Jisoo was a writer. Or rather, she used to be. A writer is someone who writes. But Jisoo wasn’t writing, and she hadn’t written anything in a long time. 

She had been to her classes and had been to work, but other than that, she had spent all her time locked up in her room, trying to come up with an idea to present to Dara that would convince her to let Jisoo write the short feature.

At present, she was dressed in her nicest suit, which consisted of a red blazer and matching red trousers, into which a white blouse was tucked. She looked like a Valentine as she lay as motionless as a corpse on the carpet. She stared with blank eyes up at the bright, white light on the ceiling while tiny spots of blue and green danced across her vision, and she slipped, slowly, into madness.

Around the room, evidence of her fruitless attempts at working. Empty coffee mugs collecting mold sat in one corner of her desk. Her laptop flashed a half-finished document and a YouTube video where a man in glasses was explaining the concept of the banality of evil. On a cork board, she pinned several pictures and clippings from papers, connected by a string like she was trying to solve a conspiracy. Two bottles of wine, one empty and one full, sat by her computer. She had hoped that getting drunk would get her writing faster. She even dressed in her nicest suit, hoping that “dressing for success” would magically invite inspiration into her head. 

But alas, there had been zero progress. 

Jisoo sat up suddenly and screamed so loudly, it spilled into the hallway, and she could hear someone running toward her room. She grabbed fistfuls of her hair and looked angrily at her reflection in the mirror to her left.

Why can’t I write anything?

In a moment, someone was knocking on her door.

“Unni? Is everything alright?” said Rose from the other side of the door.

“Don’t come in!” Jisoo shouted, standing up. “I’m writing!” 

That was a lie of course. There was 100% no writing happening in that room. Jisoo went back to her desk and began to scroll around the document that was open on one of the screens. Nothing. Nothing of substance. Just a hundred or so small snippets of dialogue or description, a few half-baked ideas that she had typed out after consuming four glasses of wine. But no story, yet, and no sign of one developing anytime soon. Rose knocked on the door again.

“Are you sure everything’s alright in there?” the knob turned and Rose herself into the room. Immediately, her nose wrinkled. “What is that smell?”

“I’m working!” Jisoo said. She picked up a mug to drink some coffee, but the mug was empty. She sighed and clenched her eyes shut. “What’s wrong with me?”

Rose watched as Jisoo leaned over her laptop and highlighted several lines of text and changed the font color to white so that she couldn’t see the terrible ideas she jotted down. Rose walked over to her and leaned down to look at what was bothering her on the laptop screen.

“It’s all ,” Jisoo said. “, all of it! I don’t understand!”

“What are you even doing?” Rose said. “Have you left your room at all? I didn’t even know you were in here. You’ve been so distracted the past… I don’t know, two, three weeks?”

“It’s this stupid short feature project at work,” Jisoo said, dropping her bottom into her desk chair and groaning. “I really, really want to be put in charge of it, but that’s not going to happen if I don’t prove to Dara that I have the writing chops for it.”

“Well, you do,” Rose said. “I’ve read some of your work, you’re good. Why haven’t you written anything? Haven’t you got any ideas?”

“It’s not a matter of having no ideas,” Jisoo said, jumping back to her feet and pacing the room. “I have too many, too many and they’re all competing for my attention but none of them are the story, yet.”

 Jisoo turned around to check her reflection in the mirror again. She turned her head and inspected the constellation of pimples that were starting to pop up around her jaw. Dark circles lined her eyes and her hair was in desperate need of a wash. She caught her own gaze in the mirror and she was filled with a deep, overwhelming sense of panic. 

“Maybe you need to get out of here for a day or so,” Rose said. “I mean, I’m no writing expert, but holing yourself up in your dingy room can’t be good for creativity.”

Jisoo turned her nose up at the thought of leaving her bower, but she was right that something was clogging up her creativity. Even though Jisoo loved writing, she didn’t deny that there were times that it was hard. But it had never been hard like this before. 

“Have you… spent any time with Jinyoung at all?” Rose asked all of a sudden. Jisoo bristled at the mention of him. She kept her eyes on her laptop as she answered.

“I haven’t heard or seen him in weeks,” Jisoo said flatly. Not since I twisted my ankle, she thought quietly to herself. She didn’t even go to see him directly when she returned his book. She opted to pass it to Jackson when she passed by the Gumiho bar. 

“I thought you two were kind of a thing now, though,” Rose said. “Maybe you should call him, see if he wants to hang out. It’d be good to get you out of this room, though maybe you should shower, first.”

Jisoo pressed the back of her wrist to her forehead and clenched her eyes shut for a minute. Every time she thought of that night at the SoTech infirmary, her mind was plagued by questions: should she not have asked Jaebum on that date? Should she have fought harder to be brought to a different hospital? Should she have lied and told Jinyoung that she wasn’t on a date? If she did, would the two of them still be okay right now? Had she been too hard on him? Could she have been a little more understanding? Had she lost him for good this time? Had she run out of second chances?

No. Not this. Not now. Jisoo couldn’t afford to get lost in those questions right now. Not while her future as a writer was hanging in the balance. Nevermind if she had lost her chance with Jinyoung, she thought. Her feelings for him weren’t that strong, right? After all, Jisoo’s first and only true love would forever and always be writing.

Right?

Jisoo groaned. “Where’s my lucky flower?”

“Your what?” Rose asked. Jisoo darted around her and reached for her work purse. 

“You know, the dried and pressed flower I always carry around,” Jisoo said. “It’s sort of like a lucky charm. Anyway, where is it? I think better when I have it.”

“Oh,” Rose said, vaguely remembering that Jisoo did keep a bookmark with a dried flower on it. “What’s it look like?”

“Uh, well, it’s pressed between two pieces of transparent parchment,” Jisoo said, not finding it in her purse, so she turned to her stack of books. “And it looks like a daisy, except it’s purple and it’s dried up.”

Jisoo flipped through all the books she’d read recently, thinking she might have stuck it in there to mark her page. But as each novel turned up empty, she started to panic some more. Where did she put it? Rose joined it, looking around her desk but not finding it. Jisoo started to flip through her things with more frantic urgency. She turned and left the room to search the couch and the kitchen counter and the bathroom. She went into Jennie’s room to check if she had left it there, but it was nowhere to be found. 

“Lisa!” Jisoo said, walking back into the living room, where Lisa was reading a magazine. “Have you see my flower bookmark? You’re not hiding it, right?”

Lisa shook her head as Rose came in to see about the fuss. 

“Why? Did you lose it?” Lisa asked.

“Unni,” Rose said. “What’s so important about it, anyway? Just get another floral bookmark, they’re like $5 at the store.”

Jisoo gave up searching for the darned thing for a minute to get herself a glass of water. R