"If my mother can’t attend our wedding, would you step in and play her role instead?"
In the café of our first meeting, where new perfumes mingled in the air, that was the sentence he offered. Sujin flustered, gulped her Americano. What brushed her nose felt more bitter than coffee.
His mother was already dead
He could not recall his mother’s face. Or rather, he refused to. Not a single childhood photograph remained; even the color of the dress she once wore had faded to gray. Instead, he asked Sujin:
—Have you ever smelled the bride’s amnesia of my mother?
—What does that even mean?
—The taste of blood carried by a forgotten woman.
In that instant Sujin knew what he wanted. It was not love.
Anatomy of desire: the erotic hallucination of forgetting
Some men ransack a new woman’s body to erase the scent of their mother. It is not simple lust. It is a suicidal urge: I want the woman who bore me to vanish. They ask their lovers to commit matricide on their behalf.
I want the woman who gave me life to disappear. Fill her absence with you.
Stories as true as skin: two men
Min-jae (32, marketing director)
On the first date he clasped Eun-young’s wrist, claiming its pulse sounded like a lullaby. He said his mother had left when he was seven. That was a lie. His mother was alive, only her features had blurred. On the second date he asked:
—Close your eyes, will you?
—Why?
—I want your face to become my mother’s.
Eun-young closed her eyes. Min-jae pressed his lips to her eyelids. In that instant his mother was gone forever.
Ha-jun (28, composer)
At every first meeting he asked the same question:
—Do you smell of mother?
Most women recoiled. Ji-hee answered:
—I’d rather have a scent that is only mine.
That night Ha-jun buried his face in her hair until dawn. At 3 a.m. he whispered:
—Now your scent will replace my mother.
Why are we drawn to this?
Psychologists call it the maternal substitution fantasy. The phrase is too hygienic. The truth is filthier. We instinctively long to delete something—mother, father, the wound of the past. We delude ourselves that stuffing the void with a new person is love.
What we truly want is not to love someone, but to kill our past through them.
Whose mother do you wish to erase?
Back in the café of the first meeting, Sujin took the man’s hand and asked herself:
If I become this man’s mother, what woman will I turn into?
A deeper question followed:
Just as you are doing to me now, whose face are you erasing?