My Version of a Meet Cute; One that Happens Decades Later
It happens ten years later. We’ve been each other’s company since eight, in a house full of words, stories written and spoken and motioned. You caught my eye because of the book you borrowed from that family library: their eyes were watching God, which I read. The words left my mouth before I could stop them: “You haven’t read this?” I blushed red in embarrassment when your indifferent gaze flicked to me. “I’m sorry! That was rude of me!” I bowed to my waist. You watched in surprise, then I remembered I wasn’t in Japan anymore. This was Jakarta, Indonesia. I was making a fool of myself. “U-uh… I hope you enjoy it! It’s a really good book!” You smother a laugh and smile, if only a small tug of one corner of your lips. “Thank you,” you said and clasped hands with your mother. All that I thought about on the ride home was how much I wanted to be your friend.
As we grew into the horny age of sixteen, we realised we weren’t like other teenagers. Sex didn’t interest us. When our classmates held hands or kissed or cuddled, where others felt longing for something like that of their own, we felt nothing. “Are we weird?” you asked me. “I don’t know,” I said. Sex education came to us from our parents, my Okaa-san and Otou-san, and your Mom. They told us, “When you’re at this age, you will get sexual urges. But don’t act upon them until you’re married.” Your Mom said, “When someone touches you, you will feel shivers running up your body, reverberating there.” She pointed to the south of our bodies. How could society dictate what we would feel? The truth we kept sealed behind our lips.
“We’re asexual,” you announced one day, resurfacing from the internet. Huh. Was that what we were? “So… you can’t fall in love?” I asked. “Not necessarily,” you said. “It varies for different people. Some feel romance, others are indifferent to it. Some may have sexual desires, but not attraction. Some people only feel that way to the people they’ve known for a long time.”
It happens now, years later. I just realised you look beautiful. Has the sun always set diamonds in your hair like that, silvered the tips of your eyelashes like that? When did I realise that? Bubbling, surfacing, revealed like a floating scrap of shell unturned… Yet when our hands brush, seconds after this awakening, the feeling is lost. No, not exactly lost. More like smoothened, as a tide would smoothen words written in the sand, as if to clear something out. Have I not clearly grasped what this is? That word… Love. No doubt, it is that word.
Warmth settles over me. A blanket wrapped around my form. There is a sense of safety, of comfort⎯you’re there with me; I’m not alone. I lace your fingers with mine. You return it. But there is no spark, no rousing of the flame, no fierce burning. I am not fuelled by passion. I checked my pulse; it has not quickened. It is as if we’ve settled into a space we’ve built over time, natural, fireless, yet happy.
The ground doesn’t give way beneath us. There is no distortion of self, no earth-shattering realisation, no spatter of blood.
People say, “You’re in love, you’re married, and yet you haven’t had sex?”
Is there only one form of love?
