Pathways

Screech in the Night

"I'll follow you in every Universe you may roam..." Jungkook whispered.

FLASH OF LIGHT

Night turned to morning without him realizing when it expired. One moment he was drowning in the darkness of his shared apartment, bathing in the artificial light of his screen as he worked and without as little as a knock on the door, the cruelty of dawn already filled the entire room.

Jungkook always lost track of time when he was alone. Solitude hardly provoked him any discomfort, but the noise of crowds could be confusing. It had nothing to do with misanthropy but he was quiet compared to other young adults he had come in contact with. He frequently zoned out and reverted to only listening to others as they spoke their views about the world. Perhaps he hadn't really ever lost track of time but got himself lost within the basic concept of it. There was no need for a search party in those moments regardless of what others might have thought, because he always found himself in whatever work he was editing, images rapidly flashing on the screen.

Each frame offered a still shot of his own soul as he poured himself all over the familiar videos he recorded. Sometimes he couldn't remember the exact feeling of a place or a person whom he filmed because they became so irrevocably his that his soul modified the entire capture, filling it with his own energy, colors, and light. Every detail was scrutinized, judged, filtered through his standard of beauty, because, all in all, at the end of the working session, he wanted to believe he was one step closer to laying his hands on supreme beauty. He never reached it, maybe only caressed it with his fingertips from time to time, marveling at the idea that it was so close to him until it fled from his reach.

The filmmaking student was the embodiment of the familiar feeling one has when they want something dangerously bad just to become numb in the eve of the fulfillment of their desires. He never managed to be completely satisfied with whatever he edited, always thinking that there must have been a way to make things even better. He also despised the moments when a short film came together too quickly as it made him feel like a fraud. A parental voice, in the back of his head, repeated that if something is too easy, it can't possibly be the best thing out there. If a project didn't drive him nuts then it meant it would simply lay discarded on a hard drive, finished, beautiful but abandoned.

Unsurprisingly, he had been deemed the most talented student in his entire class with professors shamelessly praising him and whining about losing him since he would be graduating at the end of the year. They scolded him sometimes since he barely attended theoretical courses. He studied theory alone, applying it to whatever he worked at the time. He couldn't understand how anybody could study from books if they couldn't also test stuff out. Simple workshops bored him to death and he aced all of them, but the problem was that in his last year, everything seemed dull and stupid, already discussed, stale.

He applied for a project abroad, a special collaboration course organized by an Oscar-winning Italian director and Giorgio Armani. Yes, Giorgio Armani. "Weird combination?" he thought but since Armani had embarked on artistic projects for youth, it didn't seem all like a hoax. His main cinematography professor was friends with the cinematographer which directed the Oscar-winning film and he wouldn't take no for an answer when he suggested that Jungkook applied, assuring him time and time again that it would be a meaningful experience.

The submission for that certain project was exactly what Jungkook was working on until the first hours of the morning. He was supposed to produce a short film and he found it hilarious that while his plot and montage were almost satisfactory, he was struggling with the cinematography in regards to the pallets of colors that he chose. He worked on hues and details for hours just to step away from it for a second and reconsider everything. He had the vague impression that all the frames would have looked better in grayscales, although he had no idea why he was always drawn to decrease the saturation until colors were barely struggling to exist, gasping for air while swallowed seductively by nuances of gray. But grayscale was too easy. Jungkook frowned at the impossible cliché. He couldn't allow himself to submit something like that. It made him look lazy, amateurish. Grayscale was the escape of those who didn't know how to handle colors, in his opinion anyway.