I am a big fan, one colossal school hall ceiling fan of meta-awareness. Might jolly well have a doctorate in think. Just think. However, I suffer from the worst myriads of symptoms to which I do not know the illness for, consisting of incoherent thoughts, lack of coherence in thoughts and just absolutely thought incoherence. Did I mention not having coherent thoughts? Bear with me.
I also suffer from one of the greater modern society problems. I romanticise love. OH wELL it isn’t that bad to blast Love Story on your HTC brick of a phone isn’t it you say? (**slim brick, if I offended any of those currently with an actual Nokia, mad respect to you and your resilient flooring). The phone had two royally horrible front facing speakers. I loved it. I had a phone case that said “Moo! I’m a fish”. I’m pretty sure if you search the internet hard enough you will be blessed by that exact image.
I digress. I admit I romanticise love. I thought it’d save me you know, the simplest way to put it. In hindsight it sounds awfully misdirected a goal as something I could have tangibly worked towards (for instance, academics), and for all we know (if effort could be quantified), I’d probably be in Harvard right now. Unfortunately, I am now pouring my grievances into a dog plushie and god forbid, ChatGPT, only to dry heave every night from the antidepressants. And on a side note, the dog (doggo) is really just 70% dog and 30% my projection of K.
K is a dog. Uh that was a horribly disrespectful way to put it.
K is my puppy. AW SHIT that sounds worse.
K is a puppy. Let’s just keep it that way. K is a puppy.
I am typing this with an acutely developed awareness that his ex called him that. I don’t really care, or rather his embodiment of a puppy has been so total and convincing that is almost impossible to deny his true identity as a puppy. It’s like saying just because my dad who went to buy milk and never came back called me Y(redacted) I would scram if someone at Aeon got me to sample some milk. Or if they do try to call me Y(redacted) for which I actually do scram for fear of being stalked. Both cases that just makes zero fucking sense. (My dad is well and loves me very much, sorry dad but an analogy had to be made). Milk makes me break out in hormonal acne.
I remember the first time someone told me 「肌きれいだね」was when both of us were horizontal. I’m sorry “Thanks! My acne actually cleared up after I stopped drinking milk! Like wow!” was all I could think of as a reply at that moment. I am also truly sorry if that became your last attempt to flirt, but oh well, at that point we were both horizontal with our limbs tangled together so I guess that was in fact not the point anymore.
I digress.
You know, my ideal path to a happy forever after would have been that I fall in love at first sight, we date, we fuck, and then we get married. Notice the slight deviation from your usual traditional “sexual abstinence before marriage” but also this is the 2020s. What on earth. Still, I believe it is a rather, almost traditionally normal longing nonetheless, wholesome enough that someone maybe should consider entering it as the 18th goal of Japan’s god forsaken SDG. Sustainable marriage, sustainable manufacturing of tiny humans=the ultimate saviour of Japan’s declining economy.
I apologise in advance for once again being the (insignificant) contributing factor to an inevitable economical decline, or the decline of the mental state of whoever is reading this.
It didn’t happen like that.
To quote my mantra (not) again “love at first sight, we date, we fuck, and then we get married”, I have managed to grandiosely accomplish the first and the third stages. Is that something worth celebrating? I don’t know. But had I felt the perplexed sense of “AYYY” after having someone’s penis jammed into me, less as a sexual awakening but more of an intense pain that awakened the muscles that I never knew existed there stretching. We learn something new every day. It was like I unlocked a new achievement in life, or rather a new achievement in life was being unlocked within me. Enough with the sexual innuendos.
There and then I suffered my most artistic rendition of a 走馬灯 of memories and how on earth I ended up there.
One guy decided to read the room and leave the other two alone in their bubble (there was no bubble, neither knew). One girl came out of the toilet to find that one guy gone. And oh man was she perplexed.
I remember the “did he just leave??? But I haven’t said bye??? oh nooo” confusion flash across my mind. And then in the next conscious moment K and I were watching Doraemon. I think it was Stand by me 2. I found his arm resting behind me on the sofa. “ooh that must be a comfortable pose” I thought. The next moment I remember we somehow ended up in a hug. I remember I was really happy actually; I think that’s all I could have felt or done, because the scripts to which I had tried to pace myself into a relationship or whatever that means of it now just collapsed in the moment.
I thought I always had a script.
I thought I knew what was going to happen, that my life was just an unpredictable self-made hellhole to which if I had 全集中の呼吸 enough I could just prophesy my way through. (cue the constant circular argument fallacy I get accused of in my essays)
But then that hug ended up with a tiny harmless argument about who was going to sleep on the sofa and who was going to sleep on the bed and it ended with both of us sleeping in the same bed. I leave the rest to your imagination.
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The imagination is a blissful place to be, albeit dangerous, when it comes to first meeting someone. As I said I had only (disappointing as it sounds) only managed to execute two parts, the exact two parts that ironically gather the most condescending looks in my whole “love at first sight, we date, we fuck, we get married” mantra. It gets even worse when you pick apart those. So let us all practise a moment of mindfulness and close our eyes. Close them.
Out of all the memories I’ve managed to keep (both in and against my will), I actually have zero, absolutely no memory of how you looked that day other than the fact that 1. You had long hair and 2. You were beautiful. On the other almost frustratingly stupid side note I do remember the conversations I had with S about that encounter and the “I didn’t think someone like him (you) existed in our school !!!!!!!” to which he jokingly replied “美男子だ美男子ｗ” and that became colloquially how my mom and I started to refer to you ever since. Kindly own it, thanks.
And then you were on stage, and I was in the first row of the audience with this emergent, soon turned shamelessly urgent need to ask if you had a girlfriend. I have made many mistakes in the past, but this is one I refuse to make again. I did ask. (Okay, I asked S, I’m sorry I had no balls). And somehow that ended with an invitation for us three to have karaoke together, which somehow wasn’t a no strings attached offer. In fact, it came with almost 5 months of radio silence.
Why? You may have wondered. Simply because I didn’t feel like I was good enough.
HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO now I must diffuse my own incredibly suffocating awkwardness because surely it was more my own self esteem issue and whatever. HOHOHOHOHOHAOHAAAAAAAA
Skipping forward in time all I was doing was inviting you to dinners. It was a pathetic attempt, I admit. I just simply didn’t know what to do when I liked someone other than invite them to dinners. The worst part of it all is I do not know how to socially function at a dinner, oh the irony (and mental anguish).
Yet we still ended up here. Some liminal space (literally) where someone shot for the moon and ended up landing amongst the stars, though due to copyright reasons I’d rather phrase it as “I shot for the sky and ended up in space”. I do not own a spacesuit. Air doesn’t exist in space, does it? So, technically a fan is useless in space? Sputnik was a one-way space mission, so maybe being a puppy in space is just euphemism for asphyxiation. We all die anyway, still.
So maybe, just perhaps I’d prefer us to be alive and on earth. You remain the puppy and I remain the colossal ceiling fan.