be the shape of things.
At some point I check my phone. Past 1am. Flight at 7.
"We should sleep," I say.
"Yeah." He doesn't move immediately. Then he closes his notebook, stands, and stretches in the slightly awkward way he does everything, too much, then correcting. He picks up his things.
He looks at me one more time before we go back down.
"Hey Nini," he says. It is the first time he has used the nickname. He says it like he has been deciding whether to for a while.
I look up at him.
"You're really good," he says. "At all of it. I just— I wanted to say that. While we're still here."
I don't say anything for a moment. The warmth from the first morning is back, the same one I woke up with on the first day and couldn't explain. I think I am starting to understand where it comes from. I'm not going to say so.
"Get some sleep, Mars," I say.
He laughs once, quietly, and goes down the stairs.
I stay on the roof for another minute, looking at the sky.
Then I go back to my room and finish packing, and I am smiling the whole time, and I don't try to stop.
I slept for four hours and woke up feeling like a new person.
I don't fully understand it at first. I lie there in the early LA light waiting for the anxiety to arrive. The first-day-at-the-studio anxiety that I have been anticipating for two years, that I fully expected to hit me the moment I opened my eyes. It doesn't come. I feel still. Genuinely, quietly still, in a way that has nothing to do with being half asleep.
This is not normal for me. I should say that clearly. I am the kind of person who stress-cleans at midnight before important days, who runs through worst-case scenarios the way other people count sheep, who has been known to wake up at 3am before evaluations just to run the choreography in her head one more time. The anxiety is usually the first thing. It has always been the first thing.
But this morning it isn't there. And in its place is something I don't have a precise word for, something warm and settled.
I always dream a lot. Tonight, I dreamed a lot for a four-hour-long night. Good dreams, the kind that leave something behind when you wake up, a warmth you can't quite locate the source of. At one point, I was performing in outer space in front of an alien audience that was, for some reason, very critical of my stage presence. I woke up before I found out how it went, but I woke up smiling.
I lie there for another minute, just noticing the feeling. The sun is coming through the curtains at a low angle. Somewhere down the corridor, I can hear the house starting to stir. And I feel fine. More than fine. Ready.
I don't stop to think about why. I just get up.
I do my skincare, leave my hair down, and pull on my favourite low-rise flare jeans — black, slightly worn in at the knees, my Chrome Hearts UGGs, and a loose blue t-shirt. No makeup today. Today feels like the kind of day you want to arrive at as yourself, no additional layers.
Downstairs, the kitchen is already occupied.
Seonghyeon is at the counter making toast with the focused energy of someone who takes breakfast seriously, and Keonho is sitting on the kitchen island eating cereal directly from the box.
"You can't eat it like that," Seonghyeon says, without turning around.
"I don’t care" Keonho says.
"There's milk right there."
"I know where the milk is."
I open the fridge and look for the orange juice I saw yesterday. "Good morning."
"Morning," they both say, at the same time, in the same flat tone. It is very funny and neither of them reacts to it.
I find the juice and pour a glass. Seonghyeon slides a piece of toast toward me across the counter without being asked, which is such a quiet and considered thing to do that I almost mention it. I don't. I just take it.
"Are you nervous?" Keonho asks me. He has abandoned the cereal box and is now looking at me with the direct attention he seems to give most things.
"A little," I say. "Are you?"
He thinks about it genuinely. "Yes."
Seonghyeon turns around and leans against the counter. "I've been nervous since I woke up," he says, in the tone of someone making a factual report.
I look at both of them. Two of the quietest people in the house, sitting in the kitchen at 7am admitting to being nervous about the same thing I am nervous about, in the specific way that quiet people admit things, plainly, without drama, like it would be more exhausting to pretend otherwise.
"Me too," I say. And it is true, technically. There is a small flutter of nerves somewhere underneath everything else. But it is small. Smaller than it has any right to be, given what today is.
I don't examine that too closely. I just eat my toast.
The studio is in a building that does not look like much from the outside, which I have noticed is always the case with the ones that matter. Inside, it is a different world, low light, good speakers, the particular air of a space that has absorbed a lot of sound over the years and held onto something of it.
We are introduced to the team: producers and sound engineers who between them have shaped some of the most specific, inventive records to come out of the last few years. People whose work I know by ear before I know their names. I keep my reaction contained and professional and immediately text Mrs Kim about it from the bathroom because I need to tell someone.
The plan is that the boys work in Studio A for the morning while I start in Studio B with my own producer session. We will overlap in the afternoon, sharing the space and the team.
I walk into Studio B and sit down at the production desk and look at the boards and think: this is real. This is actually happening.
Then I open my notebook and get to work.
The morning disappears.
That is the only way I can describe it. Time moves differently in a studio, or rather, it stops moving the way it normally does and starts moving according to the music instead, which means an hour can feel like ten minutes or ten minutes can feel like an hour, and there is no reliable way to track either. We are working on the two songs I have been developing the most since training, pulling them apart and rebuilding them with proper production, real instrumentation, and a sound that is finally as big as the idea behind it.
By midday, I am in the booth.
I do not notice the door opening.
The first take is a warmup, finding the room, finding where my voice sits in the mix. The second take is better. By the third, I am inside the song properly, not thinking about the notes anymore, just living in the feeling the song was built around, that specific loneliness that is also somehow full, the one I have been trying to articulate since I was a little kid in a city that did not know my name yet.
I don't notice how much time is passing. I don't notice the door opening again. I don't notice the two people who slip quietly into the back of the room while I am mid-take, because I am not thinking about anything except the song.
When I finally come out of the booth to check the playback, that is when I see them.
Juhoon is leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who has been quietly impressed for a while and is deciding whether to say so. Martin is beside him, closer to the glass, and he is not leaning against anything. He is just standing. Watching the booth with a stillness that is different from his usual energy, focused, almost careful, like he is trying not to disturb something.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"A while," Juhoon says, at the same time Martin says "not long," and then they look at each other.
I look at Martin. He has the expression of someone whose face has slightly betrayed him and who is hoping no one noticed. I do not say anything about it.
"We came to see if you wanted lunch," Juhoon says.
"I'm okay," I say. "I don't want to stop."
Juhoon nods like he already knew this was the answer. Martin is still looking at the booth, then catches himself and looks at his phone instead.
"We'll bring you something back," Juhoon says.
"You really don't have to—"
"We're bringing you something back," Martin says. It comes out more earnest than decisive, like he has just made a personal commitment and is slightly surprised by it. He clears his throat. "What do you want?"
They bring back a sandwich and a coffee and leave them on the desk without interrupting the session. I eat between takes without really tasting it, which is the correct way to eat when you are in the middle of something.
The afternoon runs long. Nobody wants to stop, and the producers are patient enough to let the work keep going for as long as it needs to. By the time the staff tells us it is time to leave, I have a verse and a chorus that feel genuinely finished, not demo-finished, not almost-there, but done. Real. Two years of working toward a sound, and today it finally has a shape I can hold.
In the car on the way back, I put my headphones on and listen to the rough mixes on repeat and do not speak to anyone, and Mrs Kim lets me, because she understands.
From the front seat I can hear fragments of the boys' conversation, something about a chorus that isn't resolving, a structural problem they couldn't crack in the afternoon session. James sounds frustrated in the controlled way of someone who does not want to seem frustrated. The EP is going to take longer than planned. I file this away without really thinking about it yet.
What I have not mentioned yet, what I keep forgetting to mention because it has become so constant that it recedes into the background, is the camera.
There has been a camera crew with us since the airport in Seoul. A small team, four or five people, mostly unobtrusive, mostly staying on the edges of things. They are documenting the process; a pre-debut record of all of us working toward our first releases, something that will exist as content somewhere down the line. I have gotten used to them faster than I expected. You forget the camera is there, mostly. And then occasionally you remember, and you wonder which moments they are keeping.
Back at the house, someone orders In-N-Out.
We end up spread across the living room, on the couch, on the floor, in the armchairs, with paper bags and wrappers, and the particular chaos of six people eating fast food in a shared space for the first time. The camera crew is there in the corner, capturing whatever this is.
"Okay, serious question," James says, holding up a fry. "Animal style or regular."
"Animal style," I say.
"Obviously animal style," Juhoon says.
Keonho looks between us. "What's animal style?"
The reaction to this is immediate and collective. James sets his burger down with the gravity of someone about to deliver important news. Seonghyeon turns to look at Keonho with an expression of genuine concern. Martin points at Keonho's wrapper.
"What did you order?"
"Just a regular burger?"
"You are in Los Angeles," James says, "at an In-N-Out, and you ordered a regular burger."
"I didn't know—"
"We're fixing this," Martin says, and is already on his feet going back to the bag to check for extras.
There are not, which leads to a ten-minute negotiation about who will sacrifice part of their animal style order for Keonho's education, during which Keonho maintains he is completely fine and everyone ignores him. It is the funniest thing I have seen in recent memory. I am crying a little by the end of it. So is Juhoon. The camera, I notice, is absolutely getting this.
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, James looks between me and Martin; Martin who is currently trying to explain the concept of secret sauce with the intensity of someone teaching a university seminar, and says, unprompted:
"You know what's weird? You two are literally the same person."
Martin stops mid-sentence. I look up.
"The way you both went feral about the studio today," James continues, gesturing vaguely between us. "And you both ordered the complicated thing at lunch yesterday and then stared at it when it arrived—"
"I wasn't sure what it was going to look like," Martin says.
"Me neither," I say.
James points at us. "See."
"That's two things," Martin says.
"It's a pattern," Juhoon says mildly, from the armchair. He has the expression of someone confirming something he noticed a while ago.
"We're not the same," I say. "I'm cooler."
Martin turns to look at me with an expression of profound disagreement that he seems to be deciding whether to voice. He decides against it, but only barely.
Keonho, who has been quietly observing all of this, says: "What's your nickname? You call Mrs Kim unnie sometimes by accident."
"I don't have a nickname," I say, which is not entirely true.
"You do," Mrs Kim says from the kitchen doorway, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this to come up. "Her family calls her Nini."
"Nini," James repeats, like he is trying it out.
"From Eunha," I say. "It means galaxy. My grandmother started it."
There is a brief silence in which everyone seems to find this information fitting in a way they cannot quite articulate.
"Mars," Seonghyeon says suddenly.
We all look at him.
"That's Martin's nickname," he clarifies. "From when we were trainees."
"Mars and Nini," James says slowly. He looks between us with an expression of deep satisfaction. "Galaxy and planet. I'm just saying."
"You're not just saying anything," Martin says. "You're saying something specific and I'd like you to stop."
James smiles and eats his fry. Juhoon is very carefully not reacting, which is its own kind of reaction. I look down at my food and decide that the best response is no response.
But I am aware, in some small corner of my mind, of the word galaxy. And a planet. And the fact that I have been going up to the roof every night to look at the stars and coming back feeling like myself again, and that I have not been going alone.
I don't follow that thought anywhere. I just eat my burger.
The walk happens by accident, almost.
We are still in the living room, wrappers cleared away, when Juhoon mentions that the light outside looks good right now. Someone says we should go out. The managers check the time, deliberate briefly, and tell us we can go; just the six of us, no staff, back before 10pm.
The evening is warm and dry and smells like cut grass and car exhaust in a combination that is specific to LA in a way I had forgotten. We walk without any particular direction, staying on the residential streets near the house, the light going gold and then orange as the sun drops.
James leads, which seems to be a natural state of affairs. Keonho and Seonghyeon fall into step together, talking quietly. Juhoon walks beside me for a while and we have one of those conversations that covers a lot of ground without covering any particular topic — his family, my theory about why certain songs feel like specific colors, a TV show we both apparently watched in middle school without knowing it. He is easy in a way that requires nothing from you, which is the best kind of easy.
At one point the group spreads out and I end up a few steps ahead with Martin, which happens without either of us arranging it.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"About today?"
"About all of it. The first day."
I think about it for a real moment. The studio, the booth, the rough mixes on the car ride home. The feeling in my chest when something finally sounds the way it was supposed to.
"Like I've been waiting so long that I forgot what it would actually feel like," I say. "And then it felt exactly like I thought it would. Which almost never happens."
He nods slowly. He is quiet for a moment in a way that doesn't feel empty.
"Same," he says. Then, after a beat: "Except the chorus. The chorus is still wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't figure out why."
"Tell me the structure."
He does. We talk about it for the rest of the walk, our voices low, while the others drift ahead or fall behind. By the time we reach the gas station on the corner, I have two suggestions, neither of which is the answer, but both of which might point toward it. He listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, slightly leaning forward, like the information might try to leave before he catches all of it.
The gas station stop becomes a full expedition, as these things do. Ice cream from the freezer section. A bag of fruit that Seonghyeon selects with his usual precision. Chips that James holds up for group approval. Martin spends an unreasonable amount of time choosing between two ice cream options that appear identical to me, picks one, takes two steps, and turns back to get the other one.
"Mars," Keonho says.
"I know what I'm doing," Martin says.
We eat on the walk home, all six of us spread across the pavement, the streetlights coming on one by one as the last of the light goes out of the sky.
We are back by 9:47pm. I note this with satisfaction.
The house settles into its usual quiet. I hear Mr Choi's round of the corridor, the doors closing one by one, his footsteps going back downstairs.
Not ten minutes later: Keonho's door, then Seonghyeon's. The particular sound of two people trying to be quiet, which is always louder than ordinary quiet. Gaming, almost certainly.
James had mentioned a movie. Juhoon is, I suspect, genuinely asleep.
I am sitting on my bed rereading last night's roof notes when someone knocks on my door. One knock, quiet.
I already know.
Martin is in the corridor in sweats and his worn-in t-shirt, holding his notebook. He glances down the hall toward Mr Choi's room, then tilts his head toward the staircase with the slightly conspiratorial energy of someone who is taking this covert operation very seriously.
I grab my laptop and follow him.
The roof is the same — same sofa, same city, same stars doing their limited best above the light pollution. But it has stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a place. Our chairs are in the same positions we left them last night. The city below has settled into its nighttime register, quieter and warmer-toned.
We sit. He opens his notebook. I open mine.
"The chorus," I say.
"The chorus," he agrees, grimly.
"Okay. Play the beat."
He pulls out his phone and plays the rough recording from the afternoon session — him humming the melody over the chord progression, the shape of it clear even in its unfinished state. I listen twice. The second time I close my eyes.
"The problem," I say, "is that it's asking a question."
He looks at me.
"The verses are declarative. They're saying something. But the chorus keeps going up at the end like it's uncertain. Like it's checking whether it's allowed to feel what it's feeling."
Martin is very still for a moment. Then he writes something in his notebook, crosses it out, writes it again differently.
"So it needs to land," he says. "Not question. State."
"Commit to it. Go"
He nods slowly. He is already somewhere else, working through it internally, and I recognise this because I do the same thing, go quiet and inward when something is almost resolved, like speaking might disturb the last piece settling into place.
I open my own notebook and work on one of my remaining songs while he thinks. The roof is comfortable in the specific way that shared silence is comfortable, not awkward, not requiring anything. The kind of quiet you can only be in with someone you have stopped performing for.
After maybe twenty minutes he looks up.
"What if it goes—" and he hums something, a variation, the same melody but landing differently, grounded now, the upward question turned into a statement that plants itself and stays.
I look at him. "That's it."
He writes it down fast, like he is worried it will leave. "Yeah?"
"That's completely it. That's the whole chorus."
He leans back in his chair and exhales and looks at the sky with the expression of someone who has just put down something heavy they have been carrying all day.
"Thank you," he says, to the sky as much as to me.
"You got there yourself," I say.
"You pointed at the door."
I smile and look back at my notebook. We work for another hour, passing ideas back and forth the way we have started to do, loosely, without ownership, whatever serves the song. He has good instincts for when something needs more space and when it needs less. I have better instincts for when a lyric is hiding from what it actually means. Together, the work moves faster than it does alone, which is something I have been thinking about more than I expected.
At some point, without planning to, we end up talking.
About the EP. About what we want it to say and whether it's saying it yet. About the pressure of debuting and the stranger pressure of wanting it so badly for so long that you sometimes forget to notice when it's actually happening. He talks about music the way he talks about everything he cares about, with too much of himself in it, slightly unguarded, not particularly concerned with seeming cool about it. I find it easy to be around. It requires me to be the same way, which is not something I am with most people, and I am starting to notice that I don't have to decide to be that way with him. It just happens.
"Can I ask you something?" he says at some point.
"Yes."
"This morning. You didn't seem nervous. And I know because Juhoon told be that you're—" he pauses, choosing the word. "A lot. Before big things."
I look at him. "Juhoon said I'm a lot?"
"He said you care deeply and it manifests physically," Martin says, with the careful delivery of someone quoting diplomatically. "His words."
I consider this. It is accurate. I have made myself sick before evaluations. I have cried in bathroom stalls before performances that went completely fine. The anxiety is as much a part of my process as the work itself, most of the time.
"I don't know," I say, which is not entirely true. "I just woke up feeling okay."
Martin nods. He doesn't push it. He just looks out at the city for a moment with an expression I can't fully read, and then looks back at his notebook.
"Good," he says simply. "You deserved a good day."
I don't say anything back. I just look at the stars for a moment, what few of them are visible above the city lights, and feel the same warmth I woke up with this morning, still there, still inexplicably present.
I don't follow it anywhere. I just let it stay.
The next three weeks move the way good time moves — fast enough that you notice it going, slow enough that you collect things.
By the end of the first week, it is clear that the boys' EP is going to take longer than the trip allows. The songs are good, genuinely, structurally good. But, they are not finished, and finishing them correctly is going to require time that LA cannot fully provide. James takes this harder than the others and processes it by working longer hours and saying less, which is the opposite of his usual mode. Juhoon is philosophical about it. Keonho and Seonghyeon are frustrated in the quiet, private way they tend to do most things. Martin goes through two days of working on the same song for twelve hours a day and not talking much, which I recognise as the behaviour of someone who is trying to outwork a problem that isn't actually about the work.
I help where I can. Sometimes this means going to Studio A when my own session has a natural break and sitting in on their playbacks, listening for what is and isn't working. Sometimes it means being another set of ears on a lyric that someone is too close to. Sometimes it just means being in the room, which turns out to matter more than I would have predicted.
The first time I stop a recording session mid-take and walk across the hall to help James untangle a bridge structure, Mrs Kim raises an eyebrow when I come back.
"Your session—"
"It's okay," I say. "His was stuck."
She looks at me for a moment. Then she nods and doesn't say anything else.
I do this more than once. More than several times. The producers in Studio B start building extra buffer into my schedule to account for it, which I find out later and feel slightly embarrassed about, and also grateful for.
There is a morning when Juhoon and I arrive at the studio before anyone else and spend an hour at the piano going through a melody he has been developing. He plays something so simple and so right that I stop and just listen, and he notices and stops playing too, and we sit in the quiet of the empty studio for a moment.
"I think this one's for you," he says.
I don't argue. I think he's right.
There is a dance class in the second week with a choreographer who does not believe in anything at half effort. By the end of it we are all on the floor in various states of dissolution. Keonho and Seonghyeon are still going, somehow, running the hardest combination again from the top. The rest of us watch them with the specific admiration of people who are too tired to feel competitive. Martin is flat on his back beside me, staring at the ceiling.
"I think my legs are gone," he says.
"They're still there," I say.
"Emotionally they're gone."
From the floor, I can see James pointing at us from across the room and saying something to Juhoon. Juhoon shakes his head but he is smiling. I decide not to ask.
There is an afternoon in the third week when a song I have been working on for days refuses to resolve. The bridge keeps collapsing, something is wrong with the emotional logic, and I know what the problem is but I cannot fix it, and the not-fixing is starting to feel personal. I am at the production desk with my head in my hands when the lead producer pulls up a chair.
"Tell me what the song is about," he says. "Not the concept. What it's actually about."
And I tell him. And he listens. And then he says: it's not a bridge problem. The verse is lying about something.
He is completely right. I rework the verse in twenty minutes and the bridge resolves immediately, and I sit back and feel the particular relief of a thing that has been wrong finally becoming right.
There is an evening when Mrs Kim and I walk to a small Korean place three blocks from the house, just the two of us, and talk about nothing important, her friends' ongoing drama, a show we have been watching, something funny that happened on set. She calls me Nini once, by accident, and then looks at me.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything," I say.
There is a night when James knocks on everyone's doors at 11pm because he cannot get a chorus right and needs external ears. We end up in the living room in various states of half-readiness, going back and forth for two hours, until Seonghyeon, who has said very little, quietly suggests moving the second line to the top. The room goes still while James tries it in his head. Then he points at Seonghyeon and says that's it. Seonghyeon goes back to his tea like nothing happened.
By the end of the third week, I finish my EP.
Five songs. A complete, sequenced, produced body of work that did not exist a month ago. I play the full rough cut for the production team and Mrs Kim and Mr Choi in a small listening session that I have been trying not to think of as a listening session because the word makes me too nervous to function.
When it finishes nobody speaks for a second.
Then the lead producer leans back in his chair and says, quietly: okay. This is something.
I keep my face neutral until I get to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror for a long moment. Then I smile so big it almost hurts.
When I come back out, the boys are in the corridor, all five of them, which means someone texted the others and they came. James hugs me immediately and lifts me slightly off the ground, which I was not prepared for. Juhoon is smiling in that warm, unhurried way of his. Keonho and Seonghyeon offer quiet, genuine congratulations. Martin is at the back of the group and when I look at him he is already looking at me with an expression that is open and uncomplicated and proud in a way that is somehow different from the others', though I could not explain exactly how.
"Told you," he says.
"You didn't tell me anything," I say.
"I told you on the roof," he says, and then catches himself, glances at the others, and clears his throat. "I mean. Generally. I told you generally it was good."
James looks between us. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," Martin and I say, at the same time.
James closes his mouth. He is smiling though. They are all smiling, actually, in the specific way of people who have collectively noticed something and made a silent agreement not to say it out loud.
Not yet.
Last night in LA.
The boys' EP is not finished. This is a known fact by now, accepted if not entirely comfortable. They will finish it back in Seoul, in their own studio time, and the debut timeline shifts accordingly. It is the right call, better to take the time and do it right, but it sits heavily on a few of them, and the last day has a particular weight to it.
We order food again. We sit in the living room one more time, in our usual positions, and it is quieter than usual. Not sad exactly. More like the specific feeling of an ending that was also, mostly, a good thing.
After a while the others drift off to pack or sleep or both. The house settles. The corridor goes dark.
I am almost finished packing when I hear one knock at my door.
I already know.
The roof is cooler tonight, the marine layer coming in off the ocean, the city lights slightly blurred at the edges. I pull my hoodie tighter. Martin is already in his chair when I get there, notebook open, but he is not writing. He is just looking at the sky.
I sit down.
For a while neither of us says anything, which by now is one of the most comfortable silences I know.
"Last night," he says eventually.
"Last night," I agree.
He is quiet again. Then: "I'm not done."
"I know."
"The EP. It's not—" he stops. Looks at his hands. "I know it needs more time. I know that's the right call. It just feels like—"
"Like you're leaving something unfinished."
He looks at me. "Yeah."
"It's not unfinished," I say. "It's in progress. Those are different things."
He considers this. "That's what I said to you about the chord progression. 'I knew what it wanted to be.'"
"I know. I've been thinking about that."
He looks at me again, and this time the look stays a little longer than it needs to. Not long. Just slightly longer than conversational. Like something is being considered and then very carefully not acted on.
He looks back at the sky.
"You finished yours," he says. Quieter now.
"I had help," I say. "I had good nights."
A pause.
"Me too," he says.
The city hums below us. The stars do what they can above the light. We sit there for a while longer, notebooks closed, not writing, not really talking — just existing in the same space the way we have done every night for a month, as if this was always going to be the shape of things.
At some point I check my phone. Past 1am. Flight at 7.
"We should sleep," I say.
"Yeah." He doesn't move immediately. Then he closes his notebook, stands, and stretches in the slightly awkward way he does everything, too much, then correcting. He picks up his things.
He looks at me one more time before we go back down.
"Hey Nini," he says. It is the first time he has used the nickname. He says it like he has been deciding whether to for a while.
I look up at him.
"You're really good," he says. "At all of it. I just— I wanted to say that. While we're still here."
I don't say anything for a moment. The warmth from the first morning is back, the same one I woke up with on the first day and couldn't explain. I think I am starting to understand where it comes from. I'm not going to say so.
"Get some sleep, Mars," I say.
He laughs once, quietly, and goes down the stairs.
I stay on the roof for another minute, looking at the sky.
Then I go back to my room and finish packing, and I am smiling the whole time, and I don't try to stop.
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I slept for four hours and woke up feeling like a new person.
I don't fully understand it at first. I lie there in the early LA light waiting for the anxiety to arrive. The first-day-at-the-studio anxiety that I have been anticipating for two years, that I fully expected to hit me the moment I opened my eyes. It doesn't come. I feel still. Genuinely, quietly still, in a way that has nothing to do with being half asleep.
This is not normal for me. I should say that clearly. I am the kind of person who stress-cleans at midnight before important days, who runs through worst-case scenarios the way other people count sheep, who has been known to wake up at 3am before evaluations just to run the choreography in her head one more time. The anxiety is usually the first thing. It has always been the first thing.
But this morning it isn't there. And in its place is something I don't have a precise word for, something warm and settled.
I always dream a lot. Tonight, I dreamed a lot for a four-hour-long night. Good dreams, the kind that leave something behind when you wake up, a warmth you can't quite locate the source of. At one point, I was performing in outer space in front of an alien audience that was, for some reason, very critical of my stage presence. I woke up before I found out how it went, but I woke up smiling.
I lie there for another minute, just noticing the feeling. The sun is coming through the curtains at a low angle. Somewhere down the corridor, I can hear the house starting to stir. And I feel fine. More than fine. Ready.
I don't stop to think about why. I just get up.
I do my skincare, leave my hair down, and pull on my favourite low-rise flare jeans — black, slightly worn in at the knees, my Chrome Hearts UGGs, and a loose blue t-shirt. No makeup today. Today feels like the kind of day you want to arrive at as yourself, no additional layers.
Downstairs, the kitchen is already occupied.
Seonghyeon is at the counter making toast with the focused energy of someone who takes breakfast seriously, and Keonho is sitting on the kitchen island eating cereal directly from the box.
"You can't eat it like that," Seonghyeon says, without turning around.
"I don’t care" Keonho says.
"There's milk right there."
"I know where the milk is."
I open the fridge and look for the orange juice I saw yesterday. "Good morning."
"Morning," they both say, at the same time, in the same flat tone. It is very funny and neither of them reacts to it.
I find the juice and pour a glass. Seonghyeon slides a piece of toast toward me across the counter without being asked, which is such a quiet and considered thing to do that I almost mention it. I don't. I just take it.
"Are you nervous?" Keonho asks me. He has abandoned the cereal box and is now looking at me with the direct attention he seems to give most things.
"A little," I say. "Are you?"
He thinks about it genuinely. "Yes."
Seonghyeon turns around and leans against the counter. "I've been nervous since I woke up," he says, in the tone of someone making a factual report.
I look at both of them. Two of the quietest people in the house, sitting in the kitchen at 7am admitting to being nervous about the same thing I am nervous about, in the specific way that quiet people admit things, plainly, without drama, like it would be more exhausting to pretend otherwise.
"Me too," I say. And it is true, technically. There is a small flutter of nerves somewhere underneath everything else. But it is small. Smaller than it has any right to be, given what today is.
I don't examine that too closely. I just eat my toast.
The studio is in a building that does not look like much from the outside, which I have noticed is always the case with the ones that matter. Inside, it is a different world, low light, good speakers, the particular air of a space that has absorbed a lot of sound over the years and held onto something of it.
We are introduced to the team: producers and sound engineers who between them have shaped some of the most specific, inventive records to come out of the last few years. People whose work I know by ear before I know their names. I keep my reaction contained and professional and immediately text Mrs Kim about it from the bathroom because I need to tell someone.
The plan is that the boys work in Studio A for the morning while I start in Studio B with my own producer session. We will overlap in the afternoon, sharing the space and the team.
I walk into Studio B and sit down at the production desk and look at the boards and think: this is real. This is actually happening.
Then I open my notebook and get to work.
The morning disappears.
That is the only way I can describe it. Time moves differently in a studio, or rather, it stops moving the way it normally does and starts moving according to the music instead, which means an hour can feel like ten minutes or ten minutes can feel like an hour, and there is no reliable way to track either. We are working on the two songs I have been developing the most since training, pulling them apart and rebuilding them with proper production, real instrumentation, and a sound that is finally as big as the idea behind it.
By midday, I am in the booth.
I do not notice the door opening.
The first take is a warmup, finding the room, finding where my voice sits in the mix. The second take is better. By the third, I am inside the song properly, not thinking about the notes anymore, just living in the feeling the song was built around, that specific loneliness that is also somehow full, the one I have been trying to articulate since I was a little kid in a city that did not know my name yet.
I don't notice how much time is passing. I don't notice the door opening again. I don't notice the two people who slip quietly into the back of the room while I am mid-take, because I am not thinking about anything except the song.
When I finally come out of the booth to check the playback, that is when I see them.
Juhoon is leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who has been quietly impressed for a while and is deciding whether to say so. Martin is beside him, closer to the glass, and he is not leaning against anything. He is just standing. Watching the booth with a stillness that is different from his usual energy, focused, almost careful, like he is trying not to disturb something.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"A while," Juhoon says, at the same time Martin says "not long," and then they look at each other.
I look at Martin. He has the expression of someone whose face has slightly betrayed him and who is hoping no one noticed. I do not say anything about it.
"We came to see if you wanted lunch," Juhoon says.
"I'm okay," I say. "I don't want to stop."
Juhoon nods like he already knew this was the answer. Martin is still looking at the booth, then catches himself and looks at his phone instead.
"We'll bring you something back," Juhoon says.
"You really don't have to—"
"We're bringing you something back," Martin says. It comes out more earnest than decisive, like he has just made a personal commitment and is slightly surprised by it. He clears his throat. "What do you want?"
They bring back a sandwich and a coffee and leave them on the desk without interrupting the session. I eat between takes without really tasting it, which is the correct way to eat when you are in the middle of something.
The afternoon runs long. Nobody wants to stop, and the producers are patient enough to let the work keep going for as long as it needs to. By the time the staff tells us it is time to leave, I have a verse and a chorus that feel genuinely finished, not demo-finished, not almost-there, but done. Real. Two years of working toward a sound, and today it finally has a shape I can hold.
In the car on the way back, I put my headphones on and listen to the rough mixes on repeat and do not speak to anyone, and Mrs Kim lets me, because she understands.
From the front seat I can hear fragments of the boys' conversation, something about a chorus that isn't resolving, a structural problem they couldn't crack in the afternoon session. James sounds frustrated in the controlled way of someone who does not want to seem frustrated. The EP is going to take longer than planned. I file this away without really thinking about it yet.
What I have not mentioned yet, what I keep forgetting to mention because it has become so constant that it recedes into the background, is the camera.
There has been a camera crew with us since the airport in Seoul. A small team, four or five people, mostly unobtrusive, mostly staying on the edges of things. They are documenting the process; a pre-debut record of all of us working toward our first releases, something that will exist as content somewhere down the line. I have gotten used to them faster than I expected. You forget the camera is there, mostly. And then occasionally you remember, and you wonder which moments they are keeping.
Back at the house, someone orders In-N-Out.
We end up spread across the living room, on the couch, on the floor, in the armchairs, with paper bags and wrappers, and the particular chaos of six people eating fast food in a shared space for the first time. The camera crew is there in the corner, capturing whatever this is.
"Okay, serious question," James says, holding up a fry. "Animal style or regular."
"Animal style," I say.
"Obviously animal style," Juhoon says.
Keonho looks between us. "What's animal style?"
The reaction to this is immediate and collective. James sets his burger down with the gravity of someone about to deliver important news. Seonghyeon turns to look at Keonho with an expression of genuine concern. Martin points at Keonho's wrapper.
"What did you order?"
"Just a regular burger?"
"You are in Los Angeles," James says, "at an In-N-Out, and you ordered a regular burger."
"I didn't know—"
"We're fixing this," Martin says, and is already on his feet going back to the bag to check for extras.
There are not, which leads to a ten-minute negotiation about who will sacrifice part of their animal style order for Keonho's education, during which Keonho maintains he is completely fine and everyone ignores him. It is the funniest thing I have seen in recent memory. I am crying a little by the end of it. So is Juhoon. The camera, I notice, is absolutely getting this.
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, James looks between me and Martin; Martin who is currently trying to explain the concept of secret sauce with the intensity of someone teaching a university seminar, and says, unprompted:
"You know what's weird? You two are literally the same person."
Martin stops mid-sentence. I look up.
"The way you both went feral about the studio today," James continues, gesturing vaguely between us. "And you both ordered the complicated thing at lunch yesterday and then stared at it when it arrived—"
"I wasn't sure what it was going to look like," Martin says.
"Me neither," I say.
James points at us. "See."
"That's two things," Martin says.
"It's a pattern," Juhoon says mildly, from the armchair. He has the expression of someone confirming something he noticed a while ago.
"We're not the same," I say. "I'm cooler."
Martin turns to look at me with an expression of profound disagreement that he seems to be deciding whether to voice. He decides against it, but only barely.
Keonho, who has been quietly observing all of this, says: "What's your nickname? You call Mrs Kim unnie sometimes by accident."
"I don't have a nickname," I say, which is not entirely true.
"You do," Mrs Kim says from the kitchen doorway, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this to come up. "Her family calls her Nini."
"Nini," James repeats, like he is trying it out.
"From Eunha," I say. "It means galaxy. My grandmother started it."
There is a brief silence in which everyone seems to find this information fitting in a way they cannot quite articulate.
"Mars," Seonghyeon says suddenly.
We all look at him.
"That's Martin's nickname," he clarifies. "From when we were trainees."
"Mars and Nini," James says slowly. He looks between us with an expression of deep satisfaction. "Galaxy and planet. I'm just saying."
"You're not just saying anything," Martin says. "You're saying something specific and I'd like you to stop."
James smiles and eats his fry. Juhoon is very carefully not reacting, which is its own kind of reaction. I look down at my food and decide that the best response is no response.
But I am aware, in some small corner of my mind, of the word galaxy. And a planet. And the fact that I have been going up to the roof every night to look at the stars and coming back feeling like myself again, and that I have not been going alone.
I don't follow that thought anywhere. I just eat my burger.
The walk happens by accident, almost.
We are still in the living room, wrappers cleared away, when Juhoon mentions that the light outside looks good right now. Someone says we should go out. The managers check the time, deliberate briefly, and tell us we can go; just the six of us, no staff, back before 10pm.
The evening is warm and dry and smells like cut grass and car exhaust in a combination that is specific to LA in a way I had forgotten. We walk without any particular direction, staying on the residential streets near the house, the light going gold and then orange as the sun drops.
James leads, which seems to be a natural state of affairs. Keonho and Seonghyeon fall into step together, talking quietly. Juhoon walks beside me for a while and we have one of those conversations that covers a lot of ground without covering any particular topic — his family, my theory about why certain songs feel like specific colors, a TV show we both apparently watched in middle school without knowing it. He is easy in a way that requires nothing from you, which is the best kind of easy.
At one point the group spreads out and I end up a few steps ahead with Martin, which happens without either of us arranging it.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"About today?"
"About all of it. The first day."
I think about it for a real moment. The studio, the booth, the rough mixes on the car ride home. The feeling in my chest when something finally sounds the way it was supposed to.
"Like I've been waiting so long that I forgot what it would actually feel like," I say. "And then it felt exactly like I thought it would. Which almost never happens."
He nods slowly. He is quiet for a moment in a way that doesn't feel empty.
"Same," he says. Then, after a beat: "Except the chorus. The chorus is still wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't figure out why."
"Tell me the structure."
He does. We talk about it for the rest of the walk, our voices low, while the others drift ahead or fall behind. By the time we reach the gas station on the corner, I have two suggestions, neither of which is the answer, but both of which might point toward it. He listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, slightly leaning forward, like the information might try to leave before he catches all of it.
The gas station stop becomes a full expedition, as these things do. Ice cream from the freezer section. A bag of fruit that Seonghyeon selects with his usual precision. Chips that James holds up for group approval. Martin spends an unreasonable amount of time choosing between two ice cream options that appear identical to me, picks one, takes two steps, and turns back to get the other one.
"Mars," Keonho says.
"I know what I'm doing," Martin says.
We eat on the walk home, all six of us spread across the pavement, the streetlights coming on one by one as the last of the light goes out of the sky.
We are back by 9:47pm. I note this with satisfaction.
The house settles into its usual quiet. I hear Mr Choi's round of the corridor, the doors closing one by one, his footsteps going back downstairs.
Not ten minutes later: Keonho's door, then Seonghyeon's. The particular sound of two people trying to be quiet, which is always louder than ordinary quiet. Gaming, almost certainly.
James had mentioned a movie. Juhoon is, I suspect, genuinely asleep.
I am sitting on my bed rereading last night's roof notes when someone knocks on my door. One knock, quiet.
I already know.
Martin is in the corridor in sweats and his worn-in t-shirt, holding his notebook. He glances down the hall toward Mr Choi's room, then tilts his head toward the staircase with the slightly conspiratorial energy of someone who is taking this covert operation very seriously.
I grab my laptop and follow him.
The roof is the same — same sofa, same city, same stars doing their limited best above the light pollution. But it has stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a place. Our chairs are in the same positions we left them last night. The city below has settled into its nighttime register, quieter and warmer-toned.
We sit. He opens his notebook. I open mine.
"The chorus," I say.
"The chorus," he agrees, grimly.
"Okay. Play the beat."
He pulls out his phone and plays the rough recording from the afternoon session — him humming the melody over the chord progression, the shape of it clear even in its unfinished state. I listen twice. The second time I close my eyes.
"The problem," I say, "is that it's asking a question."
He looks at me.
"The verses are declarative. They're saying something. But the chorus keeps going up at the end like it's uncertain. Like it's checking whether it's allowed to feel what it's feeling."
Martin is very still for a moment. Then he writes something in his notebook, crosses it out, writes it again differently.
"So it needs to land," he says. "Not question. State."
"Commit to it. Go"
He nods slowly. He is already somewhere else, working through it internally, and I recognise this because I do the same thing, go quiet and inward when something is almost resolved, like speaking might disturb the last piece settling into place.
I open my own notebook and work on one of my remaining songs while he thinks. The roof is comfortable in the specific way that shared silence is comfortable, not awkward, not requiring anything. The kind of quiet you can only be in with someone you have stopped performing for.
After maybe twenty minutes he looks up.
"What if it goes—" and he hums something, a variation, the same melody but landing differently, grounded now, the upward question turned into a statement that plants itself and stays.
I look at him. "That's it."
He writes it down fast, like he is worried it will leave. "Yeah?"
"That's completely it. That's the whole chorus."
He leans back in his chair and exhales and looks at the sky with the expression of someone who has just put down something heavy they have been carrying all day.
"Thank you," he says, to the sky as much as to me.
"You got there yourself," I say.
"You pointed at the door."
I smile and look back at my notebook. We work for another hour, passing ideas back and forth the way we have started to do, loosely, without ownership, whatever serves the song. He has good instincts for when something needs more space and when it needs less. I have better instincts for when a lyric is hiding from what it actually means. Together, the work moves faster than it does alone, which is something I have been thinking about more than I expected.
At some point, without planning to, we end up talking.
About the EP. About what we want it to say and whether it's saying it yet. About the pressure of debuting and the stranger pressure of wanting it so badly for so long that you sometimes forget to notice when it's actually happening. He talks about music the way he talks about everything he cares about, with too much of himself in it, slightly unguarded, not particularly concerned with seeming cool about it. I find it easy to be around. It requires me to be the same way, which is not something I am with most people, and I am starting to notice that I don't have to decide to be that way with him. It just happens.
"Can I ask you something?" he says at some point.
"Yes."
"This morning. You didn't seem nervous. And I know because Juhoon told be that you're—" he pauses, choosing the word. "A lot. Before big things."
I look at him. "Juhoon said I'm a lot?"
"He said you care deeply and it manifests physically," Martin says, with the careful delivery of someone quoting diplomatically. "His words."
I consider this. It is accurate. I have made myself sick before evaluations. I have cried in bathroom stalls before performances that went completely fine. The anxiety is as much a part of my process as the work itself, most of the time.
"I don't know," I say, which is not entirely true. "I just woke up feeling okay."
Martin nods. He doesn't push it. He just looks out at the city for a moment with an expression I can't fully read, and then looks back at his notebook.
"Good," he says simply. "You deserved a good day."
I don't say anything back. I just look at the stars for a moment, what few of them are visible above the city lights, and feel the same warmth I woke up with this morning, still there, still inexplicably present.
I don't follow it anywhere. I just let it stay.
The next three weeks move the way good time moves — fast enough that you notice it going, slow enough that you collect things.
By the end of the first week, it is clear that the boys' EP is going to take longer than the trip allows. The songs are good, genuinely, structurally good. But, they are not finished, and finishing them correctly is going to require time that LA cannot fully provide. James takes this harder than the others and processes it by working longer hours and saying less, which is the opposite of his usual mode. Juhoon is philosophical about it. Keonho and Seonghyeon are frustrated in the quiet, private way they tend to do most things. Martin goes through two days of working on the same song for twelve hours a day and not talking much, which I recognise as the behaviour of someone who is trying to outwork a problem that isn't actually about the work.
I help where I can. Sometimes this means going to Studio A when my own session has a natural break and sitting in on their playbacks, listening for what is and isn't working. Sometimes it means being another set of ears on a lyric that someone is too close to. Sometimes it just means being in the room, which turns out to matter more than I would have predicted.
The first time I stop a recording session mid-take and walk across the hall to help James untangle a bridge structure, Mrs Kim raises an eyebrow when I come back.
"Your session—"
"It's okay," I say. "His was stuck."
She looks at me for a moment. Then she nods and doesn't say anything else.
I do this more than once. More than several times. The producers in Studio B start building extra buffer into my schedule to account for it, which I find out later and feel slightly embarrassed about, and also grateful for.
There is a morning when Juhoon and I arrive at the studio before anyone else and spend an hour at the piano going through a melody he has been developing. He plays something so simple and so right that I stop and just listen, and he notices and stops playing too, and we sit in the quiet of the empty studio for a moment.
"I think this one's for you," he says.
I don't argue. I think he's right.
There is a dance class in the second week with a choreographer who does not believe in anything at half effort. By the end of it we are all on the floor in various states of dissolution. Keonho and Seonghyeon are still going, somehow, running the hardest combination again from the top. The rest of us watch them with the specific admiration of people who are too tired to feel competitive. Martin is flat on his back beside me, staring at the ceiling.
"I think my legs are gone," he says.
"They're still there," I say.
"Emotionally they're gone."
From the floor, I can see James pointing at us from across the room and saying something to Juhoon. Juhoon shakes his head but he is smiling. I decide not to ask.
There is an afternoon in the third week when a song I have been working on for days refuses to resolve. The bridge keeps collapsing, something is wrong with the emotional logic, and I know what the problem is but I cannot fix it, and the not-fixing is starting to feel personal. I am at the production desk with my head in my hands when the lead producer pulls up a chair.
"Tell me what the song is about," he says. "Not the concept. What it's actually about."
And I tell him. And he listens. And then he says: it's not a bridge problem. The verse is lying about something.
He is completely right. I rework the verse in twenty minutes and the bridge resolves immediately, and I sit back and feel the particular relief of a thing that has been wrong finally becoming right.
There is an evening when Mrs Kim and I walk to a small Korean place three blocks from the house, just the two of us, and talk about nothing important, her friends' ongoing drama, a show we have been watching, something funny that happened on set. She calls me Nini once, by accident, and then looks at me.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything," I say.
There is a night when James knocks on everyone's doors at 11pm because he cannot get a chorus right and needs external ears. We end up in the living room in various states of half-readiness, going back and forth for two hours, until Seonghyeon, who has said very little, quietly suggests moving the second line to the top. The room goes still while James tries it in his head. Then he points at Seonghyeon and says that's it. Seonghyeon goes back to his tea like nothing happened.
By the end of the third week, I finish my EP.
Five songs. A complete, sequenced, produced body of work that did not exist a month ago. I play the full rough cut for the production team and Mrs Kim and Mr Choi in a small listening session that I have been trying not to think of as a listening session because the word makes me too nervous to function.
When it finishes nobody speaks for a second.
Then the lead producer leans back in his chair and says, quietly: okay. This is something.
I keep my face neutral until I get to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror for a long moment. Then I smile so big it almost hurts.
When I come back out, the boys are in the corridor, all five of them, which means someone texted the others and they came. James hugs me immediately and lifts me slightly off the ground, which I was not prepared for. Juhoon is smiling in that warm, unhurried way of his. Keonho and Seonghyeon offer quiet, genuine congratulations. Martin is at the back of the group and when I look at him he is already looking at me with an expression that is open and uncomplicated and proud in a way that is somehow different from the others', though I could not explain exactly how.
"Told you," he says.
"You didn't tell me anything," I say.
"I told you on the roof," he says, and then catches himself, glances at the others, and clears his throat. "I mean. Generally. I told you generally it was good."
James looks between us. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," Martin and I say, at the same time.
James closes his mouth. He is smiling though. They are all smiling, actually, in the specific way of people who have collectively noticed something and made a silent agreement not to say it out loud.
Not yet.
Last night in LA.
The boys' EP is not finished. This is a known fact by now, accepted if not entirely comfortable. They will finish it back in Seoul, in their own studio time, and the debut timeline shifts accordingly. It is the right call, better to take the time and do it right, but it sits heavily on a few of them, and the last day has a particular weight to it.
We order food again. We sit in the living room one more time, in our usual positions, and it is quieter than usual. Not sad exactly. More like the specific feeling of an ending that was also, mostly, a good thing.
After a while the others drift off to pack or sleep or both. The house settles. The corridor goes dark.
I am almost finished packing when I hear one knock at my door.
I already know.
The roof is cooler tonight, the marine layer coming in off the ocean, the city lights slightly blurred at the edges. I pull my hoodie tighter. Martin is already in his chair when I get there, notebook open, but he is not writing. He is just looking at the sky.
I sit down.
For a while neither of us says anything, which by now is one of the most comfortable silences I know.
"Last night," he says eventually.
"Last night," I agree.
He is quiet again. Then: "I'm not done."
"I know."
"The EP. It's not—" he stops. Looks at his hands. "I know it needs more time. I know that's the right call. It just feels like—"
"Like you're leaving something unfinished."
He looks at me. "Yeah."
"It's not unfinished," I say. "It's in progress. Those are different things."
He considers this. "That's what I said to you about the chord progression. 'I knew what it wanted to be.'"
"I know. I've been thinking about that."
He looks at me again, and this time the look stays a little longer than it needs to. Not long. Just slightly longer than conversational. Like something is being considered and then very carefully not acted on.
He looks back at the sky.
"You finished yours," he says. Quieter now.
"I had help," I say. "I had good nights."
A pause.
"Me too," he says.
The city hums below us. The stars do what they can above the light. We sit there for a while longer, notebooks closed, not writing, not really talking — just existing in the same space the way we have done every night for a month, as if this was always going to be the shape of things.
At some point I check my phone. Past 1am. Flight at 7.
"We should sleep," I say.
"Yeah." He doesn't move immediately. Then he closes his notebook, stands, and stretches in the slightly awkward way he does everything, too much, then correcting. He picks up his things.
He looks at me one more time before we go back down.
"Hey Nini," he says. It is the first time he has used the nickname. He says it like he has been deciding whether to for a while.
I look up at him.
"You're really good," he says. "At all of it. I just— I wanted to say that. While we're still here."
I don't say anything for a moment. The warmth from the first morning is back, the same one I woke up with on the first day and couldn't explain. I think I am starting to understand where it comes from. I'm not going to say so.
"Get some sleep, Mars," I say.
He laughs once, quietly, and goes down the stairs.
I stay on the roof for another minute, looking at the sky.
Then I go back to my room and finish packing, and I am smiling the whole time, and I don't try to stop.
I slept for four hours and woke up feeling like a new person.
I don't fully understand it at first. I lie there in the early LA light waiting for the anxiety to arrive. The first-day-at-the-studio anxiety that I have been anticipating for two years, that I fully expected to hit me the moment I opened my eyes. It doesn't come. I feel still. Genuinely, quietly still, in a way that has nothing to do with being half asleep.
This is not normal for me. I should say that clearly. I am the kind of person who stress-cleans at midnight before important days, who runs through worst-case scenarios the way other people count sheep, who has been known to wake up at 3am before evaluations just to run the choreography in her head one more time. The anxiety is usually the first thing. It has always been the first thing.
But this morning it isn't there. And in its place is something I don't have a precise word for, something warm and settled.
I always dream a lot. Tonight, I dreamed a lot for a four-hour-long night. Good dreams, the kind that leave something behind when you wake up, a warmth you can't quite locate the source of. At one point, I was performing in outer space in front of an alien audience that was, for some reason, very critical of my stage presence. I woke up before I found out how it went, but I woke up smiling.
I lie there for another minute, just noticing the feeling. The sun is coming through the curtains at a low angle. Somewhere down the corridor, I can hear the house starting to stir. And I feel fine. More than fine. Ready.
I don't stop to think about why. I just get up.
I do my skincare, leave my hair down, and pull on my favourite low-rise flare jeans — black, slightly worn in at the knees, my Chrome Hearts UGGs, and a loose blue t-shirt. No makeup today. Today feels like the kind of day you want to arrive at as yourself, no additional layers.
Downstairs, the kitchen is already occupied.
Seonghyeon is at the counter making toast with the focused energy of someone who takes breakfast seriously, and Keonho is sitting on the kitchen island eating cereal directly from the box.
"You can't eat it like that," Seonghyeon says, without turning around.
"I don’t care" Keonho says.
"There's milk right there."
"I know where the milk is."
I open the fridge and look for the orange juice I saw yesterday. "Good morning."
"Morning," they both say, at the same time, in the same flat tone. It is very funny and neither of them reacts to it.
I find the juice and pour a glass. Seonghyeon slides a piece of toast toward me across the counter without being asked, which is such a quiet and considered thing to do that I almost mention it. I don't. I just take it.
"Are you nervous?" Keonho asks me. He has abandoned the cereal box and is now looking at me with the direct attention he seems to give most things.
"A little," I say. "Are you?"
He thinks about it genuinely. "Yes."
Seonghyeon turns around and leans against the counter. "I've been nervous since I woke up," he says, in the tone of someone making a factual report.
I look at both of them. Two of the quietest people in the house, sitting in the kitchen at 7am admitting to being nervous about the same thing I am nervous about, in the specific way that quiet people admit things, plainly, without drama, like it would be more exhausting to pretend otherwise.
"Me too," I say. And it is true, technically. There is a small flutter of nerves somewhere underneath everything else. But it is small. Smaller than it has any right to be, given what today is.
I don't examine that too closely. I just eat my toast.
The studio is in a building that does not look like much from the outside, which I have noticed is always the case with the ones that matter. Inside, it is a different world, low light, good speakers, the particular air of a space that has absorbed a lot of sound over the years and held onto something of it.
We are introduced to the team: producers and sound engineers who between them have shaped some of the most specific, inventive records to come out of the last few years. People whose work I know by ear before I know their names. I keep my reaction contained and professional and immediately text Mrs Kim about it from the bathroom because I need to tell someone.
The plan is that the boys work in Studio A for the morning while I start in Studio B with my own producer session. We will overlap in the afternoon, sharing the space and the team.
I walk into Studio B and sit down at the production desk and look at the boards and think: this is real. This is actually happening.
Then I open my notebook and get to work.
The morning disappears.
That is the only way I can describe it. Time moves differently in a studio, or rather, it stops moving the way it normally does and starts moving according to the music instead, which means an hour can feel like ten minutes or ten minutes can feel like an hour, and there is no reliable way to track either. We are working on the two songs I have been developing the most since training, pulling them apart and rebuilding them with proper production, real instrumentation, and a sound that is finally as big as the idea behind it.
By midday, I am in the booth.
I do not notice the door opening.
The first take is a warmup, finding the room, finding where my voice sits in the mix. The second take is better. By the third, I am inside the song properly, not thinking about the notes anymore, just living in the feeling the song was built around, that specific loneliness that is also somehow full, the one I have been trying to articulate since I was a little kid in a city that did not know my name yet.
I don't notice how much time is passing. I don't notice the door opening again. I don't notice the two people who slip quietly into the back of the room while I am mid-take, because I am not thinking about anything except the song.
When I finally come out of the booth to check the playback, that is when I see them.
Juhoon is leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who has been quietly impressed for a while and is deciding whether to say so. Martin is beside him, closer to the glass, and he is not leaning against anything. He is just standing. Watching the booth with a stillness that is different from his usual energy, focused, almost careful, like he is trying not to disturb something.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"A while," Juhoon says, at the same time Martin says "not long," and then they look at each other.
I look at Martin. He has the expression of someone whose face has slightly betrayed him and who is hoping no one noticed. I do not say anything about it.
"We came to see if you wanted lunch," Juhoon says.
"I'm okay," I say. "I don't want to stop."
Juhoon nods like he already knew this was the answer. Martin is still looking at the booth, then catches himself and looks at his phone instead.
"We'll bring you something back," Juhoon says.
"You really don't have to—"
"We're bringing you something back," Martin says. It comes out more earnest than decisive, like he has just made a personal commitment and is slightly surprised by it. He clears his throat. "What do you want?"
They bring back a sandwich and a coffee and leave them on the desk without interrupting the session. I eat between takes without really tasting it, which is the correct way to eat when you are in the middle of something.
The afternoon runs long. Nobody wants to stop, and the producers are patient enough to let the work keep going for as long as it needs to. By the time the staff tells us it is time to leave, I have a verse and a chorus that feel genuinely finished, not demo-finished, not almost-there, but done. Real. Two years of working toward a sound, and today it finally has a shape I can hold.
In the car on the way back, I put my headphones on and listen to the rough mixes on repeat and do not speak to anyone, and Mrs Kim lets me, because she understands.
From the front seat I can hear fragments of the boys' conversation, something about a chorus that isn't resolving, a structural problem they couldn't crack in the afternoon session. James sounds frustrated in the controlled way of someone who does not want to seem frustrated. The EP is going to take longer than planned. I file this away without really thinking about it yet.
What I have not mentioned yet, what I keep forgetting to mention because it has become so constant that it recedes into the background, is the camera.
There has been a camera crew with us since the airport in Seoul. A small team, four or five people, mostly unobtrusive, mostly staying on the edges of things. They are documenting the process; a pre-debut record of all of us working toward our first releases, something that will exist as content somewhere down the line. I have gotten used to them faster than I expected. You forget the camera is there, mostly. And then occasionally you remember, and you wonder which moments they are keeping.
Back at the house, someone orders In-N-Out.
We end up spread across the living room, on the couch, on the floor, in the armchairs, with paper bags and wrappers, and the particular chaos of six people eating fast food in a shared space for the first time. The camera crew is there in the corner, capturing whatever this is.
"Okay, serious question," James says, holding up a fry. "Animal style or regular."
"Animal style," I say.
"Obviously animal style," Juhoon says.
Keonho looks between us. "What's animal style?"
The reaction to this is immediate and collective. James sets his burger down with the gravity of someone about to deliver important news. Seonghyeon turns to look at Keonho with an expression of genuine concern. Martin points at Keonho's wrapper.
"What did you order?"
"Just a regular burger?"
"You are in Los Angeles," James says, "at an In-N-Out, and you ordered a regular burger."
"I didn't know—"
"We're fixing this," Martin says, and is already on his feet going back to the bag to check for extras.
There are not, which leads to a ten-minute negotiation about who will sacrifice part of their animal style order for Keonho's education, during which Keonho maintains he is completely fine and everyone ignores him. It is the funniest thing I have seen in recent memory. I am crying a little by the end of it. So is Juhoon. The camera, I notice, is absolutely getting this.
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, James looks between me and Martin; Martin who is currently trying to explain the concept of secret sauce with the intensity of someone teaching a university seminar, and says, unprompted:
"You know what's weird? You two are literally the same person."
Martin stops mid-sentence. I look up.
"The way you both went feral about the studio today," James continues, gesturing vaguely between us. "And you both ordered the complicated thing at lunch yesterday and then stared at it when it arrived—"
"I wasn't sure what it was going to look like," Martin says.
"Me neither," I say.
James points at us. "See."
"That's two things," Martin says.
"It's a pattern," Juhoon says mildly, from the armchair. He has the expression of someone confirming something he noticed a while ago.
"We're not the same," I say. "I'm cooler."
Martin turns to look at me with an expression of profound disagreement that he seems to be deciding whether to voice. He decides against it, but only barely.
Keonho, who has been quietly observing all of this, says: "What's your nickname? You call Mrs Kim unnie sometimes by accident."
"I don't have a nickname," I say, which is not entirely true.
"You do," Mrs Kim says from the kitchen doorway, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this to come up. "Her family calls her Nini."
"Nini," James repeats, like he is trying it out.
"From Eunha," I say. "It means galaxy. My grandmother started it."
There is a brief silence in which everyone seems to find this information fitting in a way they cannot quite articulate.
"Mars," Seonghyeon says suddenly.
We all look at him.
"That's Martin's nickname," he clarifies. "From when we were trainees."
"Mars and Nini," James says slowly. He looks between us with an expression of deep satisfaction. "Galaxy and planet. I'm just saying."
"You're not just saying anything," Martin says. "You're saying something specific and I'd like you to stop."
James smiles and eats his fry. Juhoon is very carefully not reacting, which is its own kind of reaction. I look down at my food and decide that the best response is no response.
But I am aware, in some small corner of my mind, of the word galaxy. And a planet. And the fact that I have been going up to the roof every night to look at the stars and coming back feeling like myself again, and that I have not been going alone.
I don't follow that thought anywhere. I just eat my burger.
The walk happens by accident, almost.
We are still in the living room, wrappers cleared away, when Juhoon mentions that the light outside looks good right now. Someone says we should go out. The managers check the time, deliberate briefly, and tell us we can go; just the six of us, no staff, back before 10pm.
The evening is warm and dry and smells like cut grass and car exhaust in a combination that is specific to LA in a way I had forgotten. We walk without any particular direction, staying on the residential streets near the house, the light going gold and then orange as the sun drops.
James leads, which seems to be a natural state of affairs. Keonho and Seonghyeon fall into step together, talking quietly. Juhoon walks beside me for a while and we have one of those conversations that covers a lot of ground without covering any particular topic — his family, my theory about why certain songs feel like specific colors, a TV show we both apparently watched in middle school without knowing it. He is easy in a way that requires nothing from you, which is the best kind of easy.
At one point the group spreads out and I end up a few steps ahead with Martin, which happens without either of us arranging it.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"About today?"
"About all of it. The first day."
I think about it for a real moment. The studio, the booth, the rough mixes on the car ride home. The feeling in my chest when something finally sounds the way it was supposed to.
"Like I've been waiting so long that I forgot what it would actually feel like," I say. "And then it felt exactly like I thought it would. Which almost never happens."
He nods slowly. He is quiet for a moment in a way that doesn't feel empty.
"Same," he says. Then, after a beat: "Except the chorus. The chorus is still wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't figure out why."
"Tell me the structure."
He does. We talk about it for the rest of the walk, our voices low, while the others drift ahead or fall behind. By the time we reach the gas station on the corner, I have two suggestions, neither of which is the answer, but both of which might point toward it. He listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, slightly leaning forward, like the information might try to leave before he catches all of it.
The gas station stop becomes a full expedition, as these things do. Ice cream from the freezer section. A bag of fruit that Seonghyeon selects with his usual precision. Chips that James holds up for group approval. Martin spends an unreasonable amount of time choosing between two ice cream options that appear identical to me, picks one, takes two steps, and turns back to get the other one.
"Mars," Keonho says.
"I know what I'm doing," Martin says.
We eat on the walk home, all six of us spread across the pavement, the streetlights coming on one by one as the last of the light goes out of the sky.
We are back by 9:47pm. I note this with satisfaction.
The house settles into its usual quiet. I hear Mr Choi's round of the corridor, the doors closing one by one, his footsteps going back downstairs.
Not ten minutes later: Keonho's door, then Seonghyeon's. The particular sound of two people trying to be quiet, which is always louder than ordinary quiet. Gaming, almost certainly.
James had mentioned a movie. Juhoon is, I suspect, genuinely asleep.
I am sitting on my bed rereading last night's roof notes when someone knocks on my door. One knock, quiet.
I already know.
Martin is in the corridor in sweats and his worn-in t-shirt, holding his notebook. He glances down the hall toward Mr Choi's room, then tilts his head toward the staircase with the slightly conspiratorial energy of someone who is taking this covert operation very seriously.
I grab my laptop and follow him.
The roof is the same — same sofa, same city, same stars doing their limited best above the light pollution. But it has stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a place. Our chairs are in the same positions we left them last night. The city below has settled into its nighttime register, quieter and warmer-toned.
We sit. He opens his notebook. I open mine.
"The chorus," I say.
"The chorus," he agrees, grimly.
"Okay. Play the beat."
He pulls out his phone and plays the rough recording from the afternoon session — him humming the melody over the chord progression, the shape of it clear even in its unfinished state. I listen twice. The second time I close my eyes.
"The problem," I say, "is that it's asking a question."
He looks at me.
"The verses are declarative. They're saying something. But the chorus keeps going up at the end like it's uncertain. Like it's checking whether it's allowed to feel what it's feeling."
Martin is very still for a moment. Then he writes something in his notebook, crosses it out, writes it again differently.
"So it needs to land," he says. "Not question. State."
"Commit to it. Go"
He nods slowly. He is already somewhere else, working through it internally, and I recognise this because I do the same thing, go quiet and inward when something is almost resolved, like speaking might disturb the last piece settling into place.
I open my own notebook and work on one of my remaining songs while he thinks. The roof is comfortable in the specific way that shared silence is comfortable, not awkward, not requiring anything. The kind of quiet you can only be in with someone you have stopped performing for.
After maybe twenty minutes he looks up.
"What if it goes—" and he hums something, a variation, the same melody but landing differently, grounded now, the upward question turned into a statement that plants itself and stays.
I look at him. "That's it."
He writes it down fast, like he is worried it will leave. "Yeah?"
"That's completely it. That's the whole chorus."
He leans back in his chair and exhales and looks at the sky with the expression of someone who has just put down something heavy they have been carrying all day.
"Thank you," he says, to the sky as much as to me.
"You got there yourself," I say.
"You pointed at the door."
I smile and look back at my notebook. We work for another hour, passing ideas back and forth the way we have started to do, loosely, without ownership, whatever serves the song. He has good instincts for when something needs more space and when it needs less. I have better instincts for when a lyric is hiding from what it actually means. Together, the work moves faster than it does alone, which is something I have been thinking about more than I expected.
At some point, without planning to, we end up talking.
About the EP. About what we want it to say and whether it's saying it yet. About the pressure of debuting and the stranger pressure of wanting it so badly for so long that you sometimes forget to notice when it's actually happening. He talks about music the way he talks about everything he cares about, with too much of himself in it, slightly unguarded, not particularly concerned with seeming cool about it. I find it easy to be around. It requires me to be the same way, which is not something I am with most people, and I am starting to notice that I don't have to decide to be that way with him. It just happens.
"Can I ask you something?" he says at some point.
"Yes."
"This morning. You didn't seem nervous. And I know because Juhoon told be that you're—" he pauses, choosing the word. "A lot. Before big things."
I look at him. "Juhoon said I'm a lot?"
"He said you care deeply and it manifests physically," Martin says, with the careful delivery of someone quoting diplomatically. "His words."
I consider this. It is accurate. I have made myself sick before evaluations. I have cried in bathroom stalls before performances that went completely fine. The anxiety is as much a part of my process as the work itself, most of the time.
"I don't know," I say, which is not entirely true. "I just woke up feeling okay."
Martin nods. He doesn't push it. He just looks out at the city for a moment with an expression I can't fully read, and then looks back at his notebook.
"Good," he says simply. "You deserved a good day."
I don't say anything back. I just look at the stars for a moment, what few of them are visible above the city lights, and feel the same warmth I woke up with this morning, still there, still inexplicably present.
I don't follow it anywhere. I just let it stay.
The next three weeks move the way good time moves — fast enough that you notice it going, slow enough that you collect things.
By the end of the first week, it is clear that the boys' EP is going to take longer than the trip allows. The songs are good, genuinely, structurally good. But, they are not finished, and finishing them correctly is going to require time that LA cannot fully provide. James takes this harder than the others and processes it by working longer hours and saying less, which is the opposite of his usual mode. Juhoon is philosophical about it. Keonho and Seonghyeon are frustrated in the quiet, private way they tend to do most things. Martin goes through two days of working on the same song for twelve hours a day and not talking much, which I recognise as the behaviour of someone who is trying to outwork a problem that isn't actually about the work.
I help where I can. Sometimes this means going to Studio A when my own session has a natural break and sitting in on their playbacks, listening for what is and isn't working. Sometimes it means being another set of ears on a lyric that someone is too close to. Sometimes it just means being in the room, which turns out to matter more than I would have predicted.
The first time I stop a recording session mid-take and walk across the hall to help James untangle a bridge structure, Mrs Kim raises an eyebrow when I come back.
"Your session—"
"It's okay," I say. "His was stuck."
She looks at me for a moment. Then she nods and doesn't say anything else.
I do this more than once. More than several times. The producers in Studio B start building extra buffer into my schedule to account for it, which I find out later and feel slightly embarrassed about, and also grateful for.
There is a morning when Juhoon and I arrive at the studio before anyone else and spend an hour at the piano going through a melody he has been developing. He plays something so simple and so right that I stop and just listen, and he notices and stops playing too, and we sit in the quiet of the empty studio for a moment.
"I think this one's for you," he says.
I don't argue. I think he's right.
There is a dance class in the second week with a choreographer who does not believe in anything at half effort. By the end of it we are all on the floor in various states of dissolution. Keonho and Seonghyeon are still going, somehow, running the hardest combination again from the top. The rest of us watch them with the specific admiration of people who are too tired to feel competitive. Martin is flat on his back beside me, staring at the ceiling.
"I think my legs are gone," he says.
"They're still there," I say.
"Emotionally they're gone."
From the floor, I can see James pointing at us from across the room and saying something to Juhoon. Juhoon shakes his head but he is smiling. I decide not to ask.
There is an afternoon in the third week when a song I have been working on for days refuses to resolve. The bridge keeps collapsing, something is wrong with the emotional logic, and I know what the problem is but I cannot fix it, and the not-fixing is starting to feel personal. I am at the production desk with my head in my hands when the lead producer pulls up a chair.
"Tell me what the song is about," he says. "Not the concept. What it's actually about."
And I tell him. And he listens. And then he says: it's not a bridge problem. The verse is lying about something.
He is completely right. I rework the verse in twenty minutes and the bridge resolves immediately, and I sit back and feel the particular relief of a thing that has been wrong finally becoming right.
There is an evening when Mrs Kim and I walk to a small Korean place three blocks from the house, just the two of us, and talk about nothing important, her friends' ongoing drama, a show we have been watching, something funny that happened on set. She calls me Nini once, by accident, and then looks at me.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything," I say.
There is a night when James knocks on everyone's doors at 11pm because he cannot get a chorus right and needs external ears. We end up in the living room in various states of half-readiness, going back and forth for two hours, until Seonghyeon, who has said very little, quietly suggests moving the second line to the top. The room goes still while James tries it in his head. Then he points at Seonghyeon and says that's it. Seonghyeon goes back to his tea like nothing happened.
By the end of the third week, I finish my EP.
Five songs. A complete, sequenced, produced body of work that did not exist a month ago. I play the full rough cut for the production team and Mrs Kim and Mr Choi in a small listening session that I have been trying not to think of as a listening session because the word makes me too nervous to function.
When it finishes nobody speaks for a second.
Then the lead producer leans back in his chair and says, quietly: okay. This is something.
I keep my face neutral until I get to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror for a long moment. Then I smile so big it almost hurts.
When I come back out, the boys are in the corridor, all five of them, which means someone texted the others and they came. James hugs me immediately and lifts me slightly off the ground, which I was not prepared for. Juhoon is smiling in that warm, unhurried way of his. Keonho and Seonghyeon offer quiet, genuine congratulations. Martin is at the back of the group and when I look at him he is already looking at me with an expression that is open and uncomplicated and proud in a way that is somehow different from the others', though I could not explain exactly how.
"Told you," he says.
"You didn't tell me anything," I say.
"I told you on the roof," he says, and then catches himself, glances at the others, and clears his throat. "I mean. Generally. I told you generally it was good."
James looks between us. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," Martin and I say, at the same time.
James closes his mouth. He is smiling though. They are all smiling, actually, in the specific way of people who have collectively noticed something and made a silent agreement not to say it out loud.
Not yet.
Last night in LA.
The boys' EP is not finished. This is a known fact by now, accepted if not entirely comfortable. They will finish it back in Seoul, in their own studio time, and the debut timeline shifts accordingly. It is the right call, better to take the time and do it right, but it sits heavily on a few of them, and the last day has a particular weight to it.
We order food again. We sit in the living room one more time, in our usual positions, and it is quieter than usual. Not sad exactly. More like the specific feeling of an ending that was also, mostly, a good thing.
After a while the others drift off to pack or sleep or both. The house settles. The corridor goes dark.
I am almost finished packing when I hear one knock at my door.
I already know.
The roof is cooler tonight, the marine layer coming in off the ocean, the city lights slightly blurred at the edges. I pull my hoodie tighter. Martin is already in his chair when I get there, notebook open, but he is not writing. He is just looking at the sky.
I sit down.
For a while neither of us says anything, which by now is one of the most comfortable silences I know.
"Last night," he says eventually.
"Last night," I agree.
He is quiet again. Then: "I'm not done."
"I know."
"The EP. It's not—" he stops. Looks at his hands. "I know it needs more time. I know that's the right call. It just feels like—"
"Like you're leaving something unfinished."
He looks at me. "Yeah."
"It's not unfinished," I say. "It's in progress. Those are different things."
He considers this. "That's what I said to you about the chord progression. 'I knew what it wanted to be.'"
"I know. I've been thinking about that."
He looks at me again, and this time the look stays a little longer than it needs to. Not long. Just slightly longer than conversational. Like something is being considered and then very carefully not acted on.
He looks back at the sky.
"You finished yours," he says. Quieter now.
"I had help," I say. "I had good nights."
A pause.
"Me too," he says.
The city hums below us. The stars do what they can above the light. We sit there for a while longer, notebooks closed, not writing, not really talking — just existing in the same space the way we have done every night for a month, as if this was always going to be the shape of things.
At some point I check my phone. Past 1am. Flight at 7.
"We should sleep," I say.
"Yeah." He doesn't move immediately. Then he closes his notebook, stands, and stretches in the slightly awkward way he does everything, too much, then correcting. He picks up his things.
He looks at me one more time before we go back down.
"Hey Nini," he says. It is the first time he has used the nickname. He says it like he has been deciding whether to for a while.
I look up at him.
"You're really good," he says. "At all of it. I just— I wanted to say that. While we're still here."
I don't say anything for a moment. The warmth from the first morning is back, the same one I woke up with on the first day and couldn't explain. I think I am starting to understand where it comes from. I'm not going to say so.
"Get some sleep, Mars," I say.
He laughs once, quietly, and goes down the stairs.
I stay on the roof for another minute, looking at the sky.
Then I go back to my room and finish packing, and I am smiling the whole time, and I don't try to stop.
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