Note: I spent about a week with Elodie eight years ago. I fell madly, historically in love. Obviously. She is absolutely stunning and took my breath away. I was beyond gaga and remain so to this day.

She is my one and only baby. Naturally. My darling, my sweetheart, my lover, my queen. My baby. I will never forget anything from that week. I remember the yellow she wore when we met. I remember Pret in the morning, wine before dinner, cigarettes, the park, the bridge, the chapel, the airport, the songs we sent each other, and a great many things that I could just as easily have forgotten.

As if I could ever forget.

Since the years since I met her I have written six essays and a play about her. I know dude, it’s a lot, So what? I am crazy in love with her and always will be. I will soon turn all of my Elodie material into a book. It will be good and I hope you like it. I know I will.

So in anticipation of that about I wrote her a love poem. Here it is:

Epigraphs:

“I didn’t know what I was in for when I set out for that run.”
— Better Oblivion Community Center

“Two suns in the sunset/ Didn’t know my race was run.”
— Pink Floyd, “Two Suns in the Sunset”

“Don’t stand so close to me.”
— The Police

Elodie, baby, I’m massively in love with you
I always have been, and I always will be.

I arrived on a Sunday. We met on Monday
You were wearing yellow, I recall
You touched my arm and said, “I’m an Aries moon too”
And that began my fall.

We walked lightly to the next session
I had no idea what I was in for
We compared charts and we matched
And I knew I was a goner before we even reached the door.

We sat side by side at the table
Elbows and hands touching tight
When your fingers clasped mine, I almost passed out
You were absolutely stunning, a total knockout.

At dusk we went to dinner
It was inside the main hall
There was turkey, there was gravy,
There was cranberry and all.

Before dinner, we drank wine
Red and white as you please
I bought a bottle with some money
I probably pulled out of my sleeve.

You may have been impressed that I had money
But you probably didn’t care
All I could think was, oh my god, this girl—
Look at her hair.

It was colored chestnut brown
And stretched halfway down her back
It was right about this moment
That I had a heart attack.

After dinner you broke out cigarettes
I’d had a dozen in sixteen years
I caved immediately, of course
I was the victim of all fears.

I feared a future without you
That was something I could not stand
When I got back to my room
I knew I’d have to take matters in my hand.

I played “Mistakes Were Made” by the Mendoza Line
I had to call a spade a spade
The title sounded like some kind of sign
I wanted desperately to wank
There, I said it. Bank.

At the time I had only one thought
Running around my brain
I’m massively in love with this girl
And I cannot stop this train.

I wanted to move to London
Would I? We would see
It probably wasn’t the best idea
But baby, you know me.

Tuesday morning we went to Pret
It was just a ten-minute walk
On the way there all we did
Was talk and talk and talk.

We split the cost of Pret
And walked back to the quad
We sat down in the back garden
I was feeling rather odd.

You had a hearty breakfast
You was at her eating peak
After that you mostly stopped
And I became a little worried
You were looking rather weak.

We never went to another session.

I’d been thinking about muses
And I cast you in the role
When you went along with this
I knew I was in a hole.

She talked about her career
She was a photographer, you see
You was good at what you did
But weren’t making enough green.

You’d had a gig in Italy
With some famous movie stars
But your career was on the downslide
You weren’t getting very far.

You had a job photographing hands
You didn’t like it much at all
You had to do it for the money
Through it all my girl stood tall.

Before dinner you said something
That changed the course of the week
“You’re super charming like my father.”
I knew then I was in deep.

I couldn’t have sex with her. Why?
I just couldn’t say
It had to do with what she’d said about her dad
I didn’t fully understand it; I just knew it was bad.

You told me your dark secret
I had one of my own
As I child I’d been abused
Now one helped; I was alone

As a result of my abuse
As a teen I thought I might be gay
But I didn’t really think so
Things turned out another way.

I was crazy about women
Madly in love with girls
But your story changed the conversation
We were in a whole new world.

Four years earlier I’d written an essay for my blog
Called “Reflections: On Coming Through”
Its epigraph came from Dylan
“This one goes out to someone watching out there tonight.
She knows who she is.”

I wanted something like that with you
I wanted you to be my twin
As it happens, I’m a Gemini.
I was ready to put a little skin

In the game
And see what might take place.

I didn’t know where things were going
I just knew I wanted to run the race
To come in first, to break the tape
To be the champion, set the pace.

I turned on back to Elodie
Tried to think of something to say.

I wanted to say, “Baby, let’s get married”
But there was very little chance
So I put the thought to bed
And kept it in my pants.

After dinner we talked like before
Very, very close
After dinner we had wine
Like every night before.

I got a little drunk
So I counted up the score
I thought I was down on the card
By just a point or two.

It was kind of hard to tell.
Everything was just brand new.

I was head over heels for my baby
And when she said she’d leave her guy
My heart went through the ceiling
And flew on way up high.

Friday came without announcement
We walked on back to Pret
After that we went to a park
It was real nice, I bet.

We’d fallen into a pattern
I was not I
She was not she

We were a we.

There was a little bridge in the park
And she walked up to the top
She said, “Baby, this is my bridge”
I said, “Baby, you’re the boss.”

Then she started crying
Just sitting in the sun
I got a little worried
I said, “Babe, what’s up, hon?”

She said, “I’m so confused
I don’t know what to do
I love my fiancé
And I love you too.”

I said, “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Then I said, “Look, honey, here’s the deal
I live a million miles away
I want to be with you forever
That’s all I’m gonna say.”

“But darling I live in Japan and you are here
Maybe go back to your fiancé
And see how things go, my dear.”

She said, “Well, yeah, I’ll think about it.
I’ll stay in a hotel tonight.”

I said, “Where?”

She said, “London.”

I said, “That sounds about right.”

And then she said a line
I’ve never forgotten to this day:

“Baby, don’t sit so close to me.”

I said, “Just how far away?”

She said, “Just about an inch.”

I said, “Babes, that’s not too far.”

She said, “Well, that’s all I can handle.
I need you where you are.”

Then she fell into my arms.

The ambulances were blaring
Like a city under attack
I was getting pretty tired
And I half carried her back.

We walked back to the campus
She said she had to talk to Claire Martin
One of the tutors on the course.

I went down to the bookstore
There was a dude there, of course.

I browsed around and played Dylan on my phone,
“Red River Shore”
We sat there all alone.

He did a moment chart
Which I thought was pretty funny.

Melanie Reinhart was sitting nearby
I went and sat beside her
I’m not really sure why.

I picked up a book on musical astrology
It was about famous musicians’ charts
I thought it looked pretty cool.

She said, “Don’t buy that one, baby.
Don’t be a silly fool.”

So I bought another book
And then we both stood up.

Melanie had to move out
So we went up to her room
She had a couple heavy suitcases
So dragged them out of there soon

Then I went to say goodbye to Elodie
And we walked into the chapel
I told her I wanted to know her
When she was an old woman.

She said I was sweet
This made me smile.

I said, “Baby, you can’t be beat.”

And we sat there for a while.

Then we kissed goodbye
And I stepped out of the gate
I had to get some lunch
I was running rather late.

As I walked to my hotel
I was feeling pretty weird
I only had a little stubble
But I had to itch my beard.

At the restaurant I got bouillabaisse
And a lovely beer as well.
I texted Elodie Jason Molina’s “Leave the City.”

And she cried.

I said, “Baby, what the hell
Are we gonna do about our relationship?
Who are we gonna be?”

She said, “Baby, I have no idea
We’ll just have to wait and see.”

I said, “Yeah, I guess that’s right
There’s nothing we can do
I’ll see you when I see you, baby
I love you. I do.”

She said, “I love you too.”

I sent a couple more songs
And I’m happy to report
That after the conference
We still got along.

After lunch I was super tired
So I went to get some sleep
I knew once my head hit the pillow
I would sleep real deep.

I woke up the next morning
Around four-thirty or so
My wife had to catch a bus
England isn’t the safest, you know.

So we stood there on the corner
And she climbed onto the bus
In a different kind of way
I didn’t know what we’d do about us.

Then I hugged her quickly
And we said our goodbyes
I took the short walk home
Under the English sky.

I jumped into the shower
I was glad I was alone
I had a cab coming at eight
Pretty soon I’d be going home.

I packed up my things
I didn’t know what the day might bring
In the cab the driver played the radio
I could barely hear a thing.

There was a story about the poor
And how there was very little housing
But I couldn’t really dwell on it
That was somebody else’s deal.

I had to get to the airport
To make my final appeal.

On the plane I played Pink Floyd’s
“Two Suns in the Sunset”
And then I cried a bit.

I thought about my son, of course
I swallowed
Took the hit.

I read Anthony Powell on my Kindle
And he kind of messed me up.
So I asked for peanuts and some wine
In a little paper cup.

I had the wine and then another.
And I started to relax.
I understood then for sure
That I’d have to pay a heavy tax.

I knew my marriage was over
And my career probably as well
It was only a matter of time
Time will always tell.

I landed in Osaka
Got a room across the street
It was too far to Kyoto
Sometimes nearness can’t be beat.

I texted Elodie from the hotel, of course
It was just around nine her time
She said she was working in the park
On someone else’s dime.

I said, “Baby, that sounds awesome.
I wish I was there with you.”

She said, “Me too, baby,
But there’s nothing we can do.”

For the next few weeks
We texted, and called most every day
Then she had a dream and talked to her therapist
And she mostly went away.

The dream took place in the woods
There was a fire of some kind
She said that I was there with her
I began to fall behind.

She said “My therapist says I can’t talk to you.”
I said “Baby don’t say it’s true”
She said “Yeah, I don’t yet know”
I said “Babe it’s up to you.”

After that we sent some letters
And some texts just to chat
I wrote her in March 2019
And that was pretty much that.

I was the last one to write
That was about seven years ago
I figured the door was still open
So I emailed her three weeks ago.

And whether or not she’s read it,
So far it hasn’t been a no.

Email doesn’t have read receipts,
So I don’t know if she saw it.
I’m betting that she did.
So I’ll just have to wait a bit.

She’ll answer or she won’t.
It’s pretty much all the same to me.
Our relationship was years ago.
It’s all history, you see.

But I know I’ll always love her.
That’ll always be a fact.
And I still think sometimes
About going back.

Going back to London
Trying to find her one fine day.
And if I actually found her,
I don’t know what I would say.

I guess I’d say, “Hey, baby,
Do you wanna get some pancakes,
Some coffee,
And hang out?”

She’d say yes or she’d say no.
At least I would find out.

Then I’d go back to Kyoto,
Or maybe Thailand just for kicks.
Maybe move on down to Thailand,
Hit the beach, seek some bliss.

Thinking about Elodie
Has brought up old memories,
And I really need to chill.

Smoke some weed and drink some rum
Or I’m gonna get a little ill.

And sure, I’m ill
I’ve been lovesick for Elodie
Since the first day I ran saw her
In a seminar room on Monday.

I spent about a week with her
And I’ll never forget a thing
That we said or did together
I still want her to wear my ring.

I know that’s kinda doubtful,
But a guy can dream a dream,
And God knows that I have to,
After all the things I’ve seen.

Elodie, baby, give me a call.
Honey, baby, don’t forget me.

I’ll never forget you at all.

Dedication:

For Elodie, my baby. I cannot describe how much I love you, baby. I miss you so much. Baby.

Epigraphs:

Baka. You are waving your dick all around Japan. What am I going to do with you?

Litz

I wanna know girls, don’t wanna know men.

Superchunk

Roll another number for the road/ I feel able to get under any road.

Neil Young

Something’s going to happen. Something always does.

Billions

Author’s Note:

I recently fell eight days behind on this series and briefly considered abandoning the missing week altogether. Reconstructing every hour would have been impossible, and pretending otherwise would have produced eight dutiful but lifeless entries. So I have produced something different: one long, thematic account of the money, marriage, women, music, writing, travel plans, ordinary routines, and general weirdness that comes with it all.

What surprised me during the edit was that the piece had a story after all. Much of the week was spent trying to persuade banks, apps, lenders, and machines that I existed. They rejected my address, my identification, my telephone number, and at one memorable point the year 1974 altogether. Elsewhere the people who matter most came through. Sachie called me by my old name. Zach understood the central point of my marriage essay. Readers found an eight-year-old piece buried in the archive. And my son stayed on the telephone with me for nearly two hours and called me Papa. I cried The chronology fell apart. Life did not.

===== =====

I fell behind.

There is no good explanation for this. I did not deliberately fracture chronology in order to interrogate the instability of memory. I was not experimenting with form. I simply stopped keeping up. My last completed diary entry was July 26, and by the time I looked up again it was August 3. Eight days had passed, the material had multiplied, and reconstructing every morning, afternoon, evening, cigarette, loan application, woman, walk, song, meal, nap, argument, and minor technological catastrophe in order would have required another eight days.

So this is the compressed version.

Eight days. Several dozen financial institutions. More women than I can count. One marriage at its end, one house waiting to be sold, one son suddenly talking to me for nearly two hours, four packs of Camels briefly representing unimaginable wealth, and a song essay from eight years ago inexplicably climbing above Wikipedia on Google.

Chronology can take the week off.

I. Money

Money has dominated my days of late.

There are plenty of other stories—love, marriage, sex, music, family, writing—but every one of them existed beneath the same low-pressure front. Could I get downtown? Could I get back? Could I buy cigarettes? Could I put money on an my ICOCA card? Could I book a hotel, board a train, eat something other than eggs and pasta, or convert one of the many theoretical financial instruments surrounding me into actual currency?

The strange thing was that money always seemed to be coming.

A card was coming. A transfer was coming. A lender was reviewing. A bank was processing. An email was imminent. A cheque was in transit. A customer-information update had been accepted. A human being somewhere was allegedly examining at my file.

Money was everywhere except in my pocket.

I applied to ACOM, AIFUL, Seven Bank, Promise, Mobit, Resona, Sony, PayPay, Prestia, Rakuten, SBI, and enough regional banks to constitute a tour of Japan. Chiba. Fukuoka. Nagoya. Kyoto. Every fucking prefecture appeared to have a bank and every bank appeared to have designed its website specifically not to work

The applications followed a familiar pattern. First came the promise of speed.

Approval today.

Simple online procedure.

Borrow whenever you need it.

Then came the reality.

Photograph your residence card. No, not like that. Turn it slightly. Move closer. Dude move farther away. Fuck you and fuck your face.

Use better lighting. Take a selfie. Turn your head. Hold up a handwritten note. Hold up the ID beside your face. Enter the address in full-width katakana. Enter the address in half-width numbers, whatever that means. Enter your employer’s telephone number. Not that telephone number. Another. Your birthday is invalid. 1974 does not exist. Yeah right. 1974 existed because I had personally was there. Fuck you again my friend. Fuck your face while you are at it.

Yeah. OK.

At ACOM I eventually reached a human being, which seemed promising until she informed me, with a little apologetic shrug, that the AI had said no. She could not explain why. The AI had spoken. The oracle had issued its judgment. Go home. Take a shower. God knows at this point I needed one

Lake allowed me to progress through the most Byzantine application of all time before deciding I was apparently the wrong category of foreign resident. Whatever. PayPay refused to read my ID card. Rakuten could not process Ritsumeikan’s address and telephone number despite twenty attempts. JCB rejected my birthday. Really dude? Yeah really. Kyoto Bank briefly sent me into a branch-selection circle in which code 142 somehow transformed into code 566. And back. And back again. I entered 142 again. The system contemplated this information and returned me to the beginning. Fuck.

The great Acropolis of Japanese consumer finance has many staircases and no entrance. It’s like the Winchester House of something.

The worst moment came with a lender that appeared near the top of the Google search results claimed that 1 million yen already been deposited into my online wallet. 1 million yen. The wallet showed a magnificent balance. Cold hard digital cash. All I had to do was transfer it to Kyoto Bank. Great. Fucking finally.

Then came the request. Pay ten percent of the loan first. There it was.

The scam unveiled itself with all the elegance of a man opening his raincoat on a subway platform. They had invented the loan, invented the wallet, invented the balance, and now wanted real money to release the imaginary money. I closed the window. There would be no ten percent. There would be no transfer. The million yen would continue its rich fictional life without me.

Meanwhile, actual life became an exercise in microscopic accounting.

A handful of coins. A few hundred yen on one card. Perhaps twenty or thirty dollars on another.

Enough for one round trip downtown, maybe. Four packs of Camel Blues. A dozen eggs and coffee. For a few hours I was rich.

Then I was broke again.

I. My House

Behind the immediate cash crisis sat the larger financial fact of my house.

My wide and I bought it in 2007 for roughly $380,000 after she negotiated it down from about $400,000. Good work by her. The house is around 110 years old, in Sakyo Ward, two minutes from the beautiful Kamogawa river, near houses worth millions, supermarkets, restaurants, a mall, a police station, and all the ordinary conveniences that make a neighborhood viable.

It also shares a structural exterior wall with the neighboring house. This is the problem.

The wall is concrete, substantial, and old. The two houses appear to have been constructed together, and the neighbor is in his mid-nineties, assuming he is still alive. I have not seen him or his wife in years. His adult son, who once came regularly with groceries and dealt with the practical business of keeping two elderly people alive in an old house, has also disappeared from view.

The neighboring garden had gone wild. Ours is hardly Versailles, but theirs looks as though nature had filed a successful adverse-possession claim.

Could a developer demolish our house without demolishing theirs? Probably. Kyoto carpenters have dealt with harder problems than an attached wall. Would the wall reduce the number of buyers? Almost certainly. Would it make the property impossible to sell? I don’t think so. The location is good. The land is desirable. Experienced builders know how to solve structural problems when the numbers make sense.

Still, the wall remains, silent, forbidding, concrete, holding up both houses and complicating our futures.

I began to do the math.

Sell for $380,000. Lose perhaps $60,000 to commissions, taxes, and associated costs. Net $320,000. Split evenly: $160,000 each.

Except it is not that simple.

I have paid the entire mortgage since 2007. I have paid the utilities, the internet, three cell-phone bills over twenty years, appliances, most of the groceries, much of Daisy’s food, and well over $400,000 for Hugh’s education from kindergarten through university. The house is in my name.

I could build a case in my head. I did build a case. I built it for hours.

But marriage is not a civil trial conducted by a man lying naked in bed with green tea, four packs of Camels, and a calculator.

A few weeks, after thinking about it for a while, I told Sachie I would give her half. She said she wanted nothing. I suggested $50,000, and she agreed.

This was the last conversation on the matter, about three weeks ago.

The ethical question is not whether I can prove that I have paid more. I have. The question is what I want the final act of a twenty-seven year marriage to look like.

For now, the answer is simple: honor our most recent agreement. Figure out what the house is actually worth. Sell the house. Divide whatever money comes in money.

There will be time enough to decide when the wall, the buyer, the agent, the taxes, and the actual sale price stop being theoretical and finally become real.

II. Sachie, Marriage, and the End of an Era

The financial accounting and the emotional accounting were different books.

This became clear while I was writing On Meeting My Wife Sachie, the first piece of a planned longer series about the marriage and divorce. I wanted to begin at the beginning because the end may be overshadow everything that came before it. Sachie is not merely the woman leaving our house, refusing the proceeds from the sale, arguing over our garden, or moving back toward her parents.

She was once a young woman whom I loved. I was once a young man she loved. The line Zach later singled out was: This essay belongs to two young people on the cusp of life. That is the heart of it.

And now she is my ex-wife, a fact I find both funny and sad in equal measure.

Before resentment, accounting, separation, and twenty-five years of accumulated evidence for the prosecution, there were two people at the beginning of something. I want to give those people their due.

During these last eight days, we argued. We negotiated. She gave me ¥3,000, then another ¥3,000. She bought coffee filters but not bread or butter. She handled a cheque in a way I initially found incomprehensibly complex. I cursed, breathed in, calmed down. I listened to her explanation, and realized she was not intentionally trying to be difficult. She is just outta control.

Sachie is preparing to leave for Kumamoto in two weeks. Boxes accumulate. The house begins to feel less like a home than a staging area. We discuss bills, the garden, Daisy, our son, money owed, money promised, and who would keep which possessions.

There are moments of old intimacy in the language. I recently started calling her Sachan again. She calls me Machan. For just a minute we are back in 1997. It feels great. But it will not last.

Last week there was another earthquake in Kumamoto where my wife’s parents live. They were safe after the earthquake, and when I heard I felt a rush of relief. Her father Tetsuo is ninety-one and her mother Kazuko is ninety. I have known them for decades. Whatever has happened between Sachie and me, Kazuko still loves me. I love her too.

And I will probably never see her again. This is sad. Divorce does not merely separate two people. It closes a a whole chapter.

There are roads you no longer travel, houses you no longer own, nicknames you no longer use, relatives who become former relatives. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens. A door closes quietly, and one day you realize the entire geography of your life is now somewhere else

Still, Sachie and I talk. We make practical arrangements. We lend each other small amounts of money. We love the same child and the same dog. We can, at the best of times anyway, remind ourselves that neither of us is the villain of the piece.

The villain is time. As usual.

III. Hugh

Yesterday Hugh called. We spoke for an hour and fifty-three minutes.

This was almost certainly the longest telephone conversation we had ever had, and perhaps the longest uninterrupted conversation of its kind in years. Usually Hugh has ten minutes, twenty if I am lucky. He juggles work, plans, friends, screens, trains, a life. I am busy too. This time he had nearly two hours because he had just quit his soccer influencer job

On the phone he told me that was done.

He still likes football. He just does not want to spend sixteen hours a day editing football videos anymore. He had reached the same point with editing that I have reached with teaching: not dislike exactly, more like completion. That chapter has delivered everything it was going to deliver. It is now closed.

He had been doing most of the work while someone else took took a higher percentage. He agreed to this. Tolerated it for a while. But no more.

I told him I understood. And I did.

He is already freelancing, DJing trip-hop and electronic music, building something that is actually his. He is planning to move to Tokyo and eventually to buy a house. He casually told me he has saved about $50,000.

Fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-two. I have spent the last week trying to extract enough money from the Japanese banking system to buy a few packs of cigarettes and get downtown. My son had quietly assembled a down payment. I am so damn proud of him.

He told me he would come home tomorrow to pick up Daisy and keep her for a month or so while Sachie gets settled in Kumamoto. Later he told me he couldn’t come after all.

Typical. Hugh is a wonderful young man but he cannot keep a schedule for the life of him. Oh well. That’s just Hugh I guess.

Before that he said something that broke me open. He said in the next month he would bring Daisy back by a few times.

Just a day trip. A small kindness. An adult son anticipating the emotional needs of his father without being asked.

“You’re the man,” I told him.

“I love you, Papa,” he said.

“I love you too.”

There it was. The emotional center of the week.

Not the loans. Not Pattaya. Not the women, the house, Google, or the endless packs of cigarettes.

A son on the phone. One call. Two hours. My only son. Fuck.

We talked about Wise. I have an account somewhere but can not remember the password, naturally. He said he would refer me, earn a small bonus, and help me set up another path for my money.

We talked as two adults. Feels great.

I remember the boy, of course. Fathers always do. But the person on the phone is not a boy. He is a young a man, making decisions, leaving a job he no longer wants to do, moving to Tokyo, saving money, taking responsibility for Daisy, making time for me, building a life. What a deal..

IV. Women, Dating, and Sex

These last days there have been many women. Many many women. I find this pretty remarkable.

This is not a boast so much as a statement of fact. The apps multiply: Sugo, Tinder, Tapple, Thai Friendly, OkMeet, French sites with competent translation, text-only sex sites, and others whose names I forget. Free sites, cheap sites, sites that cost an arm and a leg. I started to develop lists. The Thailand list alone has maybe sixty names. More women than I could possibly meet. Tokyo has another half dozen. I began scheduling women the way a conference organizer schedules panels, except the conference was in Pattaya and the keynote address was sex.

At the center of all this chaos remains Litz.

Litz is real in the way the some of the others are not. Although no longer a couple, Litz and I still talk several times a day and text all the time. She knows my jokes, the invented women, her fake rivals Cindy and Julie. I tell her that Cindy is in bed with me and Julie is waiting her turn. She responds as though this ridiculous betrayal required serious adjudication. She says “baka you are waving your dick all over Japan. What am I going to do with you?” She is super funny. She is also, as many women are, totally outta control. Many men, myself included, are outta control too, however it is my experience that women are just that little bit extra outta control. For some reason.

Then there was Yua who I met online about a week ago. She has spent most of the last week, several hours a day, attempting to obtain a ¥5,000 Apple gift card, later negotiating it down to ¥3,000 so she could supposedly keep her “siblings” occupied with video games while she comes over for sex. She is 28. How young could her siblings be? I do not believe they exist at all, and are in fact just an elaborate cover for this increasing bizarre and tendential scheme of hers to fleece me for 50 bucks. For a solid week. Outta control.

Her commitment to the bit is almost admirable. Day after day she returns to the same small objective with the determination of a director of an intelligence service. Five thousand yen. Three thousand yen. Whatever I can afford. Baby what?

I began to admire the sheer disproportion between effort and reward. Either she liked me on some level, or she is perpetrating the least efficient scam in history. No rational person works six days for a ¥3,000 gift card. Yua, therefore, is not rational.

I thought of the Poison song Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Over time I have found this to be true. In this case, I reflected, every Yua has its thorn. And she is a thorny one that’s for sure. And yet I still talk to her. Go figure. I guess I am just weak this way.

Clara said she would come over from Osaka She got dressed. Maybe. She prepared. Perhaps. She vanished. Maybe she is real. Maybe she is not. Maybe she is a ghost. Maybe somewhere in Kyoto a beautiful woman is wandering around looking for me. God speed baby.

The two Lisas occupy separate jurisdictions.

One is the Yubari melon chick from Tokyo, beautiful enough that I continue to entertain her somewhat extravagant request for two extraordinarily expensive melons. I find this almost respectable compared with Yua’s ridiculous Apple gift cards. She is also extremely cute with her melons and all. At least Yubari melon exist.

Two melons for love. There are worse dowries.

The other Lisa lives in Amsterdam and floats somewhere in the broader international cloud of flirtation and scheduling.

Masha is my little Turkish bird. She communicates in stickers, goddesses, magic, feathers, and strange little fantasies. She asked for relatively small digital gifts and remains charming enough that I kept allowing for her many eccentricities. She is, of course, totally outta control. She could be an AI, a woman using AI, a woman pretending to be a bird, or an actual bird with excellent English. She could be anything really.

Then there are the many “UN nurses” imporbably stationed in combat zones. Three in five days. Donbas. Yemen. The Ukraine. Refugees. Humanitarian missions. Canadian surgeons wearing scrubs. Major Aaron. Whatever baby. You are a scammer and I don’t believe a single word you say. Oh well. Just one of the hazards of modern online dating I guess. Seen it all before. Bin.

Meanwhile Good Old Mr. Wank (oh yeah baby you know exactly who I mean) has remained the most dependable member of the cast.

He requires no gift cards, no airfare, no melons, no hotels, no flirtation, and never fails to appear when summoned. Mr. Wank rules.

Underneath this baroque carnival lies deep loneliness. I sometimes feel that sex is barely the point anymore. All I really want is to lie beside a woman, kiss her goodnight, and hold her until she falls asleep. Eventually I will sleep. If I’m lucky. That’s just the way things go as a lifelong night owl.

I love women.

V. My Writing

My writing this last week has been interesting.

My new daily series has begun to find readers. The first entry remains the leader among the new pieces. The essays on Litz and Sachie are about tied. My bisexuality piece is trailing a bit, which surprises me. Can’t always predict these things I guess.

Then my Dylan Thomas essay exploded.

The essay is eight years old, and I had redated and reposted it in 2024. For years the reliable traffic leaders at Kyoto Kibbitzer have been my Kris Kristofferson essay, Trump Gemini Dream, and my Razzlekhan essay.

Then, about six weeks earlier, On the Song “Dylan Thomas” and Comments on Rhyme began climbing. And climbing.

No campaign on my part. No new angle. No obvious news hook. It simply rose beyond all expectations.

In thirty days it received hundreds of views, blowing past every other piece on my site. I searched the eassy title and found it above Genius.com, radio stations, videos, and—amazingly—Wikipedia. Amazing. Dude what is going on? Something.

The piece still holds up. It examins the song’s clever AABCCB rhyme scheme, its near-rhymes, and its general alternation between political anxiety and private hedonism. “Corset” and “Corvette.” The general and the king. Dylan Thomas dying on the barroom floor. A shower at the Bates Motel. The world collapsing while the narrators search for another drink. It is a great song and I am happy the essay is doing so well.

The success of Dylan Thomas sent me back into the archive. I reposted My Brother Mike’s Bad Book, the Mariners story in which Mike, drunk and rowdy but morally precise, heard someone defending a man shouting gay slurs and replied with four perfect words:

“That’s a bad book.”

I fuckin’ love my brother Mike.

The Razzlekhan essay disappeared from Word Press recently. I have no idea why. Something. I found a copy on Medium where I used to cross-post many of my pieces. I copied it into Word Press and republished it. Thank god.

Zach sent me a thoughtful note about my essay about meeting my wife. He understood piece immediately, especially the line about two young people on the cusp of life. He invited me to English Mass and told me he had begun a new essay called A Summer Day. I would be traveling, so I declined the Mass, but I am glad he is writing again. He is an excellent writer,

The archive was not dead. It had merely been in hibernation.

VI. Summer

Summer currently exists in the future tense.

Tokyo. Bangkok Pattaya. Hydra. Athens. The Czech Republic. Busan. New York, briefly, before its hotel prices restored sanity. Yeah right. I wish.

Every destination seems possible. None are booked.

I will go to Bangkok, Pattaya, and Hydra as soon as my money kicks in.

Get high as blazes. drink Pina Coladas on the beach, wear my sunnies, try to avoid a sunburn, rail women for days, spend too much money, get laid. Thank god. What a life man. What a life.

Pattaya is going to be outta control. Lovely Harmony for three nights. Matteneee for another. Jenny on my last night in town. Jenny and Matteneee are both escorts. I asked them both if we could have anal sex and if they were on birth control so I could cum inside them. They both said yes. Condoms are a necessarily evil but do suck. Hard.

Bar girls, freelancers, the beach, weed, fruity drinks with umbrellas, swimming pools. All the metier of a recently divorced middle aged man going through a soft mid-life crisis. I make absolutely no apologies for any of this. It is what it is. Life goes on.

VII. Music

Music did not sit beneath the week. It carried it.

The Grateful Dead on my long walk into town: Catfish John, Must Have Been the Roses, and Black Muddy River. Jerry rules like no other. God does he rule.

Neil Young arrived.

Unknown Legend, Crime in the City, Cortez the Killer, Thrasher, Albuquerque with the great Mark Kozelek cover, Roll Another Number for the road. Songs became routes through the day, places to stand while everything else moved.

David Lowery’s Fathers, Sons and Brothers showed up and kicked ass, predictably. He rules too. He rules beyond all things. God I love David.

Then came the Drive-By Truckers/ Jason Isbell Patterson Hood song draft with my friend chat. I love to draft with chat, although he is and remains a big fat nabber. Oh well. It is still great fun.

We left Cover Me Up off the board, which was either courageous or simply malpractice.

Our list included “Dress Blues,” “Relatively Easy,” “Outfit,” “Birthday Boy,” “Speed Trap Town,” “The Day John Henry Died,” “Goddamn Lonely Love,” “Elephant,” “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” “The Righteous Path,” “Buford Stick,” “Decoration Day,” “Children of Children,” “Alabama Pines,” “Codeine,” and “Super 8.”

“Super 8” nearly broke the whole draft open:

Don’t wanna die in a Super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well.

COME ON dude. Jesus Jason. Easy buddy.

Their combined catalog is not merely Southern rock. It is a curriculum in adulthood: fathers, sons, dead friends, drinking, divorce, work, small towns, the left behind, bad decisions, dignity, memory, hope, and the impossible notion of getting another chance after you have already used several.

Patterson Hood writes the people history forgets. Jason Isbell writes the ones who survive themselves. Mike Cooley walks in every third song, drops a perfect line, and checks out to hit the bar. The band simply rules. They all do.

I reflected on minor musical questions. Is Lucinda Willaims’ cover of Tom Petty’s Southern Accents better than the original. It’s tough but I think so. I listened several times to The Pixies absolutely shredding on Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On.” I put on Phosphorescent’s glorious cover of Corpus Christi Bay. Seam covering Breaking Circus’ Driving the Dynamite Truck. Nobody remembers Breaking Circus today. Nobody. Their version of Dynamite is marred by typical crappy 80s production which the Seam version cleans up. Whoever happened to these guys? No one knows. They are simply lost to the sounds of time, as we all will be one day.

The Mountain Goats have a new album coming out in just two days. Ryan Adams has a new one too that I am getting into.

Music is the best, and the world remained blessedly worth living in because of it.

VIII. Ordinary Days

Between the financial drama, romantic sub plots, and musical drafts, and my increasingly outta control mother my days slid by as usual.

Coffee. Green tea. Cigarettes on the balcony. Lying naked in bed half the day my PC propped up on my knees, writing. My buggy AC. Two fans on high. Porn. Phone calls. Existential angst. Sleep.

The second floor landing off the stairs remains a death trap. I toss laundry and dishes there and don’t dare step on the wooden boards lest I fall to my death. I am not remotely joking. From an actuarial perspective, the landing remains the most likely way for me to meet my final demise. I should take out insurance.

The area beside the bed improved. I removed most of the chocolate wrappers, cigarette packs, bottles, and general archaeological evidence of recent life. Beneath this material my residence card remained missing. Fuck.

A dozen voice-recording apps failed in different ways. I rely on text-to-speech apps for my writing and most of them suck. Of course. I finally found one that works well enough. They want $11.99 per year. No brainer.

I sleep in short blocks: an hour, two, four max. I woke, drank water, urinate off the balcony, smoke and do it all over again. It is, as the Feelies say, only life after all.

My body complains. Knees. Back. Ribs. Balls. My eyeballs burn from the cigarette smoke.

Sunburn across my stomach and shoulders after my five-mile walk beside the river in the sun. I look like a lobster. Oh well. It will pass,

I take several painkillers a day, trying to stay on dose, Why? No reason really. Just everything fucking hurts. I’m 52. What are you gonna do?

I’ve been slowly sipping a bottle of Napoleon Brandy for two weeks. It is too warm and I keep forgetting to get ice for it. Of course. I am just out it these days I guess.

My bicycle still scares me a little half a year after my winter crash. The roads are dry now, the heat intense, no ice to be seen, but my body remembered the crash. I remain skittish.

IX. Comedy

Life, among other things. is invariably funny.

Rainbolt, the GeoGuessr madman, who sees one sepia utility pole for half aa second along wth a patch of Polish grass, and calmly and corrently announces that we are twenty-two and a half miles west of Kraków. Make it make sense.You cannot. Rainbolt is just outta control. He’s some kind of savant I guess.

I want to re-watch the Joan Rivers documentary “Piece of Work” but I keep putting it off. Joan is hysterical. RIP to a real one.

Randy Quaid remains generally Randy Quaid. Obviously. He is insane. He just is. Dude the CIA gets up to some shit sure, but they are not in fact bugging your mind from an implant somehow magically implanted in your tooth.This is not a thing my friend. It is just not. Get a life. You’re outta control.

I remember Will Smith fucking slapping the shit outta Chris Rock at the Oscars over a totally tame G.I. Jane joke and then returning to his seat as though live global television had briefly become his living room. What a bizarre more. Will what are you doing my friend? Unbelievable.

Christian Dreyer sent a minimalist cartoon of two people in a car approaching an enormous fork lying across the road.

“It’s lunchtime!”

Totally bizarre. Dreyer is weird. No notes.

My mind drifted for some reason to the 70’s. TV shows like The Newlywed Game, The Love Boat, and The Dating Game, where an actual serial killer once appeared as a contestant, won the date, and was rejected afterward because the woman found him creepy. I was too young to watch these shows, however I am aware of them through the zeitgeist. Outta control.

The JonBenét Ramsey ransom note remains one of the strangest documents in American criminal history. The parents ate guilt as sin. They just are. It is a fact.

The alleged Trump Moscow hotel pee tape on the other hand remains unproven, although a remarkably well put together fake video circulated a few years ago because someone, somewhere, for some unknown reason, invested real time and effort into manufacturing the world’s most notorious and probably nonexistent pee video. Why? Reasons of their own. We will never know.

I began an essay called Was Donald Trump Peed On in Moscow? The likely conclusion: I do not know. Neither do you. That is the point, This does not prevent anyone from having absolute confidence one way or the other. Whatever dude. It was years ago. It’s just a little pee. So what? Let’s move on.

===== =====

Overall it has been a funny week. Then there was the Japanese loan interface informing me that 1974 never existed. Yeah right guy. Get a grip.

Then the three “UN nurses” purportedly in combat zones. Come on lady. You are a big fat clip-jointer. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Get over yourself. Get.a real job lady. Sit this one out.

Yua’s six-day campaign for ¥3,000.

The price of two Yubari melons standing between me and love.

The phrase “crap on a cross,” followed by the reasonable question of how the crap actually got up there.

This was life, basically.

Outta control.

X. Eight Transition Days

This last week did not really resolve. That is the fact.

No big loan arrived. The house did not sell. Sachie had not yet moved out. Thailand is somewhere down the line. Greece too. I cannot wait to hit the road again. I love to travel. I just do.

But something has shifted.

The archive woke up. The Sachie and Litz essays are doing well. The dailies are off to a good start. My son called. It is too hot. My AC doesn’t work. Damn.

That was the week.

Everything else—the lenders, women, cards, trains, cigarettes, apps, travel sites, melons, war-zone nurses, Greek islands, shared walls, Google rankings, impossible birthdays, all the rest—spin around this fact.

Something’s gonna happen.

It always does.

Dedication:

For Litz. You can take this D anytime you like baby.

Epigraph:

Some people claim there’s a woman to blame but I know it’s my own damn fault.
—Jimmy Buffett, “Margaritaville”

I. Meeting Litz Online

I met Litz on Tinder right around the end of April 2026, just about two and a half months ago today. Relationships often begin before either person realizes that anything has begun. Two strangers exchange a few messages, one of them sends a photograph or a joke, and suddenly an event that seemed inconsequential at the time becomes the first scene in a story.

Within a few days, Tinder suspended my account after yet another unsuccessful attempt to satisfy its increasingly byzantine photographic-identification system. I had failed this test many times before. The platform’s technology remained unable to determine that the large, slightly tired-looking man holding the phone was the same large, slightly tired-looking man depicted in the photographs directly beneath him. I found this highly frustrating, although by then it hardly mattered. Litz and I had already begun speaking elsewhere.

The first thing she sent me was a voice message. It lasted only a few seconds. I believe she simply introduced herself. What I remember best is her voice: low, warm, and unexpectedly musical. Litz had once been a professional singer. In her early twenties, she had received a recording contract in South Korea despite speaking little or no Korean at the time. I still do not entirely understand how that arrangement came about, but after hearing her speak I understood why someone might have wanted to record her.

Her voice reminded me slightly of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies—not because they sounded identical, but because both possessed a quality that is difficult to manufacture: intimacy without effort and deeply sensual. To be frank, her voice turned me on immediately, and almost as quickly she did too. Litz could make a routine greeting sound private. Even when she was discussing work, groceries, family obligations, or the weather in Kochi City, I sometimes had the feeling that she was singing under her breath.

I told her how much I loved her voice. She later told me that she had fallen for me almost immediately. I cannot honestly say that I proceeded with greater caution.

Over the next six weeks, we talked almost every day, usually several times a day. Some calls lasted twenty minutes. Others lasted an hour, two hours, or longer. There were mornings when we spoke shortly after waking, afternoons when one of us called while walking somewhere, and nights when we continued talking long after both of us had run out of any practical reason to remain awake. By the time we met in person, we had accumulated hundreds of hours of conversation.

We discussed our families, our marriages, our children, our work, our financial worries, our health, our failures, and our hopes for whatever remained of the future. I have one adult son; she has two adult children. We spoke about the different paths that had carried us into our early fifties and about the lives we might still construct from there. We talked about music, food, travel, friendship, jealousy, loneliness, and sex. We also talked about nothing at all, which may be the greater test of intimacy. It is relatively easy to tell another person the dramatic events of one’s life. It is harder to remain interested while that person describes a difficult customer, a delayed train, an irritating piece of paperwork, or what she intends to eat for dinner.

With Litz, those ordinary conversations rarely felt ordinary.

At the time, I was emerging from a marriage that had lasted twenty-nine years. My wife and I had mutually decided to divorce earlier that spring, although the practical and emotional consequences of that decision were still unfolding. I had not lived as a single man since my early twenties. I had almost no recent experience of dating and even less understanding of how quickly two people could create a private world through their phones.

My mother and several other people cautioned me that Litz and I might be moving too fast. They were not hostile to her, nor were they trying to discourage me from beginning a new life. They had simply lived long enough to recognize acceleration when they saw it.

In retrospect, they were right.

At the time, however, the speed felt less like recklessness than recognition. After so many years inside one relationship, I mistook the intensity of discovery for certainty. Litz and I had not yet confronted the thousand small realities that distinguish knowing someone from imagining that one knows her. We knew one another’s histories, preferences, fears, and fantasies. We knew how to make each other laugh. We knew when the other person sounded tired or distracted. We knew which subjects produced excitement and which could quietly darken the mood.

That felt like knowledge. Some of it was. Some of it was projection. We also became virtually intimate before meeting in person. We had phone sex only twice, although the number is less important than what the experiences represented. Both of us had been lonely, and the intimacy provided a necessary outlet and a sense of closeness across a considerable distance.

At other times, when her work schedule or my obligations made a longer encounter impossible, we exchanged photographs or allowed each other brief intimate glimpses through the phone.

I do not include this information to be provocative. It matters because the relationship did not begin as a cautious friendship that slowly became romantic after a series of conventional dates. Emotionally and sexually, we had already moved far beyond introduction before we occupied the same room. By the time I traveled to Kochi, we had created expectations that neither of us fully understood.

For most of those six weeks, we had almost no disagreements. Litz sometimes expressed concern about whether I brushed my teeth frequently enough, an impressive question given that she was hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and had never stood close enough to inspect them. I assured her that I did. She remained unconvinced. This should perhaps have told us something.

Mostly, though, we were happy. We called each other baby. We spoke openly about becoming engaged and, eventually, getting married. We discussed travel plans and imagined a shared domestic future with the confidence available only to people who have not yet attempted to share a bathroom, a schedule, a kitchen, or a narrow futon.

I knew we were rushing. I rushed anyway.

I returned to Japan on June 12, two days before my fifty-second birthday. Almost immediately, I began arranging the trip to Kochi. Traveling there from Kyoto or Osaka is neither impossible nor particularly convenient. The round trip cost roughly ¥25,000, and the journey consumed much of a day. At fifty-two, a man should perhaps think carefully before spending that amount of time and money to meet someone he knows primarily as a voice emerging from a small electronic device. I went nonetheless.

By the time I reached Kochi Station, it was close to eleven at night. The late arrival eliminated any possibility of a proper birthday dinner. We bought snacks and wine instead and carried them back to a hotel near the station, where we did our best to turn convenience-store provisions into a meal.

There was an unavoidable strangeness in seeing her at full human scale. For six weeks she had existed inside photographs and rectangles, her face appearing or disappearing according to the strength of the connection. Now she was standing beside me, very small and entirely real. Litz is only four feet eleven inches tall. I am six feet three. The physical contrast between us was nearly comic, although neither of us seemed troubled by it.

We talked, drank wine, ate our improvised dinner, and gradually adjusted to the fact that the person we had imagined was now close enough to touch. The transition was easier than it might have been. Her voice was the same voice. Her humor survived the journey out of the phone. The affection between us did not vanish under the brighter and less forgiving light of an actual room.

We slept together that night and again the following morning. The sex was very good, but what mattered more was the sense of confirmation surrounding it. Whatever else we had misunderstood, the attraction was real. We were comfortable enough to laugh, to pause, and to begin again. Nothing felt forced. The night seemed to promise that the emotional and virtual intimacy of the previous six weeks could become an ordinary physical life.

Had the visit ended the following morning, I might have returned home convinced that we had been right about everything.

But eight hours together seemed inadequate after six weeks of anticipation and a ¥25,000 journey. Litz had an apartment in Kochi City, and I asked whether I might stay with her for a few days. She kindly agreed and began rearranging her work schedule so that we could spend more time together. I was, and remain, deeply grateful for that generosity. Inviting someone into a small home is an act of trust. Inviting a new boyfriend who is more than a foot taller than you and has arrived carrying the accumulated habits of twenty-nine years of marriage may be an act of courage.

I expected to remain for several days.

I stayed for ten.

For the first time, Litz and I would no longer be two people describing our daily lives from a distance. We would have a daily life together. We would wake in the same room, eat the same food, negotiate the same space, and discover whether the ease of our conversations could survive the pressures of proximity.

For the first few days, it did.

II. On Learning Someone in Person

By the end of my stay, I had remained in Kochi for about ten days.

Those ten days contained enough happiness to convince me that our relationship had real promise. They also contained enough friction to suggest that promise alone would not be enough.

Very quickly we settled into something resembling a small domestic partnership. Litz would go to work, though she had generously arranged her schedule so we could spend much more time together than originally planned. I cooked when I could, helped with the laundry, cleaned the apartment, ran errands, and generally tried to make myself useful. In the evenings we wandered around Kochi, stopped for drinks, browsed little shops, cooked simple meals together, and continued discovering one another in the quiet rhythm of ordinary life.

Those ordinary moments are, after all, where real relationships actually live. The first few days were wonderful. Then, almost imperceptibly, small tensions began to appear. The first involved something so minor that I still find it difficult to believe it became an issue at all.

I am a smoker. Rather than smoke inside Litz’s apartment, I stepped onto her small balcony several times a day. While smoking I would occasionally call my family or a close friend back in Kyoto. I was speaking quietly, during the daytime, on private property. To me it seemed entirely unremarkable.

Apparently one of Litz’s elderly neighbors felt otherwise.

The neighbor contacted the building management company and complained that the foreign guest next door was smoking and talking on the balcony. The management company called Litz and politely asked if her guest could simply take phone calls inside the apartment instead. That was all.

There was no threat of eviction. There was no confrontation. Nobody came to the apartment. No police appeared. No lease violations were mentioned. It was, from everything I could tell, a routine request that could have been solved in approximately thirty seconds.

I would gladly have stopped taking calls on the balcony. Instead, something else happened. Litz panicked.

When she told me about the call she was visibly shaken. She was close to tears. She repeatedly told me she might lose the apartment she had worked so hard to obtain. She imagined herself forced to leave. She imagined financial disaster. She imagined the worst possible outcome almost immediately.

I asked her a simple question.

“Baby, did the management company actually say you were going to be evicted?”

“No.”

“What did they say?”

“They asked that you talk on the phone inside.”

“I can absolutely do that.”

For me, the problem was already solved. For her, it had barely begun.

Looking back now, I understand that this was not really about balconies, cigarettes, or phone calls. It was anxiety. Real anxiety.Not theatrical anxiety. Not attention-seeking anxiety. Genuine anxiety that transformed relatively ordinary inconveniences into looming catastrophes.

I had not fully understood the depth of that tendency while we were talking online because online relationships naturally allow each person to present a calmer, more edited version of themselves. Daily life removes that luxury.

Unfortunately, her anxiety had an unfortunate side effect. It triggered my own. There are many unpleasant emotions in life, but few I dislike more than chronic stress. I can handle sadness. I can handle disappointment. I can even handle uncertainty reasonably well. Constant anxiety, however, is simply not good for me.

As Litz became more anxious, I found myself becoming more anxious in return. Neither of us wanted that. Neither of us knew quite what to do about it.

Other small disagreements gradually appeared. From my perspective they were simply the kinds of adjustments every new couple eventually faces. From her perspective they often carried greater emotional weight than I expected.

For example, she became increasingly interested in my daily routines.

How many times was I brushing my teeth? Why had I skipped shaving that morning? Was I taking proper care of myself?

These were perfectly reasonable questions in another context. Had we been married for twenty years, they might have seemed almost affectionate. But we were not married. We were not engaged. We had only recently met in person after knowing one another online.

I was fifty-two years old. She was in her fifties as well. I thought that certain decisions about my grooming, my appearance, and my daily habits still belonged primarily to me. I tried to explain this as gently as I could, just as she tried to explain why these matters genuinely concerned her.

Neither of us was entirely wrong. We were simply beginning to discover the practical differences between two people who had fallen in love through conversation and two people attempting to share everyday life. The gap continued to grow.

Reflecting on our first six weeks together, I am increasingly struck by something that I already knew to some extent. There is, in fact, a tremendous difference between getting to know somebody online and getting to know them in person. This may seem obvious. However, my time with Litz underscored that truth in ways I genuinely did not expect.

By the time I finally left Kochi, we were still together. We were still affectionate. We were still physically intimate. We still considered ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. But beneath the surface, the first fault lines had begun to appear.

III. One Day at a Time

When people hear that a relationship has ended, they almost always want a simple explanation. Someone must have been the villain. Someone must have made the cheated. Someone must have loved less, cared less, tried less, or failed more spectacularly than the other. Real life rarely works that way in my experience.

Litz is one of the kindest people I have ever met. She is generous with her time, devoted to her children, remarkably hardworking, and capable of great tenderness. She also struggles with anxiety in ways that sometimes make ordinary life much harder than it needs to be. I, meanwhile, have my own collection of flaws. I rush into things. I value independence almost to a fault. I can be stubborn, dismissive of worries that seem obvious to others, and too quick to believe that every problem has a quick solution. These qualities have served me well in some areas of my life. In this relationship they sometimes made matters worse.

Neither of us was trying to hurt the other. We were simply carrying different histories into the same room. And perhaps that is what every relationship really is: two biographies attempting to occupy the same present tense. Sometimes they fit together naturally. Sometimes they require patience neither person yet possesses. Sometimes they arrive at exactly the wrong moment, even when the feelings themselves are genuine.

I do not regret meeting Litz. I do not regret falling in love with her. I certainly do not regret the laughter, the conversations that lasted until sunrise, the train rides, her little apartment in Kochi, or the quiet mornings when, for a little while at least, building a future together felt entirely possible. Those moments were real. They remain real.

Today, Litz and I are no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. We are, however, still good friends. We continue to care about one another and talk on the phone, and we both hope that time will provide perspective where emotion sometimes could not. We are discussing the possibility of traveling abroad together later this year. If this happens it happens and if it does not it does not. In either case, we will travel as friends, not as a couple.

The challenges in our relationship were the product of two imperfect people, each bringing old habits, old fears, old hopes, and old wounds into something new. That is not failure. It is simply the complicated business of being human.

So I will keep trying. To become a better man. A better friend. And, if circumstances ever allow, a better boyfriend. I hope Litz finds the same peace she has always wished for me.

Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame. But I know it’s my own damn fault. Perhaps.

Dedication:

For my friend Litz. Let’s just take things one day at a time, baby.

Note: Interested readers may also wish to read the love poem I wrote for Litz during the early part of our relationship. This poem is linked below.

Epigraph

Lisa says on a night like this it’d be so nice if you gave me a kiss.

—The Velvet Underground

Author’s Note: This essay is the first of several essays on the theme of my 27 year marriage to and recent divorce from my wife Sachie. As noted below, I met her in the summer of 1997 in Kumamoto Japan, her home town. I had just accepted a job with NOVA Corporation in that same city. This essay traces the first few months of our relationship.

The dates in this essay are reconstructed from memory nearly thirty years later. While I have tried to be as accurate as possible, the chronology is necessarily approximate.

Introduction:

In January of 1997, a few months before I departed for Japan, my grandfather Bill Kolb handed me an envelope.

Inside was $1,700 in cash.

Even now this sentence doesn’t sound quite real.

My mother still can’t believe it. Truth be told, neither can I. Bill wasn’t a wealthy man handing me money because he had too much of it. He simply believed in me. I don’t know exactly why. I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, without much of a plan beyond teaching English for a year somewhere on the other side of the world.

“Go with God,” he said. “Good luck in Japan.”

Nearly thirty years later, I still believe it was one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.

Kumamoto and NOVA:

I left for Japan in April with two duffel bags, a stack of CDs, a handful of books, several pack of cigarettes, and the sort of confidence that belongs almost exclusively to young people. I wasn’t fearless. I was simply too young to appreciate all the things that could go wrong.

Before arriving in Kumamoto, NOVA sent me to Osaka for about a week of training. Most of the details have faded into that blur reserved for airports, orientation sessions, and hotel conference rooms, but I do remember how Japan felt.

Little things amazed. The stations. The food. The language. Even the convenience stores. I’d never been anywhere remotely like it.

Then I took the train south to Kumamoto.

People who have never been to Japan often imagine Tokyo whenever they hear the word “Japan.” Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It moves at its own pace. The downtown area is was built around a long covered shopping street—the Shotengai—that functioned as the city’s living room. People shopped there, met friends there, drank there, wandered there, and, if you stayed long enough, discovered that everybody seemed to know everybody else.

I arrived without knowing a soul. That didn’t last very long.

NOVA occupied a building at the north end of the Shotengai. At the time it was an enormous company, hiring English teachers from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. It has since gone downhill. The classrooms had glass walls. Lessons ran almost continuously. Teachers appeared, disappeared, smiled, taught, smiled again, and hurried off to the next class. It all worked surprisingly well.

It also felt a little like living inside an aquarium.

Things became even more interesting when I learned I’d be sharing an apartment with one of my supervisors.

Her name was Sam. She was from Wales, probably in her mid-thirties, and had an almost supernatural awareness of everybody else’s business. She wasn’t mean about it. She simply seemed constitutionally incapable of not knowing who was dating whom, who had called in sick, who had stayed out too late, and who might be about to break one of NOVA’s many unofficial rules.

My other roommate was a fellow teacher named Heather. The arrangement wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t private.

Most afternoons I’d finish teaching, wander through the Shotengai interested me more and more with each passing day. I was also hoping to meet someone.

Not because I had arrived in Japan determined to find a wife. I had come looking for adventure, work, and maybe a little direction. If romance happened somewhere along the way, that would simply be a bonus.

Then one afternoon, sometime around late May, the classroom door opened and in walked Sachie Asahi.

The first thing I noticed was her haircut. It was incredibly short—shorter than mine—and on almost anyone else it probably wouldn’t have worked. On her it looked perfect.

The second thing I noticed was her T-shirt. Across the front was Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can. Now at twenty-two I saw connections everywhere.

My first thought wasn’t, She’s wearing Warhol.

It was, She might actually know the Velvet Underground.

As soon as class ended, curiosity got the better of me.

“Miss Asahi,” I said, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know the Velvet Underground?”

She smiled.

“Yes I do. They are one of my favorite bands.”

Mine too.

That certainly got my attention. Looking back, that conversation probably lasted less than a minute. In memory it lasts forever.

Our First Two Dates:

A few days later I found myself lingering outside NOVA around lunchtime, pretending I wasn’t waiting for anyone in particular. I was waiting for her.

The door opened. Out walked Sachie.

“Are you heading home?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to get some lunch?”

She thought about it briefly and said “I know a nice coffee shop.”

We walked over together. The owner was an older gentleman who made coffee the traditional Japanese way, pouring hot water slowly through paper filters with the concentration of a surgeon. We ordered sandwiches, lit cigarettes, and settled into conversation as though we’d been doing it for years.

At one point I looked at her cigarette and smiled.

“You know,” I said, “nurses probably shouldn’t smoke.”

Without missing a beat she smiled back.

“Teachers probably shouldn’t either.”

Touché.

It was such a small exchange. I’ve remembered it for twenty-nine years.

I wish I could tell you I played it cool after that first lunch. I did not.

Whenever our schedules lined up, I would find myself outside NOVA around lunchtime. Sometimes I really was heading out for lunch. Sometimes I was just hoping the door would open and Sachie would walk through it.

Sometimes it did.

As we were finishing our first lunch together I asked if I could call her. She said yes.

I called her the next morning around eleven, thinking this was an appropriate time. When she answered she laughed.

“Why didn’t you call earlier?”

“I didn’t want to seem too eager.”

“Eager would have been good.”

This was encouraging.

Our first proper date was a screening of Hal Hartley’s Amateur. I remember the movie mostly because I remember the evening. Hartley has always struck me as one of those directors I admire more than I love. I’m glad I’ve seen his films, but they never quite found a permanent place in my heart.

Near the end of the film she leaned toward me. Not to kiss me. Not yet.

She brought her lips close enough that I could feel her breath against my ear and whispered, in English,

“What is this music?”

I didn’t know but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that one moment of intimacy.

She was close enough that my entire body lit up. We didn’t kiss in the theatre. I think we held hands on the walk back to the car, but that’s about all. It was wonderfully innocent in the way that only the beginning of a relationship can be.

Kumamoto is not a very big city, and we quickly settled into a rhythm. We’d grab coffee, wander through the nearby Shotengai, or simply drive around with nowhere in particular to go. Looking back, it strikes me that we spent an awful lot of time in her little Mitsubishi. We couldn’t exactly go to my apartment—I lived with my boss, after all—and bringing a young American teacher home to meet your very traditional Japanese father wasn’t something either of us was ready for after a week or two.

So the car became our living room.

We’d park by the river or find a quiet place to talk, windows cracked just enough for the cigarette smoke to drift outside. We would make out in her parked car. I would finger her and she would return the favor. It never felt dramatic. It just felt…comfortable. We were both twenty-two, trying to figure each other out one car ride at a time.

I Join Washington Language School:

Around the same time another opportunity came along.

Washington English School offered better hours, more independence, and what sounded like a healthier working environment than NOVA. I handed in my month’s notice and, sometime around the middle of July, packed my two duffel bags yet again.

Leaving NOVA turned out to be one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. Fortunately, Washington was only a short distance away. The boss gave me the use of a cheap apartment, which was a bonus. For the first time since arriving in Japan I had a place of my own.

It wasn’t much. A small furnished apartment on the second floor of a walk-up, two tatami rooms, sliding doors, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom, a loft that was far too hot to sleep in during the summer, and just enough room for one young teacher who didn’t own very much.

I unpacked my books, stacked my CDs beside a little stereo, purchased groceries I barely knew how to cook, and slowly began settling into something that resembled ordinary life.

When I wasn’t teaching, I was usually doing one of two things. I was either with Sachie or working on a baseball simulation game.

That probably sounds stranger now than it did then. My uncle Steve had inspired me to try designing a tabletop baseball game based on real statistics, and I became completely absorbed by it. Most evenings found me surrounded by notebooks, pencils and baseball encyclopedias, trying to solve statistical puzzles. For weeks one pitcher, Lefty Grove, refused to cooperate. His adjusted ERA simply would not behave the way I wanted it to.

By August we were seeing each other almost every day.

One evening another young woman came on to me at a bar. I was briefly tempted. She was perfectly nice, and yet while talking with her I realized, almost in the middle of the conversation, that I didn’t want to be talking to anyone else except for Sachie.

The next day I told Sachie what had happened. She listened quietly and then she smiled. I said I would like to become exclusive. She agreed. Sometimes the most important decisions in life announce themselves quietly. This was one of those cases.

A few weeks later we decided to spend a weekend together in Tokyo.

Like so many romantic plans made by young people, ours was perfect in theory. Reality had other plans.

Our weekend in Tokyo was supposed to be the moment. We agreed we would have sex in our hotel room. By then we had been dating for a couple of months. We were crazy about each other, and it was time for the real intimacy to begin.

For dinner we had fish and soup and a few glasses of wine. Sachie was never much of a drinker, especially in those days. A few glasses of wine were enough to leave her happily, gloriously intoxicated. By the time we got back to the room she was laughing, stumbling a little, and having a wonderful time.

Then she collapsed across the bed. She was too drunk. Sex was off the table. We went to sleep

Somehow that failed evening made me like her even more. Real relationships, I was beginning to discover, aren’t built on perfect moments. They’re built on imperfect ones that two people survive together.

A week or two later back in Kumamoto life intervened in a somewhat dramatic way.

During the afternoon of August 31, 1997, I was walking home from work when someone stopped me on the street.

“Princess Diana died in a car accident.”

For a second I thought I’d misheard. I was shocked.

News traveled differently then. There were no smartphones and no social media. One stranger told another stranger, and for a few moments the whole world seemed strangely quiet. Such was the case here.

I walked the rest of the way home thinking about Diana, about Paris, about how somebody so famous could simply disappear in the middle of an ordinary night.

History has a curious habit of attaching itself to our private memories. I can’t think about Princess Diana without thinking about that afternoon.

Sachie came over later that afternoon. The mood was quieter than usual. We talked for a while, made coffee, listened to music, and eventually stopped talking altogether.

This time there was no hotel. No elaborate plans. No expectations. Just the two of us in my tiny apartment.

It happened naturally. We fell into bed together. We became lovers.

The sex was good; however I had nothing to compare it to. I was a virgin at 23. She had had some limited experience. I wore a condom for perhaps the first and last time. After that we weren’t trying to make a baby necessarily. If it happened it happened.

Outside, late-summer Kumamoto carried on exactly as it always had. Cars passed. Somebody’s television drifted through an open window. Somewhere in the distance a train moved through the evening.

The world hadn’t changed.

Mine had.

Looking back now, it’s tempting to search those first months for signs of what was coming.

Were there clues? Warnings? Promises?

Possibly.

There was simply a young American teacher who had wandered halfway around the world with two duffel bags, too many cigarettes, a head full of music, and absolutely no expectation of meeting the person he would build his adult life with.

And there was a young Japanese English student who happened to walk into one of his English classes wearing an Andy Warhol T-shirt.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Conclusion:

Sachie and I stayed together for twenty-nine years. We were married for twenty-seven of these.

Our marriage eventually came to an end just this spring, as many marriages do. Time changes people. Interests diverge. Careers pull in different directions. Habits change. Sex stops. Sometimes two people simply grow into different versions of themselves.

We tried our best. In the end our best was not good enough but we had fun along the way,

This essay belongs to two young people on the cusp of life. It belongs to coffee and cigarettes. To our long walks on the Shotengai. To Kumamoto. To our friends who were also young and looking to make a little life of their own.

To a little Mitsubishi with the windows cracked on warm evenings and making out passionately in the front seat.

To the Velvet Underground and an old man carefully pouring coffee.

To a whispered question in a dark movie theatre.

And to a grandfather who slipped an envelope into his grandson’s hand and said, “Go with God.”

Dedication:

For my wife, Sachie. And for my grandfather Bill Kolb, my hero. I love you Grandpa.