&. ji nee park / @pcrkjinee location: castell & jameson architects, west hollywood.
In the beginning, was impossible to think, much less breathe, in a room where she escaped no one’s gaze. Isolation was unavoidable: Chloé had been forced to carry her laptop outside, to sit in the thick of the smoke and nictotine on the office’s terrace — somehow, it was far easier to breathe there, even though her lungs burned — in order to accomplish anything. Then, her colleagues had begun talking to her again, giving her quick nods and even quicker questions, as though they had remembered that once, they had liked her, that they knew her, supposedly.
She still preferred to work outside, in the haze, chin lifted high, choosing to meet the eyes of the firm’s clients through the windows that covered the floor instead of being forced to when they walked by her desk. From her high tower she could spot them as they walked into the building too, like little mice skittering on the concrete below, and if she had wanted to she could have picked them off one by one.
There were three mistakes: one, she didn’t see Ji Nee Park coming. Two, she looked up and saw the it-girl, glowing and golden as ever, speaking to one of the firm’s better-known architects. Three, Chloé went inside to meet her. “Is she here for me?” She addressed the room first, then the woman. “’JNP’. Interiors proposal due,” she quoted from an email she had never fully processed, “I didn’t know you were working with us. Are you working with us, or are we just a bid?” She had fought to earn that little ‘us’ back. Ji Nee’s celebrity, a bitter reminder of Chloé‘s own, could make her lose it.
