A woman in a gray wool cap sat near the window of the coffee and jazz music establishment. There was a pair of older gentlemen drinking their glasses of fresh mango juice on the east end of the coffee shop. Other than that, there were no other patrons in that gloomy November afternoon, save for a girl about 18 years of age, perusing her English essay on her laptop.

The girl looked up when the chimes of the coffee shop tinkled and the baristas behind the counter cheerfully greeted the new customer. It didn’t take too long for them to instantly recognize the newcomer, their faces turning bright red as soon as he took off his hat and pulled down his face-mask. The black cap conveniently concealed an outrageously bleached blonde mop of hair. If there were one thing that was notable about him, other than his hair color of course, was his smile. The girl who was going over her English essay made a mental note of how comforting his smile was in person than when she saw him on TV. She looked over at the lonely woman in the gray wool cap and then at the gentlemen enjoying their mango juices, all three of them clearly sizing up the fellow at the door. 

The young man with the outrageous hair color smiled cordially at the barista, before his eyes fell on the girl at the center of the coffee shop. His polite, rehearsed smile faded almost instantly into one that begot his obvious lackluster appearance in front of attractive girls. It’s been a few years, certainly, since he last had to flirt to a girl, but after awhile in the limelight, his inhibitions with talking to girls were quickly diminishing. Even as he went up to the counter to order his drink – venti iced black coffee, with a shot of espresso, please – he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off the girl who was hunched over a large book with what seemed to be English print.

When the barista went off in a flourish to prepare his simple drink, Jimin took this chance to approach the girl. Everything about her seemed to glow, and he decided that it wasn’t the glow of the backlight from her Macbook. She looked precious, like a delicate china doll that had just come down from her shelf space. As soon as he came near, she suddenly looked up, cocking her head to the side for a minute, then scratched the back of her right ear quickly. 

“H-hi,” he managed to stutter out. It took him years to perfect his speech during times of discomfort and yet, at that very moment, everything that he has spent his time and effort on had been reduced back to the bumbling idiot he once was when he first entered the company. At that moment, he was no longer BTS' Jimin. He was, inevitably, just Park Jimin, a boy from Busan. 

“Hi,” the girl replied. There was a twinge of confusion at the end of her reply, like she was asking a question. At her tonality, he felt even smaller. The world seemed like it was closing in on him even more. He even felt like the three other patrons at that coffee shop were now keeping a close, scrutinizing eye on him.

“I-I saw you were reading something in English,” Jimin said, pointing at her textbook. “That’s cool. It looks like my textbook from high school, too.”

The girl closed her textbook to display the front cover for the both of them. It was a blown up picture of a monarch butterfly set against a green background, with Advanced English 1 embossed in Korean as its title. Jimin graduated from high school several years ago, and when he had finished, his year was only able to get to Intermediate English 2, with a chrysalis on the cover instead of a butterfly, symbolizing the second stage of the English lesson metamorph