“I need a little time”
“I’d like some distance—just for a bit.” Corner table of a café. I spoke; he set his cup down. I didn’t know then that an expression is more than muscles rearranging themselves. I heard the sound of a face collapsing. He only tilted his head, yet his eyelids sagged, the corners of his mouth lifted, and a faint heat rose in his cheeks. His pupils glittered, a film of tears skimming past. I engraved the scene on my memory. This is the real face, I thought.
The tremor no one notices
When you ask for distance, most people show one of three things: surprise, anger, or wariness. But there is a fourth: terror. Not the fear of being abandoned, but the dread of having a lifetime’s disguise torn away. When your lover drops one wall, something long hidden in the drawer springs out—sometimes the shabby craving of a child, sometimes the mania of a stalker. We are always performing, under the stage name Love. Yet the single sentence “Give me room” throws on a spotlight, and the creature backstage peels off its puppet skin.
That night, Yuri told me
“When he knocked, I saw it for the first time. His eyes had flipped inside out.” Yuri texted me. A month earlier she had asked her boyfriend for a pause; it ended with a police call.
I said I needed a little space, but he stood outside my window for three hours. His eyes had no focus. Later I saw the CCTV from 4 a.m.—his expression… the eyes were so enlarged he looked inhuman. Yuri paused. Her last line: “After that face, I couldn’t believe it had ever been love.”
Junho smiled
Junho was different. When I asked for space he nodded and smiled. Too smooth. A chill crawled over my scalp. The skin around his eyes never moved; only the corners of his mouth lifted—a smile far more frightening for its stillness.
‘Go as far as you can. You’ll come back to me anyway.’ The sentence was etched into his pupils. Did he think I wouldn’t see? Or did he, perhaps, want me to?
Why are we drawn?
Psychologists say obsession is the counter-move to the terror of being discarded. True, but there is a deeper reason. We ache to see the other’s real face. Love is, in the end, an expedition into a foreign land—opening the one room of you I have never entered. So we leave the door ajar on purpose. What if you hate me? What if you miss me? And when the latch lifts, a red glint flashes—the vivid face of naked desire. We feel a secret thrill: You’ll never let me go.
And so
I still don’t know whether the face he showed the day I asked for space was love, possession, or plain fear. I only know this: when I meet that face again, no one can predict the face I’ll be wearing. Did you truly want to leave? Or did you want one more glimpse of that expression?