An unforgettable woman
A poet, Park In-Hwan, sang in his poem, ‘When time passes by’: ‘Now my memory has forsaken her name. But, her eyes and her lips still stay in my heart.’ The older I grow, the closer to my heart that song becomes. When I heard the song in my early twenties, I passed it off as a meaningless popular song of a common kind. I have since met one woman after another, and experienced the essence of love in my own way. Now the meaning of the song begins to ring true in my heart.
Many people seek the essence of love from the name rather than the lips or the eyes. Lips or the eyes are a symbol of physical love, and the name stands for mental love. Driven by instinct, man has moments of giving himself in physical love. Still, in one corner of his mind, he searches for a woman who will salvate his soul and be a partner to communicate with.
But, time will teach him that the world is not the place to realize such romantic love. Then, he begins to compromise between the two forms of love, say, like a man sitting on the fence. He adopts a compromise in which to do both a mental and physical love together.
I was also looking for spiritual love only to find it a mere illusion that I pursued, and I finally concluded that love is touch and momentary pleasure from the touch. This really holds when I recall my girlfriends from the past. I try all in vain to remember all the dialogs or exchanges of a mental kind. These things are completely erased fom my memory. What remains vivid is the sweet sense of the touch that I had when I first held her hands and kissed her on the cheek. I have forgotten her name, but still remember her sexual lips, long limpid fingernails, and perfume.
A woman whom I can never forget is ‘K’, who grew her fingernails incredibly long. From my childhood, I was crazy about long fingernails. Even properly long ones did not meet my satisfaction. They should be long, long to the point of being bent down. If they are manicured with grotesque colors like black or blue, they would be much better. My heart would nearly stop beating to see a woman with such fingernails. If I had seen such long fingernails, I would have fallen into a trance. But, in reality, I could not easily find a woman who grew her fingernails long enough. It was thus only in my imagination that I longed for such a woman. Then, even though belatedly, ‘K’ appeared to me.
What made it even better was the fact that ‘K’ herself heartily loved her own fingernails. If a woman raises her fingernails simply to show them to others, she will soon have a limit to the length. But, in ‘K’s case, it was out of her own narcissism that she grew them long and long endlessly, which even more pleased my aesthetic standards. When I met her, I needed nothing else but her fingernails. I kept playing with the fingernails with little need of talk any way. She was a type of few words, and threw herself into my arms without words as if she were a solid object.
But, even then, I was still confused and may have believed that love should also have a bit of something spiritual. One day she left suddenly, obviously because of me. I realize that I must have begun to burst out with complaints about her. ‘Fingernails are not enough. I want something spiritual that would bind us together even stronger.’ I was murmuring in my mind like a fool. And she may have read my mind.
Time has passed, and I, now a man of nearly 40, still long for ‘K’. I only miss her. And her fingernails. Now I have reached conclusion that love needs no mental dimension. Love needs no sharing views about life and things. Neither do we need to whisper any sweet talk of love. Love is an ecstasy of pleasure that one feels when he touches one beautiful part of her body that he likes. Even at the moment of writing this essay, the ghostly appearance of her fingernails which were as long as four centimeters is lingering around. (January 1988)
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