Sol-woo held the pen over the blank page, staring at the Korean characters he’d just written. They gave him nothing. Not even a fraction of the emotion or the rawness that flowed so naturally when he composed in English. He’d been stuck on the same verse for over thirty minutes. The lyrics sounded stiff, flat — almost archaic.
He rubbed his temples, starting to question himself. Why? What am I doing wrong?
The hours slid by in a dense silence. It was nearly 9:00 PM and Sol-woo was still trapped in the same dead end. It was as if thousands of colors were spread out before his eyes but he couldn’t see any of them — the page only reflected a flat, opaque grey. He couldn’t find the clarity to land on the right concept.
A sting of anxiety began pressing on his chest. He’d thought this would be relatively straightforward. Wasn’t it just a matter of moving his ideas from one language to another?
He’d been completely wrong. This was shaping up to be the most complex obstacle of his entire training period. There was an enormous gap between writing in English — his practical mother tongue, the language in which he had lived, suffered, and experienced every single thing he expressed in his songs — and Korean. When he tried to force his metaphors into this new language, the words didn’t feel like his. He didn’t feel like himself.
He crossed out line after line in frustration, trying to figure out what was missing — what he needed to capture the soul of the melody. When the clock read 10:00 PM, he let out a long breath and leaned back in his chair.
I’m exhausted... but I can’t leave it like this, he told himself, refusing to give up.
While he continued digging through his own mind, two sharp knocks broke the silence. The wooden door opened and the imposing figure of Kang Tae-shik appeared. The solidly built manager took in the work table with a single glance — the evident exhaustion on the young man’s face, the mountain of crossed-out drafts. He asked no unnecessary questions. This was Sol-woo’s creative territory.
"It’s late. You need to rest," he said simply, his voice sober.
Sol-woo nodded. He had four days left to crack the puzzle of that song.
He packed up his things and headed out of the studio. Crossing the hallway toward the exit, he felt a strange disorientation wash over him. Hours locked inside the acoustic isolation of that room, completely cut off from the world, had left him slightly lightheaded. He steadied himself after a couple of seconds and walked in silence beside the manager toward the parking level.
Once inside the car, Tae-shik started the engine and broke the silence with a sharp edge:
"What’s still left on today’s agenda?"
Sol-woo went cold in the back seat. His mind had been so completely absorbed by the composition and the creative block that he had entirely forgotten the rest of the schedule. He tried to retrace his steps — but couldn’t recall what he’d missed. Sensing the weight in the driver’s tone, he knew something was wrong.
"What did I miss, Mr. Manager?" he asked with careful humility, adopting the posture of someone who acknowledges the fault before the reprimand arrives. "I got so focused on the music that I lost track of time. Could you tell me what it was?"
Tae-shik didn’t soften it or work around it. Eyes fixed on the road, he answered without mercy:
"We had agreed you’d go to the gym in the afternoon — but you prioritized something else. I fully understand the song was important to you. But as your manager, my job is to remind you that you have a formal commitment to this agency. Today it was the physical training — but tomorrow it could be a live interview or a shoot. A lapse like this could expose the company to a breach of contract claim."
The manager paused briefly, then closed with executive severity:
"You need to take complete ownership of your schedule."
He said nothing more. He wasn’t Sol-woo’s father or his emotional guardian — he was his professional representative. His job was to name the failure clearly and draw the line. Sol-woo was adult enough to process the reprimand and act accordingly.
Sol-woo nodded in the dim light of the car, absorbing the weight of the words. He knew he’d made a serious beginner’s mistake and he offered no excuses or justifications. There was nothing to justify.
The rest of the drive passed in complete silence. When they reached the Samseong-dong building, both rode the elevator up to Sol-woo’s floor. Before parting ways in the hallway, Tae-shik said in a neutral tone:
"Same routine tomorrow. Get some rest."
"Rest well, Mr. Manager," Sol-woo replied with a formal bow.
He stepped inside his apartment and closed the door behind him. He let out a heavy breath that seemed to empty his lungs completely. For the first day of his new Chapter, things had ended with a bitter taste.
Already lying in the dark room, Sol-woo stared at the ceiling while his mind refused to let go. What am I missing? he kept asking himself.
His head was still entirely trapped inside the song. If he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t overthinking Tae-shik’s reprimand. It wasn’t that he wanted to dismiss his manager’s authority or minimize his words — he understood the professional point about discipline. But somewhere deeper, he knew he had prioritized the music for a reason that went far beyond routine. He wasn’t using it as an excuse — but for him, the truth of his art would always come before anything else.
The problem was technical and overwhelming. The final section of the vocals was costing him an enormous effort.
In English, the verse flowed clean and enveloping:
"Please, don’t see me just a boy caught up in dreams and fantasies..."
The open vowels let him project the air effortlessly from the throat, sliding the words forward with a melancholic lightness.
But when he tried to fit that same emotional weight into the meter of Korean, the structure collapsed:
"Jebal, kkumgwa hwansang sog-e gadhin sonyeon-euloman boji ma..."
The final consonants of the language — the hard stops of the batchim in words like hwansang or gadhin — cut abruptly through the flow of his breathing. Where in English he could sustain a clear, crystalline falsetto, in Korean his voice came out heavy, rigid, and hollow. Trying to translate the ache of his voice into those closed syllables felt like trying to shape iron with bare hands.
Sol-woo kept turning the problem over in the dark of his room. The answer wasn’t in translating the words literally — it was in reinventing them correctly in Korean.
Easy to say. Doing it meant rebuilding the song from its foundations. He let out a resigned breath as he realized how complicated his life as an artist was going to be. In the future, if he wanted to maintain his personal signature, he would have to structure and write every song in both languages — mastering two entirely different lyrical architectures.
He wasn’t a machine. But the consuming love he felt for music would push him to get there eventually. Of that he had no doubt.
He turned onto his side and, in a murmur barely audible in the silence of the room, began singing a small fragment — applying that new approach. The result still sounded a little abstract, but he didn’t stop. He kept shaping his voice, testing the way the air fit into the Korean syllables over and over.
Midnight came and went. As he pressed forward in the dark, the weight in his eyelids became unbearable. The accumulated exhaustion finally won — and Sol-woo fell into a deep sleep with the echo of the melody still drifting through his mind.