“Dad, I got married…”
The heart monitor’s shrill beeps slice down the corridor, and through the window an ashen sky sinks lower. Room 301; her father’s lids are already half-drawn. The drip ticks, a nurse’s footsteps, then her finger—sliding across the phone—taps the black screen twice.
“You here?”
The sender: Junhyuk.
While my husband was in the bathroom for thirty seconds, that narrow crack was the only air I breathed.
The hidden door at the corridor’s end
Her father is still breathing, but she already clutches a marriage that feels like a signed death certificate. Her husband repeats “I’m exhausted,” her mother-in-law mutters, “Stop fretting over your parents.”
So she finds another door behind the marriage—a secret messenger room balanced on thin ice.
The first text to Junhyuk came at 2:17 a.m., forty-seven days ago.
“Can’t sleep.” A naked line of loneliness.
He answered in four seconds:
“Me neither.”
Forty-seven days of very small infidelity
Mirahee, thirty-five, had meant to keep vigil beside her husband.
Week one. He snored through the nights, hunting only for a charger. She held her father’s hand and answered work emails on her laptop.
Week two. A curt directive: “Dinner meeting, I’ll be late.” That night she sent Junhyuk her first photo—her father’s IV running dry at 3:12 a.m.
Week three. In the waiting-room chair she let Junhyuk listen to the sound of her father dying: a short voice note. At its end they breathed each other’s silence like a stimulant. Her husband lingered in the bathroom for twenty minutes claiming an upset stomach.
Nothing happened. We simply confirmed, while watching death, that the other was still alive.
Her hottest moment
The day the doctor pronounced imminent death: “A day, maybe two.” Still, Mirahee messaged Junhyuk.
“When Dad closes his eyes, I’ll close mine too.”
“You mustn’t. You have to stay alive.”
That evening her husband said he was “too tired” and left for a motel. Alone in the ward, she kept hold of her father’s hand and slid her body beneath the bed.
In the dark she whispered another man’s name for the first time, fingers moving. Her father’s breathing faltered; hers paused with it.
Why, even before death, do we choose loneliness?
Freud spoke of the death drive, but stronger still is the hollow where connection never reaches. Marriage wears the mask of intimacy, yet at the moments that pierce the soul—the ward, the deathbed, 3:17 a.m.—we face a silent wall.
The institution may not protect us; it may simply lock us in. Inside that locked room we die a little each day, and so we look for another door. Junhyuk was not Mirahee’s love; he was the crack through which she could still breathe.
Whose hand do you want to let go of right now?
Her father’s eyes finally closed. At the funeral her husband asked, “What can I do?” Mirahee gave no answer. What she sought was not Junhyuk but her own empty hand.
In this very moment, whose hand are you longing to release? Or, with no one holding yours, are you groping alone in the darkness behind your phone?