#* | solo.

the absence of expectation serves to alleviate some of the nerves, but there’s still that tense feeling running a straight line from his throat down to his navel that comes with situations he’s not entirely comfortable with. he’s never been here before and he’s running on about an hour of sleep on the private jet on the way to los angeles. he doesn’t know most of the people here, and those he does, he knows only in the superficiality of brief greetings and photo ops backstage at other awards show, or in the case of an even smaller few, a flimsy bond forged only by shared nights and mornings of blackout drunkenness and contact-hardened highs.

it doesn’t help that he’s had to prepare something to say just in case the world starts turning backwards and they do win. since he can speak english, it lands on his shoulders to say at least part of their acceptance speech, something he usually does all he can to avoid when they’re back home in seoul. it’s something half-empty and cliche, written more by polaris’s team than by him, but that makes it all the harder to remember on a lack of sleep and a few nerve-settling pre-show shots.

they’re seated not far from the stage and the night goes by in flashes of standing to applaud, sitting down, standing to applaud for the winners of the pop duo/group performance, sitting down with only a twinge of disappointment he knows he shouldn’t even feel, leaving to get ready to perform, performing, sitting down, standing up to applaud, and on and on ad nauseum. the loss barely even registers and he feels the flood of relief that he won’t have to get up on stage and say anything pretending dynamite is a song he can be proud of more than he feels the weight of disappointment.

he’s not a grammy-winner singer, but does he even want to be for work he’s so unsatisfied with? he’s already a multi-daesang winner for work he’d rather his name never go down in the books to.

it’s all politics anyway; politics artists more successful than he is have disregarded and left behind.

still, a part of him remains hopeful that their follow-up single will be better, that it will sound less than something ai-generated from the prompt ‘american pop song satire’ and more like an actual hit song people might choose to listen to.

those hopes deflate the moment he gets the track to learn so he can record the song’s vocal guide. there’s no more iced tea and a game of ping pong, but now it’s some sanitized attempt at kid-friendly sauve-ness that feels so out of step with the polaris he knows that he nearly sends back a message asking to make sure he hadn’t been sent the wrong demo track. 

when he thinks back, he can’t pin down the moment he should have seen this coming, that dimensions was going to send them off the rails of the music they had built into a song he wouldn’t listen to more than fifteen seconds of if it came up in his spotify recommendations by some other artist.

polaris has released songs he’s hated before. the first time he’d heard boy in luv and war of hormone, he’d silently prayed they’d find some other songs to switch them out for last minute, but since he’d begun to be more involved, he’d thought he’d found some position of power to at least guide a few songs he could stand by into each album. he’d thought it meant something to dimensions to have his input in polaris’s musical direction, that they find it of some value that members like he and min could contribute to the way polaris presented themselves.

and so, he has to wonder: was this some failing of his? had black swan and on not been enough to get dimensions the number one spot they wanted, so they’d had no choice but to strip polaris of anything ash had made recognizable in their musical dna?

it’s not even about him, logically, hopefully, but it sure feels like he is every time the audio file titled butter_demo loops back around to the opening punchs of digitized percussion, it feels like a slap straight to his face.

for some reason, his mind places him back in a club bathroom reeking of vomit and piss in berlin or los angeles or tokyo — he can’t quite remember; they all blur together now — two or three years ago. but back then, he’d been crossing substances he’d since learned weren’t meant to mix unless he wanted to see his life flash before his eyes. for the moment, he’s what most consider to be completely sober, body void of anything compromising save for the medication he’d remembered to take for...  he doesn’t remember, but the first in not as many times as he was supposed to in the past few weeks, that morning.

in his mind’s eye, he’d seen eyes boring into his, looking at him and knowing his inability to do something as simple as keep a daily medication routine. looking and knowing and being disappointed. he’d grasped the strangely full pill bottle like the last light amid his waning composure and downed a single dose with a glass of water (but not a meal — he couldn’t bring himself to muster up the iron will of stomach to handle anything solid).

but now he stands in the too-small bathroom of a psychiatrist’s office, doing his best to fight back against the sinking feeling that he’s already inhaled all of the air in the room and he’s slowly suffocating.

if he’d only cancelled like he’d wanted to — but he’d shrunk at the idea of having to look in the mirror that evening and seeing his own failure written across every tired line of his thinning face.

heart racing at twice its normal speed, he finds purchase on the wall with one hand and steadies himself to a sitting position on the bathroom floor. 

the clock tick-tocks in his mind, each beat bringing him closer to too long an absence to go unnoticed, and that only makes the remaining air seem all the more shallow.

god — it’d only be worse to pass out in the locked bathroom of a mental health clinic.

he encounters less of those instances now anyway. making as much money for the company as polaris does has its perks, and having multiple mental breakdowns public enough to no doubt become gossip in the halls of the company had a way of making people treat you with kiddy-gloves. though he’s become less of a liability in that regard recently, or he at least likes to think he’s viewed that way, he knows it wouldn’t be completely truthful to say hesitance to drive him off the edge again doesn’t seem to play a part in his decreased schedules lately.

the proposal of his participation in a series of mini-concerts to promote the opening of the base culture complex isn’t something he really needs to do. he knows already they want him to tour following the release of his next album and it’s easier for them to make profit by booking him an extra arena concert or send him to headline another big festival instead of shoving him into a mish-mash of idols, some who are only testing the waters for a solo debut. it’s ash that says he wants to do it. now a few months post-lollapalooza and having spent the last few months promoting a song ash has to go through a ten-step mediation ritual to even grit his teeth and bear performing, he misses putting on the show he wants to put on.

from there comes the question of the set list. he doesn’t want to do a watered-down version of his lollapalooza stage or an early draft of his next tour, so he drafts a few versions of some of his recent songs, the ones that still feel true to him, and covers he wants to do. though he’s opened his soundcloud and his youtube, he doesn’t get to perform covers as much as he once had. before he’d debuted solo and in the early days of phases and daydream, even into fatalism, it’d been something of a branding for him, but, in a sense, his image and discography had outgrown the handful of covers he used to like to put in every set list. the mini-concert would be a chance to do something nostalgic.

when ash auditions for dimensions entertainment, he’s thinking little beyond abstract visions and a hazy passion. he has little greed for being famous. when he thinks about what he wants out of a life as a ‘pop star’, there are no visions of fans screaming when they see a sliver of his face peeking out from between a hat pulled low and a mask pulled high at the airport or trends of his name on social media. he doesn’t really think about how he fits into it at all, only how his music does. signing a contract with a record label means a chance at people listening to his music one day beyond the snippets he shares with his music teachers and his friends.

when he’s not yet thirteen, being a singer means making music and being heard. it has nothing to do with media training or diets or injecting toxins and acid into his skin for the sake of beauty.

he doesn’t know much about dimensions entertainment itself either, other than the simple fact that they make music out of their headquarters in seoul and when he searches the internet for them, he gets results for artists that are clearly legitimately putting out music. it’s not some scam company with nothing to show for the auditions they hold. he may not have heard of any of the artists names, but he has albums to show to his parents to convince them to let him audition, and that’s enough. he evens adds a few arrest songs to his playlist, despite his inability to understand most of what they’re saying in their songs.

at the time, he has no inkling that in his first weeks in seoul, when he tells people through elementary korean that dimensions was his first audition and he chose them without trying anywhere else, they’ll respond with a skeptical look with a meaning he won’t understand until he’s had more time to grow in his understanding of the dynamics of the industry. 

appearing on next generation isn’t enough to get people to really care about his music. polaris doesn’t do much more than cover songs on next generation and their presence in their pre-debut days seems poised to establish their personalities more than anything. there’s not much personality to latch onto in a boy composed of long silences and awkward attempts to escape the camera’s gaze.

the first taste ash gets of the very thing he’d thrown himself into the cyclone of idoldom for isn’t until years after he’d begun, when he stays up all night to watch the reactions of fans to the first song on melon bearing his name in the credits, but it isn’t until i need u that the awareness that he’s finally getting to do what he’d always wanted to hits. though he’d had to move an ocean away, learn a new language, and battle through years of being forced into a mold he never could quite squeeze into, he’s writing music and singing it and people are listening. at that point, it’s an audience mostly kept captive by all the trappings of an idol boy group, but it’s an audience listening and he doesn’t let it take away from the feeling of glory that they might not all be there because they care what he has to say through his music. 

that feeling is the feeling that keeps any of it worth it for as long, and yet still as fleeting a moment in the grand scheme of things, as it does. debuting solo and emptying out everything that’s built up renews it somewhat, but it fades quicker. no original high can ever be truly replicated, but he chases it to the ends of the earth nonetheless.

somewhere between nineteen and twenty-four, writing becomes a nonstop marathon. in a way, his very first song for polaris had taken him sixteen years to write. in the same way, his very first solo album had taken him nearly twenty years to write. it’d been the build-up of his entire youth that had birthed it. childhood and distance and sweat and first love and wanderlust, it had all been bottled into a single album to signal the emotions of his youth to the masses, his very own bildungsroman. everything since then had been ending one chapter to launch immediately into the next. he’d cross the finish line, but all he’d get was a pat on the back to take off on the next leg. it burns him out, turns love into stumbling over his own feet as his lungs collapse, his heart left lying on the asphalt where it had burst out of his chest years before.

his whole body starts going numb on the leg of the race that leads up to his fourth album. there are expectations now of what he’ll do. he’ll pen tracks about love and heartbreak over a stripped acoustic instrumental or croon over a thick and silky beat. giving everyone what they want in his music becomes a shield he holds up to try to keep them from aiming their barbs at him personally, but it’s a useless venture when the shield is made of nothing more than tissue paper.

his legs finally give out and dimensions wheels in barricades to obstruct the vision of his crumpled body from the public, but when he comes back, he doesn’t come back the person he’d been before he’d left. he’s missing something now — perhaps his heart that’s dried out miles back on the concrete in the midday sun. the air is hotter than ever as polaris rockets closer to the blazing center of a supernova and he falls yet again, and his stumbles become harder to shuffle away into some back corner, both to the public and to himself.

it’s a miracle that blacklight comes to him at all.

but whether it’s something like a miracle or not, ash doesn’t believe in them, much less bank on their reoccurence.

by the time spring is unfurling the buds on cherry blossom trees in a new year, he’s resolved not to force music out of himself if it doesn’t come. he’s been there before, trying to dig into the desert to find a well of life water sprung anew, but determination to do something isn’t enough to make something out of nothing. 

he’s mostly writing for others these days, but the guitar chords that spring to life as he sits on the couch of his studio are too heavy with the emotion of his own reflection for that to be their fate this time. they’re a trickling waterfall of notes at first and he lets them sit on the pads of his fingers as he repeats them. there’s an itch to reach for the computer and get every hint of something recorded so that he can turn it into dimensions, but he holds himself off from the greed to bleed himself dry for the sake of validation from those who see the calluses on his fingers as nothing but a sign of coming fuller bank accounts.

the truth is, no matter how much ash plays and records and empties himself, a day will come when his name is nothing but a footnote. everything polaris drops these days glides to the top of the charts and floats its way to dozens of more awards for dimensions shelves, but he remembers the night in jeju when it’d first settled into his bones that ears will one day turn from his just as the eyes do. there are few who get anyone to listen as long as he already has. what more will he have to offer in five years, a decade? music has long been the source of his confidence, but he’s seen now how easily what had once felt like an endless well can be stripped from him.

if he doesn’t have that, what does he have at all? who is ash kwon and what lives inside of him if not music waiting to be distilled?

he thinks his prime may already be behind him. it hasn’t been the same since that fall before lovesick and he hasn’t been the same since that summer away from seoul in jeju. he’s twenty-four, but he’s been working at this for over a decade, which is longer than most who step into the industry last. it will break him down one day or he’ll be cast out. the worst of all, he imagines, would be to be forgotten.

because, really, what does he have other than the fraying hope that if he keeps writing music, someone will keep listening?

it’s not sadness in the melody he repeats and builds and bends in the air around him in the studio, but something he can’t quite put a name to. not quite emptiness, not quite silent resignation.

after a while, he lets himself pull out his phone and record the melody he’s been turning over in his head.

when he listens back, he’s reminded of ‘nerves’ at first and he wonders if he should pitch it into the deleted files of his phone. becoming a one trick pony pumping out the same song over and over again is one way to lose his spark. (some would say he’d crossed that line already years ago, and a calling card is nothing more than a boring formula.)

he lets the music sit in his phone for a while, but on nights alone, he comes back to it. even when he’s not in his studio, he brings it up when he’s scouring for food in his kitchen or laying and looking at the ceiling of his bedroom. 

it feels so blacklight, with the guitar and the detached vocal melody he can hear over it in his head. he’d hinted that there was more to the world he’d built with blacklight, but he’d never been quite sure if he could commit to ever sharing that more. he doesn’t know how much of himself there is to bare in such a dark reflection of his own psyche in the vulnerability of mass consumption.

but then, what else is he supposed to write about?

he’s getting ahead of himself. one song doesn’t mean a whole album. he takes the moment for what it is and makes a song. one song. that’s what he has at the moment, and thinking too far ahead will only drain him more.

crying guitar layers itself between the dying heartbeats of drum rhythms and thunder rolls over rainfalls. his own voice becomes an instrument, as it often does, an ominous wave of vocalization in between the columns of instrumental crescendo.

he’s written about the fear of fading a few times in his life, but it’s always the lurking shadow, never what comes after. it’s only natural he look at what could come and fear it, but the best stories are told about what happens after the apocalypse, not before it. and he’s seen a glimpse of that afterworld in his own mirror.

in writing, he lets himself turn and look that lurking monster in the face.

when the story comes to an end, will it be the same again?

he sees himself singing on the remnants of a stage that’s been completely demolished. a fire dies in the background, having already consumed until it had its fill. the sky falls in pieces and ash stands in the center of it. he screams until every emotion flies out of his chest, up his throat, and fills the skies with its dark wings.

his manager’s proposal that he do his livestream before lollapalooza had sounded like a good one at the time. it’d give him something to talk about to avoid the awkward silences that happened so often when he was forced in front of a camera to talk to himself, and he wouldn’t be beholden to the topic of their comeback itself since it wouldn’t be announced yet. that’s certainly a bonus. he doesn’t know that he can get online and hype his fans up for a release he himself is dreading.

when he’s driven home after crowned rehearsals to shower off the sweat of hours spent dancing, only to have to run back down to the parking lot of his apartment to be driven back to the dimensions building for his livestream, he starts to doubt his own sanity when he’d agreed to the suggestion. he’s been through more packed schedules before in his time, but he can’t say he’s all that enthused by his own choice this time not to spread it out a little more.

it’s fine, he tells himself. it’s not like he would have been sleeping if he didn’t have a livestream to do anyway.

by the time he’s seated in the studio with the company phone set up on its tripod in front of him, it’s another hour later and he’s suffering an unfortunate reminder of how long these sorts of things take. he’s anxious to get into it and as soon as his manager leaves the studio, he starts the playlist he’d prepared on the ride over and starts the live.

the viewer count raises by the thousands as ash fiddles with a pen that had been left on the desk he’s sat behind. once it gets up to a number he anticipates to be a good chunk of the people who will join, he looks into the camera and starts a short spiel so he can’t be told to do it all over again because he didn’t even speak.

“how is everyone?”

he doesn’t scan the chat to look for answers, but talks a little more, dipping his toes into talking about his preparations for lollapalooza and crowned before he gauges that he’s talked enough to satisfy his fans with the only live they might get from him for a year.

“ah, this song is good. it’s my favorite song right now,” he preludes as he hears the introductory notes of ‘glimpse of us’.

the rest of the live is spent singing along to his playlist and short one-sided discussions with the camera of his thoughts on the songs.

his first night in the hotel in santa clara, ash lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, using every nerve in his body to will himself not to drink.

it’s not like he’s gone off the rails since las vegas. he’s hardly back to where he’d been a year ago, but there’s the creeping knowledge that there’s always the chance he does end up back there. he’s made progress. even if so much of it had seemed empty the morning after the grammys when he’d woken up some place he barely remembered arriving at again.

he can’t go back to black out nights and days barely working through hang overs and highs.

but it’s not the hangovers that tempt him. it’s the lapses in the pressure that sits squarely on his shoulders again. it never really goes away completely, not when one look at the new dimensions building serves as a reminder of how hard their company pushes them for their own benefit. the few months he’d been able to spend away from touring and out in jeju last year hadn’t come from the kindness of anyone’s hearts, but a careful cost-benefit analysis of what ash finally completely breaking could do to the company.

he’d never wanted to completely break himself. if he shatters or disappears, there are staff members that wind up without a job or income. none of this is about him. it hasn’t been since the day he’d debuted, maybe even before that.

stability for him is supposed to mean stability for those who depend on him. and instability works the exact same way. if he deserves to suffer the consequences of his own actions he’ll take them, but it’s that nagging of the harm he’s doing to others that makes him fight himself when he’s worn out and anxious on nights like this.

but if no one’s around and no one ever has to find out, what could a bottle or two of wine hurt? if he makes sure to drink water too, he might not even have a hangover in the morning

 it’s not like he’d be downing vodka shots at a club, so why is he even worrying so much?

what else is there to do when he’s stuck by himself in a hotel room with the days stretching on in front of him with more of the same thing in different locations.

he mind wanders to the mini-fridge and then where he might have put the room service menu, but either of those would get charged to the company card and there’s the chance his manager would ask questions. he can’t order delivery because they’ll need to card him and there’s no way to sneak a delivery person past security stationed on their floor. it’d be even more foolish for ash to go down to the lobby himself.

he scrolls through his phone and the list of people who are at best five hours away and, at worst, on a completely different continent. he even considers asking his parents before shame quickly shuts that down.

then it occurs to him.

he gets up and digs around in his luggage for the pair of jeans he’d been wearing at dress rehearsal. he finds them and then the ripped piece of paper he’d politely shoved in his pocket with the intent of throwing away at a later time.