The instant the baby’s head slipped through the Red-Sea gash between her legs, the surgical floodlights scorched Seo-yeong’s sight white. She closed her eyes, then opened them. A mirror. A mirror fixed to the ceiling had been tilted down, and inside it the woman called “mother” was already looking past the child she had just delivered. In the burning crimson haze the infant had not yet opened its eyes, but the mother’s gaze was already leaving.
“…I’m sorry you came out.”
At that moment, sharper than the pain of the anesthesia wearing off, the words bored back into her womb. The nurse turned away; the doctor snipped the thread. The baby was exposed to air without even the strength to cry. That was the first time Seo-yeong understood: love does not begin when you slip out of someone else’s body; it ends the instant your body becomes someone else’s.
A black plastic bag lay by the hospital’s rear exit. As hazy as dawn fog, it bore no mark, yet the moment her fingertips brushed it, it turned winter-cold. At 03:42 on 14 August 1999, inside it lay the darkness that had been hers thirty-two hours earlier.
Nurse Hyo-jin lit a cigarette. When she lifted the bag, she licked her lip with the tip of her tongue. The smoke rose white, like the baby’s first breath. The black bag did not cry.
While you were inside me, I wanted you. The moment you came out, I no longer did.
At twenty-one, Min-seo listened to her mother’s KakaoTalk voice message. The breath crackling from the speaker sounded as thin as the voice she must have had as a newborn.
“…remember? The dawn of August 14, ’99?”
“Why bring that up now…?”
“I told you then—I regretted giving birth to you…”
That night Min-seo left the house wearing only a light coat. Her chest was so cold she could not bear another layer. Outside the convenience store she met a man of twenty-seven. He said he saw in her eyes the scars of hating one’s own mother. That night Min-seo exhaled her mother’s regret five times. Above the man’s body she opened the black bag. It was empty, yet inside stood her own face.
Winter, 2020. While sorting her mother’s belongings, Su-jin—forty-one—found a single diary.
5 January 1980. The baby was born today. Its eyes were so deep… I was afraid it already knew every sin of mine. I regret giving birth. This child is heaven’s punishment.
Su-jin went down to the underground garage. Her mother’s car had stayed in the same spot for forty years. When she turned the key, the engine moaned—ah, her mother’s voice. Gripping the swollen curve of her own belly, Su-jin drove. She ran red lights, ignored crosswalks, and suddenly understood: her mother’s regret had not been aimed at her. It had been aimed at herself.
- Min-seo returned to the hospital. The black bag was gone from the back door. In its place lay a fresh one. When she opened it, cold air slipped out. Nothing was inside, yet she felt it—the air of the night she was born, still here after eighteen years. She stepped into the bag and closed it. In the darkness she saw her own face, a frozen breath standing in her pupils. Min-seo opened her mouth.
“The instant you came out, I had already left you.”
The sentence was trapped in the bag and never escaped.