It was 3am and Sojin could no longer tell herself she wasn’t drunk. The contents of the empty wine bottle in front of her were filling her head with a dizziness that was more pleasant than thinking.

Who cared that it was 3am and that she had a schedule at 6? Here she was, she hadn’t touched her bed yet that night, but who ing cared? She was a grown adult, she could do what she liked. More than a grown adult, actually. Almost thirty. Good god, how had that happened? She was sure she’d been 18 yesterday. Starting out at college, a future in mechanical engineering ahead of her. When she was 18 she had thought she had potential to be something amazing.

Now here she was aged 29, at 3am, drunk and with a future she hadn’t considered. She was a singer in a girl band, for god’s sake.

It wasn’t like she’d ever looked down on entertainers; she was human, and if entertainers were anything, they were rawly and desperately human at their core. She wanted to be liked, admired, validated, she could have seen the appeal even when she was 18. The seed of this future must have always been there. When she was at college, being liked wasn’t a problem; 800 boys to 8 girls meant she was overloaded with admiration. Not that she’d cared, then. It was mainly validation she’d sought in those days. The ‘Sojin, you’re amazing, look how smart you are, you’re defying all expectations’. Instead she’d gotten, ‘Nice , Sojinie’, with the not too infrequent, ‘you’re too pretty to do a man’s job’.

She’d been angry at the time; she’d worked hard, done well in school, ignored everything that’d been said about what girls could and couldn’t do. But here she was now, in the epitome of a feminine career, in a freaking girls group for god’s sake, getting pissed on red wine at 3 in the morning like a depressed middle aged woman in a miserable marriage.

Maybe she was a depressed middle aged woman in a miserable marriage, figuratively speaking. She even had the text on her phone to prove it, telling her not to wait up, he was going to be late home, with full understanding that there was someone else. Her ‘he’ might be a ‘she’ in this case, a ‘she’ who wasn’t her husband, clearly. Instead she was a ty friend who she shouldn’t care about as much, and certainly not the way that, she did, but that was the way it was. Hyeri was her friend who she sat up half the night for, knowing she was with a man that the younger girl was enjoying keeping a secret, and that there was nothing she could do about it except get drunk because who was she to say what Hyeri could and couldn’t do with her life, and she certainly couldn’t let herself explain why she cared. The most she could do was rat on Hyeri to their manager, but that was too far into pathetic and grappling even for Sojin in her current state.

So, clearly alcohol was the answer in this case. She poured the very last drop of wine into her glass where it pooled unsatisfactorily at the stem. If she was more literary minded, she could see the liquid dark red as a metaphor for her passion and lust, but she was a mechanical engineering major, so instead she downed it in one shot and brought the glass down onto the kitchen countertop with a dangerous clatter.

This was very pathetic, she decided of herself, as she made an attempt to stand. It was past three now. Quarter past? She couldn’t make out the clock hands through her unsteady vision and the gloom where she hadn’t bothered to turn on the light. Hyeri wouldn’t be back tonight. She’d go straight to her schedule tomorrow without coming home, and if Sojin raised it in an ever-so-casual way, like she didn’t even care one way or the other, Hyeri would look at her with wide eyes followed by a smirk that said, ‘you’d do the same in my shoes, unnie’.

Hyeri genuinely thought that she was jealous. She thought that Sojin didn’t go out with men, didn’t get whisked away for covert weekends on Jeju, didn’t come home overladened with expensive gifts she would never look at again but appreciated the price tag of, Hyeri thought Sojin didn’t do those things because she couldn’t. Which was, without an ounce of boasting, bull. Sojin had had the offers, too many if anything – she was not a monster, she didn’t enjoy seeing boys with crestfallen faces – she was just too far detached for being a normal woman to take any of them up.

She was the kind of woman, if there was such a kind, to be sitting in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning, waiting for another girl who was not going to even bother to show up, mentally torturing herself by imaging said girl close and intimate with a faceless man. A man who had permission to do things to Hyeri that Sojin never would have. A man who could hold her hand, kiss her, go on dates, make love to her, all the while Sojin sat at home and tried by any means to quieten the yearning pain in her chest.

It was 3:15am. Sojin dropped her empty glass in the sink, not caring if it shattered. She would go to bed after all. There was no point waiting any more.