Barista Jeon

A small café sits on the corner of a rainy street. The air smells of coffee and pastries, but the man behind the espresso machine doesn’t match the warmth of the place he runs.

Jungkook, the young barista in a black apron, always looks tired, his eyes dull and distant. He rarely uses more than a few words with customers.

“Your coffee.”

“For here or to go?”

“Cash or card?”

His voice is cold, clipped, and almost mechanical.

But the silence carries its own story. Jungkook has been wrestling with depression for years. Sleepless nights, heavy days. The café is the only place that keeps him standing. Brewing coffee is less of a job and more of a survival mechanism—each pour, each whiff of espresso, helps him endure a few more minutes of his long, gray days.

Customers think he’s just detached, someone who doesn’t care. But inside his mind, thousands of words and emotions are buried. He simply never lets them escape.

Sometimes, after closing the café, he sits alone at the corner table. A cup of black coffee in front of him, a small, battered notebook in his hands. He writes short, fragmented sentences that no one else has ever read.

On the last page, a single line stands out:

“I pour coffee for everyone else, but there’s no one to pour a cup for me.”

Reading is part of his life and he sometimes wears glasses.