“Excuse me—did you drop something?”
The bus stop, 4:30 p.m. Charcoal clouds pressed down as if to flay the sky. She stood beneath a clear umbrella, absently turning the silver hoop in her left ear. The thin ring trembled.
Kang Jun-hyeok mistook that tremor for a knock on his own heart and stepped forward.
One more step and she’ll look at me.
He was an ordinary man—twenty-nine, office worker, never once in love until last week. Yet in that instant he felt like the protagonist of the world, the chill on her nape merely stage fog for his scene.
“Excuse me.”
She did not turn. She tilted her head, touching the earring again. Jun-hyeok stopped breathing, imagining her fingertips on his throat.
“Did you drop something?”
Even now, she remembers the company bus stop. The stranger who approached through the rain, holding up a dripping umbrella, eyes strange—a blend of arrogance and fear. What had the arrogance been?
Why do we chase the scent of the unknown?
I suppose he already thought I belonged to him.
When she boarded the bus, Jun-hyeok’s heart collapsed. She had never once looked at him, yet he had already scripted tomorrow’s lunch-break encounter: the same café, the same table, the line I brought your umbrella back.
He had not fallen in love. He had fallen into capture—the delusion born from a stranger’s back: She is waiting for me; she just doesn’t know it yet.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls this the Target Fantasy—seeing only the story we ourselves have written across an unknown face. The script invariably follows three beats:
- She is special (simply because she is unknown).
- She seems lonely (simply because she stands alone).
- Only I can cure that loneliness (simply because I approached).
Scenario One: Line 2, the subway
“Sorry—what’s the title of your book?”
Park Seo-yeon looked up. The man opposite smiled, pointing with a finger at her cover.
How can he be so certain when he doesn’t even know my name?
“Oh, this?” she answered cautiously. His gaze was too hot. “Just a novel.”
“Is it out as an e-book? I’m sensitive to smells…”
Smells? Seo-yeon’s brow creased.
“I mean—not the paper smell. The subway smell… sweet metal, you know.”
At that moment Seo-yeon understood: he wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at the character named ‘Seo-yeon’ he had created—the woman who locks eyes on the train, pretty enough, lonely enough, reading just the right book.
“I love books too,” he continued. “Everyone else is buried in their phones.”
Seo-yeon nodded, but her eyes were fixed on a flake of dandruff on his lashes. He didn’t feel her gaze; he was watching, inside his head, the scene where she welcomes him.
Scenario Two: A triangular kimbap at the convenience store
“Melona and canned cocktails—together they smell like the sea, right?”
Lee Su-jin, kimbap in hand, turned. A man by the register was staring, beer cans clutched in both hands.
“I mean—I like that combo too.”
Su-jin saw his fingertips tremble: the borderline between arrogance and anxiety. He was already strolling along the night beach with her—no, with an image of her arm linked through his.
“I eat that every summer,” Su-jin answered. She had simply been hungry; the Melona and kimbap were coincidence. But to him it was fate: same store, same time, same snack. All of it couldn’t be random.
He accepted his receipt. “Would you… like to eat together?”
Su-jin hesitated. In that second the man’s eyes flickered: What if she says no? The arrogance began to crack.
The moment we mistake possession for love
He doesn’t love me—he loves the self he becomes through me.
Psychologist Harville Hendrix says most men who approach unknown women are infatuated not with the women but with the man they get to perform—dashing, confident, the thief of hearts. The woman is merely stage dressing.
The arrogance deepens the more they “understand” each other. When she mentions loving a film he adores, the man is certain: We’re fated.
But it is a mirage. She simply likes the film; she does not like him through the film.
A final question
Tonight, on the subway, the stranger you lock eyes with—what is the true reason you want to approach her?
To know her—or to animate the doll you have already named ‘her’?
Or perhaps… you too are someone else’s doll.