From the journal of Shinobu Ikeda.
 

I picked up this guy in a bar.

You know, I can just imagine the look on my mother's face if I tell her that. She'd probably have a heart attack. I wish. But she's far away in the past I left behind now, so it's a moot point. I'm never telling her anything again. I'm never seeing her again. Nothing could induce me to lay eyes on her again. Well, okay, so a million bucks or so would do it, but even then I'd have to consider carefully.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yeah, this guy I picked up in a bar. I didn't really pick him up, of course. It all started out really innocuous like, really. There I was, feeling dissatisfied, pissed and bored out of my skull. I was looking down into the depths of my beer mug and seeing my future spinning out ahead of me like an ocean tumbling upside down. And then I looked up and I saw him, and for some reason, I thought he seemed as lonely as I felt. In actuality, that wasn't how he looked, of course. If ever there was an attitude that said don't mess with me, his was it.

But my brain was somewhere else playing poker with my common sense, so I went over to him and tried to engage him in a conversation. He took one look at me out of the corner of his eye and started to ignore me dilligently. That didn't faze me one bit, no way. I was, after all, more than capable of listening to me talk nonstop for hours.

Apparently he didn't have my ability because after about five minutes he looked at me again really coldly (I think it's supposed to intimidate me) and said, "Don't you ever shut up?"

"Being annoying is one of my life's ambitions," I told him. I was perfectly serious, though he probably thought I wasn't. "I was just thinking how lonely you look over here all by yourself-"

"I am not lonely!" he exclaimed, looking as if he wanted to do me some serious violence.

"Okay, so you aren't," I said. Hey, if he wouldn't admit it, I wasn't going to force it down his throat. "But I am lonely and I was wondering if I could hang out with you a bit."

"Why?" He was suspicious.

Because you're cute. "Look around you. Would any of those guys be capable of holding up their end of a conversation?" It's quite true. I think most of those guys' evolution had a long way to go before reaching the homo sapien stage yet.

So we ended up talking. Okay, okay, I'll be honest. I ended up talking and he ended up drinking beer and giving me monosyllabic grunts. It wasn't the most enlightening of conversations, but... damn, he was cute.

And, I really don't know how I did it, but I managed to get him out of the bar, into my beat-up car and then into my apartment. Some higher power must have been at work there. Well, whatever it was, I thanked Them/It/Him/Her with all my di- er, heart.

I didn't switch on the lights. I mean, moonlight's pretty romantic, isn't it? And he looked so beautiful in moonlight. He stood at the open window, looking at me with no expression on his face. I think he was curious, a little. I walked up to him and slid my hand under his t-shirt and I kissed him on the lips, long and lingering.

And then I drew away and looked at him. Well, he couldn't not understand my intentions now. But he didn't look surprised, or repulsed, or anything at all, for that matter. There was again a faint curiosity in his eyes, and then he smiled at me, a little, and my heart went fluttering away on little butterfly wings.

I had to ask something first, though. "Have you - ever...?"

"No," he replied, still smiling that faint smile.

And then we made love. What a quaint term. But I can't find any other words to describe it, so it'll have to do.

I woke up dreaming about my mother, of all things. It wasn't a nightmare, but it wasn't exactly a pleasant dream either, and it left a bad taste in my mouth and a small ache in my head. And then I remembered, and I turned my head to look at the other occupant of my bed.

I felt a huge grin working its way to my face. I couldn't help it. I drank in the sight of him, thinking, Angel, angel come down from heaven to warm my bed, and I couldn't help laughing a little.

He woke up and I asked him, "What's your name?"

"Iori," he said, absently, sitting up and running a hand through his crimson hair.

I watched him as he rummaged for his clothes. When he'd finished dressing, I asked him again, "Where are you staying? You're not from around here." It wasn't a question. He didn't look like he belonged here.

"A hotel somewhere." He ran a hand through his hair again, trying to do something with it. What, I had no idea. It still flopped into his right eye.

"You could crash here for a few nights - I mean, days - I mean, uh-" Good grief. "You could stay here if you want to," I finished, very lamely I might add.

He took me up on the offer. I was pretty surprised. But perhaps, he was lonely too.

And an arrangement of days and mutual sexual gratification became weeks and... something else. But I didn't know what I was feeling, this emotion that was getting bigger and bigger in my chest. How do you explain something like that?

He wasn't the easiest person to live with. I'm a neat freak and he left things behind him like lotuses. You know, I've heard somewhere that some divinity or other (which I can't remember) left lotuses behind Them/It/Him/Her when they walked, too. Only I could deal with lotuses, but in Iori's case, it was shoes, socks, candy wrappers, banana peels, apple cores, shirts, belts, pants... the list went on indefinitely.

What's the other thing I wanted to gripe about? Oh, yeah, shopping. He's the worst shopper in the world. I hated taking him with me to the supermarket, but I had to because I didn't want to shop alone. Whenever I asked him for his opinion on something, I could expect a set of definite answers. "Do you think this brand's better or this one?" "Don't know." "Do you think the price is worth it?" "Hmph." "Do you think we should buy some sanitary napkins while we're here?" "Whatever."

It annoyed the hell out of me.

But he would pay for the stuff, always. I wonder where he got all that money. His folks must be loaded.

Gorgeous, sexy and filthy rich. I would hate him if he hadn't charmed the socks right off me. Sometimes I wonder what he saw in me, why he stuck around for so long. I would be the first to admit I won't win any prizes in the looks department. This is not me feeling sorry for myself, this is stating facts. My face is permanently pock-marked (sign of a lazy teenhood), my nose too flat and my eyes are tiny. I'm tall, though, as tall as him, and this was a great relief to me. I didn't want to have to keep looking up at him all the time.

Not that he's perfect. He's far from perfect, and this I know for a fact too. In fact, I have a horrible suspicion he's even more messed-up than I am, and that's saying a lot. I can't count the times I woke up in the middle of the night from nightmares. Not mine, but his. He'd scream and trash about and cry. He only cried in his sleep. Never when awake.

Once I woke up to a sound very near me. I looked at the clock on the nightstand and saw that it was four in the morning. He was a huddled shape in the darkness, and the sound was coming from him. His pillow was wet with tears. I hated it when he did this. The screams and the trashing I could handle. I'd wake him up and everything would be all right (except for some bruises on me). But I never could do anything for him when he was like this. I'd never felt so helpless before in my life and I hated it.

I leaned over and tried to wake him. "Iori, wake up," I whispered in his ear, "It's just a dream. Wake up." The sounds didn't stop. But after a long time, they grew fainter and finally faded altogether. I shook his shoulder. Red-rimmed gray eyes blinked up at me.

"What is it?" he mumbled.

"You were having a bad dream."

"Was I?"

"Yes."

He shrugged. "It's gone now, apparently. Go back to sleep."

I lay close to him, my arms around him. "Do you remember what it was about?"

"No. Go to sleep, Shinobu."

But I didn't go to sleep because he wasn't going to. I told him about a favorite dream of mine, about my mother. She was in an elevator, and it was going up and down and up and down, and it was driving her nuts. She tore out huge clumps of her hair and yelled, "When is this fucking thing going to STOP???" And then it turned out she was just a floppy doll in a toy elevator and I was the one moving it up and down, and there I was, resplendent in judge's robe, cackling my head off like a nutcase.

He laughed at all the right places. And though I knew it wasn't all that funny, I loved him for it anyway.

Sometimes he would tell me of his dreams. Sometimes he dreamed of his mother too, dreams in which he was a disembodied spirit searching for a home, and when he saw the woman that was to be his mother, he knew that this woman would be someone who would love him forever. By the way, I know that his mother is dead. She died giving birth to him. Sometimes I think it's better to live with a memory than it is to live with the person themselves. He dreamed of his father. And he dreamed of himself as a marionette, his strings being controlled by someone who was always in the shadows. This shadow was in all his other dreams as well, and when he told me that, I felt an atavistic fear run down my spine.

But darkness makes monsters of everything, and when morning came, I'd forgotten all about it.

Daylight brought with it its own problems. I knew he was going to leave me. He'd been dropping hints about it for some time. He had always been withdrawn, but now it was as if I wasn't even there, most of the time. He talked about things unknown to me, some kind of fighting tournament he was going to join. Bullshit! I knew he hated violence, and a fighting tournament was just senseless violence under another name. Why couldn't he just come right out and tell me he'd gotten tired of me, gotten tired of our shared lifestyle? It wasn't as if I was going to throw a temper tantrum or beg him to stay or anything. I knew the terms when I made him that offer. Mutual lust and all that. I didn't care that he wanted to leave, but couldn't he at least be honest about it?

I didn't care. I really didn't.

One morning I woke up and he wasn't there. That was three days ago. His things were gone so I knew he hadn't just gone down the block to buy cigarettes as he sometimes did. My room was empty. The apartment was empty.

And I was empty too, as I went about brushing my teeth and putting on my clothes. There was a hollowness in my chest, as if someone had made a hole in me and everything had leaked out like sand. I didn't know what I was feeling.

I found out later that he'd transferred a huge amount of money into my account. I wanted to be angry at him. What did he think I was? But I knew he probably didn't mean anything insulting by it. He just has no tact at all, the idiot. Ha, another one of his numerous shortcomings.

I'm not crying. I'm not.

Sometimes things come back to me, flashes of memory. Laughing at a shared joke. Eating Chinese take-out on the floor, the languid grace of him as he sprawled carelessly against the couch, chopsticks waving about madly as he talked. Brushing my fingers through his sunset hair, my breath on his skin, and feeling... feeling as if this was all that mattered, this moment suspended in time, skin to skin, breathing in the heady scent of him, his eyes the gray of wind-kissed lake into which I could fall forever and never resurface.

I miss him. I miss him so much I could die.

How do you explain something like that?
 
 
~end~