"Do you want to go with me to this thing?” my roommate asks.

I’m on my desk, building a new song template for my songwriting class.

Huiryong is facing her vanity mirror, reapplying her lipstick, a color somewhere between pink and orange. She’s always on her way to some Thing, be it a work function or just a function of Huiryong's social butterfly ways. In the two years we’ve lived together, the apartment has always just been a loading and unloading station for her. Somewhere she stopped in between classes, on her way to her then part-time jobs at the cafe and at the boutique, then her internships, and now her full-time job at the fashion magazine and whatever party she’s required to be at. A place to shower, change clothes, and dump her work bag and portfolios. A place where her boy of the month would pick her up.

Sometimes it was a senior at work or her cousins, or her friends. It wasn’t just boyfriends, though there were quite a few of those. Just recently there was a Wooshik and a Yoonje—I never really kept track. Most of them never really make it to our conversations because, according to Huiryong, they’re just going out. Nothing serious. Besides, she never kept them longer than a semester. Except for that one guy, Seokjin or Sungjong or whatever his name is who almost made into our orbit. He seemed like a Nice Guy, but Huiryong only kept him around longer than most because she couldn’t really figure out how she felt about the guy. Which is to say I really admire the way Huiryong carries herself because if I had just a bit of normalcy I could do that too. That, being go out and meet people. Do life. But I digress.

Huiryong is staring pointedly at me now, mascara wand poised at her lashes. She’s wearing her most flattering denim jeans and a fashionably oversized white shirt. Tonight, she kept her long dark hair straight, the way it naturally is. Maybe the party isn’t a fancy work party.

“You’re gonna have to come out of this hole some time.”

“I go out,” I say, feeling a tad annoyed she would even bring this up. It’s not the first time, and as long as we live together it probably won’t be the last. Likewise, it won’t be the last time I’m going to choose not to explain to her why it’s so hard for me to go outside. I can’t even explain it to myself, tough luck finding the words so some other person understands what I‘m going through.

“Yeah, to class. To the station. That doesn’t count. As anything.”

“Yes, it does!”

“You need to go out and meet people.”

“I go out and meet people!”

“Handing out fliers at the quad doesn’t count as going out and meeting people.”

“How do you even know that?” I don’t remember telling her about Jae’s master idea. I would never willingly and voluntarily tell her about anything potentially embarrassing.

She rolls her eyes and looks at me. “Being active on social media is part of my job description. I follow Jae and the rest of you everywhere you’re online. I happen to be very good at keeping updated. And by the way, you make a really grumpy rainbow unicorn.”

I am going to kill Jae when I see him. “Okay. You’ve made your point. I’m still not going.”

“Why? Because you’re composing?”

“I am.”

She turns back to the mirror and swipes another coat of mascara on her lashes. “You’ve been clicking at that thing for two hours. You are not writing a song.”

Huiryong would know. She was a design major. If there was anything we bonded over, it was the fickleness and the unreliability of these so-called muses. Many were the nights we spent sharing a steaming bowl of spicy tofu stew, regretting the choices we’ve made in life.

I tell her, “I’m…setting the mood. Gathering my ideas…”

“Procrastinating.”

“I am not procrastinating. This is all part of the creative process.”

“It’s the first week of class. There are no deadlines. You have nothing to motivate you to get this done. Let’s go.”

“I want to get a head start on my homework?”

Huiryong caps her mascara and puts it back inside her makeup bag. “Honestly, when was the last time you even met someone new?”

Now this is a trick question. Technically, I did meet someone new. Park Sungjin was someone new. But that would entail telling Huiryong about meeting him at Khunfections and that he’s currently my TA. This would launch a totally unnecessary, not to mention uncomfortable, conversation about whether or not I’m attracted to him (I’m not) and if I want him as something more than just my TA by the end of this semester (I don’t). Deciding that a white lie is better than the truth, I look up at the ceiling and answer.

“No. But—“

“No buts. Come on. When was the last time you were out at a party?”

I don’t answer that.

“Don’t you miss it?”

That’s besides the point.

“Be honest with me, don’t you miss DJing?”

“I DJ three nights a week,” I mutter petulantly. I could feel the nervous bits finding anchors in my stomach and dragging all my insides down to the black hole inside me.

“Not on the radio. For a live audience. With realtime feedback. I’m talking about a real performance. At a party, at a club, at a rave. Don’t you miss that?”

“I…”

Sometimes, if I close my eyes, I could feel the warm humid air and the flittering pink and yellow lights from the strobe sticky and hot on my cheeks. The dance floor is moving and uninterrupted, and I put all those people hive-mided into a dancing super-organism there. It seems like a really long time ago, when in reality it was just last summer. That was me. Was being the operative word here. Past tense.

“Is this still about him?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, maybe we should.”

“That’s really none of your business.”

“Well I’m your roommate. Everything’s my business.”

I could, in principle, attack her with something like leave me alone or derivatives of, but Huiryong has difficulty with the concept. And if we’re being completely honest here, it’s a trait that has saved me multiple times in the past. I moved in with her and our other roommate, Ayeon, in first year—my mom’s friend knew Huiryong’s mom from church. The combination of new places, new people, and new situations was a recipe for a disastrous first year if not for Huiryong and Ayeon dragging me around everywhere and helping me adjust with a semblance of sanity. In other words, they wouldn’t leave me alone so eventually I had to accept the fact that we were friends.

Fair warning, don’t let Huiryong’s pretty face fool you into thinking she’s sweet because she may as well be the most intimidating person I know.

“It shouldn’t, right? It’s been…a while. And…like you say about your boys, he’s just a guy.”

“No he wasn’t. Joonyoung wasn’t just a guy.”

My stomach clenches at the mention of his name. Jung Joonyoung, ever the center of my unrequited love and the personification of my silent heartbreak. Joonyoung was a semi-permanent fixture in my life, beginning as soon as I started university and ending in the summer of last year. Wonpil and I met him in one of our Adventures in Busking. He was performing on the street, and I just had to stop and listen to his deep, husky voice. From then on we’ve developed…I don’t really know what it was, but it was enough to keep us in contact. Constantly. And, at least on my part, obsessively. He was older, therefore cooler. He wanted to be a rockstar, so instead of going to university, he took on odd jobs to keep his band afloat. He taught me how to play guitar and helped me write and record my first demo. The very demo that got me into accepted into advanced courses and straight into the supervision of Park Jinyoung.

So no, he wasn’t just a guy.

“There’s really not much to say,” I tell her. Because I’ve avoided the issue for so long, I’ve formed a unscalable block about it. “I misunderstood stuff and now it’s really weird and we haven’t talked since.”

“He asked you out.”

I look down at my hands, balled tightly into fists. “Friends go out.”

“He kissed you.”

“I may have kissed him first.”

“Stop defending him.”

“Stop vilifying him.” We’re interrupted by her phone ringing, but Huiryong ignores it. “I think your friends are looking for you.” I tell her.

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