“Do you still think about that woman?”
“Jun-young, do you still think about that woman?” At my friend’s question I set the glass down. The moment it almost rolled off the table, that night from twenty-three years ago rose up like slow smoke.
At twenty-three I was the kid shoplifting beer from the convenience store near campus for her; she was forty-nine. We shared a first kiss that must never be spoken of.
A scar left by wrinkled fingertips
Why do I still remember the blue veins etched across the back of her hand?
The back of her hand was a map drawn by time. Blue veins flowed like rivers, wrinkled skin rose like mountain ranges. At twenty-three I used that map as an excuse never to let go.
“It’s a map, so you won’t lose me,” she laughed. That was the first time I understood what power was. She knew exactly where to press my youth to make it ache. When I said I was hurting, she would cradle me yet whisper, “You still know nothing.” The words drove me mad. I’d run to her shouting that I knew everything. Each time she kissed my forehead and murmured, “Still adorable.”
A second fate in the underground garage
Why does a desire we believed finished make us feel most alive when it returns?
Last month we met by chance in the apartment building’s underground garage. She was no longer forty-eight but fifty-two. I was thirty-six. Time had flipped us completely.
She recognized me at once.
“Long time no see, Jun-young.”
“…Professor.”
“Still calling me that?”
Her laughter filled the concrete hollow. I was the boy of twenty-three again. She seized my wrist and pulled me into the elevator. The moment the doors closed she said:
“Now I’m the older one. You’ve grown, I suppose.”
The final lesson she taught
At twenty-three I believed everything she taught me was love. Looking back, it wasn’t love at all. It was the aesthetics of dominance and submission, and even now, twenty-three years later, it still rules me.
Whenever she sees me she says, “I still see the boy you were.”
- Standing before her I revert to the twenty-three-year-old kid.
- She still whispers, “Still so young.”
- That difference binds us together again.
I live with a wife four years my junior. She wonders why I linger in underground garages. She doesn’t understand why I flinch at a fifty-something woman’s KakaoTalk notification.
Desire’s time cannot be rewound
Psychologists call it the return of an unfulfilled desire. But I know better. It isn’t simply the wish left incomplete; it is the scent of the first moment I was governed by someone other than myself that I crave.
Even now, when I glimpse the back of her hand, I want to walk that map again. There is something like gravity in it. The older we grow, the more we seek the weight we first felt. She was that original weight in my twenties. Now she is heavier, deeper, more perilous.
A final question
When, one sudden day, you set out to find someone from thirty years ago, is it mere memory—or the desire to reclaim the self you once abandoned?