Work Text:
To those who’ll read this, hello.
My name is Park Jimin, I’m 34 years old and I work as a newspaper editor. But you could call me Choi Eunji, Kim Nari or Lee Hyunhwa. You could give me any age between 20 and 50. You could also make me work as a professor or a bartender. It wouldn’t matter, because the story I’m about to reveal has happened to other people too, is happening to other people. You must keep that in mind as you go through those lines: nothing of what I’ve written is romanticised, nothing has been invented. I will tell you the truth in all its beauty and cruelty, I will make you enter a world I wish I had never crossed. This is a love story, my love story.
I first met Yoongi when I was 23. He was by no mean my first boyfriend or even my first man, I wasn’t his neither. We had both known other people before and I was sure I would meet others after him too. After all, he was just a cute guy I had met in a bar, nothing could predict how things turned in the end.
The first night we spent together, I can’t really tell about it, as the only thing I’m certain of is that I was completely wasted that night. I do have some flashes of drunken giggles and adventurous hands, well, it was probably just as every first time with an unknown person is: clumsy, sometimes funny, but good all the same once the bodies connect together, the only thing left being the rhythm of hips moving against each other and the sound of slapping skin and ragged breaths.
I woke up on the next morning with an incredible headache, the disagreeable feeling of dried cum on and in my body and a source of heat next to me. That’s when I saw him in the daylight for the first time. If I remember well, I thought he wasn’t that pretty all things considered and tried to leave his apartment as discreetly as I could. But Yoongi was a light sleeper, and I ended the morning with my butt on a stool and a bowl of cereals in my hands while he told stupid jokes and complained about how sore he was everywhere.
Yoongi was short, bony and he spoke like an old man. His flat was messy and always reeked of something between sweat, alcohol and smoke. He could spend hours in a bed doing nothing but lying down, always refusing to do as little as watching a film with me (he used to say I had the tastes of a child, but I’m perfectly aware that it was just laziness speaking). Clearly, he wasn’t my type at all and I would say he was even the perfect opposite of my ideal man. Still, I found myself back in that disgusting apartment of his more than once after the first night, making sure I didn’t forget those which followed.
Because Yoongi had a gummy smile that turned his grumpy face into something so cute I wanted to coo each time I saw it, the years only made it better. He might have been scrawny, but he had enough strength to hold me tight in his arms when I was feeling bad or lonely, trapping me down in a warmth that would’ve been too much if it wasn’t coming from him. He had a deep, reassuring voice and when he spoke about music, it was as if that voice was alive and wrapped itself around me like a comfortable blanket. That was the thing I liked the best in him, his love for music. Whenever he told me about his life at the studio and all the things he was composing were the moments he was the most alive.
Were the moments when he was the most beautiful.
I don’t exactly remember when we began to live together, it happened way too naturally. It’s just that one day I woke up and realised that there were my clothes in his cupboard, my own bowls and chopsticks in the sink, my toothbrush in the bathroom, my courses scattered all over the place in the living room, my legs tangled in his sheets and my arms around his waist. Later this day, I went back to my flat after what were probably weeks and took the last things that remained there before bringing them to Yoongi’s apartment. He didn’t even say anything when he saw me come back with so much stuff in my hands, only showing me the place where I could put it. Two days after, I had terminated my lease and paid my first rent to a reluctant Yoongi.
It is obvious that things evolved pretty quickly after that. In a matter of months, I had graduated, Yoongi had opened his own studio and I finally had the guts to propose him to take a place together, somewhere we could really call our home. We moved in during the summer. I remember it was so hot during some nights that more than once we ended sleeping naked on the floor of our bedroom, as close as we could to the window. I think this period was the one during which we were the happiest. It’s probably because we were still naive at the time, thinking that what we were sharing would stay the same no matter what. We were too young, too stupid and too blinded by our own bliss to even consider things might turn bad.
I was 28 years old when I found myself bawling my eyes out in the middle of a restaurant, Yoongi on his knees in front of me and a ring between his hands. It was cheesy and not like him at all, but it was what I liked, what I wanted and he just gave it to me because he loved me. We got married during the summer, because it reminded us our moving and it was my favourite season. For the D-day, we had all of our friends and family gathered in our small apartment after the ceremony, and when his father crossed our door with emotion and awkwardness written on his face and a gift in his hands, I saw Yoongi cry for the first time.
We travelled a lot during our honeymoon. I had made sure to prepare everything so that it would be perfect and though it wasn’t in the end, the little flaws of that trip makes it even more pleasurable to remember. After all, nothing can be completely perfect in life, I guess that’s how things go, and that didn’t prevent us from being really happy during that time but also during the first years of our married life.
Actually, I still wear the ring, I can’t bring myself to remove it from my finger, even though sometimes looking at it makes me want to puke. But it’s not like I could help it, even after everything, I still love him.
For a while, life went on in a bubble of happiness and love. Though we had our fights, it was never serious enough to be considered bad memories. We would go the cinema or the restaurant at least once a month, we sometimes spent entire nights imagining a new world, Yoongi’s studio was working well and I was getting closer and closer to promotion. Sometimes, I wonder how things turned that way and I can’t help but think it’s my fault. After all, everything was perfectly fine until that month.
We had problems at the Seoul Global Newspaper. Financial problems, of course, as it happens a lot when you’re running an independent enterprise, but the main issue was social. Some of my colleagues weren’t working well and because funds were getting rarer, my boss started to speak about dismissals. A few days later, sentence fell: in a month, five people were to leave. Though I wasn’t a bad employee, neither were some of the other men working with me. So I got scared and, like everyone else, began to work even harder to escape that pitiful fate.
I would began my working day at 6 am and would often go back home after 11 pm. It was very tiring and I lost a lot of weight at the time because I wasn’t able to have proper meals and I was so stressed that every calorie I was ingesting just seemed to disappear instantly. I barely saw my husband anymore and though I missed him, I couldn’t think of any way to improve our situation.
The first time I said ‘no’, Yoongi just accepted it, applying a sweet kiss on my lips before brushing my hair until I fell asleep against him, my arms wrapped around his middle. He told me the next morning that it was okay, that he understood it was because of work and that he would never blame me for something like that. I sighed in alleviation and went to work with a light heart. The second and third times, he reacted identically, even making a joke about how it was in fact a relief for someone as lazy as him. I believed him.
The fourth time, I saw his frown, but when I asked him about it, he simply smiled and shrugged it off, kissing me before standing up and going to the living room to watch some TV. Of course, I followed him, just to make sure that it was really fine because the last thing I wanted was to make him angry. He dismissed my fear with one big smile and almost forced me to go to sleep because he said I had to be strong to face tomorrow. He swore he didn’t care. I believed him.
It’s not long after that moment I began to lost count of the times he asked me and I refused, because everyday looked the same to me. I wasn’t even able to realise what day we were anymore. Sometimes I woke up early on my days off and began to prepare myself from work until Yoongi got out of bed to tell me I didn’t need to leave today and bringing me back under the sheets, where I then stayed for the most part of the day.
Because I had fallen into that routine, to me, nothing was wrong and I didn’t saw the signs. I didn’t realise Yoongi was frowning more and more, I didn’t notice the frustrated tone of his voice when he was speaking to me but I wasn’t listening because writing an article seemed more important than my own husband at the moment. I ignored the fact he was getting more insistent, but in a pitiful way, sometimes on the verge of begging. My answer stayed the same. Each time, I would say ‘no’. I would’ve never imagined that two letters could create such a mess into someone’s life, but it did, in both Yoongi and I’s.
There was a tension growing more and more between us, and though I was oblivious at the beginning, it eventually became too evident for me not to notice it. Suddenly, each refusal was met with mean words spat into my face and my husband leaving the room before slamming our entrance door. He wouldn’t reappear before the morning. I’m not going to lie, I got really bad too at that time. Because I was so scared of losing my job, I had turned completely selfish and when he came back on the next day, I blamed him for the fact I hadn’t been able to work all night because I was worrying too much about him. Sometimes I yelled so loud the neighbour complained to Yoongi later on, and though it wasn’t really his fault, he always apologised.
“Just quit your fucking job.” That phrase was unexpected. It had probably taken days to mature inside of his head before he was able to let it out with such a great amount of frustration, tiredness and anger in his tone. It crossed his lips during one of my days off, while he was cooking for us. Nothing had prepared me to hear that. One second, there was only the oil crackling into the hot frying pan, and the next, he dropped that bomb and it was as if everything fell silent around me.
He didn’t say anything more and I didn’t either, for a while. We stayed unmoving, Yoongi gripping at his spatula so hard that his joints had turned white. None of us did or said a thing, not until a familiar scent floated until my nose. “Yoongi, the meat is burning.”
“Fuck the meat.” I remember feeling annoyed by his reaction, as if he only was a reluctant child to whom I had to teach a lesson.
“Yoongi, you are-“
“Fuck the meat!” This time I was startled, because if I was subject to shouting, he was not. When he continued, his voice was even louder. “Fuck the meat! Fuck your job! Fuck your stupid face!! Fuck you, Jimin!!” He turned around and there was so much fury on his face that my heart began to slam wildly against my ribcage. I didn’t have time to answer that he had grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me until our bedroom.
So yes, I do realise that all of that didn’t come out from nowhere. I do know that I’m probably responsible for the way our relationship began to unravel. It’s not only the sex, I had been neglecting him for everything that was a part of our married life for weeks. I would be ready to take all the blame for the fact that frustration had pent up inside of him and that he could do nothing but react. But he had millions of other ways to react: screaming, crying, begging, asking for divorce, anything but that. There are things that are unforgivable, and what he did to me after that argument is one of these things.
I won’t describe what happened in details. First, because I’m not sure I actually can and I think no one wants to know them. Second, because you all probably guessed what this is all about. Finally, because I have more memories about what followed. I can picture with an eerie precision the coldness of the bathroom tiles under my knees as I was emptying my stomach in the toilets. I remember the tears falling down my face and Yoongi’s knocks at the locked door. I remember that sensation of being defiled, the foul smell of sweat and cum that clang to my body even after I had rubbed my skin into turning deep red.
He apologised.
Of course he did, and more than once, his eyes wide in horror and his hands reaching out to helplessly. I wished I could grant him pardon and I tried. I told him that it was fine, that I forgave him. I acted as if I wasn’t waking up every night with blurry eyes and a lump in my throat. I smiled when he was touching me even though the only thing I wanted to do was to slap his hands away. I kissed back when he was applying his mouth on mine, no matter how bad it made me want to throw up.
I tried as hard as I could and for a moment, it worked. We were almost back to normal: I had finally stopped working 22 hours a day, we were eating all of our meals together, we watched films, and everything else we were doing before that month. But though on the outside everything was the same, it wasn’t working as well on the inside. It was as if we were in machine that had a lost a few screws and gears. We couldn’t function as we were supposed to do. His eyes had lost their playful glint, I wasn’t smiling as much as I did before, he was more impatient that in the past and I turned quieter and quieter each day. Still, I could have bore with it, if he hadn’t done it again.
And again.
And again.
It can’t really explain how it came to that point. All I know is that suddenly he was taking all sexual favours as granted and my protests as a joke. He wasn’t too harsh, he never hurt me physically, but he brushed off all of my refusals, repeating that I did want it and that it was fine because we were a couple and that was what couples do. However, I’m not sure that every husband pulls the sheets over his spouse’s face just so that he wouldn’t see them cry as he forces himself into them. I don’t think it’s normal for the man who shares my life to wake up with bruises all over his body because I was beating him as I begged him to stop. I can’t believe that sex is supposed to feel so disgusting for everyone.
But I apparently was the only one thinking that way.
“He’s your husband, Jimin. You two are having sex together because you’re married, that’s not a rape.” That’s what my brother said when I told him what was happening with Yoongi for the first time. The words felt like a punch in the chest and I think I stopped breathing for a second.
“You’re telling me it’s not a rape when I clearly told him I didn’t want to and he still continued?!” I remember yelling, my brother rolling his eyes up to the sky before standing up and patting my shoulder in a ridiculous fatherly manner before breaking me a bit more.
“You’re overreacting, Jimin. Besides, if you really hated it that much, you would have left by now. Stop it now, Yoongi’s a good guy, not a criminal. What you’re doing is unfair to him.”
Do you know why I’m writing all of this on a website instead of going to the police and report my husband? I already tried. It took me a long while to gather the courage, but I eventually crossed the threshold of the police station and told the woman at the reception I wanted to file a complaint for rape. I was instantly taken care of, a detective bringing me to his desk so that he could listen to my story. Three minutes later, I was out. Once I had pronounced the word ‘husband’, the man stared at me in disbelief before scolding me. “Mister, you can’t go to the police for relationship problems. An accusation of rape is a serious matter; you can’t just say that because you had an argument with your husband. Now, go home, I won’t hear anything more.” You can’t believe it? Yet, that’s what happens to a lot of people in my situation. People just can’t process the fact you can be raped by someone you love, someone you’re married with, for these people to be members of your family like my brother, or strangers like this detective.
As for why I don’t leave Yoongi, it’s something that I still can’t explain. Sometimes I think I want to and pack all of my things, but whenever I’m near the door, I lost all of my determination and cry until Yoongi comes back home. I think that I just can’t believe our lives are getting scattered that way. Yoongi has been my everything for so long, imagining a life without him is plainly scary. Moreover, there are moments when I feel like we should try to put things back together, when I want to fight for my marriage. I think I still haven’t given up on my love for him, no matter how stupid it can sound.
Now, I didn’t decide to write this for you to judge Yoongi or even me, I simply used this story as a base for something much more important: recognition. What I lived, what I’m living currently, it happens every day, to various people. Just like me, these men and women try to deal with the shame and the incomprehension from their relatives. We’re already damaged by the person we love, but what hurts even more is that there’s no one to support us and help us going through this. And my experience, that you’ve just read, isn’t even the worse out of all of them.
So if you have someone close to you who is in such a situation, don’t be a silent bystander: come forward, speak to them and help them. And if, as you’re reading that, you realise that this is happening to you, I want you to understand something: this is not normal and this will never be. A wedding ring should never mean that your own body doesn’t belong to you anymore. You have the right to protest and if you find the strength, to leave. No matter how bad it might hurt on the moment, I think it’ll at least settle things down. I’ll try to listen to that piece of advice in the future myself.
That’s it. That was all I had to say. I’m not going to tell you I hope you appreciated the reading, because I actually wish that you hated it, it would mean that I’ve met my goal.
I’m 34 years old and I work as a newspaper editor. You could call me Choi Eunji, Kim Nari or Lee Hyunhwa. You could give me any age between 20 and 50. You could also make me work as a professor or a bartender. It wouldn’t matter, because the story I’ve revealed is as much mine as other people’s, it might even be yours too. I, Park Jimin, get repetitively raped by my husband since last year.
It’s been exactly 387 days since the first time.