“Babe, did you take a sleeping pill?”
At that question I was twisting the cap of the glass vial, and his voice made me lose my grip. A small white tablet rolled off the edge of the blanket and disappeared among the folds. The room became unnaturally quiet. His breathing on the other end of the line now sounded like cold wind in my ear.
It’s nothing, just insomnia… I started to say, but even I could hear how hollow the excuse was.
While I Slept, the Room Shifted
It began innocently enough. The new job kept me awake, so after hanging up I swallowed the same pill at the same minute every night: 11:11. The ritual settled into muscle memory— clink of glass, gulp of water—then my mind whitened like an erased slate.
The problem arrived the next morning. His drowsy “Morning, you up?” sat strangely on my tongue. My fingertips still carried the pill’s bitterness, my skull felt like a locked door.
Fine. I’ll answer later.
Gift or Curse in a Capsule
Park Seoyeon—twenty-eight, account executive at an ad agency. I had opened her KakaoTalk profile hundreds of times, yet for two weeks I hadn’t even managed that. Or rather, I couldn’t. Once the pill dissolved, desire iced over; no impulse surfaced, as if a thin sheet of iron had slid across my brain.
“Shall we grab dinner—” His sentence never finished.
“Sorry, I took my pill…” I murmured, already wondering why I was apologizing.
That night Seoyeon went to a wine bar alone. I lay in bed with my eyes shut. At 11:38 her message arrived: a photo of a half-empty bottle, a male colleague’s fingers curled around the same glass stem.
Good-bye, My Appetite
The pill did more than grant sleep. It smothered every urge—to love, to text, to ache for the sound of his voice—as though someone had slammed a steel gate inside my head.
Oddly, the ache I once carried in my throat blurred. Is that so terrible? I asked myself. If love had been a fire, the tablet was the water thrown on the flames.
Her Room, Minus One Temperature
“You’ve been strange lately,” Kim Hyunsoo said, toeing off his shoes at my door. His embrace felt suffocating. Warm skin met mine, yet I only grew colder.
Do I love him, or am I simply performing love?
He fetched a bottle from the fridge and froze. The white pills stood in neat formation.
“You’re still taking these?”
I shrugged. The bulb in his gaze flickered out, as though someone had turned off the wrong light.
The Sound of a Snapped Thread
We argued all night, no sleep. He said I had changed; I said I was tired. Both were true. Keeping love alive had become exhausting.
After Hyunsoo left, I lay staring at the vial. Then I understood: I wasn’t taking the pill because I couldn’t sleep. I was taking it because I couldn’t love. His voice, his scent, his touch—once too close, now too far.
A Question Left on the Pillow
Did the pill ruin love, or had love already cracked and sent me looking for the pill?
We often bury the wrong answer beneath the wrong question. The vial on my nightstand answers only with silence.
I still swallow one tablet at the same hour. But now, instead of someone else’s voice, I ingest the debris of a desire I once reached for.
Perhaps you, too, keep a tiny habit that nudged love out of reach. Where, in the dark, is the glass bottle you closed while you slept?