“Come back? The night is still long.”
11:43 p.m., a motel in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo. Hee-eun opened and closed her eyes like a slow strobe. Neon leaked through the curtains and grazed the foot of the bed. Her phone screen was silent. The last KakaoTalk from Seoul, 1,200 kilometers away, had arrived at 3 p.m.
“Meetings end, I’ll go straight home. Love you.”
Next to her, Junhyuk snored softly. Three hours earlier he had been merely her alumni senior; the same company had opened a Tokyo branch, and delight had slid under the quilt. Hee-eun rose quietly and walked to the bathroom. In the mirror her pupils still sparkled. The first thing that arrived after the orgasm was not nameless guilt, only the calculation: What time is it in Seoul right now?
A dreamlike tremor, a twisted compass
Long-distance love is ironic. To prove devotion you must do nothing, yet the silence swells until your fingertips itch. Am I the only one? is too shameful to ask out loud; Of course he feels the same is too hollow to believe. So we spy on one another, trying to freeze moments like camera flashes, yet capture only blurred silhouettes. Because we never know when, where, or with whom, imagination fills the gaps, and the color it chooses is always the sentence we least want to hear.
“Let’s end it here.”
“I’m exhausted too.”
“There’s someone else.”
Line 2, an anonymous kiss
“I don’t even know why I did it. The hours we weren’t talking felt like a shelter someone else offered.”
Jiseon had been riding the KTX to Busan for six months. Yumin in Seoul had proposed the long-distance arrangement, but both were waiting to see who would be first to develop “an errand.” When she reached Busan, Jiseon spent a night at a pension near Seomyeon Station, then texted from the front of Yumin’s apartment: Trip over!
That day the man’s name was also Min-su—this time not the pension owner but a neighborhood friend who had happened to sit beside her for a beer. Jiseon declined Yumin’s video call. Anxiety—Why didn’t the screen lock?—was slower than the rationalization: This is just obsession. Thirty minutes later Yumin texted: Hey, I couldn’t call either—met a friend last minute. See you tomorrow!
Butterfly effect, flipping the hourglass
What we truly fear is not simply betrayal, but the possibility that I may have begun it. Psychologists call this “groundless certainty”: while suspecting the other, we quietly believe I could have done the same. That belief summons infidelity, a self-fulfilling prophecy that both will be identical. The question of who started it becomes irrelevant; what matters is the compulsion that when one flips the hourglass, the other must scatter the sand.
Three months later, Incheon Airport
Hee-eun returned from Tokyo. During the fifteen-minute wait for her luggage she read a text from Yumin.
“Let’s meet tonight. I want to say what you think I want to say.”
The affair with Min-su was over. It ended the day he said, “I’m just your Seoul proxy.” Hee-eun could not tell whether the words sprang from his insecurity or her own guilt.
On the airport bus she studied Yumin’s Kakao profile picture—unchanged in three months, yet something was different. Curiosity about who he held while I was away had vanished. What remained was the rebound question: Who did I hold while he was away?
Are you still dodging that question?
“Do you love that person, or do you love the certainty that that person will not love you?”
Hee-eun stepped forward to claim her suitcase. Between the circling bags she thought: What we really dread is missing the moment we get hurt. So I started first, and now I must finish.
The airport lights dimmed. She hailed a cab. Outside, the city looked larger after three months—or her eyes had grown smaller. When she next faces Yumin, she will ask first:
“How many times did you think of me?”
And then she must ask herself:
“How many times did I fail to think of you?”