An Americano Thrown After Four Years
Beneath the faded neon of Gangnam Station’s underpass, Do-hyeong approached. The Americano in his left hand trembled almost imperceptibly. A fine layer of foam quivered, the black rim of the cup threatening to spill but never quite doing so. He stopped one step away, and his gaze flashed sharp.
“Oh— it’s really you?”
In that instant, 1,460 days of humidity, scent, and cold air detonated all at once. Only a single step lay between us, but that step was packed tight with four entire years. I was still standing there, cradling the wound from that day, and he was reading the wound with surgical clarity.
Do-hyeong said nothing; he simply held out the coffee. A blue vein rose along the back of his hand. I didn’t take the cup, yet my fingertips reacted first. The tremor that spread across my skin—before the heat, I felt my heart drop with a thud.
How long does your wound insist on staying alive?
They say time is medicine. But no one tells you what kind. No one mentions it’s an anesthetic daubed over a festering cut.
“Am I the only one still clutching this pain, refusing even the touch of someone new?”
That night, Do-hyeong left me. Yet what I abandoned was greater still. Afterward, I could not spend a single night with anyone else. Whenever a hand brushed my waist, the emotions of four years ago ballooned outward.
‘This person too will leave me someday.’ That prophecy dried every budding romance before it could even bloom.
Su-jin, 32, currently starring in I’ll Never Love Again
Su-jin truly liked someone—Chan-yeong, a colleague from work. They shared a beer after shifts, caught movies on weekends, slowly folded their hands together. Yet the moment Chan-yeong’s fingers closed lightly around her wrist, Su-jin’s cheeks turned to ice.
Chan-yeong: “Su-jin, let’s get serious—”
Su-jin: (turning her head) “Sorry, something urgent came up.”
She bolted. The scene from four years ago—Do-hyeong grasping her wrist and murmuring I’m sorry—overlapped perfectly. The pain still lived in her nerve endings, her heart pounding.
Days later, Chan-yeong texted: You okay? You’ve been acting strange. Su-jin pressed the screen hard. How much more must I hurt? She never sent the message.
I’ll never love again isn’t true
Why do we carry the shadow of a dead relationship and push away the living? Psychologists call it unfinished trauma—the mind’s endless loop of something never truly ended. Conversations left incomplete, words never returned, endings that feel final.
But I know a darker reason. To love again means risking abandonment exactly as it happened four years ago. To protect our wounded self, we choose the option of living without exposing the wound—picking loneliness over pain.
“Have I chosen pain? Or, in trying to avoid it, chosen an even deeper solitude?”
Tae-yeong, 29, practicing how to flee from a flirtation
Tae-yeong had a third date lined up with someone she met on a blind app. The man was modest, unpretentious. She felt herself drawn to him. Yet as the third date neared, she couldn’t breathe.
What if he tries to hold my hand? That single thought tormented her.
Tae-yeong’s diary:
Three years ago, I didn’t want to let him go—so I left first. Now, afraid this new man will leave me, I’m leaving first again.
She canceled by text: I’m sorry, I’m not quite ready. Then deleted the chat.
On the walk home, alone, a thought struck her: What I’m not ready for isn’t love—it’s never hurting again.
How much more must we hurt before we can hold someone new?
There is no answer. Only the certainty that we go on hurting, and in hiding that hurt, we create fresh wounds.
Perhaps the moment we can meet someone new is not when the pain disappears, but when we can reveal it—little by little—without concealment.
So baring the wound is not the performance of fear, but the first act of courage.
“Still hurting, can you extend your hand? Can you choose life over mere absence of pain?”