“Why does her hand look like that?”
Second-year middle school, rear classroom door. The lunch bell rang and everyone stampeded out, chasing the smell of lunch boxes. I alone stayed pinned to my desk like a forgotten doll. My left hand, wedged between textbooks, stiffened like a remote control; my right trembled, then stilled. What slid under my waistband was less fear than a current faster than lightning.
If I do this, I’m a bad kid. But I can’t stop.
A span of time shorter than a sigh slipped by. On the walk to school, the lucky twelve-story apartment block cast a roof-shaped shadow. The elevator doors on the eighth floor clanged shut—and someone whispered inside my ear: Here you are again.
Hidden wiring
My body began answering not because of the toy, but because of a sharpened pencil jammed inside the Math Primer my mother bought. The moment its needle tip pierced the soft paper, my heart flooded up to my scalp. After that day I became a detective ransacking my pencil case: markers, keys, the round barrel of a lead case, skateboard truck bolts—everything was rough. Softness was never the point.
School was no different. Inside my PE uniform pocket, the red club ribbon—when I looped it around my neck, the ghost of a choke teased my nape. Friends called it just a ribbon; only I saw real leather.
Left alone
Summer break, first year of high school. I met Jieun—one year older, first encountered at the convenience store in front of the same cram school. She spoke with the entire milk carton still between her teeth.
“I flipped test pages all night and my wrist went numb. Weird, though—hurting, yet something felt different.”
She flashed a thin scar across the back of her hand. After grazing the soft inner forearm with scissor blades, she said, she savored the feel of cloth brushing the cut. One red line, and the world tilted.
Listening, I remembered the recycled Styrofoam box I met inside the elevator on the eighth floor. Its crumbling fuzzy surface was far rougher than I expected. The elevator paused at the fifth; before the doors opened, it was over. No one knew, but I carried Styrofoam dust home in my pocket and fingered it for days.
We overlapped secrets. Jieun asked:
“Your roughest moment?”
I answered: the three seconds after the elevator doors closed, leaving me alone. In that brief span, the entire world became mine.
Why the taste of taboo is sweet
Psychologist McClelland speaks of the triangle of desire: achievement, power, intimacy. But our bodies hide a fourth—taboo. Forbidden fruit can only be sweet. The sex-ed poster on the counseling-room wall always showed together: a smiling boy and girl clasping hands. I stood outside the frame—laughing alone, holding breath alone, finishing alone.
Perhaps that is why my sexual imagination always ended in being abandoned. Jieun and I used each other as mirrors: she gifted me power, I gifted her envy. We borrowed each other’s roughness, yet never reached the end together. Whenever she showed the scar on her hand, I clenched the Styrofoam dust in my pocket. It was our private currency.
That roughness, still
Twenty-five now—this very instant—I still recall the temperature of my fingertips. The hard click of a transit card, the grain of a broom handle—they still trigger responses faster than a lover’s caress. Soft things do not scare me; I fear forgetting.
If that roughness disappears, I fear I will vanish too.
One day Jieun’s messages stopped. College entrance collapse? Guilt? Did she pocket Styrofoam dust like me, or allow someone else’s roughness? I still do not know. Maybe that is why I remain alone.
Are you still alone, or are you ready to allow another’s roughness?