Midnights In Paris | Jenlisa

Énouement

Énouement:
The bitterness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out
and not being able to tell your past self

The first rays of light hit her eyes, making Lisa's face scrunch up in a sneer. She had forgotten to close the curtains when she had made it back to her hotel room the night before. Grunting, she pushed the bed sheets aside and unsteadily made her way out of the bed.

The electronic alarm on her bedside signaled that it was a quarter past five in the morning. Or twelve fifteen in Seoul, which would explain the growling of her stomach. It would have to wait, Lisa though, since she was pretty sure breakfast had yet to open. In the meantime, she decided to make herself a cup of coffee from the machine in her room. Granted that she understood how to make it work, obviously.

The coffe tasted watery and not nearly as strong as she needed it to be. Still, she drank it to the last sip while she watched the panorama from her room. The french news played on the tv in the background, its melodic gibberish lulling her to an inevitable dissociation.

With her eyes fixed into blankness, her mind went back to yesterday's events and Jennie. Jennie, who had kept her composure annoyingly professional through out the whole session of her shoot. Who had bolted out of the room as soon as they were finished. Not that she had expected her to act any different. After all, running away was what she knew best.

Still, she couldn't restrain herself from doing a mind map of all the things she had found different in her even if, at the end, she had been sadly rewarded with a list of those who hadn't changed. Those were the ones who hurt her more. Because she could deal with a new haircut and new clothes. What she could not deal with, however, was how her right eye still squinted more than her left when she smiled, how she habitually rolled her eyes when she disagreed and how she still tried to hide the mole under her right brow with make up.

Neither her character had changed that much. If anything, from the brief moment they had spent in the same room, Lisa felt confident enough to say that it had gotten worse. Jennie had always been somewhat cold and detached when it came to human relationships, yet her true self always shined through her hard demeanor as soon as she got comfortable with people. From yesterday's act, Lisa was safe to assume that she hadn't gotten that close to anyone in her work space.

Her phone rang, obligating her to step away from the window and go look around her unmade bed for the source of the noise.
She let it ring more than necessarily before picking up.

"I didn't think you'd be awake" her manager said. He was ten years older than Lisa, almost near to fourty. Still, Lisa saw him as someone a lot older than that. Maybe because he took care of her in a way that resembled a dad with his daughter rather than an older brother. Or maybe it was the fact that he was married and his wife was waiting for a child. But Lisa confided in him like a friend.

"Consider it your lucky day, then. I woke up twenty minutes ago" her voice was still hoarse since those were the first words she had spoken that day.

"Jet-lag?"

"Starving" she simply answered.

"I'm in room 202. I'll come fetch you up in fifteen and then we can go have breakfast. We have a lot to discuss."

She agreed to the plan and then proceeded to hang up the phone. She laid back on the bed, spending the next twenty minutes staring at the freshly painted ceiling of her room. It wasn't covered in fresco, nor were there any creepy Renaissance figures staring at her while she slept. It was plain white. Just how she liked it.

In the remaining hour that Lisa and her manager had to spend waiting for the cafés to open, she took the occasion to observe just how much stereotypically french everything around her was. From the small tables messily yet elegantly arranged down the pavement, to the lampposts and the Haussmann style buildings. It wasn't like Lisa knew what a Haussmann style actually meant. In all honesty, she didn't even know who Haussmann was. She had read it in the preface of her infamous "learn french in thirty days" book. Now that she thought about it, it was a shame she did not bring it with her.