There have been some pretty big changes in these three months that I've been AFK. The biggest by far is Turtle. "Who the hell is Turtle?", I hear you say, "and what the hell is up with his shitty nickname?"
So, lemme break it down to you.
Long time readers may remember this catch-up post, and me mentioning a guy who chased me down the street to tell me I was pretty. That's Turtle. Now, this is what's been going on. Ever since that night, we've been keeping in contact, sometimes hanging out. We'd talk about a lot of stuff, and I thought he was a really cool guy. Something seemed up though, and he'd only ever hang out late at night, and never stay over. The final straw was when he came over pretty seriously drunk one evening and flat-out passed out on my bed. I was not amused.
I told him I didn't appreciate that he only called me when he was drunk, and that behaviour like that wasn't going to fly with me. I left to go back to Sweden for Christmas, and he messaged me at some point, and I told him I wouldn't be around, but we made plans to meet up again in January. January comes, I text him, and... nothing. I try to call him, and nothing. I eventually end up emailing him to ask if he's even alive, and he told me he'd been hospitalized for a heart thing. Crazy. He thanks me for being worried, tells me we'll hang out again, and then disappears some more...
...until an evening in February, when Birdie and I were going to Shibuya to go clubbing a little. He texted me out of the blue, and I invited him to come with us. He asked me nervously if he was crashing some sort of date, to which Birdie and I responded with this picture.
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| Not a date. |
So he came, and he hung out, and things were pretty damn awesome. We made out in the club, and something felt different, you know? That, and the feeling of "Holy crap, we're kissing in front of people", because Japan has made me a total prude. We went on our first 'real' date in March, on the same day that my dad had been hospitalized for his heart and my world was kinda in shambles. I ended up sleeping at his apartment, and have pretty much kept doing that for two to three times a week ever since. He texts me every day, and when work is finished and I say I'm going home, he'll ask me "So which home are you going to?"
He sent me the Mariokart Love song a few weeks ago. It's official, we're the type of people you want to vomit all over.
So far so cute, right? Me being me though, there's more to this story than diabetes-inducing sweetness. The thing is, I was right when I figured that something was up, and in April I confronted him about it. You guys know what it was? It was fucking marriage. The boy was married. He'd been married pretty much all along. Had it been anyone else in the entire world, I would've just walked right out of the situation and not looked back again. That's a secret that's way too big for me to just take swallow and be okay with, so I made him tell me all about what had been going on, and he did.
So when he met me, he'd either just gotten married or was just going to get married (I'm a little hazy on the details since he only really speaks Japanese and I didn't want to interrupt for clarification unless it was something important). I remember at some point that he wrote an email to me saying: "I wish I'd met you sooner", but I never really understood, because I'm a dense fucker. In any case, things weren't good with his wife, even from the start. I'm not sure exactly what set it off, but she seemed to make it a point to be as cold to him as possible. She turned her whole family against not only him, but his family as well, saying that they were terrible people and going out of her way to be bitter and angry. In Japan, it's customary for newlyweds to spend their first New Years Eve with the husband's family, which she flat-out refused, leaving Turtle to go up to Aomori by himself. All through this, though, he told me that he'd made a promise to her and was dedicated to actually making good of it - that he'd do his best to love her, and try to placate the situation.
This made him pretty much suffer a mental breakdown, which was why he was hospitalized when I tried to get hold of him. His wife wouldn't come visit him in the hospital. She made it abundantly clear that she wasn't happy with him, and he told me that he noticed my texts and emails. "The contrast of the tone really drove it home," he told me. "You genuinely cared about me. You'd always been special, but that just made me decide to end it." And he did. Althrough the spring they've been locked in a really messy divorce. She hated him, he hated her, and everything was done through proxi.
In the most Japanese of Japanese displays, he kowtowed twice, his head touching the floor in front of me, begging me for forgiveness. "I couldn't tell you. I didn't want you to hate me." And how could I? It was much too late for any of that. Apparently, a divorce makes people avoid a person like the plague. "There's just no way somebody would date someone like me," said the very handsome, smart and enormously kind boy. In a world like that, something is seriously wrong. But shit, it's their loss. That being said, we've had to hide our dating so as not to fuck up the divorce process, and that has been less than fun.
And now, here we are. As of this week, he's officially divorced and moved out to his own permanent apartment. It's the craziest relationship-y situation I've ever been in, but at the same time one of the most rewarding. I haven't been able to see him for a bit on account of the move and his mother being here to help him, but before he moved out of his temporary place, he lent me his Nintendo DS with the latest version of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire to hold me over for the next few weeks.
He deleted his save file for me.
He wasn't even done. He still deleted his save file for me.
So here I am, feeling unsure about where we now are and what this now is, because it's me and I'm always unsure. Someone could be hitting me over the head with a sign that said 'I'm madly in love with you', and I'd still be like "Well... maybe they're just not, you know?" I just can't wait for things to go back to their usual way - I'll go over after work, he'll draw me a bath and make me some soup, we'll smoke on the balcony and then read comics together before bed. All this from making eye contact as I was just about to cross the street one fateful evening. Shit, man. Sometimes weird things happen. Sometimes they happen to be pretty damn good.
Anyways, now that this major update is out of the way, I'll give you a more general update next time. I've missed writing you Silent Readers. I'll try to get back on that.
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