A firm advocate of keeping separate personas for work and home, Yeseul is both the successful associate editor of Han Weekly and the frazzled owner of a highly strung cat. When a younger man moves in next door to her crammed-neighborhood villa then...
"Words I speak alone, nights I sleep alone, being alone, living alone. They're all natural to me."
Urban Zakapa < Alone >
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A loud bang of the door chases away the weight of pretense crawling all over Yeseul's body.
Low lights from the street lamps outside makes its small, winding ways into her apartment unit. Relishing her solitary moment in the dark, she lets out a quiet but prolonged grunt, finally throwing aside the mask she had been wearing all day.
The day has by far been the most difficult this week, with trouble brewing upon trouble. It is one thing to handle Jihye who had gone AWOL, and it is an entirely different thing to deal with team sabotage. Nari and Mia had, with deliberate intentions, screw up the entire meeting with vendors by mishandling confidential information. Yeseul hadn't thought the worst of them, or knew exactly what they were capable of.
How wrong was her assessment of them.
Tired of the drama, she lets out a series of curses to the wall, and tells herself to deal with the remainder of the mess tomorrow.
A soft, slightly irritated purr calls out from the living room, as though to chide the volatile Yeseul.
Turning the lights on for her furry friend, Yeseul lets the mediocre fluorescent light infiltrate the space as she takes off her Christian Louboutine heels. Closing the noticeable gap between a pair of beige and light brown pumps in her expanding shoe rack, she shuts its doors soundlessly.
The partitioned walls of her villa apartment are infamously paper-thin, and every little sound and vibration easily picked up by her immediate neighbors. Yeseul remembers the ahjumma and ahjussi who used to live next door. Their severe complaints for her 'inconsiderate behaviors' delivered through her landlord included the meow of her cat, the stomp of her foot, and the slurp of her ramyun.
It was nonsensical, but Yeseul knew better than to quarrel with them. The cheapest one-room studio in Apgujeong and Cheongdamdong costs no less than 700,000 won. A two-room apartment villa unit in Noksapyeong with 400,000 won monthly rental was difficult to refuse.
Well aware that the place was almost an hour's ride away from her workplace by the city bus; that Korean villas were the image of unpopular housing due to its lack of elevators; that the neighborhood was cramped, and doesn't contain sounds within its walls - Yeseul signed her livelihood away.
The harsh reality of life tells her to be cautious of her spending. Ironically, the same reality tells her to hold nothing back when it comes to creating her alter ego.
Placing her premium leather handbag on the dining table a few meters from the door, Yeseul slips into a pair of fluffy pink-colored bunny slipper. She moves comfortably across the kitchen area to the living area, and squats herself down on the edge of the room. Unlocking the vertical cat food container before her, she scoops out the feed unto the stainless steel cat bowl, filling it three quarters to the brim.
