“Now all that’s left for me is how much you can hurt me,” she said. From the bed. Had it been my head on her pillow, the words might have sounded sweet; instead, the strands threaded through her fingers were light chestnut, not black. One shade away, and the world collapsed.
I loved her. A woman. And she said she loved me. A woman.
The wound was not in my fingertips but in my faith
Why did it have to be a man? What did he have that I don’t?
We like to believe orientation is a simple compass—homosexual, heterosexual. But betrayal is measured in distance, not direction. A gulf I could never cross. The man inside her body became the emblem of everything I could never be.
A penis. Did I want it? Or did I want her not to want it?
Min-seo said, “He looked like you”
Min-seo, 29, designer, three years with her girlfriend Hye-won. One night Hye-won came home tipsy, the back of her neck steeped in a man’s cologne. Min-seo said nothing. The next morning Hye-won spoke as though she were commenting on the weather.
“I didn’t mean to, but it happened. And Min, he looked like you. If you were a man, you’d be him.”
That sentence drove Min-seo mad. The idea that the stranger had resembled her amplified the betrayal: another version of herself had satisfied her lover in ways she never could.
Ji-hwan cried in the bathroom, because she was a woman
Ji-hwan, 31, marketer, five years with her boyfriend Do-hyun. Do-hyun confessed he had been seeing a female colleague for a month.
“I’m sorry. It felt… different. Softer. Warmer…”
Ji-hwan remembered boys at school snickering that lesbian sex wasn’t real sex. The joke had become her reality. Because she was a woman, she had granted her lover the “real” thing Ji-hwan could never give.
That night Ji-hwan locked herself in the bathroom and cried behind the sound of running water.
Did Do-hyun love me only because I’m a woman? If I were a man, would he have left sooner?
Not being that man, what could I do?
A taboo is a border you cannot cross. We call homosexuality a choice, yet betrayal happens after the choosing. Unable to substitute for the man inside her, what was left for me? Unable to enter her body, unable to complete her pleasure.
So we envy more fiercely. The woman who is not a man. The man who is not a woman.
When your lover sleeps with the gender you are not, who are you?
I loved a woman. She loved a man. What stood between us? Mere homosexuality? Or is every act of love already an act of betrayal against someone else?
If your lover lies with the gender you can never become, who are you then? Still yourself—or only the shadow of someone you will never be?