Perhaps it's some inflated sense of self-worth, saddled by midday delusions and fermented desperation. Perhaps you're just getting older and you feel something is missing; everything is just the way it should be so why does it seem so wrong?

It grows on you in brief, quiet intervals like a weekend mold, withering under the telltale cadence of snowfall. It's winter now, and what’s left of the scarce daylight runs on Christmas decorations and foggy windows, nettled scarves and season’s greetings. You spend your time away from work cooped up in chicken and beer restaurants and internet cafés, counting the ridges of each passing snowflake.

Perhaps the last eighteen, nineteen years are just a surreal landscape, some drifting thought dusted in constellations and dreams, and a little of something else. Perhaps you've been asleep this whole time, perhaps you'll never wake up.

There is no album work, concert, program appearance, so you rarely see the members these days. The last evenings of December come in transient sidewalks and red bean soups. You catch a cold but it sweeps by, unnoticed, under the blinking red lights of rolling cameras, tall microphones.

Jun Jin sends in a coffee truck with a banner that wishes you success on your new drama. Andy you regularly talk to, only it’s over game chat rooms and messaging sites. Minwoo and Dongwan periodically invite you to lunch. Even though you’re dying to say yes, you usually decline because it conflicts with your itinerary and no matter how much you plead with your manager it’s little short of impossible.

As for Hyesung, they’re glimpses. Across the street, or through the spotted pane of the windshield. The distance of a thousand, thousand rungs, aged by the wines of futility. Flickering in the shadow of every unlit street lamp, between the phrases of every bedtime story, beneath every patterned rug, behind the darkness of shut eyelids. Between your lungs, squeezing, a little tighter each time.

Or perhaps they’re just fleeting images that disappear as soon as you try to hold onto them.