Numbers, letters, words, and sentences. The spidery black lines that spilled out from her pen rounded out her life, the start and the end, always with her writing. She was an author, or at least that’s what people said. But Seulgi didn’t believe it. Authors wrote to make money, to have people read their words, live their stories. But she wasn’t an author. She was a writer. She wrote because that’s what gave her life. She woke up and slept, lived and died by the words she wrote, the ones that flowed out of her, without her permission or knowledge. She didn’t write for validation or for money. She wrote to get rid of the chaos in her mind. The million thoughts rushing and tripping, knocking against each other in her mind. She never could catch one, so instead she let them fly, emerging from her hands, melding into the void.

But the thoughts quieted when she wrote. Easier to manage when they were pouring through her fingers onto the lined sheets instead of buzzing around inside her head like a child on a sugar rush. So, she wrote and she wrote, but somehow it always felt hollow. Her words always felt hollow, like there was life there, peeking out from behind the curtain of her imagination, but always too far, just out of reach.

She wrote her people again and again, gave them a different name, a different story, a different face, a different home, but still somehow they felt empty. Mannequins created in the assembly line of her mind. First a face, then a name, then a story. Always the same. She was like a jammed record, zipping back and forth between the same empty words. Sooyoung, Yerim, Seungwan…. All different people, all different stories but somehow all hauntingly similar to each other, each story mimicking the other, taunting her almost. It was like she was stuck driving 90 on a circular highway. She fell headlong, with a rush, into her stories once she started but somehow always ended up right where she began. With different people but the same, identical story. Somehow the swish of a dancer’s skirt and the tapping of a pianist’s metronome faded into the same oblivion and the hum of Seoul streets and the beats of a Paris nightclub bled into the same nothingness.

But Joohyun wasn’t like that. She was different right from the very start. She wasn’t born out of a chaotic hurricane like the others. Seulgi was fast asleep when she was born. A shining spectre, hazy on the edges of her dreams. The shadowy edges of her nose, the hidden sparkle of her eyes, the smudged curve of her lips. Seulgi jolted awake and with a clarity she hadn’t felt in years, she set pen to paper, not creating as she wrote but drawing with her words, a face now etched into her memory. She didn’t know who Joohyun was, or why the name felt so achingly familiar, but as she watched her dream take life in front of her, the words felt right, for the first time in a long while.

Like someone had thrown a spanner into the works, her whole process went up in flames. There was no story, no background, nothing. Just Joohyun. She wrote about her tall, slender frame, about her ocean-deep hazel eyes, about her silky black hair. She sketched out her laugh, as infinite as the sky and her voice, as gorgeous as the sunset. She drew in the lines of her smile and the soft curves of her body and suddenly she wasn’t writing Joohyun anymore. Joohyun was writing herself.

Joohyun gave herself the nervous habit of picking at her fingernails, the odd obsession with hazelnut bubble tea, the weird pet peeve of people patting her on the head. She made herself a chef, gave herself the dream of someday owning her own restaurant. It was as if Joohyun was willing herself into existence, Seulgi simply sat on the side-lines and watched.

The next day Seulgi didn’t remember staying up half the night. She only remembered waking up with aching fingers, a 7-page monologue on her bedside and the name Joohyun echoing in her mind. But after that day, everything she wrote, centred around Joohyun. Sometimes she was Joohyun, sometimes she was Irene but it was always the same person. Suddenly Seulgi wasn’t writing empty characters anymore, the only thing she was writing was Joohyun. A character with more life than any of the people Seulgi had ever known.

It started off so gradually, Seulgi almost didn’t notice it but slowly she started writing herself into her stories. Sometimes a passer-by on the street, sometimes as Joohyun’s neighbour but her own presence in Joohyun’s life started to grow until Joohyun didn’t have a job, unless her manager was Seulgi, didn’t have a lover anymore, unless her partner was Seulgi. Bit by bit, Seulgi grew in Joohyun’s life, just as Joohyun had grown in hers.

It was perfect, just the way Seulgi wanted it. The deep-rooted wanderlust her words suffered from had finally found a home. The emptiness was replaced by the warmth of Joohyun’s hands, the constancy was replaced by the unpredictability of Joohyun’s temper, the boredom dispelled by the tinkling melody of Joohyun’s laugh.  

Joohyun was becoming everything to Seulgi. She spoke to Joohyun and Joohyun replied, almost like her own mind had fractured into two parts. One held by herself and the other by Joohyun. She was falling, faster and harder than she ever had, losing small pieces of her consciousness daily into the blinding black hole that was Joohyun.

Her words didn’t mean anything now, unless they centred around Joohyun. She wasn’t in control of her words anymore. Nothing mattered unless she experienced it with Joohyun. Her obsession was spiralling out of control, but she couldn’t see it because control didn’t matter to her as long as Joohyun was waiting for her at the bottom of that abyss, because there was no problem large enough that she couldn’t write herself out of, as long as Joohyun was by her side, holding her hand.

But her faith was slowly failing. The deeper she sank into her own mind, the further her trust dwindled. She wrote urgently, almost fanatically, as if scared someone would take Joohyun away. She had written them into a utopia, but the safer her paradise became, the more scared she grew. Her paranoia fed on itself, chipping away at her mind, telling her that someone would take Joohyun away. That a light this bright couldn’t be hidden. She was jealously protective, ferocious in her retaliation.

When someone suggested she take a break from writing, her fear roared up and almost swallowed them whole, appalled and terrified at the thought of being away from Joohyun. So, she drew back into herself, surrounded by the chaos of her thoughts, comforted by the presence of Joohyun. The world didn’t matter. It was blind, it was stupid. It couldn’t see what she had. The love she felt when she was with Joohyun. Worse and worse she got until her every breath was for Joohyun, every heartbeat in step with hers.

They still tell stories about her. Kang Seulgi, the prodigy author that slowly lost her mind, descending into madness as she shut herself away from the world. They only ever saw her as the wild woman who attacked her editor and shut away from the world. The recluse who disappeared without a trace.

But they were wrong.

See, she wasn’t mad. She wasn’t insane.

She was just in love. So madly in love that everything else paled in comparison. A love so fierce it looked like madness. A love bright enough to burn down the cosmos. Strong enough to breathe it back to life.

But that wasn’t enough. She would never be just a girl in love with another girl because she was cursed.

Cursed to fall in love with a spectre, a writer in love with their own creation.