Wonderland

Although it was still early June, the temperature already neared thirty degrees Celsius during the day, and the franchise café — just past lunchtime on a Saturday — was kept cool by an aggressively running air conditioner. I rubbed my bare arm beneath my short sleeves and pulled my chair a little closer to the laptop.

A man sat on a grey rock against a backdrop of dry, tangled underbrush — long neglected, drained of anything living. His eyes were ringed in black that had smudged at the edges. He gazed into the camera lens, or glared into it; it was hard to say which.

Unlike most photographs with this kind of atmosphere, it wasn't shot in high-contrast black and white. It was in color.

That somehow made it starker. In its natural colors, without any help, the setting was already dark enough, rough enough, bare enough.

Just as he'd looked in Phantom's underground storage that first time, Juhan hyung in the photo — sweater neckline pulled up to his chin, staring straight ahead — looked like a model. His pose, his expression, the atmosphere he built with them: to someone like me, it was indistinguishable from the real thing.

Old Future.

Old Future.

The website Yuni nuna and Juhan hyung ran wasn't the casual hobby shop they'd made it sound like.

Beyond the shop itself, the site featured photographs they had taken themselves, pictures of the two of them, moments from travel and daily life — and short pieces of writing that came out of those experiences.