“Drinks this weekend?” The sentence dropped into the chatroom after seven long years. A name that had grown faint yet still clung to the back of my throat. I was in the middle of a meeting; I turned the phone face-down and flexed my toes. I wasn’t trembling—my body simply remembered. March 2017: the moment the back of his hand brushed mine.
A name still tingling on my fingertips
For two years we kept the temperature of “we both know, though we never say it.” We kissed; we spent a few fierce nights together, yet neither of us named what we were. Then one day he vanished, mumbling only that he was going abroad. His profile didn’t disappear—worse, it stayed online while our chat remained forever unread. A living message, forever unopened. That ghost sat inside me for seven years.
No reason for coming back
His message arrived on a May night. We met near Gangnam Station, in the bar where it had all begun. I couldn’t ask, “Why now?” Instead he said, I just felt like a drink. Just a drink? …Just. A dry martini in hand, vintage jazz behind us, we traded the same awkward jokes. His eyes were foreign yet familiar. Did he carry me around the way I carried him? The thought scalded my throat. I couldn’t look away from his hands. Are we starting again, or simply finishing what never ended?
Two months, every scene a déjà vu
After that, we met twice a week. The pattern was effortless. Friday-evening drinks, back-corner booth, then our separate apartments. Each kiss closed my eyes and spun the clock back to March 2017. He still whispered in my ear: You’re the only one I think of. I wanted to believe him—and at the same time tried not to. The man who had abandoned me seven years ago might vanish again after two short months. I knew it, really: he hadn’t returned for love but for wordless absolution.
The night he disappeared again
July 12, 2:17 a.m. The last line in our chat: “On my way.” After that—nothing. The phone stayed silent. I stared out the window until dawn. This time I must not reach out first. I had sworn the same seven years earlier. One month, two, three… he remained in the state of unread. I began to interpret his silence: maybe illness, maybe family trouble, maybe—please—not me. Maybes grew like a jigsaw with no edges. Was the silence my fault? Looking back, it always was. I had a habit of filling another’s absence with my own flaws. In truth it was simply his way: to treat disappearance as virtue.
Why do we try to grasp it again?
Psychologists say unfinished emotional loops keep the brain in an “open circuit.” No matter how much time passes, the conversation that never ended keeps replaying inside the skull. So we return—not for the lover, but for the self we never finished. Those two months were for the woman I was seven years ago. When I took him back into my arms, I was really embracing my past: the 27-year-old me, the one who cried soundlessly, the one who couldn’t say I love you. What came back wasn’t him; it was the ghost inside me.
I ask you, finally: do you also carry a silence that suddenly whispers why? And do you secretly wait for that silence to rise again, to brush against your lips?