‘Let’s just hold hands and sleep.’
That was the promise. Two a.m., a back-alley motel in Jongno. I was perched on the edge of the bed, cigarette glowing, when I felt her slip under the quilt. I didn’t yet know how toxic the word just could be. Black lingerie drank in the tips of my fingers. 0.8 seconds—maybe that long. In that sliver of time I committed every sin: I neither advanced nor retreated. We never met each other’s eyes.
A humidifier hissed, gagging our mouths.
The switch I never pressed
Since that night I rewind those 0.8 seconds every evening.
‘If I had only moved my fingertip a fraction further… or turned on my heel instead?’
Two desires tore me apart. One insisted it was already too late, so at least let’s finish what we started. The other sneered that I could still turn back. In the end I chose neither. The scar of incompletion festered into poison. Her body heat, claimed by no one, dried and clung only to me.
In truth, after I closed my eyes that night, I dreamed—very briefly.
Fingertips still cold
‘Chae-won, I’m sorry.’ I never spoke her name first, nor last. Now, muttering it hundreds of times, my mouth turns to sand.
On her twenty-eighth birthday Chae-won offered me a single chance.
‘Today, just for today, I’ll give you my body. But that’s the end. No calls, no second visits.’
The mirror on the studio-tel wall doubled us. She undressed in whispers, hands trembling.
- The click of a bra hook.
In that metallic sound I understood: from this moment on, no one would have this body. Or rather, someone would—but like me today, they would founder in front of the door it chose to bolt.
I laid my hand on her breast and stopped. Her heart beat so violently I feared it would burst if I came closer. Chae-won closed her eyes and breathed out.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Four a.m. She showered, dressed, and vanished with a soft click of the doorknob. I couldn’t even imprison a single drop of her scent left on the sheet.
A body no one possesses
Afterward I met two men.
One was a graduate-school senior, the other a work colleague. Both had failed to consume the ‘first’ of the women they loved.
The senior dated a junior for three years. On the eve of their wedding she confessed:
“I’ve never done it before. So I can’t with you either.”
From that night he drank daily, wondering how he hadn’t noticed in three years, why he alone was denied.
The colleague is sadder. In the fifth year of marriage he stumbled upon his wife’s diary:
‘My body belongs to the man who was both my first and last. I love the husband beside me now, but deep under my skin another body heat lingers.’
With divorce papers in hand he went to her, then hurled himself out of a window. Second floor—serious injuries, survivable. The couple still share a house, wearing the expression of people robbed of each other’s ‘first.’
Why are we spellbound by ‘the first’?
Psychologist Leonard Salinger frames virginal loss not as mere inexperience but as the latent power of absolute taboo. A door never opened may stay ajar somewhere in the mind. Conversely, once opened and shut, it feels forever sealed. We learn to carry that uncharted territory inside our chests.
So I still cultivate Chae-won’s body in my mind. She remains under the shower; I remain at the threshold. Because we never fully held each other, we grow in the illusion that we did.
Have you, too, once met a body no one could possess?
And is the wish that its warmth never cool a form of love—or of fear?