“She never shows up”
7:42 a.m.
In the bathroom mirror I spin my wedding ring with a fingernail.
The metal rasps against skin.
Last night she sent a single line on Kakao:
“Still in the same place?”
I leave for work without a word to my wife.
In the elevator I study the back of my hand: a pale 3-cm scar.
The last trace she left—ten years ago.
Why the bone still burns
People call adultery a conflict.
This is not conflict; it is voyeurism.
In bed with my wife, I watch her naked body dance inside my skull.
My wife’s breathing modulates into her moans.
I perform marriage.
When my wife says, “Eat,” I smile.
When she asks, “Late again?” I look contrite.
Yet under the covers I summon her body again and again.
Room 703 of the first hotel: on white sheets her first words—
“I don’t sleep with my husband anymore. Only with you.”
That was ten years ago.
A single photograph from Room 703
2 March 2014.
A motel in Yeoksam-dong, Seoul.
She smoked, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Name: Sujin.
Thirty-two, three years older than me.
Her husband was my boss.
“We’re both insane, right?”
She laughed and peeled off my shirt.
That was when her nail gouged my left hand.
The instant her claw pierced skin, I knew:
This is not the end; it is the beginning.
We parted after three months.
She quit the company.
I got married.
Ten years have passed.
Jeong-woo’s letter
Last winter, a letter arrived by chance.
Sender: “Jeong-woo”—Sujin’s husband.
“I divorced Sujin after she slept with you. Since then she thinks only of you. On the nights she doesn’t come home I look at your photo and—”
I tore the letter up.
Yet that night I dialled Sujin’s number.
“Don’t pick up.”
Her voice came through.
“I still can’t forget you.
You too?”
I couldn’t answer.
My wife was asleep.
Why is adultery beautiful?
Reading Jeong-woo’s letter, I understood:
Adultery never ends; it only modulates.
Sujin and I never met again, yet for ten years we have failed to erase each other.
We were not performing marriage; we were performing the wound of adultery.
My wife sensed the shift.
“What’s wrong with you lately?”
I replied,
“Nothing at all.”
Last question
This morning, while turning my wedding ring, I wondered:
A decade of adultery—had marriage itself been mere performance?
No.
We had gone beyond acting; we had become criminals who deceive themselves.
Then tell me—what was ever real?
Was that 3-cm scar your truth, or merely my performance?