“Right now, I’m deleting you.”
3:47 a.m. I hurled my phone to the floor and crouched on cold bathroom tile. My eyeballs felt as if they were rolling loose in their sockets; my heart hammered so hard my jaw quivered with every breath. The icy squares clung to the arches of my feet then let go, over and over.
Jae-woo tapped on the window. I knew he was standing at the door, but I severed the line. Why? That night I told him, “Hey, we’re done. I’m erasing you right now. Erase me too.”
The moment the words left my mouth my vision blurred; I doubted they were even mine. Jae-woo simply nodded, pretending he hadn’t heard. How long has it been? Three years—and he still presses my number. I never pick up.
A living ghost
Why haven’t I managed to kill him yet? Or rather—why did he leave me alive?
This isn’t mere nostalgia. Evicting someone during a manic episode breeds its own strain of guilt. I remember stuffing Jae-woo into a garbage bag and setting him outside the door—at least, that’s the version I prefer. Yet he survived; more precisely, I am forced to remember daily that I did not kill him. My eyes in the mirror still reflect that night. In abandoning him, I abandoned a part of myself; that shard remains in his grasp, calling me.
Sujin’s story: She vanished, yet—
“He knows I tried to kill him. That’s why he proves, every day, that he is still alive.”
Sujin, twenty-eight, designer. It’s been one year and four months since Min-su. The exit was peculiar. Min-su had a bipolar diagnosis but refused medication—said the pills made him “someone else.” One night Sujin took him to the riverbank. They sat in the dark.
“Hey,” she said, “shall I take you home? I know you’re sick. But I’m sick too. I’m going crazy.”
Min-su shook his head. Sujin asked, “Shall we end this?”
“All right,” he answered.
Since then, every morning at 7:30 a.m. Min-su texts: Still alive. Wanna work out?
Sujin never replies, yet wakes at 7:25 a.m. without fail.
Hyun-woo’s story: He left me, yet was never truly abandoned
“I was supposed to protect him, but I ran. Maybe that’s why he keeps calling.”
Hyun-woo, thirty-one, programmer. His ex, Jae-seok, had borderline personality disorder. When Hyun-woo quit his job to start a company, Jae-seok smashed his window. Hyun-woo called the police that night; Jae-seok was hospitalized. Hyun-woo cut contact.
Six months later Jae-seok’s mother rang: “He’s taking his meds… but he calls you every day. Could you drop by just once?”
Hyun-woo went. Jae-seok said, “I was really sick. But when you left me, I wanted to live—just to get back at you.”
Hyun-woo hasn’t seen him since, yet can’t delete the number. Each time it rings unanswered, he knows why: Jae-seok still believes Hyun-woo stands in the very place he left.
Why can’t we sever the voice of the one we cast away?
Taboo and desire are inseparable. Discarding someone mid-manic episode is the cruelest exercise of power one human can inflict on another; in that instant we attempt to annihilate their existence. Yet the annihilation is never complete. The abandoned survives—and silently prosecutes the guilt of the one who fled.
This is more than obsession; it is a warped form of solidarity. The lover wrestling with bipolar disorder wants proof that they were loved even in their darkest hour. So they summon the one who left.
“I’m still here. You failed to kill me.”
Simultaneously, the one who left cannot forget that they still stand in the space they vacated. The spot is empty, yet scented with their trace. Thus the one who left cannot cut the cord; the abandoned has become a living ghost testifying, in flesh, to the leaver’s guilt.
Are you still standing in that place?
Have you ever cast someone out during a manic storm? Or were you the one cast out? And does that name still echo?
How long will you cradle that ghost?