Yesterday, I took a miniature trip with Heechul, back and forth on the Han River Ferry. The sky was clear and bright, the day was warm enough for us to stand on the deck without a sweater. Going out, we were light-headed and say a lot of silly things to each other, made fun of tourists. It was fine going out, barely tolerable coming back. Heechul says the Chinese boy he´s been seeing uptown is infatuated with him and mistakenly believes this is love, true love. I know what Heechul means by “mistakenly” but it often comes to the same thing. Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people.

I don't have the heart to tell my own story, and keep looking for less convoluted fictions. Is this is about love, I wonder.

That afternoon I met Lee Hyukjae in Kyobo Bookshop, I didn’t just meet him, I would say, but froze in his gaze like an animal mesmerized by headlights. And it wouldn’t be my first attempt to describe his oval chin, an unbroken, beautiful jawline, an elegant curve of a nose, plump lips that break easily into a gummy smile, lips that chap and whiten in cold weather, and often go slack in a rictus of pain that obscures his bright teeth; a deep brown eyes, a face fringed with onyx hair. Memory obscures the immediate tug of Hyukjae’s beauty, drops the details from his chiseled face, the glinting facets in his unwavering stare. I remember that afternoon in surprisingly intricate detail, but nothing exceptional occurred. I made a clumsy, untoward effort to meet a total stranger, met him, got his address and phone number with dreamlike ease, established some flimsy pretext to see him again, and later felt foolish. It would be part of this way to telling about it to add that I knew he lived with a woman, furthermore a quite possessive woman much younger than himself; that he works killingly works hours at a French restaurant in Gangnam, a job that drove him into spells of numbed exhaustion; and that he was, like most young men in Seoul at that time, some kind of artist.

I met him that afternoon in December and after that I hardly thought about anything else. I went home thinking “I’ve met someone I could love”, but this thought was sliced apart by the feeling that such a person couldn’t possibly love me, he being first of all a lover of women, secondly a physical marvel, thirdly eight or nine years old younger than I was. None of which would, by itself, make Lee Hyukjae unattainable so I embarked almost immediately on the project of seducing him. I would seduce him by laying myself entirely open to him, offering myself unconditionally. Use me, I would beg him. People who look like him are completely selfish. They want everything, and if they know there’s something they can have, without obligation, any time, chances are they will take it, sometime or other.

That night, I put aside my fiction of former defeats and began writing a letter. It began reasonably, a sort of old-fashioned “How pleasant to have met you” and so on, the kind of letter no one ever writes anymore. A courtly but sensual letter “I felt in the brief time we conversed that I was speaking with someone of extremely rare sensitivity, and that you, of course, sensed my physical attraction to you, and were gracious enough to take this in stride, giving me the opportunity to show