https://open.spotify.com/track/3I3e9g9nu0p0kNhwJ0vC91?si=f5ac0eefeede4481
“I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me everything, really. They made me and make me into someone better than I really am. You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are, not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, more generous, and more forgiving. And then, to appreciate them for what they can teach you and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad or good it might be. And to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
Nebraska threw half of his body onto the bed he had left almost ten hours ago. The bag he had carried all day lay carelessly beside his feet. Like every other day, Nebraska could only stretch his back and touch the bed once the clock struck 11 p.m. If lucky, he might get to enjoy the refreshing water running from the shower in his bathroom at night. But instead of cleaning himself up, Nebraska reached for the phone that had been vibrating every two minutes since earlier. Dozens of messages from the same group chat filled his screen. Too lazy to open them, Nebraska read them from the notification bar. “Haaaaa,” that was his fourth long sigh the second he got home. His studio apartment fell quiet again. The only sound was the ticking of the wall clock, accompanied by the occasional noise from outside. Cestran, the city where Nebraska had been born and raised, had always grown quiet after ten at night.
Nebraska had never been particularly good at making plans. Not the kind that lasted, anyway.
He was good at making plans for the next day, week, or project. He knew where he needed to be tomorrow morning, what needed to be finished by Friday, and which place his friends would probably drag him to after work. But whenever the question stretched further than that “what do you actually want to do with your life?” Nebraska always found a way to look somewhere else.
Perhaps that was how he ended up with two jobs. Nebraska worked as a writer for a local coffee roastery, writing the postcards tucked inside packages of newly released coffee beans. Every new batch came with a story: where the beans were grown, who grew them, how they were processed, sometimes even the little details that would otherwise never make it onto a coffee bag. His job was to turn all of that into something people would want to read. There was something oddly satisfying about taking something as ordinary as a cup of coffee and giving it a story. He liked testing and thinking about the new beans, discussing with the roastery team and talking passionately about the new release, then sitting in front of his laptop and trying to find the right words to make someone thousands of miles away care about it.
By evening, however, Nebraska belonged to dance. What had started as an impulsive decision to join a dance studio eventually became something he never expected. He began staying after practice, helping with choreography, throwing around ideas, fixing formations, and occasionally arguing over whether a movement looked better one count earlier or later. Somewhere along the way, people started trusting him. Now, he was a co-lead choreographer for one of the studio's upcoming performances.
Nebraska had never had this many people in his life. His phone was constantly full of messages. Invitations. Rehearsal updates. Coffee plans. Random updates. He had friends in places he had never expected to have friends, connections he had never intentionally tried to make, and always learning something from someone. And, for the most part, he loved it. His life was busy, but it was full that was what he told himself, anyway. Because every once in a while, usually late at night when the noise finally stopped, Nebraska would wonder whether full and settled were really the same thing. Why did he sometimes feel like he was waiting for his real life to begin? That was the part Nebraska never knew how to explain.
Nebraska stared at the ceiling, his mind wandering back to an advertisement for Haveleste in Velius earlier that week. It had been one of those advertisements that appeared between posts on his feed, filled with pictures of wide streets, unfamiliar faces, and buildings that seemed to catch the sunlight in ways he had never noticed in Cestran. He had scrolled past them at first. Then, for some reason, he had gone back. “Should I move to Haveleste instead?” he murmured to himself. And yet, the thought of leaving the life he built didn't feel as frightening as it probably should have.
Maybe Haveleste would offer him something different. A new routine. New streets to get lost in. New people whose names he hadn't memorized yet. Maybe he could walk into a café without running into someone he knew, spend an entire afternoon doing absolutely nothing, or take a different route home without feeling the need to explain where he had been. Maybe, in a place where nobody knew him, he could figure out who he wanted to be without having to consider who he had already become. Or maybe he was just romanticizing the idea of starting over.
There was a part of him that wanted to believe a different city could give him a different answer. That somewhere beyond the familiar streets of Cestran, there was a version of himself who knew exactly what he wanted, who woke up every morning without wondering whether he was doing enough or going anywhere at all. Still, he wondered what it would feel like to try. To choose something not because an opportunity had happened to come his way, not because someone had invited him, not because he had been curious enough to say yes, but simply because he wanted it.
For once, he wanted to know what it felt like to move toward something instead of merely finding himself wherever life happened to take him. His thumb hovered over the screen. The advertisement offered a link to learn more about living in Haveleste. Nebraska tapped it before he could talk himself out of it. As the page loaded, Nebraska found himself smiling faintly at the thought that, for the first time in a long while, he was considering a possibility that belonged entirely to him.
𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗘: Adrian Nebraska Rastratama 𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗕𝗜𝗥𝗧𝗛: Cestran 𝗗𝗔𝗧𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗕𝗜𝗥𝗧𝗛: October 2, 2002 𝗛𝗘𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧, 𝗪𝗘𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧: 179cm, 63kg 𝗭𝗢𝗗𝗜𝗔𝗖, 𝗠𝗕𝗧𝗜: Libra, ESTJ 𝗡𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗬: Coergian 𝗢𝗖𝗖𝗨𝗣𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Creative writer for local coffee roasters, co-lead choreographer
𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄
XngHan (승한) is an South Korean artist under SM Entertainment and a member of the dance crew XngHan&Xoul.
He made his solo debut on July, 31, 2025, with the single “Waste No Time”
Stage Name: XngHan (승항)
Birth Name: Hong Seung Han (홍승한)
Birthday: October 2, 2003
Zodiac Sign: Libra
Height: 178 cm (5’10″)
MBTI Type: ISTP
Instagram: @xnghan
TikTok: xnghan.official