ABOUT THOSE TIMES I LEFT YOU
Chihaya, I'm about to tell you a kind of truth and can barely trust myself to do it. For you, the fact that I've left you too many times is obvious. I'm smiling to myself right now, thinking of your comically big eyes as you yell out, "Yes, that's right!" But it's hard. I don't know how to tell you the simple truth, the one that wakes me at night from dreams of you. The fact is that leaving you those many times, that incredible number of times in the short time we've known each other, was in a terrible way all I wanted. I only planned for leaving. That out of the way, I'll try to make sense of it. Because I may have left you for the last time.
Think of the way space opens up when you walk into a room or out of one, when you step over a threshold and the doorframe surrounds you briefly during the movement through. Whenever I escaped from my mother, in other words whenever I physically got away from her, the door was the good part. After all, she was always waiting past the door. She was everywhere. Only the door belonged to me, only the choice to move through it was mine. I know she didn't have any desire to nudge me to that point. She's a terror-inspiring but worthwhile person. But my excellent father, who was almost always gone, didn't offer a counter-example to balance with the example of my mother. I became a genius at running away, but not just that. I became a genius at creating mental blueprints of every space I was in, inside and out, marking the exits, understanding the doors. What I and others considered to be running away was actually a running-toward, a sprint for the void I knew to be on the other side of love.
This was something I was really good at, something I excelled at, with the bitter joke of it being that my mother would have praised me for excelling at it if it were something she wanted me to do. But of course it wasn't. No one wanted it. A lot of people love me, and I love them. But thresholds are my oldest and deepest love. My best moments are when I step into a new place where I see no one's face. I never admit it while it's happening; I always seek faces I know because I know it's the right thing to do. But before that, when the void opens up and there are no reasons to answer to anyone, I celebrate the door, both its opening forward and its opening back, and feel a kind of seizing joy at knowing I am alone. And it's the divine blessing of the threshold, the unseen miracle marked below me in space, that has always opened me up, for better or worse. So leaving you, which is what I have done so often, has always in a terrible way been what I wanted to do.
Cruelly, I managed things so that you felt you were the reason for my leaving. Truth be told, though, I was in love not with escaping, not with fleeing, but with the moment between evading you and entering another space where I would also try to evade you. You see, if there is really no escape, if everything in the heart roars and moans from horror no matter what you do, some kind of trick must entertain, and even as a child, around the time when we first grew to know each other, I think if I hadn't had that trick I would have ended my life. Something had to be there to entertain, to flatter, to interest my tiny soul. That trick was leaving. I had to leave in order to remain where I was. I had to leave you whenever I found myself with you, because I was not really there. I was always halfway out the door, romancing the threshold.
You're so funny. I swear I've spent hours laughing outc of control, sometimes in public or family dinners or other inappropriate places, when I think of something you've done or said. I crave your body and your love, more than I can possibly describe, but what I am addicted to is how funny you are. Unfortunately, when you aren't funny, the world is not funny at all. I don't think I would have minded Arata's ascendent place in your heart if I could have kept laughing all the time, sometimes at your indignant demands to know why I was laughing. But that just wasn't possible. Because your love for Arata, and his love for you, and my own orphaned love in the face of both of yours, was the opposite of funny. It was a hellscape opening up to nothing. The two of you had no desire to hold a gun to my head. But you did.
Okay, I'm going to confess to a number of leavings, before talking about the big one.
When I ditched you and the team and headed out to play Arata, without telling you why, and came back having left you emotionally as you struggled to bring me back. When I walked out of the room after confessing my love to you as you asked "What about Arata?" What the hell was that about, anyway? When I walked away during the club recruitment, with good reason I might add, since you refused to talk to me for days, and I felt it evened things up to leave without talking to you. When I spat out my misery as you begged me not to leave because of that wretched game, and kissed you without asking. You were never aware I did that, were you? That makes me smile, now, knowing you've never realized I kissed you. When I turned my back on you and kept walking. Jump forward. When I barely arrived during your game with Arata and left before we really had a chance to talk. Jump forward some more. The big one. When I had to walk away after losing to Arata, had to walk away from you and from the game, had to walk away from all of it. And that was the one time when I didn't want to go, despite the spiteful double-talking of those competitive karuta hangers-on weasels. For once, I was ready to forsake the threshold for my friends, family, for you. But I had to step over it. There was no comfort to be had in the place from which I was exiled. The loving words and embraces of the ones I love were sealed from the touch. Despite my desire to remain for once, it was not possible. It was all over and I was already gone like those poets exiled from the court and staring at the ocean somewhere and wondering what the hell went wrong.
Can you guess which leaving was the "big one"? Can you guess my criteria for choosing a good leaving to discuss? Do you even know that I walked out the door that time, in your distress and the echoes ringing back and forth between your ears? Yes, it's when I told you I loved you and left, left tragically and romantically and with no small measure of spite, because I knew you were alone in that room, shaken, saying meaningful but stupid things like "What about Arata?", left you alone to the guilt and ignorance left behind as the door closed and you heard my footsteps in the hall, walking away.
Did I have to leave you there? That was acceptable. Should I have left you there? Sure, I could have done something else, but what else could I have done? Did I know the void your voice called into, as I crossed the threshold in the comfort of leaving?
Yes, I knew that void. I knew that void very well. I could hear it opening up around you as you sat stunned behind me. It was the void of no explanation, of no words, no gameplay, no explanation, no cajoling, no arguing, no playing, no understanding, no remaining hope. It was all I could do to hurt you, supported as I was by good reasons. I left you a hole to fall into. And when you emerged from that hole, I was gone and it seemed to be your fault, but you didn't understand because there was nothing to understand. There never had been. Nothing could possibly account for my leaving, because it was off the books, off the accounts, invisible to everyone but the sad little kid called Me. I did what I was good at.
Looking back on this, I'm not sure it makes the slightest bit of sense. It's been a couple of days since I lost to Arata and lost you and everyone else in the haze as I was packed up and moved far away from the court. That may be the last time I leave you. Why? I guess it's because there is no reason to evade you. The leaving, the hollowing-out this time has scrubbed away your face and name where it used to hurt me. Or to be fair, your face and name as I had stolen and darkly cherished them.
For the first time in seven years, I am falling out of love with you. There is no reason to leave you now, no pleasure in it.
I had to let you know these things. You never fail to combine your obtuse ignorance of your own heart with guilt about things you did not make happen and cannot do anything about. You need to know the truth about me, the truth about the man who, so often, has called your name only when he knows you cannot hear him. I hope I actually summon the nerve to give this to you. Have we ever said anything that needed to be said, to each other, directly?
You need to know my love of evasion, my vigilance for finding doors, my romancing thresholds. You need to know these things, so you can cast away the hauntings of the times I left you.