Her name is Ella, she is a 34-yo woman that works as a content marketer by trade. Ella lives by herself, in an apartment under her name, on an island primarily occupied by families, kids and dogs, and she has a routine to keep her shit together. Ella prides herself on living an independent life, knowing this independence doesn’t come natural for her. For example, Ella is not the best feeder for herself. She hates grocery shopping and feels innately incompetent in the kitchen. Nevertheless, she tries her best to get this job done. Sometimes she lost track of what she’s doing as her noodle dances in the boiling water. Sometimes, she makes the ugliest egg in the world and still enjoys it.
Her name is Maude, and she never ties herself to the ground. Maude is full of curiosity about many things, behind her, there is a long list of “interests” and “skills” that she once tried to pick up but eventually let go: Taekwondo, Japanese, Photography, singing, guitar, French, yoga. And yet, she continues to want to learn new skills and fancies about being really good at random things.
Ella is always rushing to be on time for things, and she struggles to diagnose the root cause of this eternal state of rushing. As Ella lives alone through the pandemic, her self-dialoguing behaviour has significantly developed during this period.
Maude has the softest eyes for the world. If she wants, she can see beauty in almost everything, and she tries to not abuse this talent of hers. Still, more often than not, Maude is easily touched by many “unremarkable” things: A man reading in the park, fallen petu als in the shape of love, a city swallowed by an imaginary dragon of speed. Maude is always playing some sort of childish game with herself.
Strictly speaking, Ella is not so much of a pretty woman, and she has never been 100% happy about the way her body looks. Since she has memory, she has wished her legs are skinnier and longer, but she gets by with what she got. Like many other 30-something women, Ella works hard to keep in shape, and she’s very skilled at finding the most flattering angle of herself. But fundamentally, Ella knows her charm goes beyond that.
Maude speaks her own private language, and she is quite comfortable being the odd one out. She excites herself by walking the roads less travelled. And sometimes, she walks them with bizarre objects in her hand. She can easily make acquittances with literally just anything. For Maude, every object is alive, and each of them deserves to have a name.
Ella likes to dress herself in her own sometimes-quirky, usually-whimsical ways, and enjoys a kind of agelessness through the freedom of clothing. Sometimes, Ella thinks she is still the little girl that she remembers herself as, and she behaves like one when she is alone. But sooner or later, something would usually happen and reminds her the need to deal with many matters as the grown-ass woman that she is now.
Maude is as passionate about many things as she is indifferent to many others. She would emotionally engage in the life of literature figure like Isabel Archer, and she indulges her sentimentality in all sorts of music. Her heart would float every time she sets her eyes on the moon, and she’d shut off her receptor whenever the man she’s with starts to explain NFTs or democracy to her.
Among her friends and acquittances, Ella is often known as the mean one. She doesn’t say nice things easily, and hides her emotions behind ironical jokes. In her mid-thirties, Ella suddenly realizes she’s more closed off than she’s aware, and she has lost more friends along the way than she’s ready to acknowledge. But some friends do stick around — a tiny, close circle of people that keeps her grounded and accompanied — as they learned to live with the peculiarities of each other.
Maude treasures every physical and digital trace of the past, and looks after a whole garden of trivial memories. She sometimes dreams of the friends she has lost, and journals about the sense of loss when she wakes up. Maude keeps a detailed log of every stream of her emotions. Instead of hiding them, she lets her feelings out in every way she knows. Maude is convinced that, as long as she keeps digging into them, she’d be able to find gold.
Ella’s love life officially recessed 3 years and 4 months ago. Since then, she has dated numerous guys, been on and off apps a few times, had a couple of flings, and watched all of them slip away. Emotionally, Ella is jaded, passive, and she doesn’t suffer fools lightly. It’s always Ella’s first instinct to fight against the role that most men expects her to play, an approving audience, a human ornament that comes with some harmless wit, a freelance improviser of some convenient intimacy.
Maude, on the other hand, falls in love a little at every chance she has, and refuses to let her intelligence get in the way of her feelings. Maude is not shy of showing affections. She enjoys stroking the hair and gently touching the face of the person she likes. Maude is honest with her desires, and validates her sense of “being happy”, even a fleeting, shallow kind.
Over time, Ella is convinced that she doesn’t have much luck with men, and is determined to not make it her problem. She buttons up her strongest emotions, the need of being with someone, love and all that, and concentrate her effort on redefining a new, independent type of personal happiness.
Maude could always sense the moment when her “transitory happiness” starts to leak away, and quietly, she observes the familiar bleeding of her own. “One must be mad to want to voluntarily repeat this cycle,” she would write in her notebook. But still, no bleeding would stop her from embracing all the potential hurt in the world. Stubbornly, Maude believes there’s no pain she cannot endure.
At the end of the day, Ella is always striving to grow stronger and freer, and Maude is always the girl who just wants to feel everything.
my reading of the letter to Mart and many others. soundtrack looped: abandoned frog from <please like me> ost.
Dear Mart, a few Sundays ago this time (1:14pm), I was in your bed, lying beside you, trying to arouse you for sex for one more time, even though I could feel you didn’t really plan for that to happen, just like when you tried to arouse me for sex for the first time a week before that, I also didn’t really plan for that to happen. But both times, it happened. We both managed to get what we wanted: for you, it was to have sex with me for the first time; for me, it was to have sex with you for one last time. I suppose we’d both have known what it feels to be having sex when we didn’t really want it, either not at one specific moment, or not with one specific person.
Dear Mart, I never wanted to have sex with you. I never thought I’d develop that sort of feeling towards you, truth be told. When I first saw your profile on the app, I thought, just looking at this guy makes wanna smile, as if I could feel your joy to life through the screen. You only wrote one line in short but it spoke well to me: Fond of fictions, long walks and cityscapes. I knew I wasn’t attracted to your physicality, but I wanted to know more about you as a person. Something told me we’d be able to connect well, and I wanted you to be my friend since then, even knowing – from experience – the odds of it won’t be in my favor at the end of the day.
Dear Mart, would you still think of the texts we exchanged in those first days? I read them all over again after we stopped talking, and I’m still very fond of them and fond of that part of you. You told me how my writing in my profile made you giggle too, and that you were stuck in your happiness since childhood to a degree that it started to annoy people. The things you said could so easily make me laugh. Don’t you think we should all try to remember how we used to make each other laugh in the beginning, no matter how things turned out in the end? Do you remember – you probably don’t – on the day we met for the first time and walked almost 20k steps across one district to another and there wasn’t one moment of dullness, and at some point you said to me, “I just feel you’re too good to be on tinder“. At that moment, the line I tried so hard to hold down in my chest was “can you be my best friend“. Maybe I should have said that. Maybe if I had said it, you wouldn’t try to initiate sex a few weeks later, and we wouldn’t have had sex, and things wouldn’t have gone wrong, and we’d still be talking, and fond of each other. Would it? I didn’t say it, obviously. I just posted it on my Chinese social the next day as a note to self. I couldn’t remember when was the last time I had talked to anybody for 8 hours nonstop and remained unfiltered as I was. And I didn’t wanna forget the preciousness of that feeling. At least that was what I felt. But when I think back, after everything, I wonder if you were disappointed that day, becoz when it was after midnight and we were still wandering in the streets, you seemed to be subtly inviting me to your place nearby, but I just hopped on a taxi and went home.
Dear Mart, I guess I did sense you want more than just friendship from that time. And I thought to myself, I would be able to manage it. I would be able to prove to you that my friendship, our friendship, weighs more than anything sex could possibly provide. Who was I kidding? I had never managed to convince any men of that. Before you, there was a stream of men like you that I’d tried to befriend but ended up either sleeping with and/or estranged from becoz I wouldn’t sleep with them anymore. The longest one lasted a few years, with intermittent sexual attempts by the “friend”, but still, it was long enough to make me believe it was a real friendship until the “friend” eventually bailed on it. He said I broke his heart. I don’t think he realized he’d broken mine too.
Dear Mart, when you told me your best friend is a woman the first time we met and you’d been living with her and her husband before they left Hong Kong, I knew something was there. As expected, a few weeks later, you told me she was your ex and you were together for six years. When I asked you whether/how you had grieved for the ending of the long relationship, it was also the first time I witnessed your determined denial of your feelings and emotions. It struck me there’s no such thing as “being stuck in happiness” as you put it, of course, and there’s definitely more truth beneath it, probably a strong unwillingness to deal with anything difficult. You convinced yourself there wasn’t any loss incurred becoz she’s still in your life, just with a different role – your best friend, your roommate, your work partner, someone you couldn’t stop mentioning a little too often. Your reaction to that question made me wonder if you’d ever truly walked out of that relationship, if you’re ever truly ready to intake another person as a romantic partner, becoz there didn’t seem to be much space left. I didn’t share any of these observations with you, after all, it was your private matter, and I wasn’t interested in that non-vacancy anyways.
Dear Mart, I think you know I like you. You are one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and I loved seeing myself through your eyes. I laughed a lot when I was with you. And I didn’t feel being resented for being smart. I like talking to you. I like how you make me feel it’s safe to confide my insecurities and deepest wounds, how you jokingly tried to think of a way to make me money out of my peculiarities, how you think I’m not weird, just neuro-diverse, which would be the next big thing after LGBTQ+. I even like how frequently you’d use an obscure English word that I need to go to a dictionary with. I told my friends and my therapist about you. I told them I met you on Tinder but I thought we could really become good friends. I can’t explain to them why I only wanted you as a friend, but in my mind, I knew clearly what I feel and what I want. Or at least I thought I did. My therapist told me, given my track record of always being attracted to the similar type of unavailable guys, (which is sort of true), that I should try to keep my mind open and don’t rule out any possibility of seeing you in a romantic way one day. So I didn’t once tell you I only wanted to be friends. I was trying to keep that “channel” open, even though I didn’t think I would want to switch it on.
Dear Mart, do you have any clue about women’s desires? I have little. People know so little about it coz women – in most parts of history and still many parts of the world today – are not trained to express them, understand them, explore them, or reconcile with them. I started making acquaintance with my desire fairly late in my life, I barely touched myself until my late twenties, and as a 34-yo woman I’m still frequently baffled at how my desire would choose to expose herself. But broadly, I believe women’s desires are destined to act as a complement to their minds, not a proxy, but a complement. My desire would complement my mind in situations of conflict so it’d find a way to make things easier for both. So how did it start with you?
Dear Mart, I’ve gone through many times in my mind what happened that night, when everything seemed to have changed in a split second. It was the 3rd time we’d met in a little over a month, and we’d managed to stay as friends and strictly friends until then. Even in texts, there wasn’t any trace of flirting. When we’d agree to meet that weekend and you suggested I go over to yours for a coffee first before we go out for dinner, I agreed without a second thought. What could go out of line with a coffee in the afternoon? But I did tell my therapist that day before I went to your place, that I hope my agreeing to meet at your place wouldn’t give you any wrong idea. It was the typhoon weekend and the weather was a nightmare. We couldn’t go very far for dinner so we ate at one of the few restaurants that were still open in your hood. After dinner, it was about 9 or 10, and you suggested we go back to yours for a glass. Until then, we were discussing everything possible as usual and I didn’t feel like stopping at that point yet just bcoz we’d finished eating so I agreed despite a slight hesitation. 10pm was an awkward time, I thought, but I could probably stay a bit longer. The next thing I knew, we’d finished a bottle of wine, or two? It was midnight, it was 1am, it was 2am, then it was just too late, coz every time I thought of leaving, the rage of rain and wind outside suggested maybe it wasn’t the best time yet. I was trapped at your place, at 3am in the morning. Fuck. How am I going to manage this? Even then, Mart, I still thought there was a chance it wouldn’t have to happen and I’d just stay the night over. Even then, Mart. When I asked if I could crash on the couch for the night, feeling slightly tipsy and extremely sleepy, and lay down on the couch with my eyes closed, and you started kneeling down by my side and caressing my right hand and asked if I would like to move to the bed to sleep properly, and I said maybe if you could find me a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, even then, Mart. Then I moved to the bed and lay at the inner side, facing the inner wall, closed my eyes, then you came from behind and asked if it was ok if you spooned me and I groaned ok with my half-asleep mind. I felt the warmth of your body against mine, curled in a ball. I felt your breath at my neck, and your hands wandering at my thigh, and I just let you, with my body frozen and my eyes closed. I didn’t want to interfere with what was happening, I guess if I didn’t interfere, I didn’t need to deal with what was happening. Then you turned my body to face up, and you came on top of me, I had to open my eyes, you kissed me, you held me tight and your movement started to heat up. It was then I said: I feel weird, Mart. I didn’t even know what I meant by that, I didn’t analyze it at all before the sentence slipped my lip. I guess that was the least I had to do, to let you know. If all my previous body language didn’t manage to send the message across, that would be my final attempt.
The words did seem to reach you indeed, you stopped what you were doing, and assured me we didn’t need to do anything if it’s making me feel weird. Instead, you said, you could just give me a back massage. Dear Mart, I wasn’t born yesterday and I knew what a back massage means. There I was, struggling to stay awake but feeling deeply confused about you, Mart. If I could like you as a friend, why can’t I also desire you? Maybe I do, and I just didn’t know that yet? Could that be why I’d unconsciously stayed till so late? Could it be that I actually wanted you? I was too sleepy to try to figure all these out at that moment, Mart, and I didn’t want to make you feel awkward. I stopped struggling, I knew it’d be easier if I just let it happen. So I let it happen.
Dear Mart, you see, this is what I mean. A woman’s desire can be very protective of her and it could almost always find a way to complement the mind. Because my mind likes you as a friend, my desire would find her way to complement the missing part in a situation like that. I am not your victim, Mart. It’s not that I was ever repulsed by the idea of having sex with you. It’s that I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to becoz I want you as a friend and a friend only. Friends don’t have sex.
Dear Mart, do you know how many times I’ve been in that kind of situation before – having sex only out of the ease of conformity but still managed to find a way to enjoy it or persuaded myself it wasn’t a big deal but years afterward the memories of those times still sting? You weren’t the first, obviously, and you probably won’t be the last.
Dear Mart, I really did enjoy the sex. It was better than I thought it’d be, and I was more attracted to your body than I thought I would be. Since you had touched me, I had started desiring you at the same time. You see, women’s desire can be so elusive and flippant, there’s nothing sacred about it. After all, it was just sex. Sex is never that much of a big deal.
The big deal is, dear Mart, I won’t be able to see you as a friend anymore. The week after we first had sex (without penetration, as you wanted to prove you could “hold back” even though we both know penetration doesn’t define sex) was such a wavy episode. In that week, I wondered what’d become of us. I wondered if it could possibly be the beginning of something actually great and meaningful, now that my desire had caught up with my mind and both of them liked you. I wondered if we’d still be able to scroll things back if the romantic channel didn’t work out becoz 10 out of 11 it didn’t work out and I’m not delusive about the stats. I wondered if I was getting ahead of myself and should just chill and take it one step at a time.
Dear Mart, I had wondered a lot of things, you see, when we were flirting with witty texts every day after that night. After all, I’m just a normal woman, having the normal feelings, wanting the normal things. But I never wondered one thing, that if you were a dick. The possibility of that never even slipped my mind. I had only felt slightly weird when you’d say things like “you are fun in bed”, “you’re so pretty”, “I really enjoy your body”. I mean, Mart, I just couldn’t help feeling something was off when hearing these from you. After all, you’re the “saint Mart” that claims you wouldn’t use any adjectives to describe people – not just their appearance – anymore because that’d be just too reductive.
Dear Mart, do you really think it’s a coincidence that we had discussed so many different topics – including politics, coming from different takes – and remained civilized pre-sex, but would have a fight in the first serious discussion after we’ve had sex? I still couldn’t believe having that fight was the first thing we did after being horny for each other for a whole week, at that stupid bar, talking about stupid art. It surprised me how you just wouldn’t let it go after I’d repetitively said I didn’t mean what you thought I meant. It surprised me to hear the change in your tone, the different light in your eyes, the harshness and judgment you could hardly hide but I’d never seen in you before. So what if we think art means different things and we have different standards for what makes a real artist? But I can’t help noticing this change of attitude in you, as if the breakthrough with the boundaries of our bodies has at the same time awakened your presumed supremacy over my separate cerebral existence. My thoughts, my views, and my emotions are automatically depreciated the moment I submitted myself to your cock. I’ve seen this change in other men before, but Mart, seeing that in you is the least I would expect. I enjoyed the sex with you, but I hate it for what it ruined for us.
Dear Mart, I wondered why you always meticulously used “make love” when referring to the penetrative intercourse each time it came up. On the first weekend, you said, “I can’t wait to make love to you.” On the second weekend, you said again, “would you like to make love” when you’d just gone down on me and I was lying on your rug expecting nothing but to be fucked. For someone as linguistically proud as you, I know you chose your wording for a reason. Do you think “having sex” or “fuck” is too vulgar? Were you just trying to make yourself feel good? Or was that for me? If what we did was making love, wouldn’t it be natural that we should expect to hear from each other afterward, instead of days of radio silence? You might also recall, on the first night when you initiated to have sex and I told you “I feel weird”, the rest of the conversation was: Me: “I don’t want sex to make things weird between us.” You: “But I’m a robot, I don’t have feelings.” Me: “But I have feelings.” and then you had nothing else to say before you offered the “back massage”.
Dear Mart, you and I are both very aware of the manipulative power of words, the fine line is, whether we can refrain from abusing them, especially with those that are dear to us. As a robot, you wanted to “make love”. Yet as a “love maker”, you couldn’t have disgraced the phrase more than you had, because Mart, love isn’t just the high and the fun, it is also the dark and the sad, the hurt and the heal, it is an experience that requires a full emotional spectrum to truly deserve it, the spectrum you know you have deep down but decide to disable the most of it for reasons only you’d know.
Dear Mart, maybe sex hasn’t ruined it for us, maybe it has just made us see clearly what we really are to each other. Maybe I was terribly mistaken, and you’ve never really seen me, you just pretended you did. Becoz I don’t believe if you had really seen me the way I am, sex would make you unsee that. You might have seen and liked the outward features of me – my funniness, my cleverness, my “you-are-so-pretty” kind of face and my “i-really-enjoy-your-body” kind of body – but you’ve never really seen or liked me, my soul, the full and complex picture of my humanities underneath all these, coz you were never interested in her.
Dear Mart, I’m not writing to blame anything. Because deep down I still believe you never intended for it to happen the way it did, neither of us had intended that. All of us are just struggling with our lives as they unveil, and I suppose we all did things that we later regretted. I’m writing to tell my perspective of the story – this story, and many others – which I never got to tell, which most people never get to tell when something dear to them was lost. I don’t have the talent to write it into a cryptic 70-word text the way you did and be with it, I have to do it in my own clumsy, exhaustive way with words. As I’m coming to the end of this letter, I realized my initial mentality of writing it has shifted from a place of upset to a place of grief. I guess I’m also just writing to grieve the loss of a friend, or the loss of the eligibility of “losing a friend”. After all, we can’t lose what we never had.
There is a deep wound in your body, and it’s bleeding quietly. Nothing you can do about it other than asking yourself, why, again, did you give the permission for someone to cut it open, the softest little patch in your heart. The bleeding will stop eventually, as it always does. Every open wound will find a way to seal itself. It’s only a matter of time, people say. It’s also the shape and size of the scar. You can’t remember how many times you’ve failed to make it work. The disappointment is an old news, you are shattered, not surprised. You light up a cigarette, you open a bottle, you order some chicken nuggets, you listen to sentimental songs. The first stage of a routine process. It didn’t even work that well, just the only way you know how to react. You make an attempt to cry and you did. It doesn’t last long and your eyes dry quickly. You give it another try but there comes no more. You remember now you are not 23 anymore, your sadness has lost its density and become watery. Sadness used to feel more exciting, now it just makes you impatient. You broadcast it on social media and block random people from viewing it and eventually you get bored of that too. You sit in front of the piano only to find that there’s no song you can play to your mood. You walk out of the apartment and you walk like there’s no end to the road, taken by a desperation for the mechanical movement. You wish you could go on forever, till it drains the last drop of oil in you. You think of the hairy crab you had last weekend and how much you enjoyed it and how disgusted it made someone. Their death seems more validated now that the person who belittled you for eating hairy crab is no longer a standing threat. There is always a silver lining to a shitty situation and hairy crab is yours. You defended the honour of hairy crabs against the odds of love, even though that wasn’t your intention. Or maybe it was, maybe you care about hairy crab more than you care about your most innocent fantasies about human beings. How pathetic it would be if that was the case. There are easily a dozen of discrepancies that could help you put your loss into perspective and make it seem like a bliss in disguise but really, what good is that. A loss is a loss. A hurt is a hurt. It has happened and nothing you do can undo it. You own it, bite it, shove it up your ass and keep carrying on. On your walk you saw people with their dogs, baby trolleys, big objects that occupy their attentions. In a split of second you wish there was something like that in your life, anything, that would mercilessly take your priority away from yourself. There is nothing. Nothing but your empty water bottle, your health app recording your steps and reminding you of the sex you had eight days ago, your low-battery headphones playing songs of artists you can’t care to pronounce. There is not even moon. You search every corner in the sky but there is no sight of it. You feel exhausted suddenly and can’t wait to be back to your bed, curl into a ball, make it all stop. You wish to have your eyes closed and imagine a moon behind the clouds. There must be a moon behind the clouds. There is always a moon behind the clouds. It’s just one of those nights, a moonless night.
Write a piece of flash fiction about a case of mistaken identity. A stranger might be mistaken for an old friend, an outsider might be mistaken for a member of the community, or a person who has met someone a handful of times before may be confused for someone else.
I was on a trip to New York several years ago. It was for a friend’s wedding and I stayed in town for one week after that.
I had just gone through a brutal breakup right before the trip. A wedding wasn’t quite the event that’d excite me at that particular time. I tried not to make any association but still, the ceremony that officiated my friend’s love story felt like a magnifier of my own freshly failed attempt at it.
It was the first time I was in New York in summer. I didn’t know the city can be so agreeable in mid-June – sunny and fresh in the daytime, cool and breezy in the evening. Before that trip, I had only been in New York from late autumn to early spring and had known some of its worst temperament.
And there I was, after the wedding, left with my emotional jadedness in the perfect Manhattan summer. I had no plan for that week. I didn’t think I’d need one for New York. One day, I found myself wandering aimlessly in the Central Park. People looked very happy everywhere – couples having their wedding photos taken by the fountain, families boating on the lake, entertainers joggling at the center of a crowd, teenage girls in school uniforms selfie-ing in the best angles possible. I was immersed in the happiness of others. It was possible to feel happy by just witnessing happiness. Eventually, I lied down on the grass in a shaded corner, squinting at the blue cloudless sky. Everyone must have a story to tell about New York, a voice came upon me. I wondered what would be mine, if that was the case.
The next day, I woke up on the couch in my friend’s downtown apartment with a strong crave for a big meaty breakfast. My friend and her husband had left for work. I snoozed on the couch while swiping on Tinder.
In a few minutes, I matched with Andrew, a 48-year-old eye doctor on the profile. I asked if he would love to have breakfast with me.
An hour later, at an outdoor table of a restaurant near Union Square, I met Andrew. He had deep sepia eyes and a good physique. We started to exchange casual information about ourselves. I told him about the wedding, the breakup, and my sudden craving for sausages that morning. He told me he was from Boston, shared a flat in the city with his cousin, his last serious relationship was with a Korean, and anecdotes of his job as an eyeball repairman. Andrew was not a bad breakfast company.
We went out again one evening that week. It was the night of the NBA final game, Warriors vs Cavaliers. I joined him and his friends at a dive bar in the downtown. After the Cavaliers championed, we moved on with more bar-hopping and shared some edibles. The whole night we were laughing our heads off, yet most of it was a blur. It was a runway night. We opted in to an altered reality with a relative stranger just so we could opt out from our absolute reality, as far as the night could last.
When we came out of the last bar on the Lower East Side, too drunk to walk a straight line, it was a few hours until daylight. The street was dim and empty. A sense of void was taking over the hysterical joy.
We were a few steps away from a signal-controlled junction, not clear where was next. I took out the eyedrops that I carried with me and applied some to ease an acute dryness in my eyes. Andrew’s eyes lit up at the sight of that.
Is that the menthol type that gives your eyes a strong cooling sensation? He lisped.
Yeah? Aren’t all eyedrops supposed to make you feel like that? I lisped back, blinking my watery eyes. The menthol eyedrops were the only thing I ever used and they were the most popular type in the Hong Kong pharmacies.
Of course not! Only Japanese brands do that and it’s only sold in Asia! They don’t add menthol to eyedrops here.
Are you serious? I had no idea! I sounded more amazed than I intended to, like every drunk person.
I’ve always wanted to try it! Oh my god, can you give me some now? Andrew pled.
I will give this whole bottle to you as a gift. I said, amused by his exaggerated excitement.
Before I realized, Andrew already kneeled down beside me with his head tilted up, waiting for me to put in the eye drops for him. He wasn’t kidding when he said “now”. In the middle of the street, I held his forehead gently and pressed the eyedrops into his sockets. He started to make a growling sound from the minty coolness in his eyes, entertaining me with his little performance.
As we stayed in that posture, Andrew on his knees and me on my feet, facing each other, a cry broke the peace in the midnight street. “Yes! Just say Yes!”
We looked to the direction of the voice and saw this driver waiting at the junction sticking out most of his upper body and yelling at us. “Say Yes! Did you say Yes?!” Both Andrew and I halted for a moment, and burst into laughter at the same time. The driver seemed even happier as he saw us laughing hard. He held up one arm to “congratulate” us before he drove away.
At that moment, it occurred to me this was my New York story. It wasn’t quite what I would imagine for myself. But I enjoyed it all the same.
Research an occupation that takes place in an unusual or interesting environment that many readers are unlikely to know much about. Then, write a character profile of a person who works in this place.
It’s Nicole’s most delicate enjoyment and sensitivity to be sitting in the treatment room. 15 years she’s been practising as a psychotherapist, she stills feels a subtle pressure at the very back of her chest when sitting opposite a patient. She can’t easily explain that, not to her colleagues, not to her friends. But deep down she knows it’s what attracted her to this line of work in the first place. The hurtful interests in humanity. The prospect of nudity between people’s minds.
She rents half a floor in an unimpressive commercial building in the downtown with some other therapists. The six of them share four therapy rooms. There’s a small reception desk where people enter, but no receptionist. Cards of different therapists quietly serve themselves on the desk. It’s part-time work for most of them there, same for Nicole. One of her own painting is hanging up in the hallway, where patients sit and wait. It’s a big oil painting of a Japanese vase she did many years go. It’s a painting in yellow color tone and she likes to think it brightens up the hallway a bit as people wait there. Nicole hasn’t painted anything for a long time. She is in a constant struggle of time in the past few years, ever since she became a mother.
She is seeing less than 10 groups of patients every week. She used to receive more patients when it was still just herself. It’s her most profitable job and she could use the ease with finance. But there is a fine-line to be kept as she tries to maintain a balance among different roles now. In her early 50s, Nicole is a psychotherapist, a university instructor, a volunteer psychologist with autistic children, and a single mother to a 7-year-old boy she adopted 5 years ago. Her therapy approach wouldn’t allow her to have too many regular patients. There are only so much space one can spare to take in the heaviness from other people’s lives and still keep themselves intact. As a mother, it’s more important now to ensure a main part of her is intact for her son.
There are different kinds of therapists in the world. Some takes it as a job that pays as if they are just dentists for people’s minds. Therapists like this can always manage to withhold themselves and keep a distinct distance between their professional lives and their personal ones. Nothing could possibly go wrong because they are barely truly interested in their patients. There’s another kind that are truly interested in their patients, but profoundly through an academic lens. Their minds are so centrally wired around the academic architecture of psychology that they take keen interests in every patient, not as a flesh human, but as a sample human in a lifelong experiment. Most of Nicole’s colleagues are these two types and she learned it from their weekly seminar discussions. She sometimes wishes she could go with either of them as they are easier approaches. But she can’t. Nicole takes interests in her patients in a way that she truly cares. Even when she doesn’t like some of her patients as a person, she still cares. It’s in her instinct to care. It’s something she cannot just switch off.
Nicole believes she is helping her patients. Or, it’s important for her to know she still believes that. As a therapist, she is skilled with her tools. As a person, she comes with the qualities that make a good therapist: approachable, trustworthy, empathetic, compassionate, a “healer”. Unlike some therapists, Nicole is never rushing the attribution, nor is she obsessed with the “break-throughs”. She has a way of controlling the tempo and at times she’d rather hold it when it’s obvious what is the next question to ask. Instead, she substitutes it with a short silence. A few seconds for the mind to just breathe. She does it as if she is a mechanic constantly fine-tuning the airflow in the room and most of the time, she knows she is in control.
But there are still times it would come to her sheer realisation that there’s so little she can do. She can make a husband and wife see the cause of their marital problems, she can’t salvage the wrecked ship. She can convince a young girl of her own lovability, she can’t find her a lover that she deserves. She can guide a pair of parents through their grieving, she can’t fill up the hole left by a lost child. From time to time, she is overwhelmed by the sense of helplessness that it aches.
In any case, she has deep affection for her treatment room, where stories of unrelated lives are told and unknowingly intersect with each other. She thinks of the treatment room as a “home out of home”, for herself, and everyone who ever entered it. When a session ends and the patient leaves, she lingers a little while in the treatment room, looks at the empty sofa and recalls what just happened there. She indulges herself with a moment of private softness and vulnerability. Then she knows it’s time to go home, where her beautiful boy awaits.
Prompt I picked this week: Using the first-person plural, “we,” write a piece of flash fiction—no more than 500 words—about a fictional city or town. This city/town might be a slightly altered version of a real place or an entirely imagined place in which magical events are possible.
We arrive at the village house in the early afternoon. It’s a very hot summer day. Both Eric and I are fairly sweaty after the little uphill walk. Before that, it took us one hour on the bus and 40 minutes more on a private speed boat to reach this deserted island, where the owner of the house picked us up.
It is a two-story house in a pretty wrecked condition, but very spacious and in a good structure. There is a backyard, with a stone table and some stone benches at the far end of it, shaded under a big tree. They look like they’ve been for forgotten by the whole world. The whole house looks like it’s been forgotten by the whole world, and in some way, that might be the intention of it. A place exists only to be forgotten.
The island we’re at is one of the few little islands around the city that are either completely abandoned or half-deserted since the 80s, due to their small sizes and tricky locations. There are less than twenty households still living on it now. All aboriginal fishermen’s families with their own boats. I only heard of it — the moonlight island — for the first time when Eric told me about the house for rent he found online two weeks ago. It’s quite a romantic name for such an unknown island, I thought.
The owner is a middle-aged local guy, who inherited the house from his late farther two years ago. He lived in the house when he was young but now lives in the city. Take your time, I will take a walk nearby, he tells us and then descends into the woods behind the house. On our short hike, he told us the house was listed online in the past two years and had only had one tenant for six months. Every now and then there came in a viewing request from people like us. He’d receive them, show them around, and eventually never hear from them again. It doesn’t seem to bother him though. He talked about it as if he’s talking about one of his friend’s business.
So? what do you think? Eric breaks the silence after we have wandered round examining the huge house for about 15 minutes.
I love it, I say. It’d definitely take some work. But I could imagine us living here.
Me too, he said. We could have our separate writing areas on the upper leveland a shared lounge for hanging out in the evening. Downstairs could be our music zone. You can have your piano there and I’ll have my recording system and drums at the other side. How does that sound?
I look at this Irish man in his late 30s, talking in all seriousness, with beads of sweat still hanging on the side of his face, and start to wonder if he’s any serious at all.
It’s the second time we meet. We talked about going somewhere remote on the weekend. Eric found this place and suggested we check it out. As a game, we’re pretending to be this artistic couple looking for live-in studio space. In fact, I don’t think the owner cares at all about our story. In reality, Eric is an editor in a publishing house and I work in marketing for a company helping to make rich people richer. We both do a bit of writing in our spare time.
It sounds lovely, I smile at him. I will not be the first one to call off this game.
We walk over into the backyard. I sit on one of the stone benches in the shade. Eric is pacing around. He looks back at the door where we exit and spots two big Chinese characters on the beam carved in faded reddish paint.
The nights in Kyoto always feel longer than they are, and the daytime shorter. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the season; I’m always here in late autumn, this time too. I usually start to feel a bit anxious around 5 pm, when the blueness in the sky starts to darken, worrying about how to spend the night, and where. There aren’t many options for a woman travelling alone. There is only one, really: drinking at a bar. Bars are one thing this town will never be short of. But just like anywhere else, finding one that is friendly and safe enough is still not the easiest thing. It isn’t quite true what I said back there — I’m not travelling here, at least, sightseeing is not why I came. I’m just staying for a little while, wanting to be alone.
It’s never easy to be alone, and it gets particularly awkward on vacation. But, somehow, it’s still easier than being with people, at least for someone like me. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, whether it’s that I chose to be a loner, or that I didn’t really have any choice. But there I was, sitting at this bar alone, a cozy little place close to my guesthouse. It was 8 pm. I had picked the bar from Google Maps, praying that it wouldn’t be too bad. And it wasn’t bad. It certainly wasn’t fancy, with a dart board, a TV screen showing irrelevant sports that no one was paying attention to, and some musical instruments scattered carelessly in one corner. Everything was wooden — the bar table, the cabinets, the stools — which made it feel old-fashioned, and I liked it. I’ve had enough modernness at the bars in my own city; the oldness here reminded me that I was in a completely different space. An outsider, alone and free.
The bar was in the northern part of the city, quite far away from the touristy blocks, and was evidently a neighbourhood bar, where customers were mostly locals and regulars. I sensed that the first second I walked in, and felt grateful that the bartender simply gave me a casual glance, without showing any extra attention to make me feel more out of place than I already was. So there I was, sitting at the very end of the long bar table, in a corner spot that gave me a clear view of the whole place but would also help me shy away from excessive attentions. It’d be a lie to say that I didn’t want any attention; I don’t think there’s a woman in the world who doesn’t want any attention at all. But I’ve certainly passed the age when any kind of attention is welcome.
The bartender was a middle-aged Japanese guy, dressed relatively formally for a bartender, with a suit vest, a bow tie, and a casquette. It seems to be a custom in Japan, that people in the service industry always dressed formally, as if making a statement that they are doing a respectable job, even if you’re paying.
What would you like to drink? The bartender asked. I, as usual, couldn’t make up my mind and nothing from the menu looked convincing enough. Sensing my hesitation, the bartender said he could make me something off-menu, if I told him what my preferences were. What are my preferences, that was an even trickier question. I never know what are my preferences, with my drink, with a lot of other things in life. But I do have an answer prepared for this kind of question, as someone who goes to bars quite often. Whiskey based, citrusy, not too sweet, not in a martini glass, I said.
There were not many people in the bar, three or four groups of guests, including me. There was a young couple who looked like they could be university students, sitting in the middle of the room, at the bar, I tried not to look at them too obviously. But it was hard to completely ignore them either. In one way, their existence helped ease my self-consciousness about being a solo woman in the bar, while in another, they made it worse.
I lit up a cigarette while waiting for my drink, a habitual attempt to appear slightly more occupied. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the young couple enjoying each other’s company, talking and laughing from time to time, rubbing against each other when they moved their bodies as they laughed. They looked happy, at least at the moment. They probably didn’t know yet that happiness could be fleeting. I had been happy too, from time to time in the past two years, when I was with Leon. But that had ended. The relationship, the happiness. The happiness earlier than the relationship. I refocused on my cigarette, as if smoking it needed my full attention. I dragged my mind back from thinking of the breakup. Not yet, I told myself.
The bartender attempted to make casual conversation. I didn’t mind it that much. He seemed like someone who knew how to keep the right distance. He probably just felt obligated to make me feel less alone. Through the talk, I learned that he had owned and managed the bar by himself for 20 years. He had a wife and two daughters, but running the bar made his schedule quite the opposite of the typical family man’s. The official close time on Google Maps was 1 am, but he’d only close the bar when the last customer had left, which meant usually 2–3 am, sometimes later. I went home at 7 am this morning, he said. I could tell he was enjoying his life this way; maybe he was enjoying it too much. I almost felt sorry for his wife. She must either love him a lot or have a lover, I thought. As a woman, no matter how differently you identify, you just can’t help putting yourself in the same shoes as another woman.
I was two thirds down on my first drink. I looked at my phone: 8:40 pm. The conversation with the bartender was happening on and off. Most of the time he was talking in Japanese with other customers, but sometimes he’d walk over to my end of the bar and use his limited English to ask me something, the standard questions you’d ask a traveller — I started to feel grateful that he kept talking to me, which made me feel less of an awkward being and, more importantly, less lonely. I was slowly getting tipsy, feeling looser, but not yet loose enough to completely shake off the sense of being an intruder in this space, to this crowd.
I thought of how I used to feel like an intruder in a lot of other situations, when I had to meet and hang out with Leon’s friends, on occasions full of his social crowd, the creative, artsy, funky, party crowd. I thought of the constant uneasiness and slight embarrassment that I had to endure all those times, being new to everyone and, more importantly, being a perpetual outsider to that circle. That was something that didn’t ever change, no matter how many times I showed up at those occasions — showing up enough times didn’t make me an insider, just a familiar-looking outsider; and showing up enough times didn’t make me anyone’s friend, I’d always be “that girl”, Leon’s girlfriend. When I thought of the suffocating sense of subordination throughout the relationship, the feeling of always playing a part that I didn’t even audition for, a mixture of anger and aversion filled up my chest, followed by thick relief. I was so grateful to be alone now, at a random Kyoto bar. It felt more real than all those parties I went to with Leon. It was more real.
I finished my first drink and ordered another one. The bar was getting busier. Apparently there would be a band playing a live gig from 9:30 pm; they were setting up at the little corner stage at the other end of the bar from me. The university puppy-love couple was joined by more university puppy-love couples. A middle-aged man in a suit came in. Just back from a business trip from Osaka, I gathered from what he told the bartender. He was apparently a regular. It was a pretty young clientele overall. The music was getting up. I lit another cigarette. I was switched on to the “party of one” mode now, and I decided to stay longer.
The bartender seemed happy that I was staying. He talked more to me, but always with the polite distance that he seemed to be constantly reminding himself to keep from his customers. It made me feel comfortable, and feel more open to conversation, even though it wasn’t easy with his limited choice of English words.
I sipped slowly at my second drink, looking at my phone from time to time, alternating between my screen and my cigarettes. A man came in and sat on the only vacant seat left beside me. The bar was now full of young happy loud innocent Japanese souls as the university band had started their jazz gig. The new guy looked stuck out in this crowd — his overly hipster style was slightly unmatched with his age, which was hard to guess, as if he was trying to conceal his ageing process behind his clothes. He had wild curly hair, casually tied back, and was wearing some unnecessary and garish accessories. His face was marginally handsome, with facial features suggesting he wasn’t completely Japanese. When you’re alone, you have the capacity to analyze everything around you. He rolled up his sleeves the moment he sat down, immediately ordered a beer in Japanese, and eagerly started to make conversation with the bartender, indicating that he was an acquaintance. He seemed determined to not even glance at me, which contradicted the frivolous vibe he was emitting, and intrigued me slightly. Men usually look at me at bars. I expect to be looked at, at least once or twice, sometimes more shamelessly than others, like the way Leon did on the night we met.
I still vaguely enjoy revisiting the anecdote of how we met. I was completely wasted at the end of a disastrous night, having had a huge fight with someone, and went back to a party where there was no one I knew left. I was drifting around the dance floor, using my last flicker of consciousness to gauge if there was any reason that I should stay. Just then, I felt this gaze fixated on me, almost burning. At first, just like this man sitting beside me at the bar now, I was determined not to look back. I was half enjoying the gaze, half annoyed by the audacity of it. This didn’t last long before I felt it was too much, and casually looked back — there he was, this fairly tall guy with a natural elegance wearing a white turtleneck. I met his gaze, which, surprisingly, didn’t feel offensive or intruding or filled with lust, but more like an honest appreciation mixed with a mild concern. I certainly must have looked very lost and drunk. I walked over to him and said, This is not the way to look at a girl. He said, I don’t care. He came home with me that morning. And that was the very beginning of things.
The bartender became too busy to stay in the conversion with his acquaintance customer or to entertain me, and left us, two individual clients on their own, squeezed at the very end of the bar, both seeming slightly out of place relative to the rest of the crowd. When I was not contemplating my own thoughts, I could feel the faint awkwardness between the two of us. I could also feel that he could feel it too. It was hard to say who started to talk first, probably me rather than him, but then again maybe both of us at the same time, thanks to the effectiveness of alcohol. Either way, we started to make snatchy conversation, like two people in a movie might do, when they happened to sit side by side at a bar .
He was indeed, of mixed heritage with blood from Japan, Italy, America and France. He spoke fluent English with an unidentifiable accent, which made the conversation surreally smooth for a Japanese setting. He ran a pizzeria with a guesthouse upstairs. He was 29, married two years ago to a Japanese woman five years older than him. They met in Tokyo when he was a party boy and moved to Kyoto together to start this family business with his Italian father. Wasn’t that quite early to get married for a guy like you? I lightly joked. I’ve had my fair share of fun let’s say, he answered, and since my wife is older she felt the urgency of marriage for her age, and it just happened. I didn’t poke more into it, even though his commitment level didn’t sound convincing. He bought a round of shots for me and the bartender to drink together. A night out by himself in a bar like this was not that usual for him now, but he had just had a bad day and needed a drink, he said. As we talked, his phone rang several times; he picked up the first two times, answered in Japanese and ignored the rest. I told my wife I will go home in 40 minutes, he said, as though making an announcement, while ordering another drink for himself. Both the bartender and I laughed. I grew more willing to talk as I kept consuming more alcohol. I laughed at every funny and not-that-funny comment he made. It felt good to be entertained, or at least to appear so. It felt easier to laugh there by myself, with a random guy I’d never see again in this life, than it has been to laugh at those parties I went to with Leon and his friends. I felt free, free to laugh, free to drink, free to just be myself, not affiliated, not attached.
So how does it happen that a woman like you is drinking here by yourself? The pizzeria guy asked, just like any other guy would. I didn’t intend to be therapized tonight, while I also had no reason to not be truth-telling to a complete random stranger. I enjoyed having the power to tell or not tell. I decided to tell as much as I felt like. But where did I even start?
It’s just my thing, I travel alone.
No boyfriend?
No. Not at this moment.
How come? A beautiful woman like you should have plenty of options.
I felt slightly offended and, more to the point, disappointed, at this typical patriarchal mentality, as if a woman’s value can only be validated by the companionship of someone with a penis. I was not there to preach political correctness to someone who tried to solve his own issues with marriage and was not even aware of it; I was there to enjoy myself. I shrugged it off.
Do I really have plenty of options? Maybe I do. In a world like this, anyone can have plenty of options, enabled by technology and demoralizing apps. But the thing is, having too many options feels just the same as having no options. We are the generation so deeply confused by options. What good are options if you fail to follow through with any of them anyway? I started to feel the guilt burning in my chest and my brain again, together with a wave of sadness and anger. What have I done with my options? Other than hurting, getting hurt, and hurting? I hate people telling me I have options, it’s almost like a silent accusation implying that I should have done better with all my options, like they are the one to judge. I’d rather someone just rip the bandaid off it and tell me outright: “You fucked up.”
When I had just met Leon, I thought he might be The One. It isn’t easy to feel that way again when you’re in your 30s. It was intense. Everything just felt so “right” that it made me want to cry. That kind of feeling. One time in the early days, when we were both lying in bed, I asked Leon if he thought we’d always be this happy. He said of course, and that if one day we became not-happy, we’d find a way to be this happy again. It was one of those moments when I thought to myself, That’s probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, and managed, for just one second, to let go of my fundamental skepticism of all good things. Until one day it seemed we were spending more time fighting than snuggling. I grew needier and more demanding, as I usually did, while feeling more suffocated and burdened in the relationship. A room with no window, a tug of war. I slept with someone else. Leon found out. He stormed out of my apartment and out of us. That was it. How easily things got ruined. How cliché a story it is to tell. I finished my third or fourth drink. The pizzeria guy ordered another round for us; I was not counting anymore. It’s funny when you think how the initial thought at the beginning of a relationship plays a part in the whole thing after it’s over. In this case, the thought that I’ve met The One is like a joke I play on myself, a magnifier of an inevitable disappointment.
The band was ending their gig with the song Can’t Take My Eyes off You, invoking an innocent, upbeat vibe that was too contagious to ignore.
You’re just too good be true
I can’t take my eyes off you
You’d be like heaven to touch
I wanna hold you so much
……
I love you baby
And if it’s quite all right
I need you baby
To warm the lonely nights
I love you baby
Trust in me when I say
……
People love to hear songs about love, no matter how banal they are. Everyone in the bar was laughing senselessly, facilitated by alcohol and popular jazz tunes. I could be happy too, I thought. I am. How bizarre it is it to be feeling happy now, when just a moment ago I was recalling my broken relationship. How shortly people dwell on each other these days. The harder I tried to remember the feeling with Leon, the blurrier everything became. All those happy memories, like that summer road trip in southern France, they all seemed less real than drinking alone in a random Kyoto bar.
You know what, you can have any men you want, if you really want them, but it’s too easy, it’s not enough for you. You’re too smart for your own good. After a night of drunken chatting, the pizzeria guy threw his diagnosis at me. I looked at him in the eyes. What he wanted from me was so obvious. He was right, it was too easy. He had even turned off his phone in the past hour, so there were no more angry-wife calls to bother him. And I was too drunk to even care.
The bar was quieting down, the crowd gradually leaving, and only the most determined guests stayed. The pizzeria guy was smashed — he’d probably had 10 drinks at least, a mix of beer, cocktails and shots. He was not making much sense with whatever he was saying, to me or to the bartender. He was getting more audacious in his attempts to bring sex into the conversation. But he simply looked too drunk to be seriously offensive or flirtatious. He made me feel sad, and a bit unsafe to be sitting next to him now. The bartender seemed to have sensed my discomfort and mouth-apologized, I’m sorry, he whispered behind the bar, and took away the pizzeria guy’s empty glass. The two of them conversed in Japanese for a bit, the pizzeria guy nodding vigorously yet senselessly. He didn’t seem to be in full control of his movement anymore. Out of the blue he gave me a kiss on the side of my forehead and told me he was leaving.
It is my pleasure tonight. You’re really too smart for your own good. I hope you’d be a happier person. He said.
I hope you won’t be in trouble when you get home. I said.
It’s usually easier to be concerned about other people’s problems. It helps you forget about your own. I felt tranquilized on my seat for a while after the pizzeria guy left. An emptiness came upon me. It was 1:50 am. I asked for the bill. It’s all settled, the bartender said, by the pizzeria guy. I was confused about what to feel at that particular moment other than genuinely surprised. Should I be glad, or should I feel bad? It must have been a big bill. I thought of how he told me business was not good at the guesthouse, with platforms like airbnb disrupting the market. I felt bad, puzzled even. What was he trying to convey?
I changed my mind about leaving and decided to stay on, out of an unexplainable urge to spend some of my own money to pay for my own drinks. Maybe out of a need to restore the balance, or I was just too wasted to make smarter decisions. My head was spinning. Another new cocktail was served. The bartender was still apologetic for the drunk pizzeria guy’s behavior, as though he’d been harassing me or something. I kept telling him that it was ok, that I was ok. I’ve been through worse, of course. Comparatively speaking, this was nothing: he had merely been urging me to drink more than I would by myself and tried to discuss my sexual behavior. There were way worse things a man could do to a woman when he was drunk.
The bar was really empty now, just me, the bartender, another middle-aged Japanese guy who seemed to be a regular, and a young couple, of which the boy worked part-time at the bar. They were talking casually, and even when they were speaking Japanese I could tell that all they were talking about were subjects of no real importance. From time to time they tried to include me by switching to English and, in my compromised sobriety, I just let it flow. Apparently they’d end their nights like this quite often. For a moment, I felt like one of them, like I belonged there, like this was also how I often ended my nights: drinking alone, feeling both addicted and irrelevant. I became so fond of this imagined closeness that I started to dread how it would end. The bartender was talking about how he sometimes liked to get some udon after he closed the bar on his way home, and then how there was a high risk of reproducing mini-udon when they were all puked out because he’d be super drunk. Everyone laughed at the mini-udon joke. I could tell this was a joke he told often to entertain his guests, especially those who lasted till the end. I laughed and laughed, sometimes without even knowing what I was laughing about, as if once I’d decide to be entertained, everything becomes amusing. At some point, I thought I briefly lost consciousness. What was keeping me awake was really just a need to uphold a minimal level of dignity as a single female tourist. A woman should never be too drunk to walk herself home, not ever, not to mention in a foreign city.
I wouldn’t mind having some udon now, I said, half-jokingly, feeling a sudden craving. Are you sure? We can order some now, the bartender said. The idea seemed to be welcomed by the Japanese group. The bartender picked up his phone to make an order. In twenty minutes or so, a delivery guy arrived with five bowls of udon. Everyone was already focusing on their own bowl of udon before I realized what was going on. I thought some food was supposed to drag me back to the conscious side, at least a little bit, while indeed, I hadn’t felt more dislocated the whole evening than at this moment. I could feel my last surviving sobriety floating off my body, emitting a message that read “eating udon in a bar with four Japanese strangers at 5 am — better remember this moment.” Just at that second, as I was sending more udon into my mouth with a pair of chopsticks, an unstoppable rush of nausea seized me and I badly needed to vomit. I tried my best to keep calm, stood up from my stool and walked slowly to the restroom, trying to avoid any sudden movements that might make me vomit on the way. I locked the door and, almost at the same second, before I had time to aim properly, I vomited all over the bathroom. There they were, the mini-udons, everywhere.
I felt suddenly fully awake, my consciousness automatically resumed in the face of a mini-udon crisis. I can’t walk out leaving a mess like this, I thought. It’d be too indecent. I grabbed the roll toilet paper and started to wipe off the mini-udons, the floor, the wall, the toilet seat, the rim of the toilet. When the toilet paper in my hand was full of mini-udons, I flushed it down the toilet, and started over again with more toilet paper. I did that for I don’t know how long, maybe half hour, maybe longer; I’d lost all sense of time. I don’t believe I’ve ever cleaned a toilet so hard in my whole life. I have always hated housework, and yet there I was, cleaning my own vomit in a random bar in Kyoto at 5 am. I didn’t know what to feel. I wanted to cry but didn’t have time. There was an urgency more pressing than all others, the urgency to clean all these fucking mini-udons. I was almost amused by the situation, but I didn’t feel like laughing. I would be curious to see my facial expression at that particular moment, if it had been caught on camera. But there was nothing, there was no one, there was only me. Me and my mini-udon mess. No one ought to know about this.
I walked out of the bathroom trying to look innocent. Everyone looked at me in a concerned way. Are you ok? The bartender asked earnestly. I must have been in there too long. I told him that I was ok, but I didn’t think I could finish the udon. Everyone looked so tired. The sky was lightening, from dark blue to a paler shade. A new day had arrived. Now that I had vomited up everything and regained some sobriety, I could no longer ignore the absurdity of this evening. I felt a wave of self-loathing. Why didn’t I leave at a more sensible time? Why couldn’t I leave at a more sensible time? I’ve always had problems leaving a party, and Leon was the same. Our whole encounter might not have happened if not for our shared anxiety of leaving the party. You don’t really enjoy staying, you’re mad at yourself for not being able to have fun, you force yourself into fun by over-boozing, you think you are having fun because you’re drunk enough, you let it all go and slide into an altered reality. That reality lasts a while but then the booze effect starts to diminish and you find yourself stuck in a middle land, you know it’s about to end but you’re dreading the end so you keep forcing it and forcing it and forcing it, until some greater external force makes the decision for you that you should have made a long time ago. The break of dawn, the encounter with someone, the mini-udons.
I guessed that was it. I paid my bill, thanked the bartender and said my goodbyes. I dislike saying goodbyes. I wish I could do them less awkwardly.
It was a five-minute walk back to my guesthouse. When I came out onto the street, the autumn chill brushed over my face. In the morning twilight, everything appeared gentle, indifferent to my existence. The world seemed to have lost its gravity. I felt exhausted, and relieved. Now, I just couldn’t wait to go back to my room, gargle, lie in the bed curled into a ball and finally, with daylight, go to sleep. It’s only loneliness, after all. Many must have it.
A clean, well-lighted place. 