In a corner of the bookstore he tilted his head. “Am I… misreading this?” He confessed to a book he hadn’t yet opened, beginning with its very title. His finger tapped the first page—so white that the grime I’d hidden for years on my fingertips suddenly felt obscene. Beyond the novels whose endings I already knew, I met the gaze of someone who knew nothing at all. In truth, I wasn’t reading the book; I was reading the look in his eyes.
You Were Fine Because You Had Nothing
His reason for coming close was simple: ignorance. He didn’t know why a drunk man growled on the subway, why I burst into tears over a solo drink, why my heart dropped when three men stepped into an elevator. And I realized how exalted that unknowing was. He still carried belief in his body—not knowledge, but belief—wearing it like an unblemished child’s Sunday coat.
So I wanted to hide the body that could no longer stay clean. No—I wanted to soil that coat with my dirty hands.
Case 1: The “Young Tutor” and the Gloomy Lab
Lab assistant Hyewon, twenty-six. Student Doyoon, twenty. Doyoon had never exercised sexual autonomy, never tasted a hangover, never slipped on daytime sunglasses to sneak into a motel. Even in the basement laundromat he fastened every coat button; if handed the wrong red envelope, his face flamed scarlet.
Hyewon ran the “reeking experiments” for an eminent professor. The stench of sliced rat brains, the formaldehyde that clung to her clothes. While teaching him to handle glass slides, she let her fingers brush the back of his hand. He read each touch as teacher’s interest; she read them as the innocence I’m ruining.
“If you drop one bead here… the color changes, right?”
Doyoon’s voice was calm. The calm made it dangerous. Hyewon began to crave the simplicity of the storm inside him.
That night they switched off the lab lights, leaving only the glow of the microscope. Hyewon seized his wrist and showed him infected cells at forty-times magnification. They spread green. Doyoon believed that glow had migrated into his own body. The delusion was so beautiful that Hyewon wanted to go deeper.
Case 2: Roommate Yerin and Hometown Friend Hyunwoo
Yerin, twenty-nine. Hyunwoo, twenty-five. Since childhood he had called her noona. After military service he moved into her Seoul studio. Hyunwoo still called bean-sprout soup with a cracked egg “moving,” still marveled at sizzling charcoal in a barbecue joint.
Every night Yerin smoked while gaming. Hyunwoo called the drifting smoke “noona’s breath” and wanted to inhale it. One day Yerin read the diary he kept in secret. Inside, Hyunwoo had written: She is the biggest star in the universe.
I know that star no longer shines, but you still don’t—do you?
Yerin stroked his hair and stole his first kiss. Hyunwoo took it as a gift. Yerin surrendered her body to that misconception. Her body had been worn by others, yet Hyunwoo still longed to call her pure. That mismatch drove them both to the edge.
Why Are We Spellbound by Those Who Know Nothing?
Psychologists label the pull born of not-knowing naïveté attraction. When the remaining white space feels to us like a sheet already torn and crumpled, we either vow to keep it unspoiled—or ache to be the only one to mark it. Through another’s ignorance we confirm our own corruption, and that confirmation is so vivid that only in staining the goodness do we feel unmistakably alive.
A paradox: instead of stripping innocence, we beg it to cover us.