"Fine—if I marry you, I ruin my life too." Min-seo’s voice shrank into the 3 a.m. living room. The wall-clock ticked toward a ceremony still forty-five days away, each beat counting down like a death knell. The stack of invitations between us had not yet suffered a sudden death, yet the stench of something already dying clung to the paper.
That night we promised not to kill each other. Instead of knives, we would use words; we would survive by becoming the walking dead.
A Dance on Blood-Soaked Stationery
When did marriage turn into hell?
No— it always was.
We chose to become the fingernails that claw at each other’s wounds: Min-seo’s jealousy of my exes, my obsessive neatness, the bruises our parents left on our skin. We pieced the shards together like a puzzle and lied to ourselves: We’re special.
Even when we picked the invitation design. "How about a hint of red?" Min-seo asked. I nodded without thinking, as if some part of me already knew.
The Last Pillow She Left
Last April, in a Gangnam apartment, Jin-woo still hasn’t peeled the invitation off the sliding door. Beneath "Jin-woo ♥ Na-young, May 27" the erased pen marks have set into a scab.
Jin-woo, may I have one cushion?
…I don’t need it anymore. Keep them all.
Everything you ever held back.
After work Na-young climbed into Jin-woo’s car. The dash-cam captured thirty-seven seconds of kissing. She sent the clip to his fiancée. It was three days after the invitations had gone out.
Later, drunk in a bar, Jin-woo said, "I was going to break up with Na-young anyway. But when I saw the invitations, I lost it. I realized I was the one running away."
The Possibility of Filthy Happiness
Why do we cling to relationships we long to end?
The absolute rite of a wedding carves out a moral loophole: the incantation We’ve come too far to stop now. Perhaps the lie was begun precisely so we could finish it.
It isn’t fear—it’s desire.
Not the hope that our future selves will be happy, but the craving to be soiled right now. Let everything shatter at the altar. Let the guests trade knowing glances. Let our parents despair. Only then can I rot completely.
Are You Still Wiping That Night’s Blood?
Even now, someone is throwing invitations away, tapping out a message: We regret to inform you the ceremony has been canceled.
And perhaps someone else is letting fresh blood drip onto that same card stock.
Tell me: whose invitation did you once dream of tearing apart?