Do Kyungsoo at 20 really, really, really wanted to punch Do Kyungsoo at 18.

Why did you apply for the linguistics department when you were applying to university, you pretentious little turd? Why? What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? Why, why, why linguistics?

The blank sheet of paper under his hands, pristine in its whiteness, mocked him with its emptiness. Clutching at his hair, Kyungsoo almost burst into tears.

“Translate the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ into Chinese for your final paper, the professor says. Into Chinese! ‘Jabberwocky!’ Into Chinese!” Hearing his voice crack in despair, Kyungsoo was fully aware he looked and sounded absolutely insane muttering to himself in a dark corner of the university library at 2 A.M. In fact, he was garnering quite a few wary glances from his fellow students, but did he care right now? Absolutely not, he decided.

“It’s just not possible,” he reasoned with the dusty bookshelf next to him, pupils shaking in his over-caffeinated state and hands spread plaintively. “It’s not! Nothing in ‘Jabberwocky’ makes sense in English! It’s literal nonsense! You tell me, how am I supposed to translate nonsense in one language to nonsense in a language that’s linguistically almost the polar opposite of the first? Huh?”

Sadly for Kyungsoo, the bookshelf had no wise words of advice for him.

“Fine, don’t tell me then.” He huffed. “I’ll just flunk this paper then. I’ll drop out of university. I’ll go live in my mom’s basement for the rest of my life and mope over poor life decisions, and it’ll all be your fault!” He finished this statement with an impassioned thump of his fist and a fierce glower at the poor bookshelf.

“Shut up!” a girl hissed from the other side of the bookshelf. Indeed, she was the only other person in his vicinity, seeing as how the other students had sensibly moved as far away from him as humanly possible. Unable to see her face with the bookshelf between them, Kyungsoo sent back a scowl in her general direction.

“You shut up!”

“Serves you right for being a linguistics major anyway,” the girl muttered under her breath, and Kyungsoo, unable to find fault in her logic when he had thought the exact same thing only seconds earlier, settled for a final grimace at her before returning to his pitifully blank sheet of paper.

“‘Twas brillig,” he said, rolling the words over his tongue like he could taste them. “‘Twas brillig. ‘Twas. Brillig. Briiiilllliiiiiggggg.”

The words tasted bitter and round in his mouth, he decided, like some strange linguistic pill. Were there any Chinese characters that rolled off the tongue with such an awful taste? No, Kyungsoo decided, that wasn’t a helpful metric at all for translating this poem. Most likely, it was just the taste of the tears he had poured into this class he was detecting on his tongue.

“Briiiiillig,” he tried again, lengthening the word and hoping for the same bitter taste to flood his mouth. Perhaps he was onto something. “Hmm. Brilliiiiiiiiiig?”

Nope. Nothing. Nada.

It was time to move on to the next part of the line, he decided. “Slithy. Slllliiiiitttthhhhhyyyy. Sssssss. Slithyyyyyy. Toves. Toves? Toes? Toves? Toes? Doves? Toves?”

“Oh for God’s sake!” The girl shot to her feet, the chair rocketing out from under her with a screech. “Shut up! Please, please, please shut up! This is a library, not a… not a… not a whatever you think it is!”

Normally, Kyungsoo was a wonderfully behaved young man. Normally, he was the polite son that all his parents’ friends cooed over for his impeccable manners and gentle smile. But tonight was not a normal night, so instead, Kyungsoo sneered at the bookshelf separating them. “What if I don’t want to shut up?”

There was a brief pause filled with enraged breathing from the other side. “Then I might just have to push this bookshelf over onto you, if only to make you be quiet. For goodness’ sakes, your English pronunciation is awful! You’re giving me a headache!”

Inhaling sharply, Kyungsoo jumped to his feet, too. “Take that back! My English is great. I’ll have you know I’m the only one in my friend group who can pronounce ‘Cinderella’ properly in English!”

“Maybe all your friends just at English.”

Kyungsoo thought for a moment and realized he couldn’t really dispute that either. His friends were terrible at English. “Irrelevant. The point is, my English is fantastic.”

“Your. English. .”

“Oh, would you just