Best Mistake

05 | halt

i never had the courage of my convictions
as long as danger is near

On Monday morning I wake up three hours before my alarm. I check my emails, including the one from my grandfather's assistant with the subject line THINK ABOUT IT, screaming at me in all caps. I heat up last night's dinner for breakfast. I put on five different trousers before I find the right one. I towel my long hair dry and think about shaving them. There is a sort of isolated brown-mustard color ringing the hollow of my eye, hideous against the paleness of my complexion, and I don't want anyone to think it has anything to do with my inadequacy. I finish a complex routine that is not so much a choice as a necessity.

There is a framed Christmas photo on my nightstand near the door. I stand in front of it and remain like this as the minutes tick, the faces staring back at me bright and injurious. My father and I are almost obscenely dissimilar in appearance, though our conspicuous rigidity is a genetic inheritance, and it makes our smiles look slightly identical. I reach for it, trying not to swallow my tongue, and something feels strange. Of course there is disappointment. In suspension I look desperate, wearing thin the version of me that seems well-adjusted and deeply loved. But this strange feeling has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with me staring into this presumed absolute in which I pretend to be an irreplaceable part of a functioning motor. It is that it is 6.45 a.m. and I am conscious about my misery. I am spending my mornings perfecting a routine, afraid of that inevitable shift which marks the beginning of those familiar, unbearable months. I am in my room, thinking over and over again, will my life be good even if I can't remember how, even if I can't see the possibility it still exists? And in the midst of this abrupt self-reflection, I realize I am late. In a dire way that forces me to put one foot in front of the other, across the street, down the bustling subway, and to Keio Private University.

———

The days I don't want to disappear are very few and far in-between, non-anatomical feats that, sure, happen fleetingly. But they are extraordinary. All the people I encounter seemingly searching for something good to start their day with and beaming, I mean beaming, when they see me. I am their perfect morning coffee, or at least an especially eager compliment sent their way, and just like the memory of my grandmother's dried apples, I stretch them out until they distort into something incomprehensible. In a 50 square meters bathroom of a bustling train station as I close my eyes and will myself not to empty whatever still remained from last night's dinner. In the middle of a high traffic I often meet on my way to the city, feeling as though something died inside of me and with no possibility of it ever being removed. And now I am walking to the administrator's office, knowing I only have so much time before my inevitable crumble, and I greet the first person I see with a stilted bow, a polite smile, and vividly feel the muscles throb underneath the bruise.

———

By the time I push my way out the office, the sun is already flooding most of the campus grounds. I take the elevator down, and the dark shaft walls make mirror of the window, I turn away from my reflection and two students are craned over a phone screen. In the lobby, there is an art history exhibition. I go up the viewing platform and scan the partition walls, and there is a painting that I love by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Virgin of Consolation. In it, the black-clad Virgin of Consolation is sitting on a white marble throne. Across her lap is a young woman who grieves at the death of her child laying naked at the Virgin's feet. It is a pensive, sfumato masterpiece, drenched in Catholic tragedy. Bouguereau painted it after his wife, Nelly, died in childbirth along with his youngest son. As I am taking in the details of this painting, Asahina Ukyo comes to stand beside me. I'm not proud of what I do then, which is to turn away and run down the stairs, and I look over my shoulder and see that he is coming after me, his hair catching a shaft of sun. Of all the thirteen siblings, he is the one who costs me the most. And it's not that I'm scared of him, but the idea of forming complete sentences and listening to his complete sentences when he had seen exactly what I was so desperate to hide seems unbearable, and in spite of me pretending that it was nothing—that at some point I have chalked the happenings as a sleight of hand—being slapped across the face is humiliating, mostly because in the aftermath of it there is no hiding the despicable decadence of my anatomical function.