A Thousand Purple Stars (JinJi)

Aster Koraiensis

Jisoo was a writer. Or rather, she used to be. A writer is someone who writes. But Jisoo wasn't writing, and she hadn't written anything in a long time.

She had been to her classes and had been to work, but other than that, she had spent all her time locked up in her room, trying to come up with an idea to present to Dara that would convince her to let Jisoo write the short feature.

At present, she was dressed in her nicest suit, which consisted of a red blazer and matching red trousers, into which a white blouse was tucked. She looked like a Valentine as she lay as motionless as a corpse on the carpet. She stared with blank eyes up at the bright, white light on the ceiling while tiny spots of blue and green danced across her vision, and she slipped, slowly, into madness.

Around the room, evidence of her fruitless attempts at working. Empty coffee mugs collecting mold sat in one corner of her desk. Her laptop flashed a half-finished document and a YouTube video where a man in glasses was explaining the concept of the banality of evil. On a cork board, she pinned several pictures and clippings from papers, connected by a string like she was trying to solve a conspiracy. Two bottles of wine, one empty and one full, sat by her computer. She had hoped that getting drunk would get her writing faster. She even dressed in her nicest suit, hoping that "dressing for success" would magically invite inspiration into her head.

But alas, there had been zero progress.

Jisoo sat up suddenly and screamed so loudly, it spilled into the hallway, and she could hear someone running toward her room. She grabbed fistfuls of her hair and looked angrily at her reflection in the mirror to her left.

Why can't I write anything?

In a moment, someone was knocking on her door.

"Unni? Is everything alright?" said Rose from the other side of the door.

"Don't come in!" Jisoo shouted, standing up. "I'm writing!"

That was a lie of course. There was 100% no writing happening in that room. Jisoo went back to her desk and began to scroll around the document that was open on one of the screens. Nothing. Nothing of substance. Just a hundred or so small snippets of dialogue or description, a few half-baked ideas that she had typed out after consuming four glasses of wine. But no story, yet, and no sign of one developing anytime soon. Rose knocked on the door again.

"Are you sure everything's alright in there?" the knob turned and Rose herself into the room. Immediately, her nose wrinkled. "What is that smell?"

"I'm working!" Jisoo said. She picked up a mug to drink some coffee, but the mug was empty. She sighed and clenched her eyes shut. "What's wrong with me?"

Rose watched as Jisoo leaned over her laptop and highlighted several lines of text and changed the font color to white so that she couldn't see the terrible ideas she jotted down. Rose walked over to her and leaned down to look at what was bothering her on the laptop screen.

"It's all shit," Jisoo said. "Shit, all of it! I don't understand!"

"What are you even doing?" Rose said. "Have you left your room at all? I didn't even know you were in here. You've been so distracted the past... I don't know, two, three weeks?"

"It's this stupid short feature project at work," Jisoo said, dropping her bottom into her desk chair and groaning. "I really, really want to be put in charge of it, but that's not going to happen if I don't prove to Dara that I have the writing chops for it."

"Well, you do," Rose said. "I've read some of your work, you're good. Why haven't you written anything? Haven't you got any ideas?"

"It's not a matter of having no ideas," Jisoo said, jumping back to her feet and pacing the room. "I have too many, too many and they're all competing for my attention but none of them are the story, yet."