“Pick one. Right now, this instant.”
The window seat at Café Flora. 4:11 p.m. The summer sun slid down the glass, pooling on the table like spilled gold. Jisoo felt its weight scorch the back of her hand, yet her fingertips were ice. Opposite her, Minjae’s index finger kept circling his cup, faster, faster. The click of porcelain, a breath caught on the verge of freezing.
When Jinwoo pushed the door open, a scandal-sweet breeze slipped in. He halted one step behind them, gaze flicking between Jisoo and Minjae. Each glance grazed her skin like a spark. Suddenly Jisoo recalled the blue veins ridging Jinwoo’s hand—she knew the blood beneath was the same temperature as the fingertips that had stroked the inside of her thigh last night.
Minjae parted his lips; his throat quivered.
“If you take his hand now—both of us are finished. We’ll never come back. Ever.”
A sentence, a silence, a tremor. From that moment, someone’s flesh was seared away.
A single thread of desire that bares the viscera
“Pick one” is an incantation that hurls all three to the cliff edge at once. The chosen, the unchosen, the one who forced the choice—all are torn open together. Minjae knew this, so he chose the most lacerating words. He had calculated the odds of Jisoo picking him at zero percent. Yet he refused to swallow defeat whole. Instead, he detonated it, turning loss itself into a gift. A sleight of hand: carve you killed me across the other’s heart. Only then could the abandoned become the abandoner, gifting not love but guilt for eternity.
“If I can’t be the one chosen, I’ll survive on the fact that I wasn’t chosen.”
—Minjae’s inner voice
First glass. Jisoo, Minjae, Jinwoo
August 2022, wine bar Noeul in Hannam-dong. Jisoo watched Jinwoo’s finger trace the rim of his glass—she flashed back to that same finger flicking open her bra hook ten nights earlier. Minjae stole glances from behind, mouth turning to sand.
Softly, he laughed:
“Jinwoo-ssi, make it just a little uncomfortable. If you so much as brush Jisoo’s forearm, I’ll charge like a madman. Then she’ll side with you.”
It sounded like a joke, but that night Minjae stood on the subway stairs above them. The instant Jinwoo closed his hand firmly over Jisoo’s, Minjae lifted his phone to his ear and whispered just one line.
“Don’t let go of that hand. If you do, I’ll let go—forever.”
Then Minjae vanished. Jisoo could not take a single step away from Jinwoo; Jinwoo boarded the train without looking back. Jisoo remained in the deserted station, cradling two bodies at once: the abandoned and the abandoner.
Second glass. Hyejin, Dohyun, Seyoung
Early this year, café Next Door in Seongsu-dong. Hyejin sat wedged between Dohyun and Seyoung. Both claimed to have loved her for over five years, but that was only half-true: Seyoung already had a partner, and Dohyun had been on the verge of giving up. Still, the three lingered on the unfinished triangle.
Dohyun set down his coffee.
“Hyejin, you want both? Then I’ll take both away.”
She tried to laugh it off. He wasn’t joking. The next morning Dohyun severed all contact; Seyoung left on an overseas assignment. Hyejin stayed behind, repeating to herself, What did I do wrong? She had done nothing. Someone had simply shouldered the weight of choice for her.
When pain is mistaken for love
Psychologist Rolf Lücks writes in Tragic Choice:
“Pain disguises itself easily as proof of love. We fear that without pain, love itself might vanish.”
So we sometimes choose pain. Both Minjae and Hyejin had wanted to leave, in truth. Yet they wanted to make themselves un-leave-able, branding their absence onto the other’s heart like a scar.
You abandoned me.
Therefore you love me.
—the paradox of abandonment
The last sip
Right now, someone else may be perched on another triangle. If that seat were yours:
- If you’re the one saying “Pick one,” is it really love—or merely a wish to carve your obsession and fear forever into another’s flesh under love’s name?
- If you’re the one hearing it, whose side will you take? Or will you choose no one and carry that searing silence in your chest for the rest of your life?
The only thing we can choose is the quantity of pain.
We cannot reduce it, but we can decide who receives it.
And that choice returns to us, becoming blood and flesh.
That single sentence, that fingertip, that gaze—even when everything else fades, the mark remains. Forever.