By Kristin Cho
I entered the downtown scene without any creations to call my own—no portfolio, no poetry collection, nothing to present with the assurance of someone convinced of their own brilliance. I was just a shy teenage girl with long black hair and a fascination with people who lived outside the gravitational pull of normal life. But the funny thing about those places—the late-night coffee shops, the basements-turned-galleries, the cracked leather couches with half-functioning lamps—is that art was never the price of entry. What mattered was paying attention.
If you listened, if you learned, if your curiosity was real, the door stayed open. The people I gravitated toward were the ones on the margins: struggling artists, broke musicians, and fledgling photographers. These were people who were barely holding their lives together, working minimum-wage jobs and sleeping on mismatched futons. But they were sincere. They weren’t performing for approval or chasing prestige. They were creating because they had no choice. They were, in the purest sense, alive.
I’d go downtown after school or on the weekends and sit with them in dim coffee shops that smelled like old books and roasted beans. They’d talk about art, technique, philosophy, the agony of having talent but no connections, and the frustration of sending work into the void and hearing nothing back. I didn’t always understand everything they said, but I understood the language. I belonged to that world even before I knew why.
And somehow, by some strange, hilarious twist of fate, the thing that really got me accepted wasn’t my intellect or artistic fascination—it was pool. Those guys were competitive about pool the way surgeons are competitive about steady hands. It was their sport, their shared pride, their small dominion in a city that took everything else from them. And there I was a quiet teenage girl who could actually give them a good game.
They’d line up their shots with the seriousness of philosophers. I’d counter. They’d break; I’d answer. And this dynamic began to form respect. A nod given across the table, a silent acknowledgment that I wasn’t just some kid tagging along. I was someone who could read angles, anticipate paths, keep my nerves steady. That mattered in their world. Pool teaches you about people. It teaches you how they move. What they reveal. What they hide.
Reflecting on those years, I now see how deeply they influenced me. Home was full of chaos—boisterous, intense, always on the edge of eruption. Yet downtown art scene offered a stark contrast: calm and order. Even when people struggled financially or emotionally, there was a quietness to their creativity. This environment thrived on thoughtful ideas. It valued intellect, welcomed sensitivity, and saw shyness as a sign of depth rather than a shortcoming.
I think that’s why I stayed with them because I shared their frequency. And every night, after hours spent listening, watching, and occasionally knocking in a clean eight ball that shocked them, I’d go home to my parents’ house. I’d sleep in my teenage bedroom while those guys slept on floors and futons. But the next day, I’d return like a tide. As if the streets downtown were some kind of gravity well pulling me back into a world that made sense. I see now that what I found there was foundation.
It was the first time I saw what creative community looked like without the polish, without the ego, without the careerism. It was the raw version of what I’m rebuilding now through Fold. A place where you can put all the rejected, misunderstood, overlooked, brilliant, bruised pieces of yourself and have them recognized instead of dismissed. A place for the misfits who think too deeply, feel too sharply, and refuse to perform.
And now, in my home, I have a pool table. I don’t play much anymore. Sometimes I walk past it at night and it looks like a relic from a previous life—a museum piece from the girl who once used a cue stick as her entry pass into a world she wasn’t supposed to understand. But every now and then, when the house is quiet and I’m thinking too much, I’ll take a shot. And the sound of the cue ball cracking across the table brings me right back to those dim rooms, those mismatched chairs, those artists who survived on caffeine and hope, and the strange, beautiful truth that I didn’t need a masterpiece to belong.
Maybe that’s what the downtown scene gave me: permission to be someone who speaks her own language, someone who recognizes other outsiders immediately because she was one first, someone who builds worlds instead of trying to fit into them.
Fold is built from that origin. Every line, every essay, every series traces back to the girl leaning over the pool table in a downtown coffee shop, listening to street philosophers and taking her first steps into a life she wouldn’t understand until much later.
