star shopping

After trying too hard for another fifteen minutes without making any progress, she saved the project and opened her Soundcloud archive. She hadn’t looked at it in months, way too busy on her main projects to have fun on her own. Her account was still the same, filled with public beats that were loved by most, but she had made sure to remove her producer tag when she had first started training and signed the contract under SM. 

She played some of them and slightly shook her head in part admiration to the person she used to be and part desperation of how shitty of a producer she once had been. She scrolled past her own stuff to the collaborations. There weren’t many of them, she had had trouble with some users before and usually didn’t pair up with anyone to work on stuff. 

There was a remix with some guy who had later gone on to produce for YG, that now acted as if he didn’t know her, one with a scumbag that now worked for a smaller company, and another one that immediately caught her eyes. 

Aeri clicked on it and sucked in a sharp breath. The sloppy guitar strumming hit her ears first, she remembered vividly how Yunjin had been sitting on the couch behind her, humming vaguely as she played with the strings of her guitar. They had quickly recorded it, and Aeri had written down anything that came to mind. The beat in itself was simple, they had settled on adding a simple kick + snare and light hit-hats to highlight the guitar and vocals. Aeri had added reverb to make it more distant and they had shared the mic to record rough vocals they had blended later on. 

All that within a night, and to this day, it was still the song Aeri liked most. She could still feel Yunjin’s eyes on her as they listened to the mix for the first time, could still feel her lips on hers when she kissed her in a club’s bathroom in Itaewon two weeks later. 

The song had been the trigger to whatever she had been feeling afterwards. But that also happened to be six years ago. Long before their names began to be mentioned in the same sentence with the aim of comparing them. She leaned back in her chair and bit down her lower lip, if only things had played out differently. 

She shut down her computer and quickly grabbed her bag to go head back home. On the way there, she thought about how she imagined the boot camp’s schedule to be like. It was four days long, she would most likely be assigned a work partner and they would probably be given instructions to work on something together. Deep inside, she knew that partners wouldn’t be random and that her lovely company would probably fuck up her mental health further, as if she didn’t have enough to think about for the upcoming aespa comeback. The only positive point was that she didn’t have to pack much when it came to bootcamps.