Performance

I was just the slightest bit nervous on my way to the boxing gym that evening. I mean, it wasn’t like I had just ruthlessly criticised a seemingly heartfelt work of art from the very girl I was gonna be spending the next two hours with or something. And I was almost certain she knew it was me, she was already waving at me when I started looking for her. No doubt she was smart enough to put together that I had seen her name on the page and was trying to confirm it was really her.

She’s generally chilled out and kind, but I was pretty damn harsh. Even she must have limits. In hindsight, maybe systematically deconstructing a very personal piece of art was kind of a dick move.

Well, no point standing around fretting about it. Avoiding her would only make it worse. So, holding my breath just a little, I pushed open the clubroom door.

The girl on the other side, to my surprise, didn’t seem angry with me. Instead, she had somewhat of a dejected look on her face, a sadness she was trying to hide with a wry smile.

“H-hey…” I barely managed to mutter. Fuck, why was I so on edge?

“Nanako… can I ask you a question?”

“S-sure…”

“Were you the one who graded my poem?”

“Y-yeah… I think so…”

There was a very heavy silence between us for a second. Just a second. Then…

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank god…”

Needless to say I was more than a little confused.

“You’re… happy about that? I was pretty harsh in my grading.”

“You were, and when I got it back it did make me a little sad…” she sighed, and I felt a pang of guilt, “but you were also fair. Everything you said in your feedback was right.”

“So… why are you glad it was me?”

“Because it’s… embarrassing…” she looked down towards the ground, and I saw the faintest red in her cheeks. “The idea of a stranger reading that poem, it made me feel a little sick. So I’m glad it was someone I trust.”

As happy as it made me, I was surprised to hear her talk about trust so easily. All I had done was hit on her, belittle her sport and trounce her at chess. Did she really set the bar for trust that low?

“Well, I can see why you’d be embarrassed, it did seem quite heartfelt.” To my surprise, that seemingly reasonable assumption was met with a shake of the head.

“No, no, it’s embarrassing because it’s the opposite,” she said. “It’s not genuine at all, it just feels like I was… taking blind swings…”

“Taking blind swings? You mean…”

“Yeah. I… don’t really know what love is like. I’ve never had it.” Touka looked dejectedly down at the ground for a moment. Then, when her eyes met mine, and she saw the unhideable pity on my face, she scrambled to correct herself. “Ah- I mean I obviously love my family and everything, I just meant in the romantic sense!”

“But you’re—and I hope I’m not overstepping here—insanely fucking hot. There’s no way you don’t have people lining up at your feet to be your partner.”

“It’s not that I’ve never had a relationship or anything,” she sighed, “in fact I’ve had quite a few boyfriends. And I liked them all well enough, but I just… never loved them. Every time I broke up with a boyfriend, all I felt was sadness that I had lost a friend and guilt that I had wasted their time. I think… I think I’m just no good at this romance stuff. So, my poem was just… me trying to imitate the way other people talk about love. But because I don’t understand it myself, it’s just… hollow.”

In a sense, I suppose that did explain a few things. The lack of any consistent symbolism, that’s likely because poets who write symbolic stories about love already have a concrete idea of their own feelings. Same with the over-the-top dialect and style, she was overcompensating for the lack of feeling by hiding it under a pretty coat of paint.

Now that I saw it from that angle, it was hard to unsee. It seemed so shallow because it was a performance of love, not a real representation of it.

But there was something else on my mind. Dating men but never feeling anything from it? Feeling like you’re incapable of love because of it? That was an all too familiar situation to me. After all, it was less than five years ago I was there myself.

“Touka, do you think…” I swallowed hard, not sure whether I wanted to keep talking. But if I could help this girl understand herself a little better, I almost felt it was my duty to do so. No one ever did it for me, and facing this question alone was not an experience I would willingly put on someone else. So I continued. “...do you think it’s possible that, instead of not being able to love at all, you just… can’t love men?”

It was almost like her ears pricked up. She went from awkwardly avoiding eye contact to looking straight at me with an intense stare.

“What… do you…?” She began to ask, but I’m certain she already knew what I meant. And yet, I spelled it out anyway.

“Maybe you just… like girls instead?”

I felt like I saw her breath hitch for a second. Her initial reaction was subtle, but it was at least enough to tell me it wasn’t the first time she had confronted that particular possibility.

“…growing up, I never really entertained the idea that a woman could like other women…” she said, once again looking down at the ground. Then it was as if she realised her own words and scrambled to clarify them. “Ah- don’t get me wrong, I never judged anyone for it or anything! It’s just… all my childhood, and even through my adolescence, my family always talked about me finding my ‘perfect man.’ My friends always asked which boys I liked. My mum asked me what career I would want my husband to have. It was like a given truth from the very start that I would be with a man or no one at all. So I… the idea of wanting a girl instead… it’s hard to think about…”

“But you have thought about it, haven’t you?”

She didn’t respond to my question verbally. All she gave me was the slightest, smallest, subtlest nod. Just enough to be recognisable, but little enough that she probably allowed herself to deny it.

I could hardly be surprised. From the day that a person is born, their heterosexuality is assumed. Anything different is a deviation, an exception to the norm. And in a society where compliance and conformity are essentially mandatory, questioning one’s own sexual orientation can feel tantamount to rebelling against the system that raised them. Even if this country is relatively accepting and supportive of non-straight relationships, they’re still fundamentally “different.” Queer, as so many are fond of saying, though I can’t say I’ve ever liked the term.

I’d prefer for my existence not to be defined by the ways in which I don’t fit into society. But that’s neither here nor there. This wasn’t about me.

“…I can’t tell you whether you like girls, or guys, or both, or neither,” I continued, “because all of that is something that you and you alone have to figure out. But, having been there myself before, I can at least tell you I know how it feels. You feel like an ‘other,’ an outsider to a box you were forced into right?”

Once again, no verbal response, but the monetary flicker of eye contact told me to keep going.

“I won’t lie to you, that feeling doesn’t disappear. When you’ve grown up being told you’ll one day end up some way, only to realise you want something different, you feel uneasy. A given path is an easy path. You don’t have to find your own way, it’s already laid out for you. But when you’re… different… you have to find your own way. And yeah, when you’re new to it, it scares the shit out of you. Feels isolating, lonely, almost shameful. Believe me, I would know.” More than a couple of unpleasant memories surfaced, but I pushed them back down. Introspection later. Help the pretty girl now. “All I’m trying to say is, if those are the feelings you’re confronting, you’re not alone. There’s millions of other people in the world going through the same thing, or that have already done so and come out okay on the other side. Hell, you’re looking at one right?” I bit my tongue on the comment that I might not be the best example of someone who came out alright. “If ever you feel like you can confront those feelings better by saying them aloud to someone, I’ll be all ears. Don’t suffer in silence, yeah?”

When I finally shut up, I realised I had been talking for quite a while. Mostly based on assumptions I had pulled from a couple of words and a handful of involuntary gestures. How hypocritical of me, to push my own standards on the poor girl like this.

But I guess, really I was just saying what I wish someone had said to me back then. That was all.

“…I’m not feeling up to boxing today,” she said, almost barrelling past me as she left the room.

“…me neither, Touka.”

As I stood alone in the empty boxing gym, I wondered if Mai was free at home.

I could really go for a game of chess.