“When did we first kiss, back when we met?”
I fill my mouth with smoke, then let it drift out slowly. Even now you speak as if you might slip between my lips, yet you feel miles away.
A Hidden Taste
Each time your fingers brush my forehead, I return to that night. Twenty-three, a rain-soaked back alley in Hongdae, 2 a.m., the soju still fogging my head. You asked for my number; instead of paper, I wrote it on your hand. As I did, your lips grazed my skin—once. I went home clenching my fist, showered three times, never used soap. Ten years on, the ghost of your tongue still moves over that spot. You don’t know I rewind that moment every night.
Like a Broken Car
Ten years is long enough for every feeling to rust. Yet inside me one switch works in reverse: the button that grows hungrier for the beginning. We know the order of holding hands, whose turn to shower, which position is easiest. I mistook that for comfort—only to find it’s the trap of familiarity. Familiarity asks no questions.
You feel safe. I, that much more unsafe.
Lying beside you at night, I no longer feel like myself. The thirty-three-year-old me keeps chasing the afterimage I first showed the twenty-three-year-old you. The afterimage is gone, but my body still remembers that day’s temperature.
Mina’s Story
Mina, twenty-nine, has dated her grad-school classmate for seven years. In the beginning they devoured each other with their eyes. At 3 p.m. in the basement reading room, she secretly traced the back of his hand; even that touch threatened to stop her heart. Last week she asked, “It took us a month before we kissed, right?” He blinked and said, “Probably, we were busy.”
Mina whispered to me:
Once, a brush of the hand sent sparks. Now we kiss whenever and feel nothing.
I asked her: has the feeling truly vanished, or have we simply grown so used to it that it feels like nothing?
Jaehyuk’s Story
Jaehyuk, thirty-one, has been with his first love for eleven years. Recently he opened a secret account: @ReplayFirstKiss. Every night he posts a fifty-second clip of their very first kiss, filtered with the heartbeat he recorded back then. Alone, he watches it to rekindle the twenty-three-year-old inside him. If anyone saw, they’d call him strange. Yet he still memorizes the 146 bpm of that day.
Once she stumbled on the account. “Is this us?” He couldn’t answer. “Why keep doing this?”
Because, he thought, there was a you who wasn’t today’s you, and a me who wasn’t today’s me.
The Chemistry of Longing
What we crave isn’t the “first time” but the “me who experienced the first time.” Psychologists call it romantic nostalgia. The brain stores the chemicals of that first euphoria—dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins—and tries to replay them. Only a scrapbook remains in the mind; the real you is no longer that day’s you.
This is a simultaneous escape toward and escape from the taboo. Unknowingly, we poke at the forbidden “first time” and shake the present relationship. Someone scrolls old KakaoTalk at 3 a.m.; someone retraces the first date course. But even retraced, the place lies outside the map.
Your Hand, My Hand
Now I say, “Still, just once, I want to return to that day.”
You laugh softly. “Why?”
I can’t answer. How could I explain that the hand you offered me then still lingers on my skin like a scar?
And the final hidden question: at this very moment, do you, too, wish to erase the imprint of that day still inked on my hand?