They moved in on a Saturday in August, with their boxes and their bookshelves and their coffee table made of glass. It was hot, the special kind of Hongdae heat that found all your creases and lingered, under your knees and behind your elbows and in the folds of your neck. The kind of heat that made my fingers swell like grapes, round and thick and purple. I couldn’t hold anything without it slipping through my heat-numbed hands, much less wield a pair of scissors or shampoo a head of hair. They told me not to come into the salon until I was back to normal.
Over that first week, I watched them paper their walls with posters featuring nudes elongated and abstracted until they no longer resembled people. Jjajangmyeon takeout bowls and empty wine bottles lined the windows. They moved in and out of view throughout the day like actors in a frame. There were four of them.
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