( the friend #3, park chaeyoung/rose, she/her ) â introducing BAEK SERIN, the 22 year old WAITRESS AND MUSICIAN at devilâs kitchen bar, known around boseong as THE MELOMANIAC. the residents would describe her as painted nails & lipstick stains on cigarettes, lyrics hidden within coffee-stained journals, 1980âs jazz, indie, funk, and rock.
now loading her interview....
PLEASE TELL US MORE ABOUT YOURSELF.
âMore about myself, huh?â She quips, supporting her chin in one of her two hands. âI can spin my hands 360 degrees. Wanna see?â An eyebrow quirks as she focuses her gaze on the person before her and doesnât try to say anything else on the matter of her weird skill, allowing the subject to vanish when the other clears their throat. She shouldnât have been sitting in this room again in the first place. She remembers too much, even now.
âThe story goes like thisâ Mother was high up in the hierarchy of Boseongâs youth. Beautiful, intelligent, the kind of girl who could have any man she set her sights on but she threw it all away to become a poor manâs wife. Her exact words.â The words flow like a slow drawl. Half-clung to a distracted half-smile, eyes trailing the edge of the table. Past memories knock on her door, and she lets them through. âEnter Romeo. My father, who comes from rags, a farmer that struggles to make ends meet. Father said he used to makes extra money by singing on street corners and busking around with his homegrown magic tricks, which he never shared the secrets to.â
Finally, she settles her gaze. Peers at the other through the overcast glow of the lights up above. Too yellow, too bright. She blinks through the spots in her vision.
âTheyâre not supposed to meet, you know? Shouldâve never crossed paths to begin with, but in true Romeo and Juliet form: they do anyway. They promised to run away together - into the horizon, over the mountains and beyond. So itâs funny then, that I was born here, in the quiet, sheltered middle of nowhere.â
She hates it. Loathes anything that feels forced, and all of these interrogation sessions are the very epitome of it. But she must give them something. Give them the answers they want.
âThey had me, and for a while everything was right.â A pause. âBut one day, just like fatherâs magic coin tricks, mother vanished.â For a second her face holds the same look of hurt it held many years ago.
âââ
It is mid November and the sky was greying. She didnât say much from behind the window as she watched droplets of rain hit the glass with a âtapâ and by now she knew better than to light all the dark rooms in the house. And she could feel it, the tide of the past July. Itâs like this one morning she looked across the dinner table and everything that has ever been left unspoken was being said. No one ever had to tell her anything, she always managed to catch snippets of what was happening around her, observation had been but a hobby to her for as long as she could remember and the sight of her father crying was something unfamiliar to her, something she would notice right away. Serin could see it, the way her father spoke in dim lit words, the way her motherâs name escaped her fatherâs. How often do we wear smiles that hurt, smiles that tell us we have endured too long? Serin feels heavy and the worst thing is, she knows the weather of departure; the humid air, the rain pouring announcing that winter is near.
âââ
Her flashback montage is interrupted by the soft squeak of a chair, and really, she doesnât know what else to say.
âUhm. What more do you wish to know?â She muses out loud, keeping her voice barely audible. She canât let just anyone hear her sad story after all. âRight, more aboââshe mutters, but leaves her sentence unfinished.
âIâm that one girl no one writes songs about.â
Serinâs like a messy book, filled with half read sentences, marked up paragraphs, folded corners and empty pages. Half a hopeless romantic and half a skeptic. She doesnât let people in, only a few have trickled deep within the small gaps between the pages, and somehow the book opens and she gives them a chapter. She feels with a terrible intensity. Too many vowels in her mouth, too many crumpled pages in her pockets. Her mouth twisted into rivers, pouring into too many oceans at once. At times, she says quite a lot and nothing at all. She always takes too little and gives too much. Reaches for anything, finding joy in the most rare of places. Comes and goes, disappears like mist rising in the sky. Maybe she is a liminal space. An in-between. A gas station on a longer journey. blurry, dreamlike. A threshold. An exhilarating parenthesis. She is simply someone searching for - a phrase, a light, a fire. The signs along the way.
SO WHAT DO YOU THINK OF BOSEONG?
Sheâs born in Boseong. Itâs obvious in the kind of gaze she enforces. Like dead foliage, a wet morning, the dewy rise of dawn circling the dark pits of her eyes. The idea of the town swells in its bitter taste through the bite of her growing molars; the pith of intelligence blossoming with the ravenous flavor.
âItâs the place Iâve lived all my life. My home.â It feels unnatural to call it that, but it is what it is.
HAVE YOU EVER LEFT OR THOUGHT ABOUT LEAVING BOSEONG?
âLeaving?,â she trails off, gaze drifting away from the other in faux contemplation.
âThe thought has crossed my mind a couple of times.â
But, it is sorta intoxicating. Living here, being here, existing among all the rumors and secrets that define it into the town of a thriller setting and sad sound. Itâs like sheâs born glued to Boseong. Ripped out of the reasoning to leave. Boseong is a void shadow lingering in the background of the world as it parades forward.
WERE YOU CLOSE WITH HA EUNMI? WHAT WAS YOUR IMPRESSION OF HER?
âShouldnât you know the answer to this? Is it not scribbled down on the reports?â She certainly doesnât like it when others ask questions they know the answer to. She doesnât even bother to look at the other, painted fingernails drumming softly on the rim of the table.
âIt is well known we were best friends.â Closing her eyes for a brief moment, she tries to pull a soul-stirring recollection off a dusty shelf stacked with her memories, reminiscing about the day she first met Eunmi, and how lonely she felt, and how much warmth Eunmi brought into her dreadfully cold and empty life.
âShe was nice, everyone loved her. She had a way of making you feelâspecial. Being her friend meant you were liked as well.â
It was hard tho, being Eunmiâs friend wasnât always easy. Maintaining friendships, having close acquaintances, it all requires a certain amount of effort and sacrifice, something that perhaps not everyone wishes to give away so effortlessly. People grow and outgrow you. People change and most often, people forget about you.
DO YOU HAVE A DARK SECRET THAT NO ONE KNOWS OF?
<Â Â R E D A C T E DÂ Â >
