The next day Jin-kyu did actually go outside, albeit to his therapist's office. He took the subway there, studiously avoiding eye contact with the other commuters and then emerging into the torrential rain on the other side.
"Wet out there?" Helena laughed as Jin-kyu stepped into her office looking like a drowned rat, his dark hair plastered against his forehead.
"If I start throwing around the phrase 'being personally victimised by the heavens' are you going to start prescribing me more pills?" he asked gruffly, wringing out his sodden sweatshirt onto her Persian rug and hoping it was expensive.
"Oh yeah," she laughed, "you might even get the pink ones this time."
The session continued in its normal fashion of Jin-kyu trying not to brutally murder his therapist and then call Camille for help on making something look like an accident.
"And what percentage of your time would you say you've spent daydreaming this week?"
Jin-kyu shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I don't know...maybe twenty percent?"
Helena stared hard at him.
"Okay - perhaps sixty to seventyy percent, but I'm an artist - we're meant to daydream."
"Oh so you're dreaming about art then?" Helena asked with a knowing smirk.
Jin-kyu huffed, she just didn't understand his process. As an artist he needed to daydream about anything and everything in order to source his inspiration.
He never knew where it was going to come from. Like that time he had daydreamed about his family holidays in New Hampshire for two hours straight, then came back to reality and immediately sculpted a mermaid with the horns of minotaur.
It had been one of Jin-kyu's most impressive pieces to date and had kept him in rent checks and hot pockets for several months.
"What are you dreaming about?" Helena edged closer towards him on her seat. On anyone else it might have appeared predatory, but Helena had made it very clear from day one that everything about their relationship was to be utterly professional no matter how 'rugged or handsome' the patient was.
She had said the last part with a wink and a smile, and instead of putting Jin-kyu's hackles up like so many of his other encounters, it had actually made him feel at ease - safe in her company.
Sun-hee had just thanked every deity in existence that they had finally found a therapist her brother was willing to talk to for longer than ten minutes.
Jin-kyu closed his eyes and pictured the face he ha been daydreaming about for weeks. floppy, ruffled hair, high cheekbones, and delicately parted lips.
"Jin-kyu, your hands?"
Jin-kyu jolted back to the present and opened his eyes. His hands were outstretched in front of him as if moulding clay.
"Are you thinking about something you would like to sculpt?"
Jin-kyu blinked and looked down again at his poised fingers.
"Yeah," he murmured, "perhaps."
Jin-kyu arrived back at his apartment an hour or so later and went straight to his sketch book. Flicking through, he noticed the array of similar drawings. All of them attempting to depict the face he kept seeing in his daydreams. He didn't, however, seem to be having much luck trying to recreate it in charcoal on paper. This was definitely something that was going to have to be created in 3D to do it justice.
*** *** ***
December 1st
Jin-kyu stepped back from the finished sculpture, each individual part fired, reassembled and glazed a beautiful porcelain white. The ceramic curves and planes embodying the figure from his dreams.
Being actually life-sized it had been far more ambitious than any of his pieces to date. The figure also bore no strange mythological appendages, he was just...human. Elegant in his simplicity and rendered raw in his nude state.
Jin-kyu shared his studio space with another artist - a painter named Lebedev. As much as Jin-kyu barely tolerated Lebedev himself, the man in question's daughter was pretty adorable. Her name was Suzy and she had come by that day with her father in order to see Jin-kyu's completed piece.
"What's he made from?" she had asked as she clutched her purple teddy bear closer to her chest and stared up in awe at the sculpture of the young man.
"Ceramic," Jin-kyu had replied with an indulgent smile.
"What's that?" Suzy had enquired, wide-eyed. "He's all white, not painted like Daddy's work."
Jin-kyu chuckled, "Yeah, I chose not to paint him - couldn't decide on the colours." He winked, "He’s ceramic, like a vase."
"Samic?" Suzy had giggled gleefully, pointing up at the ceramic boy, although with her other thumb still in her mouth it came out more like, "Sammy!"
A few minutes later Lebedev rushed back into the studio, clutching at his cell phone with a wild look, "Suzy! We have to go now, say goodbye to Uncle Jin-kyu!"
"Everything okay?" Jin-kyu asked, raising his eyebrows as all the colour seemed to drain from Lebedev's face.
"I forgot my wife's birthday!" Lebedev stammered with the look of a man condemned, "Suzy please hurry - if we go quickly we might be able to make it to Macy's so Daddy can spend this month's pay check."
Jin-kyu laughed and shook his head, helping Suzy to put her winter coat back on with her knitted bunny-mittens.
"It's cold out there," he explained as he pulled them over her small fingers and shooed her off in the direction of her anxious father.
"Jin-kyu can you lock up and maybe put away my paints?" Lebedev called back, before Jin-kyu heard the door slam, a gust of freezing winter air blowing through the studio.
"Sure, sure," Jin-kyu muttered, rolling his eyes and turning to go store all of Lebedev's paint cans back in the cupboards.
Unfortunately, the other artist had a habit of leaving everything scattered haphazardly about... and this was how Jin-kyu ended up managing to knock his elbow into a precarious pile of still wet brushes. One of the brushes flicked across the room, clattering dramatically to the floor and leaving a trail of sticky blue paint across the bare concrete.
"Shit," Jin-kyu murmured, stooping to retrieve the brush. Standing up again he came face to face with his sculpture.
"Fuck!" he exclaimed loudly as he noticed a large splash of blue colour had landed on the piece’s face, dripping down across the right-hand cheek.
"Fucking Lebedev..." Jin-kyu growled as he moved to go wet a rag in the sink. Upon returning, he lifted it up to the boy's right eye where most of the paint had hit.
It should have come off easily enough as it was just sat atop of the glaze, but something made Jin-kyu pause. The way the paint had landed, the single eye standing out in bright azure sent a strange tingle down Jin-kyu’s spine.
Jin-kyu swallowed hard as he drew back slightly so he was eye to eye with the figure. "Well," he breathed, "I guess your name is Sammy."
Jin-kyu sighed as he let the hand with the rag in fall unused to his side. He took a further step back and slumped into the creaking wooden chair that was adorned with a cat-cushion Sun-hee had made during her 'cross-stitching' phase.
"Shut up bro - I could have done drugs instead," she had snapped as her brother had struggled to contain his laughter.
"But Sun-hee..." he had whispered, "this cat has six legs."
"Well the pattern was clearly wrong," she had grouched, shoving it into his hands, "put it in your studio or something - that place is so freaking dreary, no wonder you have depression!"
Jin-kyu smiled softly at the memory.
"Sometimes I think my sister wishes she could swap me for someone else in our family. Someone who died," Jin-kyu said suddenly, as quietly as he could, not taking his eyes off the now paint-splashed sculpture.
The boy stood there silently, his different coloured glazed eyes un-judging, unmoving. His lips parted thoughtfully and yet, no sound escaped them. No pity, no awkwardness, no contempt.
Jin-kyu took a deep breath, "Someone who wouldn't be so much of a burden...a disappointment."
He picked up a non paint-caked brush and rolled it absently between his fingers, still calloused from all the sculpting work he had been doing that month.
"You know, apart from Sun-hee, the person I speak to the most is probably Lebedev." He shook his head, "Fucking Lebedev. Or perhaps even Camille. She's my agent...I don't think I could even really call her a friend. She's been to my apartment but it was really just to yell at me about deadlines for pieces and to tell me I needed a shower."
Jin-kyu sighed and stretched out further in the chair so his boot was nudging the bottom of Sammy’s podium.
"I take the pills," he murmured, "I know some people say they mess with your head and make you 'not yourself' but I don't mind that...I wouldn't mind being someone else for a while."
Jin-kyu squeezed his eyes shut, "It's probably just all a big deal out of nothing huh? I mean it's not like I'm suicidal, I just get a bit down. I was always surrounded by friends at school and at college...just afterwards...guess I got a bit lost. I figured I'd have it all sorted out by now and when I realised I didn't...I suppose I stalled. That's what Sun-hee reckons...makes me sound like a car that's broken down doesn't it?"
Jin-kyu swallowed and looked back up at the sculpture. With a grim chuckle he realised he had probably just said more about his feelings in the last five minutes than in all his sessions with Helena put together.
He breathed out a gust of steamy air in the cold room. The radiators were broken again. Lebedev had tried to 'bleed' them or something and ended up getting black gunk everywhere. The other man had subsequently incorporated it into a painting so it wasn't a total loss but the studio was still fucking freezing.
"I guess I should get going..." Jin-kyu murmured, glancing up at the windows and noticing that it was getting dark outside already. In a fit of ridiculousness he felt a slight pang of sadness at having to leave his sculpture behind in the studio.
God I'm lonely
Jin-kyu sighed grimly to himself. High-school him would so rail on present-day him.
Jin-kyu flicked out the lights of the studio with a heavy heart, making his way out into the cold evening air. He pulled his jacket up to his stubbled chin, the metal of the zip biting the skin there.
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