More Coffee, More Time

What the hell am I supposed to do now. Oh shit oh shit oh shit….Shirt, that’s it…shirt. Underwear, good idea, duh. Pants! Can’t go out without pants. Just go, go quickly but quietly so she doesn’t wake up.
I manage to get out of the apartment without waking her or Yuske up. I can still feel my heart racing even faster. I start walking fast, thinking if I walk fast I can definitely get away from the shitty feeling that’s about to hit me. I retreat to the subway that’ll take me to the shopping district. I need food; I need to sober up now. Of course what just happened was pretty sobering. The air is circulating in the subway and it feels cool as the sweat evaporates from my skin. Kyoto in the summer is at best warm and humid and at worst a giant rice cooker. The subway is a little crowded, especially for a Monday night and this late. I look at my watch and realize it actually isn’t all that late.
That’s right, we got drunk early. It wouldn’t have happened so soon, drinking spread out over a night but Yuske always drinks too fast around her. He’s in love with her, has been since the first day of University. I remember him confiding in me that he was in love but didn’t want to talk to her. Yuske’s always been a bit afraid of girls. Not me, I’m at ease around them. They’re just girls after all. I’m not a player, really. I was the first one to talk to her, inviting her along for drinks. She was with a group of friends and we brought a few other guys. It wasn’t really a go-kon but it may as well have been one.
The subway stops at my stop and I get off along with a few other people. There’s noise and fire. It’s still the Gion Matsuri*. Sometimes I feel like that festival drags on too long. There are a few younger girls in yukata* who giggle as I walk past. Their giggling makes me uncomfortable, more so than I’d expected. The street noise, the press of bodies gives me a headache. I can’t stand other people touching me, though my whole life I’ve been pressed by people, squeezing into small spaces. An elevator where you don’t have 8 people breathing down your neck isn’t a full elevator. A street without a herd of people propelling your forward is a lonely, deserted street.
Holly’s is open so I head inside and order an iced coffee from the smiling woman behind the counter. The room feels cooler and I realize I’ve been sweating again. Who wouldn’t be sweating in this heat. Yeah, it’s just the heat that’s made me sweat I tell myself. The window seat looks nice and I plunk down to watch the people go by. It’s a usual night in the commercial district, business men, college students, young girls in short skirts, a few uniforms, some gaikokujin* speaking languages that I know aren’t English. I take a sip of my coffee and run my hands through my hair. Before I can stop myself my head falls forward. FUCK! I can feel my head screaming, making my temples throb. I wipe my hands across my face, just really smearing the sweat around. They still smell like her, like girl.
How the hell did it happen? I didn’t think I was that drunk, or was drunk enough rather. Yuske passed out on her couch after we’d helped him in. I’m getting us two glasses of water and she’s laughing and she’s getting closer and I’m kissing her like an asshole and Yuske just snores away and we get into the bedroom and can’t even really get our clothes off and…and…fuck me… I hate myself. I try to focus on the coffee because my throat starts to get lumpy and my eyes burn. I’m a man and men don’t cry. One could also say men don’t fuck their best friend’s crush. I need a story, a cover, something. I don’t want to see her again, I don’t want to see Yuske again. Maybe I should become a monk and retire from the world. At 11:00 on a Monday night that idea seems awfully appealing. The straw makes the finished noise. I’m out of coffee.
I order another coffee because right now it’s the only thing I know to do. I’m slowly replacing the alcohol with iced coffee. The caffeine fighting the alcohol fatigue; the post sex fatigue. I know no matter how many cups of coffee I have the answer to my predicament won’t come. Just sitting here in Holly’s staring at people who go by, wiping my hands down with the packaged moist towels, won’t change anything. As I said earlier, I have no fucking idea what the hell I am supposed to do. We fucked, Yuske missed it.
I need more coffee because I need more time.
Gokon- a match making party with an even number of girls and guys
Matsuri- festival
Yukata- a light cotton cousin to kimono worn in the summer for festivals
Gaikokujin- the polite term for foreigner. Kanji are “other country person”.
I didn’t see this guy on a train but as I was walking past Holly’s Café in Kyoto. He looked utterly lost and dejected and we managed to make eye contact as I walked past. I didn’t have my notebook handy so I tried to memorize the details. He looked like he needed a friend but I don’t have the Japanese to ask him what was wrong.

Are you even listening???

Are you even listening?
He just wanted to talk because it’s always just talk. They always want us to just talk but that gives the false impression that we’re actually having a conversation. Don’t be fooled, we aren't. With my friends real conversation is a lost art, kind of like chadoo*. People kind of know how to do it but it’s only a pale imitation of what conversation used to be like before people started learning that I knew how to listen. Once they knew I could listen they stopped letting me tlak. What bugs me is that I didn’t notice it until recently. I’ve slowly lost my share in the conversation. I’m more often just witnessing someone’s verbal masturbation. Oh good grief I’m an ecchi magazine. I need a shower.
I don’t know where I learned to listen. I think somewhere along the way people decided I was a good listener because I didn't have much to say when I was younger. It was good then, to be praised for my listening. But as I got older and my listening got me more friends; I started to have more to say. It’s at the point now where I’m having my side of the conversation in my head and somehow when there’s finally space to speak all that comes out is “nnn”* or “hai”*. Then again it’s not like I have any big problems compared to the people who call me to just talk. Wlel maybe theirs aren’t big problems either as they tend to be the kind of problems that just need a little release, like a fantasy that becomes less potent once you act on it. They just need to tell me what’s going on and then it’s over, a little better even. They clap me on the shoulder, promise to buy me coffee next time. They tell me if I need anything to let them know.
But I don’t know if I need anything. I’ve just lost the ability to say what I need. I’m so used to having conversations in my head, like I am now, that I’ve forgotten how to have a real one. I suppose the lost art of conversation is lost on me as well. In a lot of ways conversations are tiring when I do manage to actually have them. It’s a lot less energy to just sit back and listen. It’s the precieving that takes a lot of energy, or rather the trying not to notice. When you’re the focus of everyone’s verbal fap fest you end up noticing a lot about human behavior. If I passed the test I’d major in psychology but there’s no way I’d do this for a living. But the bad side is that once you see how people act it’s a lot easier to infer what people aren’t saying. There are lines to read between that you didn’t even realize existed. It’s the way that Aya sits around Kochi, the sigh over a cup of coffee, the thrust of a filled rice bowl. It’s all pregnant with meaning that I really wish I didn’t get. It gets caught up in this complicated web that they wove in my head. Aya likes Kochi but Koichi is more into her best friend Arisa who is into Kochi but not as much as she’s into Kazu. Kazu sighs over the coffee because he’s too absorbed in baseball to deal with it all and he just wants to hit the damn ball. The rice bowl is actually unrealated to my school drama it’s a family drama. Something is wrong between my parents and it’s the one thing I can’t figure out. I want to know what’s going on but my parents keep things close to their chest so until the shoe drops I’ll never know. It would be best if I’d just never noticed and continued in my blissful world where my parents marriage is just like everyone elses marriage. Then again maybe it is but none of my friends ever talk about their families. Romantic drama is inheriently more important that family drama. It gets higher ratings after all.
I’m tired of making sense of the world and I want to retire from it in a lot of ways. I feel like an old emperor. I am in the world with no real power. My role is ceremonial, though that makes it sound nicer than my masturbation metaphor so I’ll follow this one instead. It sounds like something you could work into a conversation and people would thinkit was really cool and insightful. Then I’d pull out a cigarette and be even cooler. I’m a legend in my own mind. I’m a great conversationalist in my own head, probably because I even listen to myself. These thoughts want to come out but at the same time they don’t. To be forceful, to tell Aya I really don’t give a flying fuck about if Kochi will even like her back, to scream at my parents to just have it out, to yell that I have something to say, isn’t something I’m used to. I’m not content to watch the world but at this point its my own option. Anything else and people get impatient and ask “Are you even listening???”
Chadoo- tea ceremony
Nnn- “ummhmm” used to indicate that you are listening to someone but not nessicarily agreement
Hai- “Yes” again in this case it’s used to indicate that you’re listening.
On what looked to be a fairly fruitless train ride to Mitaki I saw this guy get on. He was walking with another guy but looked like he couldn’t wait to get away. I had to try not to stare because he leaned against the door of the train in an open display of frustration and I really wanted to know what was bothering him. He just closed his eyes and didn’t seem to be sleeping because he was standing up. Maybe he was just looking for some quiet.

Keitai* Family

People leave things on the Shinkansen* sometimes. It just happens. They’re busy, grabbing their boxes of omiyage*, their senior’s bags and their backpack and the thing they were carrying just gets lost. Usually it’s something unimportant, a manga book or a magazine. They’re expensive but not returnable and not something I’m sure they’ll really miss. I mean, the guy (it’s always men. Women never leave things on the Shinkansen) will get home and realize somewhere between Tokyo and Fukuoka he lost his manga. No problem, he’ll just go around the corner to 7-11 and pick up a new one. But sometimes, they do leave something important that I can return.
Today is one of those days. I’m wandering through car 5 on my way to Hakata, the end of this line before I switch cars and head home. I make my way through the cabin as fast as I can because I really hate it when customers ask me questions, but an oba-san* gets my attention. She hands me a black folded cell Keitai and tells me that the man sitting next to her lost it. I accept it with the most professional of assurances and head back to my station concealing my private glee.
Keitais are fairly easy to return but more importantly, they’re fun. It’s boring on the Shinkansen. Nothing really happens, few people are ever drunk or unruley and they’re almost impossible to scam. I get bored pretty easily and sometimes I like to think about people. When I get someone’s Keitai that they’ve left on the Shinkansen it really gets me thinking. I open the Keitai and the most telling thing about a person is their background picture. If a guy has some anime or manga character on his Keitai, he’s probably an otaku and why would he splurge on a Shinkansen ticket? If it’s a pretty pop star he’s probably single (I know this because mine is this right now.). I sometimes get Keitais with pictures of young girls who aren’t pop stars. It always pisses me off when it belongs to an old guy who stammers something as he takes his Keitai back. Today’s Keitai has one of the cutest pictures I’ve ever seen. It’s a young wife, shoulder length hair that curls just perfectly under to frame her round face. In her arms is a pudgy little baby that from all the pink has to be a girl. They smile at the man taking the picture with Keitai Wife making Keitai Baby wave. They look immensely happy and I’m jealous for a moment. This happiness that the photo conveys, it can’t be real. It only exists in teenage girls love comics. I’ve seen too many men smelling faintly like a love hotel to think that such happiness exists.
I check the contacts, it’s the only way to be certain. His wife is listed under wife, naturally. Sometimes it’s wife, sometimes it’s family but never their name. I scroll past the various men’s names. Some are friends from college, some from high school, one or two that you met through work who started at the same time you did. You dutifully have your senpai’s* name in your Keitai, naturally but it doesn’t say who it is so I imagine it’s one of the names listed alone in his contacts list. Just as I’m getting so annoyed I want to throw the Keitai in the trash I finally see it. A woman’s name. But the mix I feel doesn’t settle as well as I hoped. I’m pleased, in a perverse way, that this man is cheating on his wife and family, he’s normal, their happiness is a front like so many other peoples’, like my genial smile. I snap back to the Keitai Family and I feel an emotion that I don’t normally connect with. It’s righteous anger. I mean, I get annoyed with people, I get frustrated but I’m never angry on behalf of someone else. I am so utterly pissed off that such a man can have such a gorgeous Keitai Wife and cute Keitai Baby and still fuck around with some woman, probably a woman at his office or something else. I’m at the point where I can’t see straight and prepare a grand sweeping speech I will give this guy about how little he deserves even a fraction of the happiness he experiences simply by waking up in the morning next to Keitai Wife.
But I hate feeling angry, it’s uncomfortable to get that angry in long sleeve uniform. I try to calm down. In my world, I’m the husband of Keitai Wife and Keitai Baby (their names don’t form in my head as clearly as their images do). It was I who snapped this photo before I headed out to Tokyo on a business meeting. I wouldn’t see them for a whole week and the thought of being separated from my Keitai Wife and new Keitai Baby was something I couldn’t bear. So I snapped this picture to keep me company; and then kissed my Keitai Wife and Keitai Baby. I promised to call them everyday and I did. I was worried Keitai Baby would say his first words while I was gone but I was lucky and he didn’t. Hearing Keitai Wife made me miss her even more. Every Conbini* bento* I ate made me want her miso soup even more. Ever night when I went to sleep on the western bed I missed Keitai Wife sleeping next to me. I excitedly got on the Shinkansen to head home, back to Okayama. On the way a thin haggard looking conductor takes my ticket but even he can’t dampen my happiness because I’m going home to Keitai Wife with a Tokyo Cheese Cake and Keitai Baby with a Tokyo Kitty-Chan* toy.
I do something I have never done before. I usually call the person’s company or the person’s wife to alert said person of their lost cell phone. Sometimes they pick it up, sometimes we mail it, sometimes we drop it off at the closest station and they come and get it. But today I break protocol on behalf of my beloved Keitai Wife and Keitai Baby. I open the contacts again and call the woman’s name.
Her voice is pleasant with a tired quality. “I would be tired too if I was waiting for my married lover to come do unspeakable things to me” I think to myself.
I somehow stammer out pleasantries but she sounds confused. She’s probably trying to cover for the fact she’s been caught. I smirk even wider to think of the fight this will cause, the end of their little tryst.
Then the hammer falls along with this entire fantasy I’ve built up. Her little brother is so forgetful. Ototo-chan?!* Is this another lie? After I tell her where his phone can be picked up, I hang up and check the contact information. How was I so stupid as to miss it before? As clear as day it says “Nee-san” and my palm smacks my forehead. I really am an utterly pathetic person. I close the phone and try to put the world away, the fantasy away. I manage to suppress it brilliantly until I’m almost home. I feel more worn out from this shift probably all the energy I spent trying not to want Keitai Wife and Keitai Baby.
I open my door and feebly say “Todaima”*.
Somewhere in the house I swear I hear a sweet musical female voice saying “Okarinasai”*. Keitai Wife is waiting for me, if only for a moment longer.

Keitai/keitai denwa- cell phone
Shinkansen- The Bullet Train, a high speed train.
Omiyage- presents brought back when someone goes on a trip. They’re usually a local specialty that can be bought at train stations.
Oba-san- Grandmother, collective term from a woman past middle age.
Senpai- the “senior” is the best English translation, this person is also a mentor at work
Conbini- convenience store
Bento- boxed lunch
Kitty-Chan- Hello Kitty
Ototo-chan- affectionate term for Little Brother
Nee-san- older sister
Todaima/Okarinasai- “I’m home” “Welcome Home”
On the Shinkansen back from Kyoto a man left his cell phone on the Shinkansen. He didn’t interest me but our conductor did. He had a very interesting smile as he held the phone and I was trying to imagine what the smile was about. It was actually a bit more of an impish grin than I make it in this story.

Green Eyes' Fantasy

Being so close hurts, but only a little. It’s a kind of hurt I don’t mind. At least I’m close to him. The train isn’t crowded but we both have a habit of standing too close to each other. I sometimes entertain the notion that he’s standing close out of some unconscious attraction to me.

But that’s probably not the case. He’s standing close to me because he thinks of me like a brother. For him, there’s no sexual tension in standing so close to me that all it would take would be for the train to lurch suddenly and we’d kiss. Or maybe the distance isn’t that close but I really wish it was. As much as it hurts I like being this close to him because it’s almost like we’re a couple, almost like we’re together.

I think about it a lot, we see each other everyday. We started at the same company at the same time and became friends. I probably liked him even then but romantic feelings didn’t enter into my head until I had that dream. I’d tried to shake it off. It’s always akward having sex dreams about people you know. The dream self becomes so meshed with the real self that you start wondering if that person has the same desire to have sex with you that they did in the dream. It was more like things started to fall into place for me than this huge revelation. I’m not gay, I mean I don’t think I am. I still want the wife and the kids and the T5* house, the Japanese dream. It’s just this phase, it’s just a close friendship. It’s natural for me to have a crush on him isn’t it? It’s something that’ll go away when I meet the right girl right?

That at least helps me deal with it. Thinking if I just found the right girl my feelings for him would go back to being normal. I’ve been on a few dates but I think I’m always comparing them to him. I kind of take it out on them that they aren’t him. It’s not fair, to them or to society. It’s not fair that I take up their Saturday nights with what feels like a charade. It’s not fair that on the rare occasion one gets me back to her apartment I can’t really think about having sex with them. I’m just not interested. But again, that probably just means they aren’t the right girl. It’s nothing permanent right? No, it’s not. It’s just him really, not other guys.

The fantasy, that’s really all it is, that we could be together in the way that I want is desentigrating. His wife had a baby recently and while I don’t hate her or the baby, it just puts this logical obstacle in my fantasy I have to go around. I mean, before the baby I could just pretend he’d left his wife or that he’d never met her to begin with. But now, with the baby, I can’t dislodge him from the family. His baby makes me feel even more abnormal. The way I want to do things isn’t the way you’re supposed to want to do things. It’s not a part of myself I like. Though that would mean these feelings are really mine, a genuine part of me and in a way that means it’s not a phase. CHIGAOU!* DAME!*

But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about waking up and seeing him, kissing him. It doesn’t stop me from wondering if he gets close to me on trains because he wants the same thing I do. We’re standing on the train and I find my eyes zeroing in on his lips. He smiles a bit, talking about the baby crawling. His smile makes him look a lot younger than he is. It’s a nice smile, though still very brotherly. But I’ve found in my experience there’s a fine line with him between brotherly and romantically.

It’s always the same plan. I go to a party for work thinking about kissing him, about getting him too drunk so he has to lean on me and we kiss and then we’ll be together. Or I’ll be cured, depends on if I’ve had a date that week or not. I start drinking for the variety of reasons and I always forget that I can’t hold my liquor. I’ve never been good at knowing my limits and before I know it I’m the one passed out on a bench while he’s walking me back to my apartment. He leans down and looks at me, his face getting a bit too close. If the world wasn’t spinning and I wasn’t trying desprately not to throw up it would be the perfect opportunity to kiss him. I try to make a sentence but it comes out drunken sludge that isn’t taken seriously. He laughs and helps me to my feet like a good aneki*. This is another part where the line becomes blurred. I like it when he takes care of me when I’m drunk because it feels like so much more than being in a sibling type friendship. It’s the one time I feel like I truly welcome my feelings about him, when I’m not embarrassed about this phase or fantasy or orientation. Whatever the hell I am and this is. We stumbled back to my apartment which isn’t far from his and that’s where I lose the night.

And then I wake up pissed as hell with a headache. It’s over and I know he’s waking up at home with his wife and kid. I’m back to being a freak. Everything is cool, he remembered to help me turn on the air-con. I can’t feel his warmth on me but my hands smell like his cologne and hair gel. I search desprately through my memory for what happened when I got home. Did I finally kiss him, threading my fingers through his hair? Did he suck me off and that’s why my hands smell like his hair? Or did I pull it as I fucked him? Answer is mostly likely D none of the above and that’s a mixed bag. The scent’s not strong enough or anywhere else on my bed but it’s just enough and I respond hating that it feels good, hating that I can’t make this legitimate and I finish feeling both relieved and utterly pathetic. This fantasy, because in the cold hard light of day that’s all it will ever be, has it’s roots planted deep in me. It feels like an invasive species, destroying what is supposed to be my way of thinking. I can’t be this way. This too shall pass. It is right now, as I pull another tissue out, that I really hate him with a searing purity. I hate that he gets a baby and a wife, the norm. I hate that he gets approval and that he doesn’t have to deal with this jealousy, this wanting.

If this fantasy’s vines rose any higher, my eyes would be green.

Chiagou- wrong, bad. The kanji are also the same as different.

Dame- A very strong “no” has the “it’s bad” connotation.

Aneki- Older brother

I saw these two younger men in suits standing together on a train. The train wasn’t really crowded but they still stood very close to each other. I couldn’t really say if one had feelings for the other but their closeness was interesting to me. I purposely stayed away from defining him as being gay, straight, or bi because he doesn’t really know himself in the story. Figuring out that part of yourself can be complicated esp. in a society that tends to treat being gay as a phase rather than a legitimate orientation or meets the revelation that one is not straight with violence and hatred (and the various degrees in between). Obveously being a Kinsey 3 and having straight privledge I don’t think I can really accurately put into words what someone like the person in my story would feel. I really hope it doesn’t offend anyone. If it does leave me a note and I’ll take it off.