The day feels sluggish, slow. Thoughts come at Seungwan as if from a distance, too vague to linger, too shapeless to elicit anything beyond acknowledgement.

She feels like she should be feeling more. The recent breakup, the stressful job, the traffic jam. Something should pull her out of the fog. But it doesn't, and the hours slip by like clockwork, unnoticed.

She feels like she's missing something. It's an annoying sensation, that this strange discomfort is the only thing piercing the haze, but it sticks stubbornly in her mind.

All through the day she double-checks her email, her calendar, her shopping list. Nothing is amiss, but the sensation persists.

Work is uneventful. She sits at her desk, mechanically going through the motions that have become second nature to her over the years.

On auto-pilot, she only snaps out of her reverie to once more check her assigned tasks. Did she miss something? She didn't, everything is on track. So why does it feel like she must have?

It's the same at the supermarket. Groceries fill her cart, colors and shapes blurring together. The list swims before her eyes, shifting in and out of focus, and the certainty that she is missing something only grows distractingly stronger as she checks off each item.

She feels like she's letting something slip past her, like she'll get home and it'll slap her her right in the face, large and obvious and so clear. But she waits in line, pays her check, drives off, and still nothing.

She pushes the key in the door, drags her feet through the threshold, slips out of shoes and coats and bags, and still only the tense expectation.

The TV plays a rerun of something Seungwan must have watched years ago. Every scene springs in her mind a moment before it plays on the screen, like a long-forgotten memory slowly stretching its limbs and returning to the foreground of her thoughts.

Garbled dialogues and grey landscapes follow one another in a strange, inarticulate sequence, and the unease buried inside Seungwan’s chest grows, digs deeper, turns to urgency as she leans closer and strains her eyes, focuses, really focuses.

It hits her so hard that her vision goes blank for a second. But she’s sure of it, and the certainty makes her pulse race with something unnameable, a wordless panic, an urge to do something, to fix what is wrong.

As her heart settles, she carefully returns her eyes to the figure. It’s blurry and distant and too faded for shape, but she knows who it is. It was this figure, in a car next to her, sitting at a corner table during lunch, in line at the store.

All along, it was this. It’s so clear now. The shape on the screen holds the answers, the thing she’s been missing, the mistake she almost made. But she can avoid it, if only she can find this figure. If she can discern its true identity, amid the pixels that make up its image.

She slides out of the sofa and crawls forward, closer to the TV. She clings to the screen, fingers brushing against static and sending tingles down her spine. Up close, the landscape seems to waver, unstable against her scrutiny.

She pushes deeper, forces the image into stillness, into clarity. The force of her glare, the tightness of her grasp, breaks through the fragile bubble and crumples the world in on itself.

Pools of noise swallow reality, burst through the faded frame, and the more she clings, the more it takes over. The grey flickers spread to her fingers, cover the palms of her hands, grow over her and into her, and the whole world becomes static.