Alone

I became alone.
Well, not entirely — Bongguk was still next door, completely absorbed in Diablo — but I was more focused on the band and still doing the Jeju gig, so I muddled along one way or another.
Giyoon and I stayed in occasional contact, not quite friends, not quite anything — just fine, in a low-key way.
The summer of 2002 was such a blur because of the World Cup that I barely remember how it went, and around that winter, Giyoon’s shop started struggling.
She’d opened a second location in Nonhyeon-dong but got scammed on the lease deposit and lost a big chunk of money before the place even opened.
Cash stopped flowing well through the Hongdae store, so I threw whatever help I could at it using my Samsung Card and LG Card.
The pattern was: charge 3 million won on my card, and once that 3 million came back in cash, use it and pay the card off before it went overdue the next month.
That worked fine for about a year, no problems.
But at some point the pattern started slipping — 3 million became 1.6 million, 2.8 million became 1.2 million — and before I knew it my card debt had ballooned to 30 million won.
I scraped together what I could and managed to pay off around 10-something million, but with roughly 20 million still tied up, Giyoon went bankrupt.
For the next four or five years I’d run into her occasionally and watch her sink further into the hole, which was hard to see, but honestly I wasn’t in any position to judge — all I can say is those were rough days.
Most of the money coming in from the Jeju watercolor-instructor gig went straight to covering the card debt, and between interest and late fees I was just barely scraping by.
Then out of nowhere, Bongguk — who’d heard about it from somewhere — said:
“Hey, you know about the government-funded training program?”
“Huh? What program?”
“If you go to some school and take classes, they pay you living expenses.”
“For free?”
“Not just free — they actually pay you.”
“Wait, what? Seriously?”
We signed up without a second thought and started attending classes.
This guy quit within a week saying it was boring, but I stuck it out for two months.
We learned HTML basics, some Illustrator, some basic Photoshop — nowhere near enough for actual professional work, honestly, just a string of time-filler classes.
Still, I got a little money and could eat cheap lunches at the nearby civil servants’ cafeteria, so for me at the time, it wasn’t a bad deal.