Friday arrives softly.
The city slows just enough to breathe, as if the week has exhaled and given permission for something lighter to settle in its place. Eun-woo notices this in small ways: the crowd on the street moves with less urgency, conversations linger longer outside shops, even the traffic lights seem patient. He has no particular reason to be in the university district on this afternoon—no class to attend, no gallery to visit—but his feet carry him there anyway, a habit so old he no longer questions it.
He sees Ahmad by chance. Or so it seems.
Ahmad is walking alone on a busy street, moving with the steady purpose of someone who knows exactly where he is going. A book is tucked under his arm, its spine facing outward. There is nothing remarkable about the moment—just another person among hundreds on a Seoul afternoon—and yet Eun-woo stops.
Something about Ahmad's presence feels unchanged by the noise around him. The crowd parts and flows around his figure, but he does not bend to accommodate it. Instead, he moves to a different rhythm entirely, one that seems to exist slightly outside the frenetic pulse of the city. His expression is calm, almost meditative, as though the world's chaos is merely scenery he has learned to see without really looking.
Eun-woo's chest tightens.
On impulse—or perhaps on something deeper than impulse—Eun-woo approaches him.
"Ahmad."
Ahmad turns, and for a moment, his face shows nothing. Then recognition arrives, small and contained. "Eun-woo."
They speak as if they are not the people who stood across from each other in a studio with accusations hanging between them like smoke. This is the courtesy of strangers who have decided, without discussing it, that certain things will not be mentioned.
Their conversation is polite, almost cautious. No art. No references to the past. No accusations dressed in careful language. Just small exchanges about the weather—how autumn is arriving slowly this year—and studies, and the way Seoul feels different depending on where you stand. Near the university, the city feels hopeful. Near the river, it feels like memory.
Eun-woo suggests coffee nearby, an offer framed as casual but weighted with something he cannot name. Curiosity, perhaps. Or the need to understand something he cannot yet articulate.
Ahmad hesitates.
The hesitation lasts only a moment, but Eun-woo feels its weight. In that pause is all the distance between them—the unresolved nature of what happened in the studio, the way they had looked at each other with something too intense to be merely artistic disagreement.
"It's Friday," Ahmad says simply. "I need to pray first."
The words are not an explanation. They are a boundary, drawn with gentleness but with absolute clarity. There is no apology in his tone, no request for understanding. He states it as fact: this is what I do, this is what I am, and I will not negotiate it.
Eun-woo nods, and he is surprised by how easily he accepts it. There is something in Ahmad's certainty that makes refusal impossible. "After, then? When you're done?"
"Yes," Ahmad says. "There is a café on the smaller road, just past the corner. The one with the green awning."
"I'll be there."
Ahmad leaves, heading toward a nearby mosque tucked between shops and apartment buildings—unassuming, almost hidden among the ordinary structures of the city, yet steady in its presence. People walk past it without seeing it. But Ahmad walks toward it as though it is the only real thing in the world.
Eun-woo watches him go until he disappears into the building.
He spends the time before their meeting wandering aimlessly through the streets, unsettled in a way he does not understand. The sound of the city continues—traffic, conversations, music bleeding from café speakers—but beneath it, another sound drifts faintly through the air, carried on the afternoon wind: the call to prayer.
Eun-woo does not understand the words. The language is foreign to him, the melody constructed on scales different from anything in Korean music. And yet the cadence lingers with him as he walks, calm and unwavering, a voice that does not shout but somehow reaches everything around it. It is the opposite of desperate. It is the opposite of pleading. It simply is, and in that simplicity is a kind of power.
He walks past the entrance to the mosque. Through the open door, he can see Ahmad kneeling on a mat, his forehead touching the ground. The gesture is one of absolute submission, yet there is nothing defeated about it. It is a choice, made consciously, made again every day. Eun-woo watches for only a moment—he feels like an intruder, witnessing something too intimate—and then he moves on, his footsteps carrying him toward the café with the green awning.
At the café, Eun-woo arrives early. He orders coffee he does not want and sits at a table near the window. The afternoon light is still bright, though it has taken on a different quality—softer, more golden. The city has moved into that brief moment between work and evening, when people pause before transitioning into the next phase of their day.
When Ahmad joins him later, there is a noticeable difference in his presence. Something lighter in his posture. His shoulders, which Eun-woo remembers as tense, now carry an ease he has not seen before. It is as though the day has been reset, as though he has shed something and emerged renewed.
They sit across from each other. The table is small. The sunlight filters through the window and falls across Ahmad's face, defining the planes of his features in a way that makes Eun-woo's breath catch slightly.
"Thank you for waiting," Ahmad says.
"It wasn't difficult," Eun-woo replies, which is not true in any literal sense but is perhaps true in the way that matters most.
Their conversation deepens naturally, without forcing.
Ahmad speaks about faith—but not as doctrine, not as rules or restrictions imposed from the outside. He speaks of it as discipline. As responsibility. As a way of remembering oneself in a world that constantly asks people to forget. "When you pray," he says, "you are not asking God for anything. You are reminding yourself of what you already know to be true. That you are small. That you are part of something larger. That your ego is not the center of the universe, even though the world tells you it should be."
Eun-woo listens more than he speaks. He watches the way Ahmad's hands move as he talks, the way his eyes focus inward, as though he is seeing something beyond the café walls. When he does speak, it is about art—but not technique, not the mechanics of creation. He speaks about purpose.
"Art can either witness the world," he says, "or shape it. I've spent so much time thinking I needed to shape it. To impose my vision. To make people see what I see." He pauses. "But maybe the responsibility is just to witness. To really look at what's there and reflect it back."
"And if your reflection changes things?" Ahmad asks.
"Then it does," Eun-woo says. "But that's not the goal. The goal is honesty."
They do not agree.
There is a fundamental difference in how they see the world, a difference that cannot be bridged by a single conversation over coffee. Ahmad believes in submission to something larger than himself. Eun-woo is still learning to believe in anything. But they do not argue. Instead, there is a quality of genuine listening—not the performative kind, where one person waits for their turn to speak, but the real kind, where one person genuinely tries to understand the world as it appears to another.
For the first time in a long while, Eun-woo feels neither admired nor feared. He is not the brilliant artist whose work carries power, nor is he the dangerous one who must be protected against. He is simply seen—completely, without judgment, without the need to be anything other than what he is. And that unsettles him more than judgment ever could.
The café grows quieter as afternoon shifts toward evening. Other customers leave. The light changes. And still they sit, their conversation moving in circles, touching the same themes from different angles, never quite resolving anything but never quite abandoning the search for understanding either.
When they finally part outside the café, the afternoon light is softer now, almost dissolved into the approaching dusk. The city is quieter, as though it has settled into itself. Ahmad offers a courteous goodbye—nothing more. No invitation to meet again. No insistence on continuity. Just a simple acknowledgment that this moment has existed between them, and now it is ending.
"Thank you," Ahmad says, and Eun-woo understands that he means for many things that were never said aloud.
Eun-woo watches him walk away, aware of an unfamiliar sensation taking root in his chest—not guilt, which would be easier to name and easier to resolve. Not desire, though something in Ahmad's presence will continue to call to him. But question. A fundamental question about what he has been doing with his life, about whether witnessing might be enough, about whether submission could ever mean anything other than surrender.
Friday has passed.
The city will continue its rotation, indifferent to what has happened in a small café with a green awning. And Eun-woo will return to his work, to his studio, to the careful construction of his vision. But something within him has been gently, irrevocably interrupted. He cannot return to what he was before this afternoon, even though he has no idea what he should become instead.
He stands on the quiet street, watching Ahmad disappear into the evening crowd. And for the first time in years, Eun-woo does not know what comes next. The question hangs in the air like the memory of the call to prayer—persistent, unwavering, impossible to ignore.