Kim Jun-hyeok sat on the edge of a woman’s bed at 7:20 a.m., breathing hard. When he exhaled into the hair of the girl he had loved fifteen years earlier, he found not the sweet scent of lemon soap but something layered and yellowed—a smell mixed with the cement drifting up from the construction site downstairs and the fatigue seeping from her skin.
“So you’ve grown as old as I have.” The words slipped out on a sigh he had tried to swallow. The woman turned away, covering her armpit. Between them lay time, no longer sparkling, now shriveled and dry.
The Corpse of What Was Once Hot
We never gave first love a proper burial. Instead, for fifteen years we pulled the corpse from the basement and kissed it daily. That body still held the weather we remembered, the clothes we wore, the music from the café where we met. Yet the living flesh kept rotting. The perfume she sprayed on her nape had changed; once a faint, sweet cinnamon, it now stabbed the nose like charcoal smoldering. The skin was still soft, but exhaustion seeped out of it—more than anything, that enraged us.
“Why did you change like this? Am I that pitiful?” The words escaped before I knew it. I knew I was the one who had changed, yet I wanted to shift the blame.
The Lie the Body Remembers
Park So-yeong, thirty-eight, a deputy manager living in Jamsil, went to meet the lover of her twenties on the day her husband left for a business trip. A single text—“Long time no see”—pulled her in. Room 1205, Lotte Hotel, Jamsil. The moment the door opened, she knew the man no longer had the frame she remembered: the fresh gleam in his eyes had dulled, veins ridged the backs of his hands. Still, she buried her face in the pillow; she had to smell him.
Back then he had smelled of gym air, post-shower soap, and no cigarettes. Now, pressed to his neck, she inhaled a tangle of tobacco, beer, and the fatigue of a grown man. The scent clenched her heart. I still want this smell. Yet it was not love—only the perfume sickness of my youth. She went to the bathroom to breathe. In the mirror she saw a stranger: not twenty-two, but thirty-eight.
The Wilting Garden of Desire
Psychologist McKinley says we never fully kill our first desire; we inter it, then dig it up now and then. Fifteen years. The corpse was more decayed than we imagined.
Why are we so sensitive to smell? Olfaction is the sense most tightly wired to emotional memory. The moment we catch the scent of first love, every feeling from that time flares. But the feeling is no longer alive; we are only fevered with the perfume of a corpse.
The cruelest truth: we do not love the person. We love who we were then. The more the body of first love withers, the more frantically we clutch it, as if we could resurrect our own youth.
The Chill That Returned Instead of Fragrance
Now we no longer inhale each other’s scent. At 3 a.m. we stare instead at KakaoTalk profile pictures, hunting for the face of fifteen years ago. But it is gone. All we hold is the ghost of a memory.
Do you truly want the smell of that person now—or do you want the self trapped inside that smell? Between the corpse of your youth and the living body before you, which will you choose?