“You were different from the very first moment I saw you,” he said. A single candle between us quivered in the dim light of the wine bar, making our pupils flicker. Yet my mind refused to release one razor-sharp image: two months earlier, on the subway, when his phone flashed a KakaoTalk alert—"Ji-soo," long black hair, provocatively red lips. Since that day, I have never trusted his gaze again.
Specters in the Gaze
Even while he confessed, I could feel dozens of other women brush past me in his eyes: the office worker in a black suit on the train, the college student smoking outside the convenience store, the dancer in a glittering dress at the club. All those after-images swirled together and settled like dust over the three small words he offered me.
His pupils were a photo album stuffed inside a box. My picture lay on top, yet the hidden ones beneath kept pressing into my skin. So I smiled—defensively—even at the moment of being loved. The fear that I might still be overlapped with someone else felt larger than the pleasure of being chosen.
Traces of the Glance
Case one. Yujin, 29, works in marketing. On her first date she could not meet the man’s eyes. She whispered the reason to me: He scanned three hip-looking women while I was sitting right there. Then he told me, “You’re different.” Do you know what that means? Different compared to the women he’s seen so far—which makes me just another item on the same list.
Case two. Yoon-soo, 32, a developer. After receiving a confession, she spent the entire night combing through her suitor’s Instagram following—six hundred accounts, twenty percent women. At dawn she had zoomed in on every “like” he had ever left on another woman’s photo. The thrill lasted seven hours; anxiety took over for the rest of the day.
The Tongue-tip of Greed
Why do we cling so fiercely to the traces of a gaze? Because love, from its inception, is a possessive greed that refuses negotiation. The sentence I love you secretly carries the impossible demand: From now on, look only at me. Yet men arrive at that demand already wounded by the necessity of choice. He had to choose, and the instant I realize I am merely one of the options, the wound opens in me as well.
Ji-soo with the red lipstick, the black-suited commuter, the anonymous girl in sequins—they are not simply the past. They remain as future possibilities that can be revisited at any moment. The more I love him, the clearer that spectrum inside his eyes becomes, and I can never erase it.
A Question Etched on the Heart
So I ask one last thing: Do you truly believe you are being loved right now? And in that confession, is only your image reflected? Or are you, too, already blended with other men inside his gaze, meeting the words I love you while carrying all their phantom weight?