“You can’t leave me. No one else can fill you the way I do.” When he whispered it, half-drunk, into my ear, why did the words feel like ecstasy? That night I swallowed whole the photos of other women on his phone, gulping them down until they scraped my throat. No tears, no rage—only the vertigo of his instability crashing over me like a wave. He always staggered just enough to leave a gap I could slip into. Stability bored me; instability fed me.
I wanted to wring every last drop, even if it was only flavorless.
Choosing the unstable man was never a lapse of judgment. Inside me, a gnawing sense of insufficiency had been writhing for years. My mother used to say, “I hoped you’d be better. Then you could be loved.” Years later the sentence changed lovers: If you endure more, ache more, you’ll finally be loved. So I devoured his feverish love like a blood-stained lemon I was determined to juice dry. Each time he rolled in the sheets with another woman, I clutched him tighter, as if in revenge. After this, he’ll look only at me. I vowed it again and again, and each time the hunger returned.
Yuria: He Was Always There, Until He Wasn’t
On her twenty-second birthday, Yuria first saw Eun-jae—the man who kicked open the back door of the graduate seminar because the professor had just altered the exam scope. Her pen clattered to the floor; when he bent to retrieve it, she sized him up in a heartbeat.
That violence—maybe I can make it aim only at me.
From that day on, Eun-jae became her refuge. When he vanished drunk to a senior’s apartment or tore up his exam papers, Yuria opened both arms. “It’s all right. You’re exhausted, but I’m here.” Curled against her, he slept like a child. Yet every dawn he disappeared to places she could never map. Yuria smiled brightly: “Actually, I’m more excited when he’s gone. Unstable people… they always need filling, and I’m the only one who can.”
Eventually Eun-jae left the country. No forwarding address. Yuria still checks his KakaoTalk profile a dozen times a day; each change of photo tightens her throat—who is he with now? In her nightstand drawer rests the frayed sweater he once wore. The scent is long gone, yet sometimes she presses it to her face. Even emptiness is love.
Sujin: How to Reassemble Shattered Love
Three months after her wedding, Sujin received divorce papers. That same night she met Min-seo, sobbing in front of a convenience store over a chocolate bar she’d bought herself—she hadn’t received a single Valentine’s gift at work. Sujin stuffed the divorce decree into her back pocket and offered Min-seo a bite.
“Min-seo says I was her only comfort—she didn’t even get Valentine’s chocolate at the office.”
Sujin’s eyes lit up.
She can endure anything as long as I exist. Without me… Min-seo is nothing.
Twice a week Min-seo called, crying. “Maybe I should quit my job. Focus only on me.” Sujin knelt each time and held her again. “It’s okay. I have everything you need.”
Six months later Min-seo began finding stability. After work she drank with friends instead of Sujin. One night she went silent. At 2 a.m. Sujin waited on Min-seo’s landing for more than an hour. When the lights finally flicked on, Min-seo arrived laughing, arm-in-arm with a female colleague. As the door shut, Sujin scrolled through their Kakao messages and screamed silently: What was it I couldn’t fill?
In that instant she understood: the day Min-seo ceased being unstable, she ceased loving Sujin.
When we feel love is scarce, we choose scarcity itself.
Children whose parents loved inconsistently grow up confirming “real love” only in unstable arms. The fantasy this time it will be different is a pain-seeking instinct wired into the brain. An unstable lover’s affection is like broth poured into a starving child’s mouth—ecstasy so fierce the chest seems it will burst. Yet we are never sated. The unstable beloved is the last crust of bread on a famished jaw: once swallowed, only deeper hollowness remains. Still we reach for the next crust, because hunger has become our identity.
That night I stood with the refrigerator door gaping open. Inside, every ingredient gleamed fresh, but I could not swallow a bite. Now that his instability was gone, I no longer knew how to feed myself. The meat and greens stared back as if they were the very shape of my lack. Suddenly all the moments I mistook for love—moments steeped in someone else’s chaos—overlapped.
I realized what I had truly starved for was not love but myself, named Insufficiency. Therefore—
No one will come to feed this hunger now.
In the dark mouth of the empty fridge I slowly closed my own mouth. And then the door. In the darkness only hunger remained.