02:17, message read 1 min 34 sec ago
A thin green line hovers above the chat room. Ji-hoon has seen it. Or has he? He wasn’t there. In the profile photo he smiles softly at the camera, yet his gaze is entirely elsewhere. All I had was a 512×512 block of pixels.
Had I wanted not Ji-hoon, but the sentences that described him?
Your expression was painted by me
Height 183 cm, a tiny scar left of the left thumbnail, a habit of slipping one hand into a pocket—each trivial detail thickened the illusion of reality. Yet it was my reality. I hadn’t yet heard his voice, yet I was certain his laugh would reveal a slight aquiline nose. Certain? No—desire’s retouch. Over one profile picture and scattered lines of chat I layered coat after coat of paint.
First meeting, 19:04
Salon de Noir, Hongdae. Through the window the man I believed to be Ji-hoon approaches. Black coat, jeans, scuffed sneakers—identical to the photos. So identical it felt foreign.
“Hi.” “Oh—hi. You came.”
The first glance lasted 0.8 seconds. He smiled, but not the smile I had sketched. His voice was lower than imagined, the nails clean. The scar was missing. Its absence in the place it should have been was proof of my delusion.
Why did she always undress?
In the chat she was “Yeong-hui.” Twenty-eight, son of a hotteok stall in Jongno, profile picture a black cat. I met him and learned he was actually Jong-ho, thirty-two. A mistake, he said at first.
I thought if I apologized you’d never get angry. I was naïve.
Jong-ho recalled the days he lived as Yeong-hui. Yeong-hui was freer. He spoke, cigarette in hand on his own balcony:
“When they called me Yeong-hui, I didn’t feel like myself—and I liked that. Yeong-hui was more fun, braver than me.”
As Yeong-hui he slept with women. Yeong-hui was skilled. Yeong-hui undressed first. Yeong-hui was the he he wanted to be.
How does desire fill the blank?
Winnicott spoke of “excessive projection.” The emptier the canvas of the other, the more lavishly we paint. One photo, a brief bio, a handful of lines—less information, wider blanks, and into them we project the prototype of our own longing.
I never loved Ji-hoon; I loved the fiction he might have been.
03:42, read again
I reread my last message to Ji-hoon:
“I want to know you.”
He didn’t reply. Perhaps he couldn’t. He wasn’t who I knew.
The line above the chat is still green. Ji-hoon is online. No—his account is online.
Whom did you come to meet?
Right now, in some café, someone is waiting for her own Ji-hoon. She doesn’t yet know he may be three kilos heavier, that his voice may cut sharper. She waits, unknowing.
Whom do we travel to meet? A person—or the phantom we have fashioned?
Tell me, what color are you brushing onto the stranger on the other side of the screen right now?