Chapter 6:
Episode 6: Mixtapes & Memories
Pre-Canonization: A Kim Ji-yoo Story
The shop was unusually still that day.
No students laughing in the back corner.No local rappers testing out loops.Just the faint hum of an old fan turning like a heartbeat, and the slow, rhythmic creak of Marco’s chair behind the counter.
The air smelled of rain-soaked dust and burnt coffee. The kind of scent that lingers long after the storm has moved on.
Ji-yoo sat by the register, a half-empty mug cooling beside her notebook. The pen trembled slightly in her fingers, its tip pressing against the paper like it was afraid to begin.Then, slowly, the ink bled into words — uneven, jagged, imperfect.
"Rain in Manila," she murmured."Always raining, even when it’s not."
The phrase sat there like a wound reopened.She frowned, crossed it out, rewrote it. Then again.
“Too soft,” she whispered under her breath. “Needs to bleed more.”
Across the room, Marco hadn’t moved in what felt like forever.His laptop was closed — a rare sight. He sat slouched in the old office chair, head tilted slightly forward, hands turning a scratched CD case over and over like he was afraid to let it go.
The silence stretched.
“You okay?” Ji-yoo asked, her voice quiet, almost swallowed by the hum of the fan.
Marco blinked, as if pulled from a dream. “Yeah. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He hesitated, then held up the CD. The label faded, the writing almost gone — only a ghost of black ink remained.
MARCO – DRAFTSDate: smudged and unreadable.
“Stuff I made before I got sick,” he said finally. His tone was soft, detached — the way someone talks about a stranger’s story.
Ji-yoo tilted her head. “You made a mixtape?”
He gave a low chuckle. “Mixtape’s a generous word. It’s more like... a collection of half-finished ghost projects. I used to think one of these would change my life.”
She leaned forward, curiosity replacing hesitation. “Play it.”
Marco looked up, uncertain. “It’s rough. From years ago. You won’t like it.”
She smirked. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”
For a moment, he said nothing. Then he sighed — that long, tired kind of sigh that sounds older than it should — and slipped the CD into the old stereo.Static cracked through the speakers like distant thunder.
Then came the beat.Uneven. Raw. Pulsing with something heavy and broken.
It wasn’t like his usual sound.It was darker — sharp metallic tones cut through fractured rhythms, the kind of music made by someone running out of time and still trying to outrun it.
Ji-yoo closed her eyes.The bass was cracked, the melody wounded — but alive. Beneath the distortion, she could almost hear him. Younger. Desperate. Fighting against something invisible.
When it ended, neither of them spoke.Only the sound of the fan, creaking like an old memory refusing to stop.
Ji-yoo opened her eyes first. “These were your dreams,” she said softly.
Marco nodded, gaze fixed on the stereo. “Some of them.”
“What happened to the rest?”
He was quiet for a long time — long enough that the silence began to ache.Then, finally, he said it.
“Lupus happened.”
The word hung in the air like smoke.
“Started small,” he continued, voice calm but thin. “Fatigue, joint pain. I thought it was burnout. Then came the brain fog. Days when I couldn’t stand up straight. Days I forgot what chords I’d played. And suddenly—”He gave a hollow laugh. “Dreams start to feel like luxury items.”
Ji-yoo’s throat tightened. She’d seen the signs — the way he sometimes winced mid-sentence, how he’d lose his train of thought mid-song. She’d wondered. But hearing it out loud was different. Real.
“Marco…” she began.
He raised a hand gently. “Don’t. It’s okay.”He stared down at his hands — the faint tremor in them more noticeable now. “I’m not saying it to make you feel bad. I just—”He exhaled slowly, steadying himself.“I want to finish something real before my body quits on me.”
The words landed like a quiet explosion — no dramatics, no pity, just truth.The kind of truth that doesn’t beg for sympathy, only understanding.
For a moment, neither of them moved.The rain outside began again, soft against the windowpane, syncing with the fan’s slow rhythm.
Ji-yoo reached over and closed her notebook.
“Then let’s make something they can’t ignore.”
He looked at her — searching, cautious — like he wasn’t sure if she meant it.
But she did. Every word.
For the first time in a long while, there was a spark in his eyes.Maybe hope. Maybe fear of it.Both were enough.
The stereo clicked softly as the disc stopped spinning.The fan groaned.And somewhere between those small sounds, something shifted — not loud, not visible, but real.
A promise had been made..
They worked deep into the night.
Outside, the rain whispered against the windows like a metronome for ghosts.Inside, the shop was a cocoon of light and hum — wires coiled on the floor, empty mugs by the monitors, air thick with static and caffeine.
Marco sat hunched by his desk, a heating pad tucked against his lower back, eyes half-glazed with exhaustion. The glow of the laptop painted his face in fading blue.Ji-yoo leaned beside him, one knee drawn up on the stool, tapping out lines in her notebook while her other hand flipped through old folders on the screen.
“Here,” she said suddenly, dragging a dusty file into the project window. “This one has teeth.”
A clipped beat crackled to life — uneven, gritty, impatient. Like it was trying to claw its way out of the speakers.
Marco frowned. “That’s from a long time ago. I never finished it.”
“Then we finish it tonight.”
He raised an eyebrow, lips quirking. “Bossy.”
“Efficient,” she shot back, grinning just enough to make him laugh.
For the first time that night, the heaviness lifted.
They fell into rhythm.Loop by loop, they began stitching together fragments — beats from old projects, lines scribbled on napkins, melodies she hummed between sighs.The shop became a living thing: cables breathing, speakers thumping, the fan’s hum keeping time like an old heartbeat refusing to stop.
At one point, Marco leaned back, rubbing his temples. “You ever think about how songs are just… memories pretending to be immortal?”
Ji-yoo looked up from her notebook. “That’s depressing.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s true. You write something to remember a feeling — and the moment you finish, it’s already gone.”
She smiled faintly. “Then maybe we write to make it hurt less.”
He met her eyes — tired, but still burning — and nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
They kept going.
At 10:43 p.m., she found her line.A verse that didn’t sound like her old self, or the idol she’d been — just her, now. Bruised, but breathing.
She spoke it softly, like testing its weight.
“I lived in lights that burned me out—now I glow in shadow.”
Marco froze mid-click. “Say that again.”
She did — slower this time, each syllable deliberate, shaped by the kind of ache that doesn’t fade.
When she finished, silence filled the room, heavy but not empty.
He chuckled softly. “That’s probably your best line yet.”
Ji-yoo blinked. “You think so?”
He nodded. “It’s honest. Painfully so. You sound like someone who stopped asking for permission to be real.”
She looked at him — really looked — and smiled.“No,” she said quietly. “We wrote that.”
He hesitated, then exhaled, a slow, shaky laugh slipping out.“Yeah,” he admitted. “We did.”
The night stretched on.They layered sounds, polished rough edges, chased ghosts through the mix. Her voice cracked once — twice — and she cursed under her breath.
Marco just smiled. “Don’t fix it,” he said. “That’s the point.”
“What point?”
“That it’s you. Not the perfect version — just the true one.”
Her hand froze over the mouse. She didn’t reply. But the corner of her lip twitched upward.
By midnight, they had something real.Not clean. Not flawless. But alive.
A fusion of past and present — his broken loops, her fragmented verses — stitched together with everything they’d lost and everything they refused to let go of.
Marco hit play.The beat rose like distant thunder. Her voice followed — raw, imperfect, human.They listened in silence.
When the last note faded, Ji-yoo turned to him. “What do we call it?”
He thought for a long moment, eyes flicking toward the spinning CD beside the laptop. The one labeled Drafts.
“Memory Tape,” he said finally. “It feels right.”
She nodded, typed it in, and beneath the title, added in small, trembling letters:
“For when we forget who we were.”
Marco read it once, twice. Then smiled faintly.“Poetic,” he said. “You’re getting good at this.”
Ji-yoo closed her notebook, leaning back in the chair beside him.“I had a good teacher.”
Outside, the rain eased into a soft drizzle. The fan hummed on, the last sound in the quiet shop.Neither of them said it, but both felt it — something had changed tonight.Not fixed, not healed.Just moving forward.
The clock read 12:47 a.m. when they finally shut everything down.
The laptop’s glow faded to black. The last loop of Memory Tape whispered into silence, replaced by the soft hum of the fan and the faint patter of rain outside.
The shop looked half-dream, half-aftermath —the floor littered with crumpled notes, empty cans of coffee, and the ghosts of ideas that hadn’t made it into the mix. The smell of static and rain hung in the air, heavy but clean, like the end of something that mattered.
Ji-yoo stood, stretching the stiffness from her shoulders. Her notebook was thick with fresh pages — words that finally meant something again.Marco, slower, pushed back from the desk and winced, a hand instinctively pressing to his lower back.
“Careful,” she said softly.
He managed a crooked smile. “It’s fine. My body just likes to file complaints after midnight.”
She rolled her eyes. “You say that like it’s funny.”
“It’s either laugh or fall apart,” he said. “Laughter’s cheaper.”
Ji-yoo gathered her bag, tucking the notebook inside like it was something fragile. She turned toward him, holding out his old gray hoodie — the one that had spent more time draped over his chair than on his shoulders.
“Here,” she said. “It’s cold.”
He took it with a nod, eyes lingering on her hand a little too long.“Get some rest, Ji,” he murmured. “You’ve been running on caffeine and ghosts for two days straight.”
She smiled faintly. “That’s my diet. Keeps me haunting the living.”
He chuckled, low and tired. “Then you’re doing great at it.”
They stepped outside, into the halo of the flickering light above the doorway. The air was thick with drizzle, the kind of rain that never truly stops — just changes rhythm.The street beyond was empty, save for the glow of distant headlights reflecting off puddles.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t awkward — it was full. Like the space between verses.
Ji-yoo shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, eyes on the wet pavement.“You ever think,” she said quietly, “that maybe the rain just keeps coming back because it’s afraid to leave?”
He tilted his head, curious. “Afraid?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Like it knows it’ll dry up eventually, so it keeps falling… just to remind the world it existed.”
Marco smiled — small, tired, but real. “You should write that down.”
“I already did,” she said, and for a second, he didn’t know if she was joking.
Then, before he could respond, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.A small, hesitant hug — awkward only because it mattered.
Marco froze, startled. Her touch was warm, grounding. He hesitated before returning it, his hands resting carefully on her back, like she was something he wasn’t sure he deserved to hold.
Her voice was soft against his shoulder. “You’re not running out of time, Marco. You’re just… learning how to use it.”
He swallowed hard. “You talk like a lyric.”
“Maybe I am one,” she whispered. “Maybe we both are.”
A beat passed. Then another. The rain thickened around them, painting the world in silver noise.
She pulled away first — smiling that half-smile of hers, the one that hid more than it showed.“Don’t stay up too long,” she said.
“Impossible,” he replied. “The song’s still playing in my head.”
“Good,” she said, stepping backward into the mist. “Then you’ll remember it.”
“I will.”
She paused at the edge of the light, her silhouette framed by the rain. “You better.”
Then she turned, hood up, vanishing slowly into the wet quiet of the street — her footsteps fading until even the sound was gone.
Marco stood there long after she disappeared, the shop door open behind him, the smell of rain and vinyl wrapping around him like a memory. His reflection shimmered faintly in the puddle by the door — blurred, unfinished.
“Goodnight, Ji-yoo,” he whispered.
Then, quieter — almost too soft for himself to hear:
“Don’t forget this song…even if you forget me.”
He stepped back inside, letting the door close with a muted chime.The shop was dim again, the track still looping faintly through the speakers — their song, raw and alive.It bled softly into the night, echoing against the rain —a heartbeat refusing to fade.
End of Episode 6 – “Mixtapes & Memories”
No students laughing in the back corner.No local rappers testing out loops.Just the faint hum of an old fan turning like a heartbeat, and the slow, rhythmic creak of Marco’s chair behind the counter.
The air smelled of rain-soaked dust and burnt coffee. The kind of scent that lingers long after the storm has moved on.
Ji-yoo sat by the register, a half-empty mug cooling beside her notebook. The pen trembled slightly in her fingers, its tip pressing against the paper like it was afraid to begin.Then, slowly, the ink bled into words — uneven, jagged, imperfect.
"Rain in Manila," she murmured."Always raining, even when it’s not."
The phrase sat there like a wound reopened.She frowned, crossed it out, rewrote it. Then again.
“Too soft,” she whispered under her breath. “Needs to bleed more.”
Across the room, Marco hadn’t moved in what felt like forever.His laptop was closed — a rare sight. He sat slouched in the old office chair, head tilted slightly forward, hands turning a scratched CD case over and over like he was afraid to let it go.
The silence stretched.
“You okay?” Ji-yoo asked, her voice quiet, almost swallowed by the hum of the fan.
Marco blinked, as if pulled from a dream. “Yeah. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He hesitated, then held up the CD. The label faded, the writing almost gone — only a ghost of black ink remained.
MARCO – DRAFTSDate: smudged and unreadable.
“Stuff I made before I got sick,” he said finally. His tone was soft, detached — the way someone talks about a stranger’s story.
Ji-yoo tilted her head. “You made a mixtape?”
He gave a low chuckle. “Mixtape’s a generous word. It’s more like... a collection of half-finished ghost projects. I used to think one of these would change my life.”
She leaned forward, curiosity replacing hesitation. “Play it.”
Marco looked up, uncertain. “It’s rough. From years ago. You won’t like it.”
She smirked. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”
For a moment, he said nothing. Then he sighed — that long, tired kind of sigh that sounds older than it should — and slipped the CD into the old stereo.Static cracked through the speakers like distant thunder.
Then came the beat.Uneven. Raw. Pulsing with something heavy and broken.
It wasn’t like his usual sound.It was darker — sharp metallic tones cut through fractured rhythms, the kind of music made by someone running out of time and still trying to outrun it.
Ji-yoo closed her eyes.The bass was cracked, the melody wounded — but alive. Beneath the distortion, she could almost hear him. Younger. Desperate. Fighting against something invisible.
When it ended, neither of them spoke.Only the sound of the fan, creaking like an old memory refusing to stop.
Ji-yoo opened her eyes first. “These were your dreams,” she said softly.
Marco nodded, gaze fixed on the stereo. “Some of them.”
“What happened to the rest?”
He was quiet for a long time — long enough that the silence began to ache.Then, finally, he said it.
“Lupus happened.”
The word hung in the air like smoke.
“Started small,” he continued, voice calm but thin. “Fatigue, joint pain. I thought it was burnout. Then came the brain fog. Days when I couldn’t stand up straight. Days I forgot what chords I’d played. And suddenly—”He gave a hollow laugh. “Dreams start to feel like luxury items.”
Ji-yoo’s throat tightened. She’d seen the signs — the way he sometimes winced mid-sentence, how he’d lose his train of thought mid-song. She’d wondered. But hearing it out loud was different. Real.
“Marco…” she began.
He raised a hand gently. “Don’t. It’s okay.”He stared down at his hands — the faint tremor in them more noticeable now. “I’m not saying it to make you feel bad. I just—”He exhaled slowly, steadying himself.“I want to finish something real before my body quits on me.”
The words landed like a quiet explosion — no dramatics, no pity, just truth.The kind of truth that doesn’t beg for sympathy, only understanding.
For a moment, neither of them moved.The rain outside began again, soft against the windowpane, syncing with the fan’s slow rhythm.
Ji-yoo reached over and closed her notebook.
“Then let’s make something they can’t ignore.”
He looked at her — searching, cautious — like he wasn’t sure if she meant it.
But she did. Every word.
For the first time in a long while, there was a spark in his eyes.Maybe hope. Maybe fear of it.Both were enough.
The stereo clicked softly as the disc stopped spinning.The fan groaned.And somewhere between those small sounds, something shifted — not loud, not visible, but real.
A promise had been made..
They worked deep into the night.
Outside, the rain whispered against the windows like a metronome for ghosts.Inside, the shop was a cocoon of light and hum — wires coiled on the floor, empty mugs by the monitors, air thick with static and caffeine.
Marco sat hunched by his desk, a heating pad tucked against his lower back, eyes half-glazed with exhaustion. The glow of the laptop painted his face in fading blue.Ji-yoo leaned beside him, one knee drawn up on the stool, tapping out lines in her notebook while her other hand flipped through old folders on the screen.
“Here,” she said suddenly, dragging a dusty file into the project window. “This one has teeth.”
A clipped beat crackled to life — uneven, gritty, impatient. Like it was trying to claw its way out of the speakers.
Marco frowned. “That’s from a long time ago. I never finished it.”
“Then we finish it tonight.”
He raised an eyebrow, lips quirking. “Bossy.”
“Efficient,” she shot back, grinning just enough to make him laugh.
For the first time that night, the heaviness lifted.
They fell into rhythm.Loop by loop, they began stitching together fragments — beats from old projects, lines scribbled on napkins, melodies she hummed between sighs.The shop became a living thing: cables breathing, speakers thumping, the fan’s hum keeping time like an old heartbeat refusing to stop.
At one point, Marco leaned back, rubbing his temples. “You ever think about how songs are just… memories pretending to be immortal?”
Ji-yoo looked up from her notebook. “That’s depressing.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s true. You write something to remember a feeling — and the moment you finish, it’s already gone.”
She smiled faintly. “Then maybe we write to make it hurt less.”
He met her eyes — tired, but still burning — and nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
They kept going.
At 10:43 p.m., she found her line.A verse that didn’t sound like her old self, or the idol she’d been — just her, now. Bruised, but breathing.
She spoke it softly, like testing its weight.
“I lived in lights that burned me out—now I glow in shadow.”
Marco froze mid-click. “Say that again.”
She did — slower this time, each syllable deliberate, shaped by the kind of ache that doesn’t fade.
When she finished, silence filled the room, heavy but not empty.
He chuckled softly. “That’s probably your best line yet.”
Ji-yoo blinked. “You think so?”
He nodded. “It’s honest. Painfully so. You sound like someone who stopped asking for permission to be real.”
She looked at him — really looked — and smiled.“No,” she said quietly. “We wrote that.”
He hesitated, then exhaled, a slow, shaky laugh slipping out.“Yeah,” he admitted. “We did.”
The night stretched on.They layered sounds, polished rough edges, chased ghosts through the mix. Her voice cracked once — twice — and she cursed under her breath.
Marco just smiled. “Don’t fix it,” he said. “That’s the point.”
“What point?”
“That it’s you. Not the perfect version — just the true one.”
Her hand froze over the mouse. She didn’t reply. But the corner of her lip twitched upward.
By midnight, they had something real.Not clean. Not flawless. But alive.
A fusion of past and present — his broken loops, her fragmented verses — stitched together with everything they’d lost and everything they refused to let go of.
Marco hit play.The beat rose like distant thunder. Her voice followed — raw, imperfect, human.They listened in silence.
When the last note faded, Ji-yoo turned to him. “What do we call it?”
He thought for a long moment, eyes flicking toward the spinning CD beside the laptop. The one labeled Drafts.
“Memory Tape,” he said finally. “It feels right.”
She nodded, typed it in, and beneath the title, added in small, trembling letters:
“For when we forget who we were.”
Marco read it once, twice. Then smiled faintly.“Poetic,” he said. “You’re getting good at this.”
Ji-yoo closed her notebook, leaning back in the chair beside him.“I had a good teacher.”
Outside, the rain eased into a soft drizzle. The fan hummed on, the last sound in the quiet shop.Neither of them said it, but both felt it — something had changed tonight.Not fixed, not healed.Just moving forward.
The clock read 12:47 a.m. when they finally shut everything down.
The laptop’s glow faded to black. The last loop of Memory Tape whispered into silence, replaced by the soft hum of the fan and the faint patter of rain outside.
The shop looked half-dream, half-aftermath —the floor littered with crumpled notes, empty cans of coffee, and the ghosts of ideas that hadn’t made it into the mix. The smell of static and rain hung in the air, heavy but clean, like the end of something that mattered.
Ji-yoo stood, stretching the stiffness from her shoulders. Her notebook was thick with fresh pages — words that finally meant something again.Marco, slower, pushed back from the desk and winced, a hand instinctively pressing to his lower back.
“Careful,” she said softly.
He managed a crooked smile. “It’s fine. My body just likes to file complaints after midnight.”
She rolled her eyes. “You say that like it’s funny.”
“It’s either laugh or fall apart,” he said. “Laughter’s cheaper.”
Ji-yoo gathered her bag, tucking the notebook inside like it was something fragile. She turned toward him, holding out his old gray hoodie — the one that had spent more time draped over his chair than on his shoulders.
“Here,” she said. “It’s cold.”
He took it with a nod, eyes lingering on her hand a little too long.“Get some rest, Ji,” he murmured. “You’ve been running on caffeine and ghosts for two days straight.”
She smiled faintly. “That’s my diet. Keeps me haunting the living.”
He chuckled, low and tired. “Then you’re doing great at it.”
They stepped outside, into the halo of the flickering light above the doorway. The air was thick with drizzle, the kind of rain that never truly stops — just changes rhythm.The street beyond was empty, save for the glow of distant headlights reflecting off puddles.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t awkward — it was full. Like the space between verses.
Ji-yoo shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, eyes on the wet pavement.“You ever think,” she said quietly, “that maybe the rain just keeps coming back because it’s afraid to leave?”
He tilted his head, curious. “Afraid?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Like it knows it’ll dry up eventually, so it keeps falling… just to remind the world it existed.”
Marco smiled — small, tired, but real. “You should write that down.”
“I already did,” she said, and for a second, he didn’t know if she was joking.
Then, before he could respond, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.A small, hesitant hug — awkward only because it mattered.
Marco froze, startled. Her touch was warm, grounding. He hesitated before returning it, his hands resting carefully on her back, like she was something he wasn’t sure he deserved to hold.
Her voice was soft against his shoulder. “You’re not running out of time, Marco. You’re just… learning how to use it.”
He swallowed hard. “You talk like a lyric.”
“Maybe I am one,” she whispered. “Maybe we both are.”
A beat passed. Then another. The rain thickened around them, painting the world in silver noise.
She pulled away first — smiling that half-smile of hers, the one that hid more than it showed.“Don’t stay up too long,” she said.
“Impossible,” he replied. “The song’s still playing in my head.”
“Good,” she said, stepping backward into the mist. “Then you’ll remember it.”
“I will.”
She paused at the edge of the light, her silhouette framed by the rain. “You better.”
Then she turned, hood up, vanishing slowly into the wet quiet of the street — her footsteps fading until even the sound was gone.
Marco stood there long after she disappeared, the shop door open behind him, the smell of rain and vinyl wrapping around him like a memory. His reflection shimmered faintly in the puddle by the door — blurred, unfinished.
“Goodnight, Ji-yoo,” he whispered.
Then, quieter — almost too soft for himself to hear:
“Don’t forget this song…even if you forget me.”
He stepped back inside, letting the door close with a muted chime.The shop was dim again, the track still looping faintly through the speakers — their song, raw and alive.It bled softly into the night, echoing against the rain —a heartbeat refusing to fade.
End of Episode 6 – “Mixtapes & Memories”
Please sign in to leave a comment.