(3) You enter the room with the same unit number but one floor above yours _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________   When my seniors told me that college days would be "gone in a daze", I didn't expect it to be literal. At the very least, I would expect to end my freshman orientation week in a more sober state. I couldn't recall anything that happened that night, nor how I manage to stumble against the weight of my-similarly-drunk-friends all the way back to the dorms. We reeked of alcohol and was an unsightly mess. Yet our minds were dancing on cloud nine, too lost to bring ourselves back to senses. I must have left them at some point, probably by the road as they tumbled and fell. Did I laugh then? Probably. I could be mean when I get drunk. Being drunk that night was accidental. I hardly drink, so when my friends tested my limits, it didn't take long for the alcohol to overcome my system. Miraculously, I stayed on my two feet all the way back to the familiar sight of the dormitories. Anything thereafter, I heard from him in time to come.    - ∞ -   My hangover must have been worse than I expected. My room was comfortably darker than usual and my blanket was softer than before. Mornings during fall season always kept me in bed, and so I cocooned myself in the blanket as my bolster purred and snuggled beside me.    My bolster purred.    And snuggled beside me.    Its tail rested lazily on blanket, toying with the surface playfully.    WHAT.   I startled the cat beside me when I woke up with a start. At once it meowed fearfully and bounced off the bed, right onto the desk beside the bed, where a boy was sleeping with his head on the table. The opened laptop screen illuminated his face slightly. He looked like a child, untouched by the worries of college. My heart skipped a beat at his quiet beauty.    The cat's heightened alertness meant that it was looking at me slightly menacingly and was emitting this undercurrent of angry sounds. It woke the boy up. Through his sleepiness and slight confusion at the staredown that I was having with his cat, he managed to grab his cat by the tummy and brushed its back so that it calmed down a little.    "Don't worry Byul, appa is here." He said thoughtlessly, like it was some sort of habit.    I brought the blanket nearer to me, now that I realised the greater danger was the boy more so than the cat. And I wasn't referring to his deadly gorgeous looks or dimples that appeared when he smiled to his pet. Or the fact that he looked angelic with a lazy creature sitting on his lap, and him cuddling it gently.    "Who are you and why are you in my room?" I said it a bit too gently, as if afraid to break the moment between him and the cat. He looked up and blinked.    "Huh!?"   I did not expect that this angel was capable of such expressions.    "Yah, in case you haven't realised, this is my room." He said as he continued Byul.    I stared at him blankly. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness around me, I assessed the room before me. There were strings strung across the ceiling that were pegged with many photographs. Almost everything were in black and white, including the clothes in the opened closet and the stationeries on the table. His mug, the cat, the postcards he had on the wall, were all in black and white. It was like stumbling into an old silent film, where everything was a monochrome.    I gasped. "Oh God, what happened?" I timidly looked under the blanket to check whether my clothes were intact.    "Yah, who do you think I am?" He said with a slight edge in his voice. He rubbed his tired eyes. Evidently, he needed more sleep than computer time. "I have no idea what happened, but last night you turned up at my doorstep with Byul in your arms. I thought you must have helped me find her because she was missing for a good hour. I was thanking you and all when you just followed Byul into my room and took over my bed. Then I realised, you didn't bring Byul back. Byul brought you back. You probably followed her because you were too drunk to make sense of anything."   I was completely dumbfounded when I heard that incredulous story. I looked at the cute creature on his lap and felt guilty for having intimidated it moments earlier. "Sorry," I said, half directing it to Byul, and half directing it to the boy.    The morning was cold, and I realised that since all my clothes were still on me, and I couldn't find my coat hanging around any part of his room, I must have left it at the party venue last night. . I wanted to leave this room so badly since I was dying from embarrassment, but seeing him in his comfy, cozy knitwear just reminded me of how cold I was. I wrapped myself in the blanket again. Maybe it was the after effects of drinking.    "You don't look so good." Despite his coldness earlier, the boy grabbed one of his sweaters off the wall and passed it to me. Needless to say, it was black. His frame was not much bigger compared to mine, so I accepted it and put it on.    "Thanks..uhm..."   "Myungsoo. Kim Myungsoo." He said.    "Thanks Myungsoo. I...well...I am gonna get breakfast. I'll return the sweater to you after I wash it." I said sheepishly before making a move. My hand was on the door handle when Myungsoo suddenly slided across the room on his swivel chair and tugged the corner of my sweater.    The growl in his stomach spoke louder than his words, "can you get me some breakfast too?" He cheeks a faint shade of pink.    - ∞ -   It didn't take long for me to realise what happened that night. I had returned to my room, but before I could fish out my keys, Byul had led me up the stairs to Myungsoo's room, which was one floor above mine.    Myungsoo was a professional photographer despite his young age. I quickly learnt that he was working under the euphemism L in Japan, and he was quite established in the scene for a couple of photobooks already. He was both living a life of monochrome, and also capturing life in monochrome. I expected to never cross paths with him again after the day I returned him his sweater, but Byul was relentlessly chasing me all the time. She often showed up at my doorstep, so after a while, I decided to buy cat food for her.    "I don't get it, she's so attached to you." Myungsoo once said when he came to my dorm room looking for Byul again.     "Your cat knows where her loyalties lie." I said with a grin.    "With food." He said before budging into my room to grab the bag of chips on my table. He was exactly like his cat, always on the search for food. Myungsoo treated food the same as he treated his photography and his cat, and it was a special bond of affection and attention. If he spotted any food, everything else in his peripheral vision would dissolve to nothingness, and the food before him would be the sole object he attended to. Only when the chips met his taste buds, would he break out from that trance in satisfaction. His gaze lingered onto my desk.    "You draw?" He asked, looking at my sketchbook.    "Ya," I replied, Byul nonchalantly she continued munching on her snacks.    "You're pretty good." He mused as he flipped through my works.    "Nah, just some lame sketches."    He said nothing, but continued examining the book curiously.    If there were anything that linked our friendship together, it was food, Byul and sweaters. It came to a point when I was in love with the monochrome sweaters so much that I just helped myself to his closet. He didn't care anyway. In fact, he thought he was salvaging my sense of horrendous fashion.    - ∞ -   Being with Myungsoo was like seeing the world through a different lens. It was fall, and autumn leaves were turning the streets into brands of orange and yellow. Clad in his fully black outfits, and me in his sweaters, we roamed the streets to capture the cityscape.    "Isn't fall the most beautiful in the day, when you can capture the colours of the leaves?" I asked. We were at the top of a hill where a pavilion was, looking over Seoul. There were not many people here at night, and since the weather was turning too chilly for most, people had shut themselves in. I was sketching the scene before me under the dim street lamp, while Myungsoo was scanning through the photos that he had captured on his DSLR that night. I was his assistant and makeshift model during the semester. In the cold night, we huddled closely to get some warmth from each other.   "Exactly, so why should I show someone things they've noticed all along anyway?" He said. "When you were shutting yourself in due to the cold, I'll be your pair of eyes seeing the autumn night."    He was always