A Silhouette
I made a playlist to accompany this piece on Spotify. Feel free to listen to it if you so choose.
Names have been changed to respect privacy.
いつでも捜しているよ どっかに君の破片を
旅先の店 新聞の隅
こんなとこにあるはずもないのに
奇跡がもしも起こるなら 今すぐ君に見せたい
新しい朝 これからの僕
言えなかった「好き」という言葉も
Avoiding my reflection in the train window, I hit repeat, mindlessly watching the blur of verdant trees and mountains broken up by increasingly long stretches of tunnels, before slowly sprawling into towering grey, mirrored buildings. Counting the few seconds remaining to grab my bag and hurriedly disembark at Tokyo Station, I scrape the wheels on my bag, huffing out an irritated breath trying to right it before stepping onto the escalator. The crowd clumps — solo travelers, couples, families — jostling together as an amoeba within the labyrinth of platforms and turnstiles, until I can wrench myself free near an exit and shuffle into the winding taxi queue. Everyone’s heads are down; rapidly scrolling articles and social media; texting coworkers, families, friends, and newly-met strangers while my own gaze rests upon the rapidly setting sun blanketing the stacked buildings in evening pulled shadows.
One year turned to two, to five, then seven, and yet I’m still searching for a silhouette I fear I’ll never see again. A broad back, always walking away, into the sun, into the dark, into the abyss. Chicago, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, anywhere and everywhere in smoky clubs and empty parks, even though I know that near forgotten visage won’t be there.
The line moves forward. The song ends.
I hit repeat again, blinking away the mirage of fragmented memories and messages from a User Not Found.
I have always dreamt of leaving. To do away with everything and everyone. Discard the me who is tired of being tangled up in other people’s dreams. Sawing through the iron-clad expectations tightening around me. To one day RSVP ‘Yes’ to that Saturday night UK-garage party, and the next dropping my phone into the trash and leaving for another country instead. Settling in a small, quiet town — green and grey with endless stone roads — and spending my days writing and laying in an open field surrounded by the scent of mountains with only trees, jagged rocks, and a small lake for company.
I often joke to my sister that one day she’ll find my apartment emptied, after I finally decided to fuck off to the mountains and become a monk.
She sometimes laughs.
Navigating a singular, unique life beneath the weight of first-generation immigrant expectations — brimming demands to live out the emptied dreams of our parents’ survival — is subsuming. Daydreams shift into nightmares, and the fervent itch — the all-consuming need to leave — claws at my throat, gasping for a breath refusing to fill my lungs.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never forgotten him.
Jordan was the first person I ever dated. It wasn’t until my bewildered realization upon graduating high school early and leaving my overly white, racist hometown behind for college that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the undesirable, nebulous brown blob my peers convinced me I was.
We met on a rainy September night through a mutual friend my freshman year, at a party for some student group they were a part of. Jordan, myself, my visiting sister, and his friend from high school, Phil, stood together in the entryway of a stereotypical college apartment — UIUC flag hanging on an otherwise unadorned living room wall, handles of vodka and cases of cheap beer in the kitchen — rain soaked and fruitlessly attempting to dry ourselves off, our skin clammy and sticky. We quickly formed a bond as a group of loosely acquainted strangers hovering near the door, feeling out of place as the only non-white people — a Black guy, Korean guy, and a pair of Indian siblings — in an overheated room descending into debauchery. We were too sober and left as a group soon thereafter, sharing umbrellas and walking through misty streets, laughing and reveling until parting late into the night, after haphazardly adding each other on Facebook.
Errant likes here and there became a constant fixture of my seemingly aborted six-month acquaintance with Jordan, until one day my Facebook messenger pinged. He’d seen my recent Facebook status about God of War, victoriously and expletively remarking on opening Pandora’s box and mentioned how he’d played it, too. Our messages devolved into excruciatingly detailed play-by-play commentary of my suite mate’s late-night Ocarina of Time runs she would undertake whenever we were stoned. But the crux of our conversations always found a way to circle to our most significant commonality: A deep, fervent love of music.
We shared link after link of deep cuts: Japanese hip hop, pop and J-Pop, house music, experimental electronic, rock, folk, demos, songs and artists we kept eyes on. We could go toe to toe on nearly every genre, and I felt like someone pushed away the barriers holding me back from discussing the wide and varied breadth of my greatest loves in life.
It was the first time someone could keep up with me.
When he asked to grab dinner at a local Thai restaurant, I had no idea it was a date. I was confused and planned to head out simply as myself while my suitemates cried out to please, please not make robot noises the entire night.
I couldn’t understand their incessant fussing; we were simply going to dork out and eat Thai basil chicken.
The shared, horrified looks on my suitemates’ faces due to my utter inability to understand how anyone could express interest in me — when so often my affections fell by the wayside — left me white haired with exhaustion.
Our mutual friend who introduced us, on the other hand, was beyond thrilled and came over to help me choose an outfit.
“Rupee! Is this your first date with a guy?!”
It was not. That happened in the summer after graduating high school, which was not only my first date ever, but even 12 years after the fact remains one of the worst dates I’ve ever been on. He took me on a walk through the woods in the middle of July, got high on our date, and tried to get me to climb a tree.
I deleted his number soon afterwards.
Jordan never subjected me to the outdoors. He sought me out because of our shared esoteric interests; he’d spent a summer in Japan and actively supported my applying to transfer to a Japanese university for my sophomore year. He DJ’d around Champaign-Urbana, produced his own music, rubbed shoulders with post-aughts musicians in Chicago on the weekends. We had similar tastes in avant garde visual arts, and he nudged me to swallow my fear and embrace being queer.
He occasionally made robot noises, too.
Despite our both being introspective introverts, we grew to have an odd rapport, spending increasingly more time together and I was astonished when people saw us as a couple. I tried insisting we weren’t in a relationship, but even I knew that wasn’t quite true.
We were never official, not in the ways of pinning or sharing a letter jacket. We never kissed or checked off any of the “standard” dating boxes. But we clearly weren’t single, are-they-or-aren’t-they platonic friends either. There was almost too much we had in common and an understanding of one another’s malaise that even our closest friends could never seem to draw us out of.
Our sets of friends could not quite see around their own reflections, to where we waited just out of sight, and were unable to see who we were as people. His friends saw individual facets of who he was, while mine spun the shifting, restless Rupa kaleidoscopes with unquestioning acceptance.
Jordan and I were two adrift individuals living under such pervasive loneliness, wringing us until we had nothing more left to give. We were mirrors for the people in our lives and in our own periphery, unable to see our reflections.
So we heaved our mirrors next to one another, hiding behind them and gazed at each other instead.
We grew closer at a time when I was falling apart. He was the one person who loudly encouraged me to be Rupa, wholly and completely, and to fight for myself in a way that no one else seemed to want me to. I’d always been the one who drew out a person’s true essence — their deepest regrets, dreams, darkness, hope, and weirdness — but until him, everyone else carved their own version of Rupa, chiseling, sanding, and smoothing as I fought to keep my jagged, raw edges, protecting the person I was growing into.
I dreamt of moving to Japan since I was a child; the language, cultural exports, and literary tradition enamored me from a young age. After spending two and a half weeks in Tokyo during late summer of 2009, I took an afternoon to visit Waseda University’s campus to weigh the option of transferring more seriously for the following year, bringing an admissions packet back to the States and frequently thumbing through it late at night in my dorm room.
I painstakingly worked on the rather arduous, convoluted application process — including printing official documents on the specified A2 paper and using red ink on a manila envelope — and after waiting a handful of months, I was genuinely shocked when I was accepted. Admissions was so impressed with my application that they waived my required interview and even took a tiny amount off my first semester of tuition.
Honestly, I think they were simply relieved I managed to follow instructions.
I now had to “choose” between attending Waseda University or my backups — Sophia University and International Christian University — without registering another creeping option slowly blackening the periphery of my brightened, technicolor futurescape.
On the drive to Champaign — between jet lagged naps and loud bangs from popped semi-truck tires — I decided to try and make a concerted effort to bridge the chasm between my father and I and repair our fraught relationship. We mirrored one another — stubborn, sharp tongued, and emotionally walled off — which led to frequent, ugly fights. With a couple hundred miles separating us, I hoped we could finally have a chance to set aside our poisoned, verbal lashes and see each other as we truly were. I drove back to my hometown nearly every weekend to spend some time with him and my mom, trying not to bite through my tongue as I restrained myself from picking up spiky bait. Despite eight months of effort, we couldn’t escape the tempest we’d charted a course through, and I knew a cosmic, drastic change was needed if we were ever going to break our trapped reflections.
As I hemmed and hawed over my imminent trans-Pacific decision, my sister asked if the progress I made in repairing our relationship was enough for me to leave with few regrets. My mom echoed the same with the added caveat that, with my father being older, there was a chance he’d pass away in the three years I would be gone.
Can you live with yourself if you leave?
Later, a suite mate found me in my room, lying in bed with the curtains drawn at 2PM and crying softly into my pillow. Standing at the foot of the bed, she murmured quietly that I must’ve made my decision.
It wasn’t a question. We both knew it wasn’t the choice I wanted.
Some weeks prior, when I prematurely decided to attend Waseda, my suitemates and I planned a going away bar crawl which was later amended to a “just kidding, I’m actually staying!” crawl instead.
We ambled over to the first bar. Jordan met us as I pounded drinks and threw back shots in a frenzy; my darkening mood seeped through my too-loud laughs, and he stuck closer to me, worriedly asking if I was alright. Rounds of drinks made their way to our table and I batted away his hand even as my anger continued to rear its head; resentment towards my sabotaged dream with the life of my father as a bargaining chip clinking against the ice in my vodka tonic.
I swirled the melting drink in my hand before draining its glass as well.
My friends excitedly discussed new classes, future apartments, and anxieties about fresh roommates for next fall as I listened in a daze. Thanks to my whiplash change-in-plans, I scrambled to find an apartment and made the last-minute decision to study abroad in Tokyo for the summer as a concession to not moving there permanently.
I threw back another acidic shot.
Blurredly, we teetered to the next bar. I stood inside for a handful of dizzying minutes — friends looking for booths, drunken shouting colliding against Taio Cruz blaring from the speakers, bass shaking the sticky floors — before I grabbed the handle behind me, backed out the door and sprinted down Green Street.
I couldn’t stop running. Blood coated my lungs, metal and burning vodka heavy on my tongue, white noise pounding, my disused legs screaming and prickling with every thud, thud, thud my heeled boots ground into the pavement. I ended up in front of Grainger library, where I spent most of my late nights, swallowing spring-chilled air and pulled out my squeaking phone.
Jordan: Where are you?
I managed to text Grainger and he quickly found me. Approaching slowly with heavy concern in his eyes, he gently tugged my arm and walked us over to a bench, where I collapsed and sobbed out the last frayed stitches holding me together. He held me with one arm as I laid down and hid myself in his side.
The metallic air I swallowed earlier finally ran out, and the endless dripping of my resentment, the hurt, stained the bench beneath us. My anger felt directionless, unsure where to release itself; the ominous ultimatum that was cast over my future crashed against my ribcage, but it was thrust back by my own overwhelming disappointment.
Why was it such a herculean effort to choose myself? To live out my own dreams, settle fully into my quirks and morals, taking on the sacrifices my parents made by experiencing a life they may have only distantly fantasized about, in their one-room homes in the cities and villages of India. Instead, I spent my time deluding myself into believing I wanted to collect unlived desires: I gathered up inherited generational suffering, bitterness, my own trauma, and let it compound until any semblance I had of the person I was on my way to becoming dissipated into nothingness.
I let myself — my proud raw and jagged edges — be chiseled and smoothed into a living statue.
Jordan kept holding me as I gasped around dry tears, quietly responding when I asked the rhetorical question of why can’t I choose myself that maybe one day I will, and no, that person isn’t staring at my belligerent crying as I indignantly grumbled out they were, my protests muffled with my face still buried in his side.
We stayed there the rest of the night, not mentioning a return to the faraway bar crawl, while the silence and the dreams I achingly chose to abandon embraced us.
Two nights before I left for Japan for the summer, Jordan came to visit me at my parent’s house while they were out of town. He asked his sister to drive him up from the south suburbs and kept me company as I finished packing. I nervously tried to fill the silence with quips while my horrendously restrained bitterness seeped its way into my suitcase. He nodded and became worryingly silent as my frantic flailing grew more chaotic.
The minutes creeped closer to Jordan’s sister returning, and finding nothing else to fidget with, we went back downstairs, sitting on separate ends of the couch due to my aversion to anyone touching me, which he always respected. We never mentioned our evening on the bench, aside from my hungover, mortified apologetic texts I sent the next morning; it was mutually understood I never wanted to revisit that evening.
I noticed him shifting in his seat and asked if he was alright. Getting up, he walked over to the front door and grabbed a brown bag he brought with him and handed it to me. A “safe travel’s” gift he said quietly. Bewildered, I took a glance inside before bursting into buoyant laughter, my first real, genuine laugh of the night.
Inside was a giant bottle of sake, the type that lines shelves of sushi restaurants, straining under the sheer weight of glass and alcohol.
I gulped for air, wiping tears from my face, remarking that I was about to leave for Japan. Wouldn’t it make more sense to bring a bottle back for him instead?
He smiled, a deep chuckle rumbling out of him, recognizing that yes, it was ridiculous, but he simply wanted something for me to remember him by. Something that he knew would make me a little happier to leave for the place I’d given up on.
My laughter petered out into a tense silence.
Bright lights flashed across the windows signaling his sister’s return. I walked him through the front door, and he stopped before descending the stairs. He turned around, stalked over, before enveloping me in a bone crushing hug. He’d never hugged me like that before; I don’t think he ever really hugged me before that moment. Waving sheepishly after stepping away, he walked down the steps into the car.
I watched from my stoop as the taillights turned onto the street, rounding the corner, before disappearing out of sight. The door creaked behind me, allowing a soft rush of cool air to chill the back of my neck, sending a shiver through my spine into the brick below my unsocked feet.
I stood there until all I could hear was the whispering of crickets and the soft thumps of moths bumping the bright lanterns hanging by the door, imperceptibly thawing my frostbitten heart.
We wrote to one another during those two months when 6,294 miles separated us. What initially began as us talking about our days — if I was adjusting with the program (I wasn’t), if I made any friends (eventually, yes), if I finally felt happy to be there (not yet) — turned into us revealing withheld admissions.
I resisted enjoying Tokyo. I arrived feeling disgruntled and jaded, which I thought at the time stemmed from disillusionment, but what I now know was an iron defense mechanism, rigid and unyielding in a futile attempt to convince myself that the decision I made was the one I truly wanted.
Every day, every hour, I refreshed Facebook on my borrowed Blackberry and tiny laptop, waiting for Jordan to reappear in my inbox.
We were honest with one another there, in a way that felt impossibly difficult for two repressed individuals to do whenever we stood face-to-face. We could remove the silvered veils holding back what we always wanted to say to one another and allowed our screens and distance to convey our unspoken anxieties, dreams, and hidden memories.
One day, a guy from the program invited me to lunch at a ramen shop near our dorms in Yoyogi. We had a mutual acquaintance; an old classmate of mine from high school went to his college, and they were in the same fraternity. I warmed to him immediately, cackling when he admitted he wanted to approach me the first day but thought I was cold and bitchy so he kept his distance.
Our bowls of spicy noodles were set on the table and my phone buzzed as we swapped stories about growing up in Illinois suburbs. It was a call from my sister which I ignored before she called again. After ignoring it the second time, she feverishly texted me saying we needed to talk. Immediately. Annoyed, I replied that I’d call after lunch which was marked with a single text back:
Rupa, Upstairs Dada died.
The restaurant disappeared as I was sucked into a vacuum. Setting my chopsticks down, I tried to shakily reply before giving up and called her instead, speaking in hushed tones. My lunch partner asked if everything was alright, and I looked at him saying no, it was a family emergency.
My favorite remaining great uncle, who I saw and affectionately referred to as my grandfather, had passed away.
Setting money down and apologizing for leaving abruptly, I half ran back to the dorms as memories of us sitting on his cot in the upper apartment of my maternal grandparents two-flat, laughing and moving our ears in tandem, the scratchiness of his long beard, and his kind voice materialized in my mind. I tracked down a payphone and called my mom, sobbing unashamedly and drawing the stares of salarymen around me.
Swallowing the scent of cold, dusty air conditioning, I told my mom I would leave my program for a week and join her in India for his funeral. She resisted the idea but conceded when I reminded her of my plans to visit him that winter and spend some time together after nearly 10 years of being away. This was my only chance to say goodbye.
I hung up and hurried back to my closet sized dorm room, ripped my laptop from my haphazardly unpacked suitcase, and messaged Jordan. It was too early in the trip for me to talk to anyone there as a friend — friendships, lifelong and otherwise, wouldn’t really settle for another couple of weeks — and there was only one person I knew who could understand the depths of my grief.
He replied quickly, by far the fastest he’d ever responded, worried about my being alone in Tokyo and not having anyone to lean against. And then, he said the one thing we’d averted from telling each other for nearly a month:
“I will not lie. I was trying to avoid becoming too attached to you because I knew that you were leaving for Japan pretty much all summer, but I have failed miserably and miss you more than you know.”
From that moment on, everything changed.
We signed off with “I miss yous” more often than not. He began revealing more of his past which he’d previously kept blanketed around himself and told stories about his time in Tokyo: His aunt pranking him into staying at a capsule hotel; banging his head on doorways not made with 6’2” men in mind; how he soundtracked the night walks he’d taken through the city. We frequently played phone tag, missing each other on Skype, and many of my excursions venturing from the dorms were punctuated with my breaking away from a growing circle of acquaintances to instead find a public phone and listen to a loop of unanswered ringing.
A few days passed after receiving word about my grandfather, and I anxiously checked my phone waiting to hear from my mom. The program was taking us to nearby Mobara for a brief homestay jaunt and the internet was dicey in the more rural areas. Before we boarded the bus, I’d arranged to leave for a week to attend the funeral after receiving lukewarm permission from the program’s director. My mom wasn’t responding to texts and email and I called her to find out what day the funeral was.
There was no answer.
Confused, I tried repeatedly, before finally contacting my dad, asking why she wasn’t answering the phone. He wouldn’t give a straight answer. Teeming with frustration, I snuck out of the local cultural activity assigned for the afternoon to contact my sister, demanding to know what the hell was going on.
Something about her silence and brief hesitation against my buzzing irritation tugged at the unfathomable heaviness within my statuesque façade.
She’s in India. She left a week ago and told us not to tell you.
The funeral’s already over.
The permafrost lake I stood upon cracked, hairline fractures cleaving into my broken heart as my surroundings whited out. Shock, anger, hurt, betrayal, loneliness curdled throughout my body and hardened further into the sculpture I never wanted to become.
Moving despondently, I sought out my director in her temporary, makeshift office and informed her I would be staying after all. She shrugged me away. One of the student advisors on the trip sat with me as my flattened voice told him about my Upstairs Dada, finding minute solace in talking to someone, anyone, who would listen.
I laid awake in the futon of my host family’s spare bedroom, deep into the night. The girl I was doing homestay with turned over in her futon, sleeping unawares while I rubbed my nose, sniffling even though there were no more tears left to shed. Just a dull ache beating against my skull.
Windows creaked as wind brushed against it, the air conditioner whirring and quietly snapped open and shut as it coated the room with a chilled respite. My eyes locked on the moon shadowed ceiling and I struggled to let the air pass through me, only one plea scratching itself repeatedly in its stead:
I’m sorry I never said goodbye.
Summer fizzled and burned quickly until my time in Tokyo came to an end. The friends I’d reunited with during late night viewings of the World Cup finals, eating ramen at 5AM at a tiny stall in Roppongi, and freshly created bonds with new friends slowly filled my splintered, bleeding shell. I stared out the plane window for 10 hours; softly crying from unexamined grief, confused about my tempestuous feelings for a guy in the program I repeatedly rejected until he finally wore me down, and my burgeoning excitement about finally hanging out with my (soon to be) best friend Henry.
Preparing to face Jordan, after months of unencumbered feelings typed onto our screens and finally being vulnerable together felt increasingly precarious. We stepped closer to each other behind our mirrors, but something ominous kept us from reaching out to touch one another.
In the two weeks leading up to my returning stateside, I received multiple messages from his friends asking if I’d heard from him: He stopped responding to their texts or showing up to gatherings and parties. He was impossible to find. I was confused and unsure what I could do from halfway around the world; Jordan consistently replied to me, only remarking on rare absences that his summer coursework was brutal.
One night, he drunkenly messaged me wondering where I was — a desperate edge lined the few disjointed messages he sent, and I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong. He’d received some distressing news and promised to tell me what was on his mind when Skyped next. When I finally got a hold of him — staying awake until 3AM, yawning and blinking slowly as our time zones and schedules aligned — I patiently waited for him to talk about what was wrong.
He didn’t utter a single word of it.
Noting my frustration, he again promised to talk later when I wasn’t so tired, before hanging up. Alarms blared, instinctively knowing something serious was going on, and I encouraged him to message me, or talk to anyone he trusted. I asked him to respond to his worried friends and he said he would.
The plane landed. I was home.
We reunited in Champaign on a weekend before school resumed for the fall, heading to a dubstep and moombahton set with Henry and a couple of our mutual friends. Awkwardness enshrouded us as we faced one another after a summer of baring our hearts through blue-lit screens. The safety of distance and the written word gave us a refuge to be honest in a way standing next to each other no longer could. We said too much by not saying anything at all, and the thousands of miles which once separated us — giving us the freedom to be honest with one another — turned into a chasmic gulf when we shared the same air again.
As he stepped away from what we once were, his friends began texting me more. Some tried to flirt and gain my attention which I waved away, while others were simply curious to know the mysterious Rupa in Jordan’s life. We arranged group hangouts in the hopes Jordan would meet us out, finally seeing the friends he avoided for the summer.
He rarely showed up.
His friends regularly complained about his unresponsiveness that I was now beginning to experience. Our tone mutually changed, cooling with a stark formality and the ease of our summer correspondence fell away with the decaying leaves. Drunk one night and boiling over with turbulent, crashing contradictions, I texted Jordan, begging him to at least tell me he was okay.
He responded within a day, promising that no matter what happened, he wouldn’t stop talking to me.
Some weeks passed and we saw each other infrequently. I stopped by his new apartment he shared with Phil and another one of their friends before I went home to visit my parents for the weekend. We went to our spots on opposite ends of the couch and I handed him 5 Centimeters per Second, my favorite Makoto Shinkai film. He moved to put it on, but I jumped up frantically, insisting he watch it without me because it was the type of introspective, depressing film one needed to experience alone. He accepted my strange requirement without question.
While sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, my phone squeaked with a text from Jordan, saying he enjoyed the movie but was still confused as to why we couldn’t watch it together. I grinned, the ease of our conversation reprising itself at last, and we made plans to discuss the nuanced ending when I was back on campus.
A few days later after coming back from class, I opened a couple of missed texts from Phil. He asked when I last heard from Jordan. The heaviness I’d avoided since the summer pressed against my ribs, and after telling Phil I heard from Jordan when I was gone the previous weekend, he pressed for any detail if Jordan gave any indication of something being wrong.
Our texts became unwieldy and difficult to follow, until Phil asked me to come over, saying Jordan wasn’t there. Puzzled, I responded I could stop by later in the week since I had an early class the next day, unsure why we needed to be alone.
No, Rupa, he’s not here. None of his stuff is in his room, it’s completely empty.
My hand shook, phone slipping from my slick fingers.
He’s gone.
Phil handed me my 5 Centimeters per Second DVD when I walked through the door. He guided us over to Jordan’s room — a place I’d only seen once when he moved in a couple of months prior — and I stood in the doorway, staring at the stripped down bed, half open closet door, and an empty CD case from an embarrassing Arashi mix I made for him months before. He’d entertained my bizarre ardor for this middling JPop group I enjoyed at the time, and asked for an “intro guide” to their discography.
He never judged me, even when I had questionable taste.
I held it in my hand and turned to Phil. The cracks which tried to fill themselves over the summer finally fell apart. My breathing shallowed, as my panic and hurt filled his now empty room, unable to believe he could leave the one thing I gave him behind.
Phil turned to me, gently gesturing towards the emptiness of the case.
He took the CD with him. He took something to remember you by.
None of us were truly okay when he left — the Jordan sized ache made itself known no matter how we tried to fill it in and move on. He shut down his Facebook account, never answered our calls, ignored texts and GChats, disappeared from Skype, and dropped out of school.
I’d never experienced being ghosted before, but even I knew this wasn’t quite it.
Some of his friends were hurt and depressed, choosing to eschew hangouts because his absence overwhelmed them. Others were infuriated, refusing to hear or mention his name without seeing red, barbed words bitten out in an effort to mask their pain.
I promise I won’t stop talking to you.
He may have left because of school or family. None of us really knew. Some of his friends blamed me for his leaving — why couldn’t you make up your mind, why didn’t you help him more, he only talked to you in the end — while mine lashed back, reprimanding them for being callous and off base.
My frozen lake broke, and I plunged in, watching the surface re-freeze leaving me trapped beneath.
I spent the next seven months in a haze. I drank heavily after shattering the discipline set in place to not relapse into my shelved teenage alcoholism. I dated absent guys who lived hours away from me, waiting on staircases for them to answer the door. Almost every night I haunted the darkened streets around campus, laying on The Steps while listening to morose music until the first etchings of dawn blinked across the horizon.
I broke my own heart over and over again, until the I should have helped him more’s and why didn’t he stay’s echoing in my mind screamed themselves hoarse.
After hitting rock bottom that April, I drunkenly sat on a curb in River North, crying from humiliation and neglect, when a stranger sat next to me.
I was loath to trust a man patiently lending an ear to some drunk, crying person outside a douchey bar, but he seemed steady. He was warm with a familiarity I’d nearly forgotten. Parsing through my blubbering, he listened to my saga of the past year before handing me a tissue and a business card.
You don’t deserve to be treated this way, by anyone. I don’t even know you, but I know you’re more than what these people are telling you you are.
He offered to talk, no strings or weirdness attached, but I never contacted him. His card is still somewhere in my apartment, a reminder that sometimes the people who see us best are the ones who are furthest away.
Jordan lived out my dream of leaving. He started anew elsewhere, ripping out our seams and pursuing what he needed to, to grow into his future. He moved forward and left the rest of us behind.
I have never resented him for it. In fact, I was envious, am envious, of his courage to leave us. Some may say it was cowardly, but from my eyes, I knew he struggled to leave. He gradually let go of each of his friends, until I was the only one left. He said a good bye in a way I didn’t quite understand was his farewell.
In our short time together, he fought for me when I kept fighting against myself, and clearly saw the Rupa I was made to believe no longer existed.
I can’t keep living like this.
I threw aside the false affections I was worn down to accept from a guy who wanted me as a footnote in his life. I stopped entertaining other suitors, friends, family members who demanded I show them the exact image they wanted to see — the Rupa they wanted to stand before them — and instead broke the upper half of my body out of the enclosure I had began to rot in.
When I got back to Champaign, raw and jagged from an emotionally cataclysmic weekend, I dug through a box in the office off of my bedroom. I got to the bottom, pulling out a Post-It note with a name and phone number a high school friend I stopped speaking to gave me before my Freshman year.
Jittering from nerves and the understanding I was going to do something my parents, society, and Indian culture largely rejected, I punched in the ten digits, breathing through an automatic messaging system before selecting the extension I needed.
“Hi, this is Rupa Jogani. I’d like to register as a new patient to see a psychologist in your office.”
A date was set. I hung up the phone, light-headed with possibility and finally grasping onto my own future again. The marble encasing me chipped away, as I rolled out the stiffness and aches of a long-held, uncomfortable position.
Another summer was here.
Jordan found Phil and I five years after he left. Phil texted me right after the notification popped up on my phone that Jordan had added me on Snapchat.
Rupa, do you see this?! Did he add you, too?!
We sent each other the occasional message and photos of how we were and where we were. We never talked about our summer letters or when he left. Time and distance gave us the room to let frosted hurt melt away into genuine happiness that he and I were alright.
I dreamt of him often in the years between him finding us again, wondering if we’d recognize one another in a crowd. If the loneliness that held us down ever alleviated. We often walked together in those dreams, silent and comfortable, always in the bodies of our 19 and 20 year old selves.
We’ve never seen each other in person, but that’s okay. It took four years for me to pour out the sake he gave me that late, summer night — it was too heavy for me to continue carrying.
I know who I am these days, the Rupa who was set off course all those years ago, finally finding their way back to the person they were always meant to be.
Life is one long uncertainty, one where we stand and fall over and over again, loved ones shuffling in and out of our lives, with nothing truly tangible to grasp onto. People leave us to venture further along their own paths, but just as we are left behind, we too are leaving others as well. The build of clouds, the descent of rain, the smell of soil as it all cascades around us. An unbroken cycle.
I both long for and fear the day someone’s reflection fails to appear before me. For the mirror to be lifted and set aside, only me standing in its stead. Fidgeting, vibrating, subtly moving towards the mirror beyond my reach, but instead my hand is grabbed. I am made to stay. To sit, and instead speak of my own life and not someone else’s. Not Yours, theirs, whatever the person needs to hear and see back.
Just me.
People can stand in front of my mirror all they want, now — it doesn’t mean I have to stand with them. For years, I believed the one person who stood on the same side of our mirrors was the only one who ever could.
He left, but I was no longer alone.
Other people stood with me, too — Henry, my close friend from study abroad, the new ones I made in the interim years. They’d been blurred, too far away for me to see initially, but as I tore apart my false sculpture, which had distorted their images from behind opaque glass, they revealed themselves. Other silhouettes fade in and out around them; people I have yet to meet, but who will one day stand on the same side.
There’s banging on the glass; reflections ripping and clawing at my retreating back, trying to drag me back into their unlived lives. The ones standing next to me shake their heads, gesturing instead to what lies behind me. I walk into the blank nothingness, certain that broad back well beyond my horizon is waiting for me to join it again.
After dropping my suitcase off in my Airbnb, I stretch languidly, my spine popping and cracking after spending an entire day on trains. With a heavy sigh, I grab my keys and wallet before walking onto the empty, moonlit Sumida streets, breathing in the autumnal air and basking in the comforting silence of my two minute journey to the local konbini. I left my rarely foregone headphones in the still lit apartment eight floors up, allowing the silent night to settle itself around me.
Grabbing an Asahi Super Dry beer and chocolate coated, waffle ice cream sandwich, I crinkle the bag in my hand and start across the street, the timer slowly counting down the steps I have left to take.
Something moves from the corner of my eye; something familiar. My head whips around and a broad, shadowed back greets itself behind me. I smile, feeling the moon sweetly tugging it and I let myself exhale, a years’ long breath held for too long.
I breathe in, walk into the narrow Airbnb, alternating between bites of ice cream and sips of beer.
This is Part II of an essay trilogy. You can read Part I here.
