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You confessed to me on the very bridge where we’d met.
A storm was raging all around us, and yet we’d both stayed there, under the downpour, with the wind whipping our faces, because I had to leave and you had to stay, because both our worlds would end if we did not reveal those truths before parting.
And yet, as you laid your soul bare, it was as if the raging fury of the elements had been rendered powerless to hurt us. As if your feelings had taken on a physical shape to protect us from nature itself.
But I couldn’t accept them. Not like this.
“Falling in love with someone is easy,” I’d been whispering, and yet my voice had been the loudest sound to ever echo in my mind, “loving them is the hard part. You have to promise me that you understand this. If you don’t, then– we can never be together!”
“I understand!” You’d grabbed my hand, and looked into my eyes like you never wanted to look at anything else ever again, and my breath had caught in my throat. “I swear on my life that I understand. I know loving each other will not always be effortless, I know we risk stumbling and falling and sometimes hurting ourselves, as all entwined hearts do. But you’re worth it. I’m ready to stay with you, through thick and thin, because even the greatest of pains it could cause me is nothing compared to how happy you make me!”
And it had been such a perfect reflection of my own feelings that they had poured forth from my heart, in the form of tears shining down my cheeks. That had scared you, the terrible fear of having hurt the man you most wanted to guard from harm. But your dread had vanished when a smile appeared on my face, and I kissed you.
We were drenched, but we were one.
Isn’t that a beautiful story?
Well, except that’s not exactly how it happened.
You’d wanted to do it on that bridge, sure, but there were a lot of people passing by that day, and each time you tried to start a tirade about how colors looked brighter and food tasted better since we’d met, someone would giggle or say something about their coworker being a bitch.
Of course, usually, you would have waited for the moment to be perfect, no matter how much time it would have taken. But you wanted the date of your confession to be special too, and you’d been holding back for a week and a half to declare your love exactly two months after we’d met. And you didn’t know when you’d get another opportunity to do it, so you couldn’t put it off.
Plus we only had two hours to spend together before I had to go take my cat to the vet because he was constipated. My cat, not the vet.
Really, you had no choice but to hurry. At least according to your perfectionistic tendencies.
So you’d given up after maybe fifteen minutes, and decided to find a quiet place in the park instead. It was nice. It wasn’t where we’d met.
Also, there wasn’t a drop of rain in sight. Honestly—a storm would have felt more bearable. It was the middle of summer, and we were both sweating like pigs.
Come to think of it, me taking off my tee can’t have made it easier for you to gather your wits. You’d already had to skip most of the formalities, too, because when I’d seen you arriving in your dress-clothes, already getting red-faced just from the walk between your house and the park, I forced you to take off your suit jacket and open your shirt so you wouldn’t die. That already happens too much.
Still, you mustered up the courage to speak. And it was… clumsy. You were nervous, because you didn’t want to scare me off and ruin our friendship. And I didn’t help, at all, because I spent at least half of your speech wondering if you were saying what I thought you were saying. And it was a long speech.
The confusion was on me, though. Your words were clear, and nice. I was so glad to hear that you were as happy to spend time with me as I was to be with you. It was just hard for me to believe that the only person I’d wanted to date in years liked me back.
Especially when we hadn’t known each other for that long. It worried me, of course. I wasn’t sure whether you knew what you were saying, or if you were just so inexperienced, and so unused to having a friend that you were mistaking joy for love. Back then, I couldn’t tell whether your feelings for me were real, or if you’d change your mind the second we would hit a rough patch. I wasn’t even completely sure whether you loved me for who I was, or if you just liked the attention.
But when I finally understood what you meant, I was too overwhelmed to bring up these concerns.
And you never told me I was worth the complications, the effort, even the pain. You showed me. Every time you needed to. You laughed at my corny and at my gross jokes, and at the ones only the two of us can understand. You listened when I told you to fix your detrimental behavior, not always easily, but you did—and you learned to call me out on mine. You did your best to understand even the sides of me that were completely foreign to you, to love all the parts of me that I wanted to keep as much as I loved them. Call it what you want, you gave me the same amount of love I poured onto you and for you. Because you make me smile and laugh and worry and relax and love being alive with you, because you’re so human and so interesting, and because you’re worth every mess and every mistake and every difficulty too.
Ah… But I’m getting ahead of myself. At that point, the only thing on my mind was a cocktail of relief, excitement, exhilaration. Embracing you before you could even finish your confession, but still listening to it to the end before I reciprocated.
I don’t remember what I said. Probably… something about being happy. I definitely told you I loved you, and was overjoyed that you felt the same. But the words I used? They’ve long escaped from my mind. In fact, I doubt I could have remembered them even ten minutes after saying them, when on that day, all my thoughts were forced out of my head to make more room for you.
Also, I didn’t cry. Mostly because it had been a couple years since I’d stopped being able to cry over anything but sad videos of humans and animals sharing bonds stronger than the language barrier, but not strong enough to protect them from separation. That, and cutting onions.
I laughed. It seemed to worry you for a second, but the brightness of my smile must have been enough to reassure you. And I asked if I could kiss you, and when we did it was awkward and tasted kind of bad, but I was so thrilled that we were sharing a kiss, a kiss and so much more. I still am.
I love you, Karamatsu.
And even if it wasn’t perfect, even if we were fumbling or fussy or foolish, I loved our confession.
Maybe others get more romantic stories. Maybe they only happen in books.
But I wouldn’t trade ours for any other.