"Only after I made sure the last Tokyo-bound train had left did I say his name for the very first time."
I Thought He Hadn’t Arrived Yet
Beside the studio, at the convenience store, 1:47 a.m.
I left the bento untouched and rolled the name Seojin across my tongue three times.
My breath fogged the plastic handle.
That night the company club dinner had ended; to save cab fare I waited for the last train, then suddenly deleted the message: Are you there?
The screen went black the moment I erased it, and his name poured into my mouth like black sand.
Seojin-ah.
It hovered behind my lips before I swallowed.
At the same instant, I felt I was slipping an invitation under the door of someone not yet inside my room.
Why the Dark Psychology Breathes
People rape their lovers before the affair ever begins.
In thought we undress, kiss, even steal the tears first.
Meanwhile the other, knowing nothing, keeps being “violated” inside us.
This is no mere fantasy.
The eve-of-love night is like a new town where illegal extensions rise overnight.
Once a name is uttered, it erects a phantom bed in the next room and keeps growing there.
Maybe now he likes me a little?
Or is he still wrecked over his ex?
Each question swells to the size of a sigh, then seeps through the wall.
No Footprints in Her House Yet — But
Mijin, 29, marketer
Friday dawn, Mijin set two phone alarms.
If she wakes at 7:30, lunch with Seojin is entirely imaginable.
He always claims the terrace table at the café across from the office.
Mijin met tomorrow’s version of herself already seated there: two iced Americanos, one weak, one strong.
Seojin doesn’t yet know she takes it strong, but Mijin already pretended to know.
That night she left the refrigerator open for forty minutes and listened to Seojin’s voice — a voice she had never heard yet somehow knew too precisely, so precisely it frightened her.
When the wall clock’s second hand struck twelve, she realized:
I haven’t started dating him; I’ve cast myself as his watcher.
A Contract Signed in the Shadows of the Transfer
Do-hyun, 31, game planner
Do-hyun exploited every one of the 3 minutes 27 seconds it took to change from Line 2 to Line 9.
While the platform slid beneath him he simulated how he would brush the back of Jian’s hand — once, exactly 0.7 seconds, a fingertip gliding down the ridge of her hand then lifting; she would laugh.
And then what about me?
He opened the voice-memo app and mimicked the laugh he imagined, saving it as: 230414_Jian_Laugh_1117.wav.
That night, though nothing had happened with Jian, he played the file fourteen times.
On the fifteenth he lowered the volume.
This is trespassing.
In his mind he had already slept with her, betrayed her, made her cry.
After tasting every outcome in advance, he couldn’t compose a single text.
No point serving a meal I’ve already devoured.
From that day forward he avoided Jian.
Why We Still Haven’t Held Hands
Psychologists call the condition anticipatory relationship.
The brain produces a finished screenshot and rejects real life’s low resolution.
So it takes a month to hold a hand — or we never do.
Inside my head he has already wounded me, come back, wept; I have wiped his tears and forgiven him.
Thus the first disappears from reality.
We’ve been dating since yesterday.
Our first kiss is in fact the twenty-third.
You Thought You Hadn’t Caught Fire Yet
After tonight, Seojin, Jian, or the name you just summoned may appear in a single line of text.
You will not be surprised.
Because you left the door wide open until he arrived.
You called his name even at this very moment.
So do you know what hurts more than the fact he hasn’t come?
The name you called never called you back.
Say it once more, then.
Under your breath, deep in your mouth, like a delicious sin stashed between bunk-bed mattresses.
If still no answer, you’ll be late again tomorrow, busy imagining him.