“So what are we, exactly?”
Half past midnight, a back-alley bar in Jongno. Jisu held her soju glass so tightly her knuckles went white. The moment the question slipped out, the liquor on the table seemed to harden into ice. Jaemin gave a thin laugh and flicked his lighter; the flame trembled.
Why ask me now? Jisu muttered inwardly. We’ve been sleeping together for six months, I blow-dry your hair every morning, we split the grocery bill on payday.
But Jaemin exhaled smoke and said, “We’re just… keeping it easy, that’s all.”
Easy. The word brushed across her mind and her heart fell like a stone. All those nights of breath-scalding closeness, gone with a single shrug of “easy.”
Words grow wings with blood
Definition is desire’s poison. The instant we ask what are we?, the answer has already been decided. The moment someone confesses I love you, the sentence becomes the iron bars of a cell. The word love suddenly turns into a cramped room that traps the free rush of breath.
Why do we crave a name so badly? Lover, partner, dating. Will one word let us breathe easier? No. Words are nooses that tighten around the neck. It’s not the unnamed relationship that terrifies us; it’s that once it is named, the feeling I wanted to the point of death becomes a flimsy scrap of paper.
Hye-jin’s diary: March 17, 3:12 a.m.
Tonight Dohyun said again, “I go crazy every time I see you.” Then he rolled over and fell asleep. Crazy? Yet he has never introduced me as his girlfriend. In front of the club he calls me “a friend.” Friend—that hateful word.
Last week, at the club dinner, someone asked, “Dohyun, are you and Hye-jin dating?”
He gave a little laugh and knocked back his beer. “Ah, just a good friend.” His eyes darted away from me like someone playing tag. I drank another bottle of soju that night. In the restroom, retching, I thought: A good friend? The mouth that bit and tore at my chest said that?
June 3, 9:45 p.m.
At last I asked. What are we?
Dohyun blinked. “Why now, all of a sudden?”
Why now. After eight months of clutching the hem of his T-shirt, it’s “all of a sudden”?
Just tell me. What am I to you?
After a long silence he answered in a voice small as a guilty child: “I… like you, but I’m not ready to be in a relationship.”
I like you, but. The same refrain. I like you, but I don’t love you. I like you, but I can’t keep you.
That night I left Dohyun’s place and took a cab. Until Seoul’s lights blurred outside the window I kept murmuring, What are we? I chewed the sentence until it bled, and swallowed my tears.
Why do we hang ourselves on one word?
The philosopher Sloterdijk said that humans are animals who cannot endure the undefined. But what we really want is not the definition itself; we want proof that I am everything to you. The word girlfriend is just the obsession I’m your only woman in disguise.
The allure of taboo lies here too. An undefined relationship is a secret room. A scalding secret only we know. Yet the door might open at any moment, so in panic we fit it with a lock. That lock is a word. The sentence We are lovers is the key to the prison.
If you try to cage me, I will shatter
Curiously, the one who dreads definition is often the same one who craves it. Later Jaemin confessed: the night Jisu asked what are we? he broke into a cold sweat. The moment he said we’re dating, fear seized him that she might leave.
We are all hostages of words—those who define and those who are defined. The whisper summoned by the word love is actually the contradictory longing closer than death, yet perfectly safe.
“So, even now, are you demanding a definition from someone?”
On the bed, in the hush before dawn. You still haven’t asked the question. What are we? It rises to the edge of your throat, then slips back down. In that instant you hold the soft terror of the undefined in your arms.
You think, If only he would say it, then I could escape this dread. Yet you know words will never save you. The moment the single syllable love tightens around your neck, you will finally understand: we are not loved by words; we are abandoned by them.