8:14 a.m.—breathing in the scent of a face I never saw
A foreign perfume rises from the sheets the moment I inhale. I turn my head: the pillow is already cold. The linen under my palm is cool and faintly damp—where someone’s hair must have soaked in. I dodge a man’s shirt-button lodged in the carpet as I walk to the mirror. Mascara feathered at the corners, a smear of torn red on one lip. Evidence that must be erased—and there is more than enough of it.
When I open the vanity drawer, a small note flutters out.
If you want to apologise, you must be forgotten first.
—written by me at 2:47 a.m.
02:17—you and I in a half-deleted photograph
While scrolling through my phone I find one image I started to delete but never finished. The angle is blurred, the faces indistinct, yet the red dot branded on the nape of my neck is razor-sharp. The flash has flared, but even through the bloom of light I am smiling. Or rather, I was smiling. There had been little alcohol that night; instead, a single look carried the voltage, and I threw the switch on purpose. The decision to forget came first; the body merely followed.
The clock in the corner of the photo reads 02:17. I have no memory of that hour. I only prepared the line for morning: “I must have been drunk.” A simple excuse, yet in truth the most honest lie I could tell.
First silence: three months before her wedding
Jieun says, “At first our eyes met on the subway.” Thirty-four, marketing director, wedding three months away. Her boyfriend of three years; the hall is booked. Yet on a Friday night she hard-deleted a photograph. The man in it: her first love, back after ten years. He still calls her “the girl who cried behind the school hill.” At those words her heart slammed against her ribs—someone who remembered the nineteen-year-old she had secretly wept for. So that night she decided to forget herself. Eyes closed on the bed, and at sunrise she would claim, “I guess I drank too much.”
Second silence: between mentor and student
Soo-ho begins, “Professor, I—” and never finishes the sentence. A doctoral student, twenty-nine. A slip with a junior colleague in the lab. Beyond the border of teacher and student, they spoke each other’s names only in breath. At dawn a senior researcher sent a single attachment:
Attachment: the first night, taken without your knowledge.
The frame is tight, the light too bright; neither can meet the other’s eyes. The glasses on the bedside table are cracked. The next day, someone in the lab deliberately corrupted the experimental data. The professor quietly called her in and said, “You made a mistake.” In exchange for overlooking it, Soo-ho bought silence by erasing the memory—convincing himself the night had never happened.
What remains, what is erased
When I strip the sheet, a small white mark remains. Not something spilled from the body, but where someone’s desire solidified. You try to scrape it away with a fingernail; the stain only spreads.
The odour in the linen will fade by morning. The scent on the skin lingers even after a shower.
Found beneath the bed
I lift the duvet, and from under the bed a narrow hair-band rolls out. Pink silicone, elastic. I rub it between my fingers: still lukewarm like body heat. I close my fist around it and shut my eyes again. Morning light bisects the bed. Still, no one knows. Or rather, everyone pretends not to.
A final question
Lying here now, did you really erase a memory—or a way of erasing yourself? Whatever you lost may still be lying exactly where the dust settles beneath the bed.