The metallic click of a belt buckle. One step back.
“Friday’s our team dinner.”
His hand resting on the keyboard was large, unhurried.
I clung to his voice, never reaching that hand.
Rejected again.
When he rose and tossed the scrap of paper into the bin, he threw away my entire day.
A Kiss Cast on a Shadow
“I believed you could surpass my level.”
He pronounced a verdict. It wasn’t hope; it was a score.
Between us stretched a hot-bar: three kilos of body weight, double the salary, a handful of internships, an app that grades faces. All these numbers merged into one yardstick that gauged the height of his gaze.
The moment he chose me, I believed I would be complete.
But that moment never arrived.
What Kim Seoyeon Said
Seoyeon met him first: a senior from the design club, second-year summer night.
“He saw I’d missed the bus and gave me a ride.”
“That was it?”
“No—I mistook it for a beginning.”
He never invited her anywhere. He simply opened the car door, letting their eyes meet for an instant.
For six months Seoyeon shed fourteen kilos. Each evening she snapped mirror selfies and posted them. He tapped “like.”
She called it hope.
“In the end, he didn’t want to see me prettier; he wanted to watch the process of me becoming prettier.”
Another Story from Yongsan
Kang Junhyeok was an artist. He believed one exhibition would snare the man’s gaze.
From a rooftop goshiwon he stretched canvases larger than his room. Every Friday he loitered in the café near the gallery.
“How about this one?”
Junhyeok asked the empty chair.
The man set down his mug and left without a word.
Junhyeok’s paintings sprouted wings and sold. The gaze remained aloft.
He closed the gallery and still stared at the spot where the man had stood.
He never loved me; he loved the fire I set to myself.
The View From Below
What pulled us wasn’t the man; it was the standard he radiated.
The instant I meet it, I’ll arrive.
But the bar kept rising. Ninety became ninety-five, ninety-five became a hundred—yet the score could never be a hundred.
Because the standard was a fiction born of my own desire.
He simply stood there, with no intention of descending.
Seoyeon’s Final Whisper
“I cast something toward him and called it love, but it wasn’t. What I threw away was myself.
All that remains is an empty scoreboard and the reckoning that still refuses to end.”