Day 5: Part IV

I assumed he was referring to our continued correspondence, but before I could ask directly I had fallen asleep. When I awoke for the second time, his grandmother had joined him and an understandable reticence befell between us. So much so that his grandmother, after our return to her house and witnessing our listless selves mope about, strongly suggested to Sean that we take the bus to a nearby city, a few miles over a yonder mountain.

Not knowing had proved more troublesome than having my suspicions confirmed. As we rode over the mountain, the driver speeding through the curves as though drag racing, occasionally I’d sway into Sean’s shoulder and he’d hold me upright like a seatbelt. It was not as though my knowing would make me envision Sean as some perverted who had invited me unaccompanied with ulterior motives, but I had the same view of him as before, if understanding him a little better; that his hands on my shoulder were meant to protect me and be of small comfort to him. All along, he had just wanted to see me. I understood that. I had wanted to see him, too.

When we arrived, some passengers took their luggage to a nearby bench and waited on their phones, some walked to the train station up ahead, and others crossed the street to their homes among the cement. Some crows cawed at a woman who had been eating something and, without hesitation, one had swooped in and stole it while the other began to fight the first for it right above the poor woman’s head. They flew off.

“The crows are aggressive,” Sean said, as we walked over to the crosswalk.

These were the first words we had exchanged in a while and I wasn’t going to let it pass obscured. “Yeah, maybe we should call the caw-ps.” Sean seemed more surprised that I had responded than he was humored by the pun, but he gave an approving nod as we wandered down a random street.

One hole-in-the-wall melon bread shop took great pains to stand apart from the otherwise aged white walls with its cafe maroon, its crowning ornamentations with accented fairy lights, and its glassy gold display of its melon bread varieties. “Hey, Sean,” I said, pulling a bill out of my wallet, “can you order for me? And can you ask if they’ll let me take a picture?” Melon bread was many a characters' go-to lunch, and with such an elaborate decoration, I felt the need to commemorate my induction to that tradition.

“Of course. Which do you want?”

“Plain.” He was reluctant to take my money, but I waited until he complied.

“Sure.” As Sean approached the girls and began ordering, I heard him refer to me as, "tomodachi," as he pointed back and both their eyes fell upon mine. I knew that meant friend and it was all I’d ever expected to be called by him, but much like these after-school part-timers’ surprise at seeing a foreigner or, most likely, that someone wanted a picture of their otherwise ordinary occupation, life often provided challenges to one’s assumptions. There was some giggling and frantic pacing back and forth inside their small kitchen box. Sean flashed an ‘okay’ sign and I snapped a photo.

They handed Sean my bread, faces red, and began bowing and so did I. “That was so stupid,” I said as we walked down the street, “I should’ve just ordered and left. I can’t believe you convinced them to let me do that.” I tightened my clutch on the pastry bag.

“Dude, it was hilarious. They were shouting ‘Just act natural. Just act natural. How do I act natural!?’ Like something out of a slice-of-life anime.”

“Wait a minute,” I said with an encroaching grin, “does anime imitate life or does life imitate anime?”

“Woah.”

We laughed at this profundity and sought the answer in the photo. It was too bright outside to see it properly, so Sean took us on a detour to a grocery store. The automatic doors opened with its electronic bell chime, “ ‘ello. ‘ello. ‘ello.” Besides a housewife who had a big leak sticking out of her basket, we were the only other customers. We wandered through the aisles as though we’d run out of eggs and milk, scrambling for last-minute dinner ideas. Sean, on a whim, grabbed a pre-packaged meal of calamari.

There were some tables in the corner and we sat down to enjoy our fixings. Sean peeled off the steamy plastic covering and I retrieved my melon bread from the pastry bag's opening. There was a cookie-crumble cantaloupe-like stripping made from sugar. The bread had a moist and fluffy texture that, once squished down to take a bite, the reminder would slowly rise again like a red velvet cake in the oven.

In the photo, we could hardly see the workers, but if we zoomed in we could see them smiling naturally, as though the picture were taken to commemorate their friendship and not a personal whim.

“They’re pretty cute,” I said, then, with a slap, covered my mouth with my hand. It was impossible to pretend that everything was the exact same between us. I was afraid that even an innocuous comment like that would make him heartbroken.

“They are," he said, setting some spare chopsticks on the plastic plate. “They’ve got nice smiles.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being honest or trying to maintain some semblance of our previous flow of conversation. I crumbled my pastry bag and shoved it in Sean’s plastic grocery bag along with his trash. “Hey, can I, um, talk to you about, you know, um…”

“That I like you?”

“Yeah. Uh, that. Um. It’s not that I’m grossed out or anything. So, don’t worry about that. I guess, just, I’m a little confused. Like, what are we supposed to do, now? Moving forward.”

He took a moment to answer, as though presenting his dissertation to a doctorate committee. “It’s best if we forget about it.”

“What?”

“It’s not like anything would happen.”

“Yeah, but I mean, I don’t know. If those are your true feelings shouldn’t we talk about it?”

“If this were under normal circumstances, then maybe, but you’re going back home in a few days. It’s pointless.”

“You can’t dismiss your feelings like that.”

“I’m not dismissing them.”

“Yes, you are. You make it sound like it’s a fling of the mood. That it’s not important enough to hold on to.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” I said and he didn’t answer, though whether from disagreement or refusal to admit it, I couldn’t tell. “Honestly, I’m kind of jealous you have feelings for someone.”

“You’re jealous of me?”

“Yes.” He gave an irritatingly short scoff, hardly a scoff more than an exhale, and feeling like my words were being diminished, I leaned across the counter, hovering myself above the chair. “I’d like to fall in love with someone. I don’t know anything about that, so it’s annoying--”

“You’re annoyed?”

“Y-yeah. Sort of.” I reclined into my seat. “Maybe that wasn’t the right word. What I’m trying to say is that if I had feelings for someone--”

“But you don’t.”

“Okay, but I’m saying, hypothetically.” My legs were shaking under the table. “If I had feelings for someone,” I said, not looking at him but at the shelf behind him. It was discount liquor. Further back by the registers, there were printed ads taped to the sides of the table. One was a cartoon for Korean barbecue. “I’d hold on to them until…” He was listening with crossed arms. It made it embarrassing to say, as though no matter how much I believed in what I said, I was wrong. “Until the last ember put out.”

“Sometimes you need to douse it with water or it’ll go on forever”

“That’s so cruel! How can you say that?”

“Because I can’t wake up every day deluding myself that there’s a chance.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Alex, it’s not some stranger. It’s you!” He pointed at me, as though his finger were Cupid’s arrow, and accidentally banged the table with his other hand. He seemed to have scared himself more than me, looking at his finger like it were his enemy. “I’m sorry,” he said, relaxing into the back of his chair. “Let’s just drop it.”

His long hair glided across his forehead like shirt sleeves when you start to cry. “No.”

“Alex, come on.”

“Look, I may not know a lot about falling in love, but if I’ve learned one thing from Romance anime, it’s that the right thing to do after a confession is to give a definitive yes or no.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“Well, um, you see, right now, I don’t have one.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m being serious. Maybe the reason I’ve never had a crush on anyone is because I’m the kind of guy that needs to be pursued.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“But it could be. All I’m saying is that I don’t know. It feels like I should say ‘no’ but that doesn't sit right with me.”

“I don’t know if you’ve realized this but you live across the ocean and a continent.”

“So?”

“It’s wishful thinking.”

“We kept our friendship alive for four years. And my parents were married long distance for their first year.”

“What are you saying?”

I shrugged. “I guess, hearing you say you liked me out loud was kind of relieving, more than I’d thought it would be. And while I can’t answer you yet, I don’t want you to feign friendliness when we both know what's going on. I think you deserve the chance to, uh, how do I say this, let your feelings spark and burn like a summer barbecue. Sure.” I gave an awkward smile, more like gritting my teeth, and to top it off, I flashed him two thumbs up as though it was his first game in the little leagues. “Woah, are…are you crying?”

He shook his head and dried his eyes. “It’s just a barbecue sounds delicious.” He gave a similarly awkward smile and I knew what he meant.