Digging
At the end of a Monday night in Tokyo
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I say.
We’re at Ichiran in Kichijoji; sitting, eating, drinking, talking. A girl puts mugs of beer in front of us and shuffles away.
“If I got a new girl, and she was absolutely stunning — I’m talking gorgeous and smart and successful — would you be shocked, or wonder how I got her?”
I listen to the buzz of diners — to the sounds of chopsticks on bowls, clinking beer glasses, and rowdy, late-night conversation. I wonder if I come to these places too often.
“Not really, no,” I say. “But, I would probably have to ask how you caught her.”
“Honestly?”
The word is like a shovel into soft dirt. Digging.
“Honestly. But then, what sort of an answer were you expecting?”
I sometimes feel as though love is mostly a numbers game. Play long enough, and you’ll win — you just might not win what you want.
“Look,” he says, “we both know I don’t have the highest opinion of myself. And I know I’m not utterly unlikeable or whatever, so I wouldn’t expect someone to react to me finding a girl. Even a nice one, or a cute one. But I can’t help but think that most people — maybe all people? — would be shocked if I showed up with the perfect girl. It’s like, ‘How did HE get HER?’ you know?”
I sometimes think about this. It makes me sad to think that we need our relationships — and our love — validated. To think that society needs to review them before it nods in approval.
I am kind of sick of that.
“And probably, yeah, they would think that,” I say. “People are always going to think that. They’d do the same if it was me. I mean, we do that with celebrity couples we don’t even know. People we’ve never met.”
“Yeah, but if it were you, it’d be a whole lot less people.”
“Maybe. But if you find someone and they like you and you like them, screw what other people might think, you know?”
He shrugs.
“Well, I’ll never have that anyway, so I don’t think it even matters what I’d do in that situation.”
There’s a word in there — a word like a sour taste — that makes me flinch.
“I’ve come to really dislike using the word ‘never’ like that.”
His laugh is bitter.
“Lucky for you, you weren’t the one who used it.”
The sentence drives his shovel back into the earth, and we sit for a time, soaking in a pool of murky thought we should be trying to escape from.
“And also, it’s true,” he says suddenly. “And how do I know it’s true? Because I absolutely believe it. Absolutely. And even if I was wrong, this kind of thing becomes self-fulfilling anyway. So by virtue of truly believing it, I make it real — I override the theoretical possibility that I might have been wrong in the first place.”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “I mean, that’s why I don’t like using the word that way.”
‘Never’ is a word that burrows deep into your mind and creates walls you can’t climb.
I could never do that. I’ll never have that. She’ll never love me. I’ll never be like him. I never want to see you again. I’ll never forgive you.
I shake my head. “It’s just funny, you know? And a bit sad, too. It’s like we use our own words to cage ourselves.”
“I think the difference is that you avoid it for what it represents, and I use it because of that.”
And for a second, my heart breaks — for the people who dig holes in the earth and continue to dig because it’s easier to go down than it is to climb up. For the people who spend their whole lives digging, and the people who give up on the sun.
“But anyway,” he says, shaking his head, “we don’t need to keep talking about how much I dislike myself. I’m sure it’ll come up again sometime in the near future.” He laughs. “I mean, I hope not, but who am I kidding, right?”
“Another beer, then?”
He nods, and I smile.
“You’ll get there,” I say.
“You know, I’ll never know if you truly believe that, or if you just want to.”
The sentence hits hard, because sometimes words dig holes, and sometimes they build walls, but these just slap me in the face. I realize in that instant there’s only so far my words will ever go, and only so far they’ll ever reach.
I realize I can speak as many words as I want, but it will always be up to the other person to listen, and understand, and accept them.
And the the truth is, they might never do that.
Never.
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