“So, you and I are no longer two sides of the same coin?”
3:42 p.m. Hye-jin scrolled through the member list of the KakaoTalk room “19th-grade pre-college friends” and could not look away, as if she were waiting for a taxi that would never come. 127 people. She and Tae-hwan, plus 125 others who barely knew one another. The last remaining ligament. Delete it and it’s over. Her finger trembled.
The ring he left behind is gone, but the mark is etched in the bone
Tae-hwan said nothing. He had only perched on the wall behind the sports field on her nineteenth birthday and asked, “When we turn twenty, will we be different?” Hye-jin had laughed under her breath and answered, “If we change, we die.” Three-hundred-and-sixty-one days later, Tae-hwan erased Hye-jin’s silhouette without a single word. It wasn’t a disappearance; he simply began removing her from his mind—first, and quietly. Frame by frame, like cutting scenes from a film they had watched a hundred times.
The night we breathed each other out and away
I didn’t leave you. I only walked back out through the door you once entered. Sujin, a sophomore at Mirae University, woke with a start every night at 2:17 a.m. That was the hour Jun-ho used to check whether she had read his messages. For four months she held her breath and closed her eyes at that exact minute. The unread mark lingered like a blue ember on the screen. She pressed Jun-ho’s profile picture to enlarge it: the photo from last summer together was still there. She traced the ridge of his nose and the small scar just below his collarbone with her fingertip. The glass was cold. 2:18. Jun-ho came online. The green dot flickered on and off. Sujin slid the phone under her bed, closed her eyes, and summoned the weight of Jun-ho’s fingers tangling her hair. Is he erasing me now? Or is he carving me, bone-deep, all over again?
After you vanished, I still live inside your pupils
In the end, Hye-jin exited the room of 127. No farewell notification arrived. What she deleted wasn’t the chatroom but the nineteen years they had shared. Perhaps neither Tae-hwan nor Hye-jin would ever realize it. Nineteen hurts. It is the incompleteness of a moment just before adulthood, the ache of becoming grown while leaving each other unfinished. In other words, breaking up at nineteen is not severing a bond; it is a mutual murder—of one person’s future, of one person’s possibilities, of one fragile belief.
Why we part without ever quite killing each other
Nineteen, having killed no one yet, nurses the desire to keep each other alive forever. So we have sex, we kiss, we promise to meet again. Yet we know the desire is impossible. Afraid of the self that will resurrect in the future, we block, we leave, we erase. But deletion does not erase. The severance at nineteen is always partial. The half that survives forever holds its breath inside the other’s time; the severed half forever breathes inside the other’s skin.
You erased me, but I still hear your breathing
Hye-jin is twenty-four now. She is traveling with a new lover. As the plane lifted off, the city lights below glittered like that nineteenth-year night. Then, in her ear, she heard Tae-hwan’s breathing. The thread I thought was cut is still tied. She closed her eyes for a moment and gripped her new lover’s hand. When I let go of this hand, will I be nineteen again? Or this time, will I truly be able to kill you?
The instant you believed you erased me, I resurrected inside you. So I ask: did you really kill me? Or, through me, were you the one who died?