It's Krystal Jung's last week in Seoul and she's going to make it count.

07:00:00:00

At the beginning of the summer, I tried to get on top of the whole moving-continents thing by reminding myself I still had time. Days and hours and seconds all piled on top of one another, stretching out in front of me as expansive as a galaxy. And the stuff I couldn't deal with - packing my room and saying goodbye to my friends and leaving Seoul - all that hovered at some indistinct point in the indistinct future.

 So I ignored it. Every morning, I'd meet Sulli and Kai at the mall and we'd spend our days hanging out in cafes. Or, when it rained, we'd run down umbrella-crowded streets and watch anime I couldn't understand on Kai's couch. Some nights, we'd dance in strobe-lit clubs and go to karaoke at four in the morning. Then the next day, we'd sit at train-station donut shops for hours, drinking bubble tea and watching the sea of commuters come and go and come and go again.

Once, I stayed home and tried dragging boxes upstairs, but it stressed me out so much, I had to leave. I walked around the streets until I got dizzy from all of the walking. Until I had to stop, trying to count my breaths.

And then it was August fourteenth. And I only had one week left, and it was hot, and I wasn't even close to being packed. But the thing was, I should have known how to do this. I'd spent my whole life ping-ponging across the globe, moving to new cities, leaving people and places drifting in my wake. 

Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that this goodbye - to Seoul, to the first friends I'd ever had, to the only life that felt like it even remotely belonged to me - was the kind that would swallow me whole. That would collapse around me like a star imploding.

And the only thing I knew how to do was to hold on as tightly as possible and count every single second until I reached the last one. The one I dreaded most.

 Sudden, violent, final.

 The end.