The First Line in the Chat Box [10:14 PM] Junhyuk: What are you wearing right now?
Sujin sat on the edge of her bed, wearing only an oversized long-sleeve T-shirt. She paused, staring down at herself. The camera was off, yet his question filled the room the way darkness seeps through a window. After a long beat she typed: bare face and hit send. He replied, me too. Since that night—180 days ago—they have never once looked at each other’s bare face.
The Moment Desire Grows Boring Across the screen, every sense runs backwards. Words, not fingertips, graze the skin; emojis shiver instead of voices. At first the slipperiness was thrilling. Unseen by anyone, sentences between the two of us rolled like snowballs, swelling larger and softer. Then one day Sujin found herself unable to take the next step. The words let’s meet rose to her tongue, only to be chilled by the colder question: and then what? Junhyuk, too, tossed out I still think our eyes would really lock if we met once every ten days, then quickly excused himself with last-minute company dinner. They had become fluent in each other’s text-shaped fantasies. Real skin can be coarse; breath can falter; tone can turn awkward. They weren’t bored; they were terrified of becoming so. The wish to remain un-bored had grown larger than boredom itself.
Two Rooms, One Mirror Café rooftop, a Saturday at 2 p.m. Chaewon arrived early and sat at an empty table. Six months earlier, in an “ideal-type World Cup” chat room, she and a man nicknamed NextDoor94 had first exchanged the word let’s meet. That day, last week, and the week after next had all been cancelled. Reasons were interchangeable: haven’t washed my hair, parents dropped by, looks like rain. After sending the cancellation text, Chaewon stared at herself in the restroom mirror. Why am I like this? She pictured the slight curve of shoulder muscle in his photo, the faint uptilt of his eyes. She feared that the moment her real self slid into that frame, disappointment would arrive before reality did.
Why She Stepped Back Seoul Station, 11:30 p.m. Hyeji had missed her train. After rebooking for two hours later, her first meeting—he had arrived in town ahead of her—was pushed back a full day. Sitting on a bench in the concourse, she texted: If I leave now, we could grab a beer. No reply. Thirty minutes later he wrote: If we meet now, I think my first impression will take a hit. That night Hyeji gazed for a long time at her reflection in the platform’s glass wall. Who on earth have I been in love with? His voice from the screen, 127 messages beginning with I fell at first sight, the screen kisses squeezed from two palms—everything flicked past like a panorama. She feared it would all shatter the instant it collided with the tangible. So she chose the train. Postponed hours, postponed bodies, postponed truths—together they kept us from breaking.
Why We Keep the Taboo We whisper that the reason we never meet the person in the DMs is because we’re bored, but the opposite is true: we keep our distance so we won’t become bored. The screen becomes a vast shield, a pane that can erase or magnify both my flaws and yours. The psychologist Avi-Tal calls this the digital mirror stage. Before facing the other, we first turn them into the screen onto which our desire projects best. On that screen I am flawless, and so is he. If we pull the screen away—if we meet—the image begins to blur like a double-exposed photograph. So we repeat: I’m tired today, it’s raining, something came up. All excuses converge on one plea: Let’s not ruin us.
The You I Haven’t Met, the Me I Don’t Want to Meet On the 180th day Sujin sent Junhyuk a final text. [02:07 AM] Sujin: If I meet you now, I think both of us will be ruined. The message turned read at once. Five minutes later the ellipses appeared—Junhyuk is typing…—but no reply came. Sujin flipped her phone face-down and looked out the window. Under the streetlamp a couple passed, silhouettes overlapping. The man held the woman’s hand tightly; the woman tilted her head and laughed. They knew each other’s flaws and still pressed mouths to them.
Do you still want to meet me? Or do you prefer to keep holding the version of me that must never be met?
The screen went dark. Even if another 180 days pass—360 days—the question will not be when will we meet? but the quiet accumulation of reasons we must not. ---
If you, too, haven’t met someone after six—or six hundred—days, ask yourself now: Do I truly want their face, or do I want what their face keeps me from seeing?