Sophomore year in college, Nayeon experiences her first identity crisis. The first moments feel like a clock turning off within herself. She’s out of time. Nothing moves her. Not even sappy, gutwrenching movies like Titanic or In The Mood For Love can get a teardrop out of her. There are times where she listens to the same ten songs everyday on repeat. She tries eating “clean” but ends up gorging herself on cold, stale fries at McDonalds during late nights, disoriented mind fueled by Strong Zeros and sleeping medication. All the cosmetics in her makeup drawer expire. She wonders if she’s decaying from the inside out like rotten fruit. Beautifully spoiled. Slowly disappearing. Detached from reality and intellectually vacant. Being a girl is a blessing but she’s missing out on it. Fading into fantasies, dreams like realities, realities like dreams. Listening to music becomes burdensome. Waking up is a pain. She trades in drinking for smoking.

She’ll entertain herself once in a while and wear lipstick to bed. She doesn’t change her muted grey sheets for weeks. Kohl smudges her droopy eyelids from morning till night. Is spiraling in bedrooms considered a hobby? She washes her hair in the bathroom sink with sunglasses on. The scrapbook in her mind collages tattered ballet shoes, pure white swans, cigarettes & maraschino cherries, diet Cokes, and classic novels messily sprawled across hardwood. As other means of humoring herself, she buys birthday cakes from her favorite bakery and spends the night clawing fistfuls of champagne buttercream into on her living room floor— of course, she does this as a metaphor to fill the hunger within herself somewhere. Suffering through internal rage should definitely be a hobby, right? Nayeon distantly recalls a professor in one of her classes describing how Sylvia Path killed herself by sticking her head in the kitchen oven. Then, the numbing emptiness shifts into random fits of uncontrollable sobbing. She can’t even look at the mirror without drowning in an overwhelming urge to weep. How can anyone ever possibly understand what she’s going through? What she’s enduring? No one notices. Everyday is Halloween as she dresses up as a normal and collected person who has everything under control. This continues on for a year until she contemplates quitting school altogether.

“Babes, you look like you do Coke,” Momo blurts out.

“What the hell!?” Taeyong chokes on his Crystal Pepsi, awfully scandalized.

“She does!” Momo defends with raised hands. “Seriously girl, are you snorting snow?”

Taeyong and Momo — her close friends since freshmen orientation — ambush her during lunch in the dining hall noisy of spoons scraping bowls and table gossip. They notice that she’s beginning to look gaunt. Like heroin chic, Kate Moss circa 90s gaunt. And it freaks them out. It’s hard enough to read her barbwired thoughts and laconic persona, but when she mirrors a living skeleton who looks like the smallest breeze could knock her down, it’s time for an invertenion, ahem, conversation. Nayeon silently stares at them both as her fingers dully drum against the table, a chandelier of grief hanging from her sunken cheekbones. The secrets inside the library of her mind is like the moonlight revealing the raging, nighttime sea. Time passes accordingly to her as she fiddles with the sterling silver ring on her thumb. Transparent skin to see through her padlock heart, wires for veins, metallic nails, and graphite teeth. Maybe it was a mistake she was born human. Perhaps she’s a prototype? Nayeon bites back an unamused smile, she wishes her creator was Hajime Sorayama. Life would be so much easier as a y robot.

“Hello??” Momo waves a hand in front of the blonde’s unflinching face. Even Taeyong sweats in exasperation.

“I might be depressed,” She announces finally as if it were the punchline of a bad joke. Like nothing matters. Like she could honestly care less about the whole thing.

Nodding slowly, Momo resumes stabbing her fruit salad. “Like I’m-going-to-fail-finals-and-get-put-on-academic-probation depressed or Girl, Interrupted depressed?”

Taeyong gawks at the Japanese exchange student in astonishment.

“Maybe in between?” Nayeon responds way too passively for his liking.

Taeyong shakes his head. “Explain it clearly so we understand.”

Nayeon heaves a deep sigh. “What’s so special about being depressed? It’s not anything glamorous.”

“Are you very sad?” Momo phrases it so weird that Taeyong has half the mind to smack her.

Nayeon nods curtly. “I’m crying on the inside.”

Taeyong and Momo deadpan at her blank expression. The funny thing is they know she’s serious.

“Well. . . Maybe it’s loneliness.”

“Why are you lonely?” Momo presses. “You have me and stupid Taeyongie.”

Nayeon pensively rakes a bony hand through her starkissed hair. “Okay, not exactly loneliness but. . . Hmmm, alienation? I don’t know, I’m at the mercy of my own poor mental health because I feel out of place. So I indulge myself to fill the void that I’m feeling.” Belatedly, a sophisticated smile crosses her face. “Anyways, where should we eat for dinner tonight?”

Now, at the glorious age of twenty-three, Nayeon can’t help but be amazed that she survives those agonizing days. She does end up dropping out of college, and move to a more cheaper place — well, cheaper because she splits the rent with her roommate Sana. But before Sana can be discussed, the whole mess with Jaehyun has to be dissected first. With Jaehyun, Nayeon is a lion without claws. She actually humors herself with self-depreciating jokes of how useless and lost she’d be without him. He would say otherwise — he calls her his knight in shining armor. Maybe that’s the irony of love. The two first meet during one of her sporadic weekends of oddball jobs and crappy paychecks. She does waitressing shifts at some nightclub lounge in the college district where Taeyong’s cover band plays songs from their Malice Mizer tribute album. 

Her body halts in the middle of scrubbing down the lacquered bar, fascinated by the incredibly sentimental lyrics of Ma Chérie in her limited understanding of Japanese. The lead singer’s  — a bunny faced Kim Doyoung who has golden, syrupy vocals too sweet for gothic despair — voice is littered with holes of yearning and an onslaught of scorned anguish. It blinds her all at once like glaring headlights and drenches her entire being in freezing rain.

恋人達は理由もなく. きっかけも なにもなく.

(— Lovers don’t have reasons. Nor do they have motives, they have nothing.)

“What’s the point of love if it’s not real?” Nostrils suddenly assaulted by the insatiable eau de parfum of honey and coffee, Nayeon turns around to night-colored eyes smothered in gossamer and fatality. His sharp voice cuts into her like an engraved dagger, and liquified electricity melts into her bones. Ice travels down her spine as she fights shivering under his potent intensity. Gazing up at him throws her in frescoed passages of Greek mythology, scaffolded by opulent warnings and tragedies done up in decadence. He wears the same staff uniform as her, she figures he also does janky jobs here and there. Eyeing him over she simply blinks and returns to glancing back at the band on the stage. 

“Love?” Crumbled seashsells fill .

His dimples deepen in a mischievous smile. Each inch he nears closer, the more her senses engulf in his intoxicating Margiela perfume. “Caterpillars eat leaves to become butterflies. Humans need love.”

“I can’t eat love,” Nayeon replies monotonously. For some reason she knows what he’s getting at; plants need sunlight to grow, bees can’t survive without honey. Disregarding the casual sensuality hanging in the short distance between them, the idea of an insincere love being utterly pointless intrigues her. The idea of any kind of love is new to her understanding. But she wants him to challenge her — sway her mind almost.

His boyish, rambunctious laughter is lightning striking. “Are you stupid?”

Who the hell is this guy? And why is he smiling down at me like I’m some prize pet or something? “No, just existential. . . .” And maybe, kinda neurotic.

“You could’ve fooled me.”

“If love will only bring me more pain then I don’t need it,” She states stoically. And yet the sensuous mood still oozes something menacing and alluring.

His celestial and angular face proclaiming ism. Heady tobacco and bourbon vanilla  in the air. Silver night. Her heart slightly fluttering like holographic glass-stained wings of a gilded butterfly. The dimpled, lopsided quirk of his pink-petalled lips. Tension that sparkles like fireworks. The usual suspects; desire, shame, adrenaline. The ecstatic and dangerous emotions of attraction. Each passing second they maintain eye contact births a subtle, mutual understanding.

“Pain humbles people. We all need to hurt — to struggle a bit more. That’s why when you experience love, you go a little insane.”

“Why?”

“Because love can show you a fairytale happiness you didn’t think you’d ever experience, but it suffocates you to the point where you feel like you’re dying every breath you take.”

On the outside Nayeon appears so unaffected and calm, like a stone sculpture or abandoned garden. But, inwardly, chains loosen around her heart from logic that is no more intrusive than rose thorns grazing her fingers. The real name for pain must be pleasure. This enigmatic stranger communicates with his eyes what his lips don’t say. She has an idea he could wreck her. Kill her even.

Rationale exiting her head, Nayeon grabs him by his shirt collar and kisses him in lieu of a response.

“Are you trying to shoot some cliché love-at-first-sight drama?” She whispers ominously with tears in her glassy eyes against his lips. He eagerly dives back in for one more open-mouthed kiss, the taste of nicotine and burnt sugar poisoning their tongues.

A Cheshire grin splits down his face as he whispers back. “Right, I’m recruiting you as the lead actress.”

Nayeon learns his name — Jung Jaehyun — that same night when he brings her back to his loft and takes her down like petals unfolding from flowers. She thought she was all glass thorns and venomous nectar before him, it only hits her now how beautiful and lethal she is in his arms; a seductive, vibrant blood-colored flower with the most emerald leaves and loveliest scent.

Jaehyun’s name tastes like dark chocolate and amaretto sours in Nayeon’s mouth. His presence is caffeine spiking her pulse, and absence like digital crumbs left in an empty chatroom. His sinfully irresistible sweetness contradicts his sharpened nuances. It’s as if he’s always hiding a sword behind the bouquet of roses in his heart. Desire blooms to rework all his starry beliefs and gritty romanticism in the stainless steel parts of her industrial emotional damage; eroded crystal arms, streamline melancholia, fractured cement relics. She wants her metal-plated android hand to hold his volcanic rock hand. Do I wanna laugh at love or cry for it? What even is that? A proverb? Maybe someone as lost as she is might be better. 

“Well, if it isn’t the ever-so-jaded Cinderella herself,” Nayeon looks up to see the personification of dusky white orchids, sugared snow winters, and opulent ultraviolence — Jung Jaehyun. She explodes into a kaleidoscope of muted anarchy. “Did I keep you waiting long?” 

She questioningly raises a brow.

“You texted me to meet you at midnight,”  His face distorts in confusion.

She shrugs.

“Nayeon,”  He pauses briefly, then gestures to their dimly lit surroundings. “What are we doing in a McDonalds?” 

“I wanted a Big Mac,” She confesses seriously. 

Surprised, Jaehyun hums in mild humor. “You got all dressed up to eat fast food?” 

“I dressed down,” Her light-reflective Dion Lee sweater dress, black satin knife mules, and royal blue Thierry Mugler Centipede sunglasses masking her editorial taupe eyeshadow says otherwise. Lowering said sunglasses, her tiger irises scan the hair tie she accidentally forgot on his bathroom sink wrapped around his wrist. An ache pressurizes in her chest. She might blow a fuse. He’s a renaissance heartthrob and she’s a nécéssaire for jeweled complexities and gauche uncertainty. This is a bad romance.

“Well, I have a gift for you before we go order food,” Jaehyun protrudes a CD from the inner pocket of his tartan coat and places it on the table. 

“Merveilles?” Violin fanfare, medieval angels, visual kei and European aesthetics spins the silver starlet around in a whirlpool of orange autumn leaves. The tracklist includes Malice Mizer songs that launch her back into the other night at the lounge.

“You seemed to really like their music,” He grins proudly, eyes tinging in swirling cosmos. “It’s mine but you can borrow it for as long as you’d like. I have plenty more CDs at my place if you ever wanna come and browse through them.”

“Is that a cheap trick to get me to go home with you?”

“It is,” Jaehyun admits with a half-guilty chuckle. “But I think you’re way more than a one-night stand. You intrigue me, Nayeon. And I’m pretty obedient to the girls I like.”

The promise of eternal bliss laces his less-than-swoony flirting. Not seeing him again might make her suffer terribly. She can’t bear to be alone again — not tonight. “So you’re not done playing with me?”

“I hate small talk,” Nayeon tells him one day when their bare bodies lazily entwine amidst her ribboned teddy bears and dark cherry scented pillows.

“So what would be considered big talk?” Jaehyun steals a Pianissimo from her nightstand and lights up, his other arm wrapped around her waist tightens intuitively.

“Childhood memories?. . . Things like deepest, darkest fears and contemplations of life.”

“Ah, that’s challenging,” He blows rings of raspberry-flavored smoke, lowered voice all velvety rasp and hoarse. “What else is big talk?”

“Critiquing old movies, analyzing art in museums, deciding where to order takeout,” Like an elegant fox, she reaches up and pushes the unruly cinnamon curls out of his devestatingly surreal face. “. . . And making love.”

Smirking, Jaehyun flicks the ashes and kills his menthol in favor of spending the rest of their lazy Sunday morning indulging her in big talk.

Later that night, they share an embrace in her vintage clawfoot tub — her favorite place to seek comfort and destress from back-breaking anxieties. Scene: handprints on foggy mirrors, perfumed bubble bath & rose petals, slick hair clinging to wet skin.

“Nayeon-ah, who do you prefer?” Jaehyun asks, burning cigarette sticking out his mouth.

“Hm?”

“Gackt or me?”

“Gackt,” She states obviously.

“Atsushi Sakurai or me?”

“Acchan.”

“Of course, my pretty girl prefers pretty boys,” A lovesick smile adorns his face as he props his elbow on her head as his personal armrest. Nayeon unconsciously frowns at the popcorn ceiling in response. Crap, he thinks he’s raising a little adorable plaything, doesn’t he? For some reason this jerk keeps teasing me even more lately. Am I a joke? . . I hate him.

“Wouldn’t you date a celebrity over me?” She swipes the ice ball menthol from his lips and deeply inhales from it.

“Nope!” He chirps, peppering her head in numerous kisses. She wonders what about herself is so alluring to him. Somehow, bullets of insecurities riddles dents in her sinking form.

She heaves a sigh, exhaling grey ghosts. “Liar.”

He chuckles against her ear. “I’m a bad liar.”

“Men are good at telling lies,” Nayeon’s quiet voice pens across the four bathroom walls as if they were intimate pages of a private journal.

“And women like hearing their lies,” Jaehyun presses a longing kiss into her forehead and his fingers through her silky blonde tresses. Instinctively, she cuddles closer into his side, spilling foamy water over the tub.

もっと あなたを抱きしめ眠りたい. 優しい記憶に変わった今でさえも,この腕で抱きしめ眠りたい, 出会った頃の二人のように.

(—More and more, I want to sleep holding you. If even now changes to gentle memories, I want to sleep holding you in my arms like when we first met.)

Jaehyun’s husky rendition of Au Revoir bounces off the walls, echoing throughout his her apartment like her own personal concert. Each musical note is a shadowy twilight covering her senses, erupting her skin in a symphony of smoky wildfires and traveling goosebumps. His gravelly singing reminds her of black Jun Takahashi bear plush toys, cursive love poems on tattered notebooks, glimmered steelblue ladybirds, and intricate skulls carved out of mother of pearl shells. Maybe there was a chance Gackt specifically wrote these lamenting lyrics for Jaehyun to convey to Nayeon the things he could never express in daylight. Damn.

Her breath hitches in .

“Your heart just fluttered, didn’t it?” He nudges her playfully.

“You’re annoying,” She scolds mostly to her fluttering heart.

He’s so mesmerizing. It doesn’t help that his wet hair revealing his forehead makes him look sculpted and refined from marble, or that his muscled biceps circling her waist floats her way up in the clouds.

“You never told me you could sing.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

“And I was being mysterious, huh?”

“I have all the time in the world to explore you.”

“. . . Jaehyun, would you spend the rest of your life with me?”

“I’d go anywhere in the world as long as I’m with you.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Then let me ask you something: do you think we’re soulmates?”

“Soulmates?”

“Y’know,” Jaehyun intertwines their fingers together. “Do you see the red string of fate connecting us?”

“No,” Embarrassed, she tries pulling away only for him to trace butterfly kisses on the insides of her palm.

“Why not?”

“Being tied to someone else is scary,” She tries batting him away as he teasingly cups her squished cheek, forcing her maraschino lips to pout. Over the antics, she tosses his diminished Marlboro and splashes a handful of sudsy water in his giggling face.

“What about being tied to me?”

“No way.”

“I won’t let you go anywhere.”

“Really?” Her lips betray her in a wolfish smile. He’s crazy. Shoot, she’s crazy too.

“Really.”

She chooses rolling her eyes in favor of blushing.

“Ah, I never wanna leave this tub,” Jaehyun sinks back and allows her spine to relax further into his chest.

Nayeon withholds her response. There’s nothing left to say anyways. It’s another dreamy night of being in her lover’s arms. If the world suddenly combusts in flames, she’ll willingly burn to ashes. Even if he pushes her head underwater she’ll like it. Elated and content, she couldn’t ask for more.

 This must be it, she peacefully closes her eyes as she drifts into sleep, Happiness finally found me.

Now, Sana. . . Sana is a whole other chapter in Nayeon’s book. Sana likes the color pink, frills and ribbons, and the City, ice-cream parfaits, online shopping, romantic candle lit dinners, and Hello Kitty charms. Her room is a full reflection of this as it’s decked out in vintage mirrors, hanging garlands, pastel candy colors, floral patterened wallpaper, shoujo manga, and a princess-like bedroom set with a canopy. Nayeon veers more on the opposite with a minimalistic approach. A painting of Marilyn Monroe by Hajime Sorayama furnishes her asphalt-shaded wall, in addition to a simple mattress on the floor, and an old wine-crate that serves as a makeshift nightstand which holds her glass ashtray, white musk incense, and Malice Mizer compact disc. The landlord is pretty lenient too, the first month he let them slide with late payments since job-hunting in the skyscraper jungle can come through with consecutive rejections. Nayeon reasons its fine that she’s unemployed. All they really need is food in the fridge, heat, and to keep the lights on. However, she has some savings, she’s not as desperate to work as Sana who dreams of an extensive Jimmy Choo shoe collection, dazzling ball gowns, and a penthouse in Gangnam. 

“Ah, did you find a job?” Sana’s head pokes out her bedroom with an excited smile.

“Not really,” Nayeon lowers her steaming mug of flowery earl grey. Sana takes note of the blonde’s signature luxuriously grunge attire; a Vivienne Westwood corset top, micro miniskirt, lace up black platforms paired with ripped fishnets, and a leopard fur coat. Relax, it’s faux fur. Nayeon accessorizes her not-appropriate-for-work outfit with heart locket earrings and a Helmut Lang handcuff bracelet. Although they have such drastically different fashion styles they stick like magnets. She could picture Nayeon serving coffee at an upscale café in her sky high platform boots and chronic poker face. The thought alone makes her giggle.

“Where are you going then? Maybe I could tag along too!” Sana beams while buttoning up the jacket of her hand-me-down Chanel tweed skirt suit.

“Nah, I’m good,” Nayeon’s ruby lips tug in a half smirk as she leans against the kitchen counter. “Besides, don’t you have a job interview thingy to get to?”

An alarm rings over Sana’s head, springing her into military mode. “Oh, snap! I’m running late!”

Nayeon rolls her earthy brown eyes as Sana leaps into a frenzied heap of flailing limbs and kitten heels click-clacking back and forth across the floorboards. At the same time, she’s not surprised. Sana has a bad habit of being a complete tool sometimes. Nayeon swears its genetic. “Yah, do you think reading all those dumb girly magazines and getting hundred dollar manicures every other week is gonna pay the bills?”

“Crusty nails is so not a cute way of living!” Sana harrumphs as she hastily grabs her beige Liz Lisa trench and off the coatrack. Nayeon can’t help but roll her eyes again at the lost cause in her foyer. “I’m going to be majestic and stylish with pretty nails until I’m an old grandma covered in wrinkles!” She’s not kidding.  “Wish me luck! Wanna grab lunch at our spot today?”

Nayeon’s smirk momentarily falters. “Can’t. Sorry.”

The doe-eyed princessa pouts. “So chic as always. See you tonight then. Bye-bye!”

“. . Yeah, later,” Nayeon can’t help but smile fondly as the orange haired airhead exits their apartment. That’s where guilt showers her heart and she douses the rest of her unfinished tea in the sink. She can’t bring herself to tell Sana that she’s actually meeting with Jaehyun today. It’s been almost two months of living together with Sana, but it’s still sort of weird to Nayeon that her roommate is also dating the same guy as her. Taeyong and Momo thinks they’re both insane, jumping way over the rainbow and yellow brick road. She gave up trying to defend the arrangement using logic a long time ago. She doesn’t get how Sana can be so open and unbothered about Jaehyun though. It confuses Nayeon even more that Sana’s so friendly and outgoing with her too. Sure, Sana pissed her off in the beginning. She was too eager to please and happy-go-lucky. However, there was a quality about Sana that compelled Nayeon. She was spoiled milk clueless about the world, innocence clung onto her like body glitter despite her promiscuous actions. In a way, Nayeon felt that they were the same and that perhaps the mature thing to do would be getting closer to one another. Despite the prior circumstances, she’ll admit that Sana has grew a soft spot in her heart.

Nayeon sighs and shakes the negativity off. With her studded leather handbag and pack of raspberry menthols, she leaves their apartment and walks out into the clear Seoul morning. The sunlight shines a halo on her mane of blonde beachy waves, hair bouncing voluminously as if she were shooting a shampoo commercial through the crowded streets of hungover businessmen and navel-gazing teens rocking the latest trends. Each movement she makes spreads a mysterious fragrance of dark honey and sandalwood. The scent is dizzying, a tad sweltering like heatwave in the Arabian desert. A little masculine. She has the edginess of a rockstar’s girlfriend, Parisian humor and nonchalance, and surreal beauty drawn in of a mangaka’s pen. The unearthly blondie quickly spots her boyfriend sitting outside at their favorite brunch joint.

“It’s too cold to eat outdoors,” She arches a brow at the cappuccino and french fries covering the table. Jaehyun alerts at her arrival and a cool smile slowly spreads across his full lips.

“Well, hello to you too,” The gaze he gives her is cigars on ice. Too cool for school, huh? She resists a scoff while taking her seat across from him. It’s annoying how the littlest things he does still affects her. Being all heartbreakingly beautiful and what not, cosplaying as some ethereal deity blurred in moondust and boxy streetwear. Maybe that’s why she can’t give him up after these nonsensical turn of events. When it comes to love, she’s quite the late bloomer, but there are scars in her heart that belong to Jaehyun. And only him.

“What’s up?” Nayeon effortlessly lights a cigarette with her sleek gold engraved lighter.

Jaehyun slyly grins. “Do I need a reason to see my darling dollface?”

Nayeon lets a silence pass as if time was created especially for her. “Wow, does that kinda crap work with Sana?”

“It does,” He confirms, cunning grin still present. “I can be all cheesy and lovey dovey with her and she eats it all up. How is our sweetheart doing anyways?”

She thinks he’s cruel. Each leathery word he speaks feels like constricting around her skin. Sana is so different, her pleasant voice is caramel drizzling over sugar biscuits that seeps sweetly into Nayeon’s ears. That girl’s heart is a gorgeously filled candy box, it’s hard to picture her being with Jaehyun who tends to be quite cold at times. In fact, dating both her and Sana has made Jaehyun more smug, more pleased and delighted with himself. A part of Nayeon wonders if he’s even human. She knows if they fought over him instead that would only fuel his amusement more. “You’re ridiculous, you should get a third girlfriend while you’re at it.”

“Don’t be silly, then I’d have to start scheduling dates and treating our time like appointments.”

“Sounds like a pain, doesn’t it?”

Jaehyun chuckles at her indifference. “I think it’s cute. You know, Sana’s crazy about couple items but always tries hard to hide them so you don’t feel bad. She seems to be more considerate to you than me.”

Nayeon blows smoke in his face. “Jealous?”

“A little. Boyfriends are supposed to be a woman’s everything. But I guess I’m not her whole world.”

“Is that why you’re dating us both?” Nayeon irritably taps ash off onto the concrete. “So you can get from her what you’re missing from me? And vice versa?”

The secretive smile Jaehyun gives her makes her stomach somersault. A player. Loser. Scumbag. But she can’t let go of the glittering leash on his neck. Or maybe she’s the one trapped in a diamond collar. Silhouetted in a mixture of grey clouds and longing, Nayeon deems they’re both tortured and obsessed. Like starving artists. Like headless fools. Absentmindedly, she reaches for Jaehyun’s cup, letting the bittersweet taste of coffee overpower the bitterness already on her tongue. With a heated vengeance, Nayeon paints an interested smile on her face as Jaehyun carries on about nothing. She had passed the level of crying and laughing over love.

I paid for love, bastard. I paid for it.

𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗’𝖘 𝕹𝖔𝖙𝖊: Hellooo ꒰ ୨୧ᵕ̤ ㅅ ᵕ̤ ꒱ !! The closing gif used is from Vivienne Westwood’s Spring/ Summer 1997 “Vive La Bagatelle” Collection. When I write my characters, sometimes impressions arises and I wonder what kind of people they’d be in various scenarios. I figured if we ever see this story’s Nayeon getting married, she’d walk down the aisle blindfolded while wearing an extravagant designer wedding gown. She’s got that passive and reserved air but tends to be eccentric whether she realizes it or not. I tried to express that well in this chapter: a silently charismatic woman who can occasionally explode full of surprises. The chapter image actually features the Hajime Sorayama painting in Nayeon’s room and I included an image of Kate Moss drawn by manga artist Fujiwara Kaoru. I idolize how Naoko Takeuchi incorporates a lot of couture fashion in Sailor Moon, and in the anime Nana there’s numerous references to the Pistols and Vivienne Westwood. This inspired me to do the same and fill this story with art, fashion, and music that the characters identify with. I actually had a color — or more like a texture/textile — scheme of silver-plated, black leather, and taupe shades in this chapter that I wanted to convey to the audience. This is only the intro and sneak peak into her background and personality, so please do wait in anticipation for her journey. I will do my best in bringing the next chapter as quickly as possible to my dear readers! (Hint: Sana’s next). Please subscribe, upvote, and most importantly comment! Nothing is more exciting than a new story comment alert:) Feedback and interaction is everything to a writer, so please don’t be shy! Until next time . . . 🖤