Through Her Eyes (2Yeon)

xxviii. Voicemail

Nayeon didn't actually realize what a momentous day it was. It was a dreary Friday, there was rain on the way, and she'd gotten up at six am to do a few hours of reading for those increasingly worrying essays whose deadlines had begun to loom with disturbing menace. Friday's also meant that she got to spend more time with Jeongyeon once her final class over for the day. They got to do the usual which was eat while watching a movie together. Jeongyeon's face was always displayed on the television whenever Nayeon found the time to set it all up. They got to spend the rest of the evening together and with longer hours.

Neither of them wanted to go out on Fridays, having set that date for this occasion. Their newfound college friends were disappointed in them for always declining their offers but they never got tired of bringing it up.

Red-eyed, yawning, and shivering from the cold, Nayeon made her way and dragged her sleep-deprived body up countless flights of stairs to reach a small, stuffy little classroom in a back building. She pulled out pen and notepad, as she always did. She was endearingly old-fashioned in this respect, until essay-writing season comes round, and then she began spewing out incredibly unladylike volleys of swear words as she searched desperately for a three-word summary of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories that she scribbled in an almost-illegible hand ten weeks before.

Then, scrunching up her sleep-deprived eyes, she tried to switch her brain into 'concentrate' mode so that her professor's outline didn't blur alarmingly every time she glanced at them. That Nayeon failed totally in this attempt is evidenced by the fact that the first two questions she answered in-class were directed at three identical, fuzzy figures. She could only hope her professor wasn't alarmed by the fact that she appeared to be giving an answer to the whiteboard eraser.

The entire class passed in a similar sleep-deprived haze, and it wasn't until the very end, as they were all packing up our things, that one of her classmates exclaimed, "I can't believe that lecture went on forever! Don't cha think?".

If this had been any other semester, this remark wouldn't have been that momentous. But this time it was different. There was a special significance to her words that it took Nayeon a moment to fully grasp. Friday was just like any other to other people but it wasn't for Nayeon. Because she always had a date with Jeongyeon — through the phone. Nayeon did plan to visit Jeongyeon during Christmas break which was in two months or so.

This wasn't even her last class for the day. She had another one in two hours. Or the last class of first year, or any other year for that matter. But any class that was over was a relief to Nayeon who had never missed the significance of it even once. She was always glad to be over with one class, knowing she usually had only two or three classes scheduled.

Nayeon's been at university for a year now. In actuality, she's been a student for most of her life: since the age of six, she's been putting on uniforms, writing essays (okay, maybe not from the age of six, unless you count a few polemics on which Spice Girls single is better [in case you're wondering, the answer is always 'Stop Right Now']), and writing 'Occupation: Student' on airport immigration cards and tax forms. Learning has been her only consistent and engrossing occupation since before she knew how to tie her shoelaces.

So, as you can imagine, it's a little daunting to realize that her days of staring at whiteboards and overhead projectors will soon come to an end. That she may never take another university class, and that her days of addressing her teachers as 'Mr Smith' and 'Professor Brown' may very well be over. The fact that the one, stable aspect of her identity, the one which has helped her anchor herself and understand her place within society, is gradually disappearing.