“Isaac, I still love you.” She murmured it at 2:47 a.m., the bedside lamp casting a faint bruise of light across the room. I kept my eyes shut and answered with counterfeit snores. The word love floated from her lips weightless, hollow. An hour earlier I had already woken to a softer sound: her whisper from the bathroom.
Jung-woo. Three syllables slid along the edge of the bed and grazed my ear. It was not my name.
A Thirst Beyond the Word Love
Often what we call love is merely fear wearing its most convenient disguise. Whenever the name Jung-woo flashed across her phone, her eyes glinted like a pointer’s. I knew that gleam was trained on someone else, yet the dread that a single I love you might bring the ceiling down kept my eyelids sealed.
I was raked by a nameless thirst. It wasn’t simply sex I craved. I itched all over, as though love were a festering sore, terrified of losing her, desperate to keep even the tip of a finger on her skin. Each time she remained inside the fence called “husband,” I wanted to prove how flimsy the fence really was. Instead of knocking on the door she had closed with a declaration of love, I went looking for another key—terrifying myself in the process.
The Night She Called for Jung-woo
High-rise 809, Tower A, Gangnam. Our bedroom turned into a dark jungle after midnight.
“Working late again,” she said. The screen showed “Jung-woo (Samsung)” seven times in a row. I didn’t miss the slight tremor in her pupils; it was not the look one gives a co-worker.
At 1:12 a.m. she rose and slipped to the living room. I followed. Behind the sofa she lowered her voice:
Jung-woo, I can’t sleep without you. Tonight I almost ended it, but your smile keeps replaying.
The words sliced my chest open. I stepped forward and folded my arms around her from behind. She startled, the phone clattered, and on its screen Jung-woo’s profile smiled up at the city beyond our window.
After that night we could no longer look at each other. Meeting eyes risked discovering who would first dare to say I love you again.
Second vignette: Su-jin Lee, housewife in Bupyeong, Incheon, married nine years. Every night she repeats the same line to her husband, Kim Hyun-su: “I still love you today.” Yet her diary carries an entry dated April 7, 2023:
While he stayed out until dawn, I thought of Jung-woo. When I closed my eyes I felt his breath on my ear. Kim Hyun-su will never know. What lingers is not that I loved him, but that I said I did.
The Sweetness of the Forbidden, the Emptiness After
It isn’t merely language that fails when love collides with betrayal. We raise the word like a shield, but the shield is cracked from within.
People claim love is trust; in truth trust is only hunger. Each time the name Jung-woo surfaced, my body starved. A damp, furtive thirst no avowal of love could slake—a smoke rising from the ashes of burned desire.
Under the banner of marriage we believe we bind each other, yet what we crave is monopoly. Monopoly is merely chronic anxiety wearing another mask, and that anxiety keeps inventing new Jung-woos.
Who Lies at Your Pillow Tonight?
The instant we realize the word love cannot bear the weight of betrayal, what choice remains?
Tonight, when you whisper “I love you,” do those lips still rest where the words can be trusted? Or have they already carried someone else’s name back to your pillow?
Love, in the end, is only the question of what fruit our lies will bear. And the fruit is never sweet.