Ji-yeon lay on the bed and rolled her tongue. The root of it had rasped itself raw until the sand-paper sensation spread through her entire body. Hour 120 of the fast. The inside of her mouth blossomed with a taste like azalea-red blood. Then the scent of warming mozzarella slid into her nose. Seung-hyun walked in holding a pizza box. The cheese burst into beads of hot oil with the steam.
Ji-yeon closed her eyes. The fragrance draped over her face like a thick quilt.
This is the answer.
“If he shows no reaction while I’m dying, then this isn’t love.”
She had locked herself inside love’s laboratory, using fasting as the reagent. Each morning she awoke, stared at the ceiling, and drew up a checklist. Today he would ask in a trembling voice. Or maybe he would feed her with tears trembling in his eyes. Nothing happened. Only the smell of pizza drifted by.
Certainty arrived. But it had nothing to do with love.
While I suffer, he lives. And in that living I confirm my absence.
Eun-ji, 31, designer
Eun-ji was on day three of her “cleanse.” Each time she opened the refrigerator, a graph-paper grid of ravenous black hunger etched itself across the darkness inside. Ho-jin drank beer and watched YouTube; the bass from the speakers vibrated inside her ribs.
At night Eun-ji went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. Ho-jin suddenly asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”
“No.”
“Really? I’m going crazy craving murakami tonight.”
In that instant the glass trembled imperceptibly in her hand. She knew too well she must not let Ho-jin see that tremor.
I don’t want to be the one who wins. But I don’t want to lose either.
Su-jin, 29, marketer
Su-jin staged a “silent strike.” Words snapped off, eye contact evaporated, the stove stayed cold. Min-su noticed nothing for the first two days. On the third evening he opened the delivery app and said, “Hey, you’re not eating again? Should I order just for myself?”
Instead of answering, Su-jin looked at her reflection in the mirror.
I say nothing. While I say nothing, he drifts farther away. That is exactly what I want. That distance.
Women who cloak themselves in silence are in fact doing calculations. Fasting reenacts not solidarity but isolation. If you pretend not to notice while I am dying, then you do not love me. The pain of being unloved is already known. The pain of confirming it becomes a new dimension of power.
Silence manufactures its own sentence: I will speak no more. Yet even that sentence never reaches the other. Silence, therefore, remains only a self-fulfilling proof: I chose this indifference, so I am not defeated.
Ji-yeon lay on the bed and stroked her stomach with one hand. It sagged like an emptied universe. Seung-hyun finished the pizza, folded the box, and tossed it into the trash. The sound of the door closing. From the far end of the hallway leaked the tinny music of a mobile game.
She closed her eyes. The exam was over. She had known the grade all along. Yet in the moment of confirmation, as always, her belly spread into a dark hollow. The hunger was no longer inside her stomach. It had become a slender thorn that still gleamed in the dark, lodged square in her chest.