“Mr. Kim, they say your wife was really wild back in college?”
Company dinner. My husband wasn’t meant to hear it—just a drunken aside from a colleague. That night he lay awake, eyes open, while his wife snored softly beside him. In his mind, the college festival blazed again: her laughing in another man’s arms.
The anatomy of desire
Seven years married. We believed we had sealed each other’s past. But it was no seal; it was a fuse. The girl I never knew, the years I never shared, resurrected in someone else’s mouth—why does it scald like this?
The helplessness when the illusion shatters: “I possess her.”
Her past is no longer our private opera. Men in the audience are already mouthing the lines.
First detonation
“Hey, your wife is stunning.”
Park Jun-ho recalled Team-leader Choi’s words at the office club. Another drinking night. Choi had been their college senior. “Song Ji-yeong, right? Same department. 2013 MT—total madness. She crawled out of a tent at dawn…”
Jun-ho’s glass tipped, soju soaking his suit. No one noticed. From that day on, whenever Ji-yeong visited the office he couldn’t move. What if someone else…
Second impact
Jun-ho dug up an old Facebook message—three years ago—from one of Ji-yeong’s classmates.
“Brought you up at drinks tonight. The night you first did it with your boyfriend… said it was crazy hot ㅋㅋ Everyone freaked.”
Ji-yeong had deleted it. Jun-ho had taken a screenshot. That night, on top of her, he suddenly pulled away. Another man’s voice echoed in his ear.
Why do we burn so hot?
Lacan: “Desire is the desire of the Other.” We crave to know our lover’s past and dread knowing it. At the heart of this double desire:
- Possession: wanting every second of her life to be mine
- Erasure: wishing to delete the time before me
- Mimicry: the perverse wish to be her old lover
We thought marriage was the final curtain, but there is no final curtain. The past is a jellyfish that keeps stinging the present.
Whisperings from backstage
Even now, Jun-ho wakes at 3 a.m. While his wife sleeps, he scrolls through Team-leader Choi’s SNS, hunting for photos from 2013. I want to witness her twenty-two-year-old self.
The unspeakable obsession: the years without me must also be mine.
Final scene
Think for a moment. Right now, your lover might be describing your most intimate self to someone else. If you learned that your body, your sounds, your scent are archived in another’s memory, could you still claim true possession? Or are you, too, secretly desperate to hear it?