The sky cracking into a fierce amber somehow seems like the best time to set yourself to anything.
Sooyoung rocks her camera on her hip, first letting her fingers fumble around the thin strap digging into her neck and then resumes pacing around her apartment. She both cranes her neck elegantly like a swan and bobs it off-beat like a pigeon, merely drunk from that hazy up-at-dawn feeling. But all too sober from that teenage, romantically deprived feeling. Her eyes are shielded, foggy and dark, but the window blinds beg to be rolled up, beg to capture the area in tangerine light. The mixture of the two different rates of exposure is wonderfully artistic, though.
Sooyoung takes a brisk snap of her window blinds.
“Sooyoung?” Something cawed from the back of her neck, but it sounded neither like a swan nor a pigeon, but a lot like a drowsy Seulgi. Her roommate’s presence well-explained the amount of amber flooding over the walls. “Why the hell are you still up? You have to be at work in like -“ This felt little like a roommate conversation but unfortunately much like a scolding from her mother, and sweat drew into Sooyoung’s palms, and guilt rose heavy around her jaw. She checked to made sure that uncomfortable feeling wasn’t due to the camera strap digging further into her skin – it wasn’t. Furthermore, Seulgi ended her sentence with a detail she didn’t want to remember. “- an hour.”
“I was just taking pictures.” Sooyoung mumbled, as if Seulgi was perched over her feet beneath her and not standing behind her, where she refused to look. There was a heavy sigh. Seulgi’s breath smelt like murky, half-sour toothpaste.
“You’re literally going to be a corpse tomorrow.” And Seulgi probably meant today but Sooyoung didn’t want to correct her; she knew that when it was still partially dark and before your assured alarm, it still counts as a day in advance. Obviously. That’s how the mind tells it’s marooned, dragging body that there’s still enough of a sleeping opportunity within one hour, right?
Drunk from fatigue and romantically sober Sooyoung is speaking spotty nonsense, but honestly, she couldn’t care less. “I don’t know why I haven’t quit that ing office job and made this freelance photography thing what I do full-time, you know.”
Seulgi felt exhausted and sour. Too, like she was disastrously robbed of cradling her Pikachu plushie at this very moment. But her voice naturally sustained calmness, not calamity. “Freelance photography things don’t pay the bills.” It was harsh, but clear and softening, in a way only Seulgi’s voice could let on.
Sooyoung didn’t really want to reply, didn’t really want to do anything. There weren’t enough remarkable things to photograph in their modest living space, either. She comprehended it best to stock up on energy drinks, and then visit all of the coffee shops she could pass by at noon - first showering off the murky haze. Seulgi didn’t see any intelligence in her actions, but with a reluctant sigh there wasn’t much to be said. She faded back through the door frame, enveloped by darkness and a tid bit more sleep.