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Iwaizumi Hajime

Professor Thornton

WRITING 31

May 10, 2013

Oikawa Tooru, an Essay by Iwaizumi Hajime

Oikawa is obnoxious and childish and an asshole, and it should have been impossible to fall in love with him, but I did anyway. I don’t know when it happened—whether it came with winter, in between the flurry of the first snow, or in the spring, when the trees blossom anew with life. Maybe I fell with the browning leaves, but a part of me whispers that it all began with summer—because of course it did.

Because, if I have to be honest, I don’t think there was ever a moment when I didn’t love Tooru.

As hard as it is to fall in love with him, he also makes it easy. Makes it effortless to laugh at the way he once scowled, lips pulled downwards as he stomped out of my bedroom with an annoyed lilt of my name because I had, again, hid the left sock of every single pair he owned. Makes it simple to fall into step with him when we traversed the winding road to school, conversation flowing carelessly as a million topics breached the early weekday mornings tainted with sunlit dew. Makes it painless to say goodbye, because really, goodbyes with Oikawa is more of a see you later than it was a good run.

There are thousands of miles between us now—an ocean in the summer. Yet this aching emotion just seems to grow, and every time we talk, I feel it expand, taking up space until there isn’t even room for me to breathe.

He’s warm, like my earliest childhood memory. Loud, like the laughter filling my lungs. Beautiful, like home.

I want to tell him—and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid, because damn it, I’m petrified. There are a million things he could say, a million different ways he could break my heart, but at the same time, I trust him. He likely already knows how so damn fucking in love I am with him, partly because he’s self-aware enough to know he’s, unfortunately, hot, but also because I’ve already laid my soul bare for him that there isn’t much I can hide from his stupidly perceptive eyes.

I know he loves me, too—mostly because he told me—and even though he hid it with his bright laugh, I know it carries the same scared sincerity that thrums in the pit of my chest. He says it in everything he does, anyway: in the way he sang, completely off-key, when I struggled to wish away the monsters that haunted my dreams; in the way he bought me a can of coffee every other day throughout high school without fail. In the way he calls me Iwa-chan.

He admitted yesterday that he misses us—misses the summers and the lengthening days and the nights spent curled up in blankets as we whispered into the dark. I miss us, too—miss having him pressed against me as he goes off another tangent while I carefully, deliberately hit him on the head in retaliation for his scattering brain. Miss hearing his laugh just a breath away from my ear even as he whines at the so-called abuse, because he knows claiming it hurts will bring my fingers to his hair, gently massaging.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should have run with him. Asking him to turn around was never an option, because as much as he loves me, there are limits even I cannot breach. Oikawa is Oikawa because he’s crazy enough to keep running towards his dream even when fate threw him into the pits of hell.

I guess that makes me crazy, too, considering I’m chasing after him despite the fact that his dream walks a separate path from mine. Maybe that’s why we are who we are—crazy enough to keep searching for each other, even when the world throws us apart.

But it’ll be summer soon, and with summer comes us—Oikawa Tooru and Iwaizumi Hajime, shrouded in late night snacks and worn-out volleyballs.

Maybe this is where we’ll begin, too.

since you sent me your uni assignment

Attachment: How to Fall in Love with Iwaizumi Hajime, a guide by Oikawa Tooru.docx