welcome aboard! @kugatsui
Tuesdays are oddly ambiguous days of the week, often taking on the guise of another day. Some weeks, they feel like Mondays, a twenty-four hour-long extension of that rumbling, sputtering start that’s still teetering reluctantly---painfully so---on the edge of take-off. Other weeks, they skip over the hump with a glorious leap and seem to run straight into Thursdays, an ending come deceptively early.
On the first kind of Tuesdays, Mi sometimes finds herself propelled from the shop by a potent dose of restlessness and boredom. Today, the curtains she’s been tediously fixing up stitch-by-stitch have been left strewn over a worktable, doors hastily locked up. Today, she has another destination: it’s not one of the food stands around the Insadong area from which she usually returns to the shop; it’s not her apartment, which welcomes her home faithfully and quietly between the hours of seven-p.m. and one-a.m.; it’s not a lack of destination either, the uncertainty that she indulges in.
She manages to find an empty spot---just large enough to fit the borrowed pickup truck, some three blocks away from the school. Between both her arms and one hip, she manages to carry an old quilt, her bag, and a couple totes of assorted food---which she maneuvers with difficulty through the school’s door (only really made possible by the help of a kind staff member who’d been on his way out). From there, it’s just one, two, three, four, five, six doors down toward the end of the hall: the room is still brightly lit, announcing its occupancy---by a particular lady named September whose company and presence Mi finds herself wanting at the moment. A presence she can’t help but gravitate toward for all its shine and glitter and sparkle. What that shine is, she hasn’t figured out yet.
“Guwol-aaaaaah!” Smack! There’s the caricature-ish sound of flesh against glass as Mi presses her cheek up to the door with a sing-song call, before letting herself into the classroom with a flourish---at least as much as she can manage with a hundred things in hand. She allows them to drop to the floor with a bow, grin plastered onto her face as she straightens, facing September. “I knew my favorite teacher would be hard at work soooo---I, your favorite student, present my newest project, destined for an ‘A’, I hope.” With a burst of overdone enthusiasm, mustered for the show, she frames the pile of bags on the floor with jazz fingers. “Ta-daaa! A portable indoor classroom picnic for two!”