A single strand of hair on the white pillow
"Not tonight either?"
Jun-yeong kept his eyes on the TV remote. The black screen sliced the space between us. I waited, reading his face, until half past two. For an hour the scent I had pressed deep into my lingerie had teased my own nostrils. He knew. I knew. I’m still young. I’m still alive.
A bed gone cold as marble
Before we married, Jun-yeong’s breath caught at the mere brush of my hand. On the subway, if our fingertips grazed, his ears flamed. Now? Even when my bare skin skims his waist, he stares past me at the city lights beyond the glass. Body heat cools in an instant. Which cooled first—flesh or affection? When did love start pushing me into the coldest, farthest corner of this house?
The mummified wife and the voyeur husband
Perhaps he’s found someone else to look at instead of me.
Night after night I was tormented by that suspicion. Whenever Jun-yeong’s gaze lingered on some actress in a commercial, I clutched the soft roll of my belly. His pajamas grew looser; mine shorter, the straps thinner. Still, he never stirred. Our bed had become a cave—two separate caves. In his corner he watched YouTube; in mine I endured the flickering eyes of imaginary men on my phone. I can still be someone’s desire.
March 14—like a warning bell
That night he came home at two a.m. I pretended to sleep. He showered, lay down. Then his hand brushed my waist. A trivial contact, yet unmistakable: cold desire rising not from the brain but from below.
"Asleep?" His breath grazed my ear. I rolled over. His eyes were dark, a stranger’s gaze I hadn’t seen in ten years. His hand moved to my breast; the flesh stiffened with dread.
Why now? Why when I’ve finally given up?
We mingled our bodies that night, but I kept my eyes shut. While his fingers guided me, I summoned our first kiss a decade earlier. Those once-scorching lips now felt like ice. My body received him, yet my soul had already locked the door.
The same strategy, another couple
I heard about my friend Hye-jin, nine years in. Her husband Min-seok had also cited "stress" and ignored her body for two years. Then one day, out of nowhere, he stroked her thigh—for the simple reason that a new female colleague resembled her. Hye-jin said, "Yes, he wants me, but only as a screen to project that woman onto."
We have become the canvases for our husbands’ desire for someone else. They lust after another through us and call it “reigniting the spark.”
The boomerang of power
Why does a husband forsake his wife’s body—then suddenly set it aflame again? Esther Perel reminds us that in long relationships, desire is inseparable from power. When he turns away, he is exercising power: I can always refuse; my desire is independent of you.
But the moment that power wavers—when the wife looks elsewhere, stops pleading, smiles at some faceless man on her phone—panic strikes. What if she falls for someone who isn’t me?
That fear relights the fire, yet the flame drops onto skin already scarred. The wife no longer burns with longing; she merely burns.
Whom are you seeing when you look at me?
These days Jun-yeong approaches me again. He watches me dry myself after a shower. Now I close the door. Once I would have done anything for a flicker of his gaze; now I stand where his eyes cannot reach.
Do you see me, or the woman I am not?
I no longer wait for an answer. I simply grip the doorknob and, in the space beyond his reach, begin the slower work of finding myself.
Is your body still someone’s desire, or has it already turned to desert?