Who Knows? - Karina / Yu Jimin

The studio smelled like old coffee and whatever candle the sound engineer had been burning since noon, something amber and soft, like the last hour of October. It smelt like someone had bottled up an autumn evening and left it to breathe. You were alone in the vocal booth, headphones around your neck, staring at the sheet in your hand as though it personally owed you an explanation and was taking its sweet time providing one.

"Take five," your producer Yoongi had said forty minutes ago, and had not come back. You didn't blame him. The third verse wasn't landing and both of you knew it, in the way two people who have made music together for years know things without having to say them. You could feel the shape of his resignation in the way he'd set his coffee down before leaving, a small deliberate gesture of temporary retreat. The song was nearly finished, a slow, searching thing that didn't quite have a name yet, like a stray cat that had wandered in from somewhere and made itself at home but hadn't told you what it was called, but the bridge kept slipping out of your hands like water.

That was the thing about bridges: they were supposed to be the part where something shifted, where the song finally arrived at what it had been trying to say the whole time, came home to itself. But you couldn't manufacture that arrival. You could only wait for it, and the waiting was its own kind of work. It was the uncomfortable, fidgety, slightly desperate kind of work that looked, from the outside, exactly like doing nothing.

You set the sheet down. Picked it up again. Set it down. Stared at the ceiling, which had a water stain in the upper left corner that you had stared at during so many stuck sessions that you had privately begun to think of it as a collaborator. A silent one. Unhelpful, but present.

You pulled out your phone.

There was a notification from a fan account: a photo compilation from last night's music show. You scrolled past your own stage shots with the usual mild out-of-body sensation. You had never quite learned to look at photos of yourself without the feeling of watching someone else do a very competent impression of you. This continued until the algorithm, following its own mysterious logic, deposited you without warning into someone else's feed entirely.

Karina — 카리나 — Aespa, the caption read. The photo was from the same stage as last night. White lights, the kind that make everything a little more real and a little more impossible at the same time. A camera angle that caught her mid-turn, the line of her jaw, the clean unhurried precision of her movements. It was the kind of precision that doesn't look like effort because it has gone past effort into something else entirely, something settled and assured, like she had been born moving like this and the years of practice were just her remembering something she always knew.

You knew who she was the way you knew most people in this industry: peripherally, respectfully, from behind the comfortable glass of professional courtesy. She was Aespa's leader. She was technically extraordinary. She had a reputation for being exact and kind in equal measure, which was rare enough that people mentioned it when they mentioned her.

But lately she had set up residence somewhere behind your sternum. This was the part you couldn't quite explain to yourself, the part you kept setting down and picking back up like an unsolved lyric that was almost there but not quite, that kept slipping around the corner just as you got close. It didn’t happen loudly. Not the way a crush announces itself, but more like the way a song gets inside you before you've consciously decided to love it. You'd be in the middle of something entirely unrelated and you'd notice it, that warmth.

You had met her twice. The first time: a hallway at a broadcast station. The elevator doors were starting to close, and you had reached out without thinking and held them so she could enter. She looked at you and said thank you with a smile that was something more personal, like she was actually glad. You had said of course as the doors had closed and you had stood there for a full five seconds doing absolutely nothing, which was unusual because you were a person who was generally always doing something.

Five seconds of just standing there in a corridor, thinking: oh.

The second time: an industry dinner, three tables away. You hadn't meant to watch her. You had, objectively, been across the room eating japchae and minding your own professional business. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw her laugh at something her manager said. It was the kind of laugh takes over a person's whole face and doesn't consult anyone on the way out, the kind that scrunches up the eyes and throws the head back slightly and is entirely, helplessly real. You had looked up, and the thought had arrived uninvited, fully formed, like it had been waiting in the wings for exactly this moment: I want to know what made her laugh like that.

Back to the present, you put your phone face-down on the console. Firmly. Like you were setting a boundary with yourself.

You're being ridiculous, you told yourself, with the specific patient tone you used when you were trying to be reasonable at yourself and knew it wasn't going to work. You've met her exactly twice. You held an elevator door. She said thank you. You said of course. That's it. That's the whole thing. That's all there is. Lock in.

You picked up the sheet again. The bridge stared back at you, unmoved.

Outside the booth, through the glass, you could see the studio in its late-afternoon state: takeout containers from hours ago, Yoongi's jacket on the back of the chair, the amber glow of the candle doing emitting it's soft light, a stack of notebooks with corners bent over pages you'd probably never go back to. The everyday architecture of work. Familiar. Yours.

You wrote, in the margin of the lyric sheet: Japanese Denim. Circled it. Underlined it. Stared at it.

The song still didn’t have a name, not officially, but something about those two words slid perfectly into the empty space like a chord resolving. Japanese Denim was a feeling you could hold without it dissolving, soft fabric against skin, a memory of warmth that didn’t have to justify itself. It made you think of your voice, the way it sounded like a confession said gently on purpose, the way your songs never rushed the longing, never tried to solve it, only sat with it until it turned honest.

Yoongi came back twenty-three minutes later with two coffees and took one look at what you'd written in the margin. His expression did the thing it did when he was trying to seem neutral about something interesting.

"Is that the title?"

"Maybe," you said.

He sat down, wrapped his hands around his coffee, looked at you with the unhurried assessment of someone who has known you long enough to read the weather. "What's it about?"

You thought about the elevator. The warmth of that thank-you. The dinner, three tables away, the laugh that took over her whole face and didn't ask permission.

"I don't know yet," you said.

The award show was the sort of event that looked glamorous in photographs and felt, in person, like a very beautiful waiting room where everyone was wearing their nicest clothes and pretending not to be tired. You were seated in the fourth row with your label rep on one side and the ghost of your social anxiety on the other, both of them quiet, both of them present, neither of them particularly helpful.

And then, Aespa was on stage.

You told yourself you were watching professionally. You told yourself you were simply appreciating the choreography, the staging, the way the production team had engineered the lighting rig. These were reasonable, defensible things to notice. You were a musician who cared about production. This was entirely normal professional appreciation.

Your eyes kept gravitating towards her. Your eyes kept returning to her, as though every time you looked away they got homesick. The way she moved had that particular quality, with total commitment, zero excess. It was like she had made a private agreement with gravity and gravity had agreed to cooperate. Three minutes on a stage and not a single gesture that felt wasted.

You felt like the most incompetent steward of your own feelings that had ever been granted admission to a televised award ceremony. Your whole catalogue, four years of it, two albums and an EP and a handful of singles that had done things you hadn't expected them to do, was built out of this, out of saying the real thing. Soft admissions. Open wounds dressed up in melody.

You had built a career out of being honest in music. People said it about you in interviews, in reviews, in the kind of late-night parasocial conversations fans had about artists they felt like they knew. He's so honest. You can hear it. It sounds like he means it because he does.

And yet here you were: unable to do the simplest possible thing, which was to walk up to a person you admired and say hello, I find you extraordinary

Instead you clapped when Aespa's performance ended, the same way everyone around you clapped. Appropriately. Correctly. A coward wearing the very convincing costume of someone entirely composed.

The backstage corridor after the show was its own ecosystem, managers moving in a storm, stylists trailing garment bags, the occasional idol navigating through it all with the practiced serenity of someone who had long ago accepted that their life would always be lived partly in motion. The air smelled of hairspray and the specific floral perfume that several companies seemed to issue as standard equipment. Someone's award was sticking out of a bag at a dangerous angle.

You were looking at your phone, a message from your manager about the post-show dinner, which you were already composing a polite way to shorten in your head, when someone stopped beside you.

"Excuse me—"

You looked up.

Karina was standing there with the straightforward, uncomplicated quality of someone who had decided to do something and was simply doing it. Up close she was more human than the stage had allowed. There was a small smudge of eye shadow at her outer corner she hadn't caught, a strand of hair that had escaped whatever the stylists had done with it, the slight high-color quality of someone who had just performed and was still running on the back end of that adrenaline. She looked, somehow, more extraordinary for all of it. Like the imperfection was the thing that made her real, and the real version was the better version.

"You sang 'Get You' at the MBC showcase last month," she said. Direct. Not tentative. Like she had decided to say this thing and was saying it, and that was that. "I was watching from the wings. I couldn't stop thinking about it."

You stared at her. Your brain, apparently deciding this was the precise moment to be maximally unhelpful, offered the following in response: she was watching from the wings. She was there!

"That's—" you started, and then stopped, because what you had been about to say was that's my song, which she presumably already knew.

"Sorry," she said, with the quick self-correcting grace, "I should have — I don't know. I just wanted to tell you. It was really something."

"Really something," you echoed, helplessly.

Which was, again, not your finest conversational moment. You were aware of this in real time. You were a person who made his living with words and you were currently operating at roughly the level of a very polite boulder.

But she smiled, not the stage smile, the other one, the one that arrived slightly sideways and a little crooked. "I'll take that as thank you."

You chuckled and said: "Your performance tonight was… really something."

She looked at you, and then at the floor, and you could see the exact moment she registered that you had given her phrase back to her, because her smile went private, small, and tucked-away, folded up like a note she was going to put somewhere safe for later. "I'll take that, too," she said, and walked away into the corridor's general chaos, and you stood there for long enough that your label rep had to come find you looking at the space where she'd been.

"Are you okay?"

"Completely fine," you said.

"You're standing very still."

"I'm thinking," you said. "About the dinner."