To Be Continued...
The Ex-Student is in Ube, then he’s in Papua New Guinea, then he’s in Oita, then he’s in Ehime. How do I know this? From the e-mail.
We’re e-mailing each other again.
Life Begins At
Before I left the U.S., The Brain decided, almost without my input, that The Japanese Adventure was going to have a two-year duration. This month is the end of that two-year period. This month my life, after my year in Japan and the frozen year that followed, will again be set into motion.
Next week, I’ll have a job. Next month, I’ll have my own apartment. Next year, I’ll be married again, and pregnant for the first time at the age of thirty-six. At thirty-seven, I’ll have my first child, and a second will follow just before I turn forty. Sometime within that time period, I’ll return to Japan where I’ll spend the next fifteen to twenty-five years of my life.
That is one fork in the road.
This is the other:
Next week, I’ll have a job. Next month, I’ll have my own apartment. Next year, I’ll begin my prerequisites to enter graduate school. At thirty-seven, I’ll begin a Ph.D. program in another state. I’ll have a doctoral degree by the time I’m forty-two.
What does the Ex-Student have to do with any of this?
Fealty
I love him. I always have, since our first date, loved him. I love him the way I’ve never loved anyone. I love him so much that I would pledge my loyalty to him and would set my future in the direction he pointed me. I love him that much.
But I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him because I don’t trust myself.
I have a hard time with relationships. I want my independence and I want someone to love me. I want to be married and I want to be free. I don’t trust love.
How It All Ended, or, I Was Looking For A Woman Like You
And the Handsome Businessman?
This is how it ended with the Handsome Businessman:
Dear ________,
I am sure that you don't want to hear my name any more, but I just want to explain my behavior.
Going back to earlier last year, I sometimes felt that you don't like to hear stories about women around me. When I talked about my wife or other women, you were upset. I had thought I prefer not to talk about women around me to you, even I don't have any relationships. Since then I reluctant to talk to you about women. So I didn't want to go there.
I was looking for a woman like you, and once in a while, I go to a bar with some women. I used the word " dating with a girl friend" is taken by you just during the conversation. It means going to a bar with women sometimes. Recently I had a relationship with a teacher just one time, but it had already finished. Last Friday was not a date, just talking.
I think that it is already "none of your business" But I want to apologize to you that my nasty behavior made you unpleasant. And I know that this e-mail will be the last contact for us.
That’s right. He cheated on me. He cheated on me with another English teacher. My replacement once removed, in fact. Literally my replacement. (Yes, yes, I know. I know how futile it is to expect faithfulness from the married man with whom I was having an affair. I know. I know. I know.)
“I was looking for a woman like you," he writes. And I can’t even begin to dissect this statement without unpacking the reductive belief--held not just by him, but by many, many men--that on some level, women are all alike, interchangeable. It's just a matter of finding the next one that was just like the last one.
But I know better: There is no other woman like me, not in any bar in Ginza, not in any English classroom in Japan, not anywhere on this planet.
And my reply to his e-mail was this:
Do not send me anymore e-mail and do not attempt to
contact me for any reason in the future.
And then it was ended.
Finally.
My Bad Luck
This week, bad luck came in three: Akira cheating and admitting it to me. The toilet and shower backing up and spewing shit all over. My computer taking a nose dive.
One by one, things failed. And one by one, they were fixed.
Fixed.
What does it mean to fix (or be fixed) or to heal (or be healed)? What does it mean to break (or be broken)? We are never the same after being broken. But are we better for having been broken, for having been fixed? I say yes. Yes, we are.
If I try to interpret the dream that is my waking life, I see a relationship going nowhere. Then I see it ended. I see a clogged pipeline. Then I see it cleared. I see my link to the outside world, my digital memory, fail. Then I see it fixed, restored.
Other Important Events In the Dream That Is My Waking Life, In No Particular Order
The Ex-Student, a navigator, reenters my life. He sends me a photo from the radio room of the ship he is on. His face is thinner. He looks a bit older. He has the slightest smile. He offers Japanese lessons when I tell him I am studying Japanese again.
I begin to write again after months and months of limping along wordlessly. The writing returning is a sign that the ice is breaking. My frozen year is thawing. My life is set in motion again.
I e-mail Eric, Shoko, Akari, Kazuko, Kaori, Kyoko, and Anita. I hear back from Eric, Shoko, Akari, Kazuko, Kaori, Kyoko, and Anita.
A visit from my mother.
At lunch with my mother and my aunt, eating menudo with pigs’ feet in a Mexican restaurant in the valley. The last time I ate pigs’ feet, my grandmother cooked them. The last time I ate pigs’ feet was at her table, years before she died.
A dream about my grandmother, sad to see us giving away her possessions.
A job interview and the prospect of science entering my life again.
Hearing Nicole tell about the beginning of her and Steve’s relationship, which began when he was thirty-five, the same age I am now.
Steve? Who’s Steve?
Without getting into too much personal information, Steve and Nicole met when Steve was thirty-five and Nicole was nineteen. At first, it wasn’t a serious relationship (for Nicole anyway), but it soon became a serious relationship and now, nine years later, they are married. Recently had their first baby.
Why is this so important to me?
I look at my relationship status at thirty-five and I see a wasteland of failure. I see a divorced, prospective-less, thirty-five year old woman. But when he met Nicole, Steve was thirty-five, the same age that I am now. They didn't expect it to go anywhere, but it did. Steve’s life was transformed, first by Nicole, now by the baby. A new life began for him, at thirty-five.
The End Is Just A Kind of Beginning
To be continued...
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