My Hybrid's Duality [ KTH ]

Chapter I. Layover

RRRRIIIIINNNGGGG!!!
RRRRIIIIINNNGGGG!!!
RRRRIIIIINNNGGGG!!!

Without opening your eyes, you reach an arm out to press the snooze button on your alarm clock. It's muscle memory at this point.

You burrow your face into the warm softness of your pillow, looking forward to another 5 minutes of shuteye, when a thought breaks through the cloud of sleep fogging up your brain.

'It's Saturday.'

And not just any Saturday. It happens to be an end of the month Saturday.

Which means...

'Payday!'

Your eyes fly open and find the digital display on your clock: [07:01]

While most people these days use the alarm clock in their mobile phones, you prefer using the actual, physical version. Yes, it's old school, but you're a very tactile person. You relish in the feeling of depressing a button to snooze or turn your alarm off.

You push yourself up to a sitting position, fishing your phone out from your bedside drawer. You've been stowing it away an hour before bedtime, in a bid to regularize your sleeping pattern. So far it's been working.

You pull up the mobile banking app to check that your pay has indeed reflected in your bank account, and your eyes nearly pop out when you see the amount that came in.

The number really shouldn't have come as a surprise. You've been working your ass off in the past few months, and it paid off. Despite being a new hire, you were the top performer of the quarter, which earned you dirty looks from the office's more seasoned employees. But you didn't care, because being Employee of the Quarter also came with a Big. Fat. Performance. Bonus.

'I've never had this much money in my bank account before. Should I get myself a treat today?'

The thought is a novel one. Having grown up poor, you were raised believing that frugality, not cleanliness, is the virtue closest to godliness.

You chew on your lip, wondering if you should just save the entire amount for a rainy day. That's what your halmeoni would tell you to do, for sure.

But then you think back on these last three months, all the long, grueling hours, all the lunch breaks you worked through instead of joining your colleagues to eat and socialize, the extra work load you kept taking on...

Nope, no way you're delaying gratification this time. You deserve to treat yourself for sure.

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It's a glaringly bright day outside, and it's been so long since you've enjoyed a day out that you almost hiss at the first touch of unfiltered sunlight on your skin.

You take in a lungful of clean, crisp air that's not blown out of an air-conditioning unit and immediately feel... lighter.

'I really should go out more often... Why don't I go out more often???'

You stand there for a long while, simply basking in the sun, absorbing some much-needed Vitamin D, when you realize that you haven't even decided on what you want to do for the day.

When you first arrived in Neo-Seoul, you had a long list of things you wanted to do, food you wanted to try, sights you wanted to see... a list that quickly dwindled to nothing as work ate up more and more of your time.

You try to remember things from that list now, but it seems like a memory too far gone; so instead, you reach for a more recent one.

A few of your coworkers had been chatting about the latest, coolest "place to be": a strip of boutiques and cafés in the neighboring town of Old-Seoul. It seems worth checking out, despite being a ways away.