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He still remembers the day you left, driving to the airport in the dead of night to catch a 14 hour flight to New York City.
He remembers all of your friends hugging you tight, blinking back their tears so you wouldn’t find leaving any harder as other travelers skirted around the crowd and through the terminal doors. The cards they wrote you were slipped into your carry on, little trinkets meant to remind you of home carefully tucked into your suitcase between the socks and underwear the lot of you had giggled about.
One suitcase—you took one big suitcase and a bag you could tuck over your shoulder. You picked up every single year you’d spent in Miyagi and smushed them all into that fucking suitcase and prepared to leave.
He remembers looking into your eyes and shoving his hands in his pockets, determined not to touch you. If he did, he was going to cry. There was no avoiding that. And he refused to cry. Not then, when he knew that your eyes searched his face for even the tiniest reason to stay.
He never hugged you goodbye, and he regrets it every time he sees your smiling face on social media. But he knows he wouldn’t have been able to hold you that close just to let you go and feel you tear his heart out when the doors of the airport slid shut behind you.
“New York? As in, New York City, America?”
You bit your lip, nodding at him. Your eyes held so many different emotions; excitement, fear, hope, and anxiety all swirled together and bathed your irises in a strange light that he’d never seen them in before.
“That’s…..far, isn’t it?”
Wrong words. He winced internally at his mistake as he watched your shoulders slump just a little.
“Yes, but….Kei, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’ve been dreaming of this for my entire life. I…..I don’t think I can say no.”
He doesn’t remember that night very well. His own mind blocked out the memory of the fight that followed. He can recall bits and pieces if he focuses really hard (he doesn’t want to. He’s humiliated by how he acted.), but the few words he remembers easily make him want to punch himself in the face:
“If you love me, why are you trying so hard to get away from me?”
And God, he hadn’t meant it. He knew it wasn’t true, he knew it wasn’t fair, he knew you weren’t looking to be away from him, just trying to be closer to a goal you’d been chasing for years now. But he was so terrified of losing you—the one who knocked him out of all his funks, one of few people that saw clear past his harsh exterior, the one who encouraged him to chip away at it every now and again, the one who insisted on baking strawberry cheesecake together because it was “a lot more fun and romantic to make and eat together than shortcake” and he couldn’t disagree with that sparkle in your eyes.
You had forgiven him later on for throwing something like that at you, and that act alone made him sick to his stomach every time he thought about it.
Who the fuck did he think he was? Asking you to pick him over something he knew you had worked towards your entire life?
He was asking you to pick him—the person whose first instinct when you announced that you had the opportunity of a lifetime was to coax you out of it for his own selfish gain. Him, the person who had struggled to even verbally say he loved you despite the fact that he knew how you lit up inside whenever he did. And sure, he gave you flowers and back rubs and cuddles and kisses, but he knew you wanted to hear it, and he still couldn’t bring himself to do it. Him, who tried to manipulate you into staying when the two of you both knew the only right answer was for you to go.
Who the fuck did he think he was?
So a week before you left, he took you on your last date together. You went out to dinner, and then you went skating. When you returned to your shared apartment, your friends were there waiting for you with champagne and a video tribute to you.
That night, he had kissed you and held you and promised you that he loved you, that he always would, that he was so proud of you, that he would always be rooting for you. And then:
“I am breaking up with you.”
You had smiled at him. “I know.”
As he drove you to the airport, with Yachi and Yamaguchi leading the trail of cars for your own personal goodbye parade behind you, it had taken everything in him not to reach over and place his hand on your thigh as he drove through the streets. He turned on the radio so he would keep himself from begging you to stay, or worse—asking you to wait for him. He bit his lip and ran through the spiel he gave on his museum tours in his head to keep the tears from welling up in his eyes.
“I won’t go.”
He looked up from the book he was reading.
“What?”
“I won’t go. I can’t, if it means I’m going to hurt you.”
No. No no no no no no.
He never wanted to be the person holding you back. No. He couldn’t let you stay and resent him as your dream dangled in front of you like a carrot on a string, so close but forever out of your reach, all because of what he had done. He couldn’t make you stay when he knew you had to go.
He wanted to tell you. He wanted to tell you that he loved you too much to watch you give up on your wildest dreams just for him, an asshole that didn’t deserve that from you. So, he swallowed his pride, looked back down at his book, and willed his eyes not to gloss over as he spoke.
“Don’t be stupid”.
And now, as he sits at the dining table in what used to be your shared apartment, sitting across from what used to be your chair, and staring at what still is your smiling face on the lockscreen of his phone, he wants to kick himself all over again. He knows it’s selfish, but he wants you back here, in Miyagi, with him. He wishes you had missed your flight. He wishes his car had a flat tire. He wishes your friends hadn’t been so supportive. He wishes he had told you to be stupid. He wishes he had told you to stay.
The strawberry cheesecake you’d insisted on baking together a few nights before you left makes him gag, his stomach turning somersaults. It tastes like shit unless the scent of your favorite shampoo is filling his nostrils as you share a slice with him. He doesn’t dare try to make it on his own, because he knows it won’t be the same—or worse, it will be, and it’ll mean he really has no reason to want you back here so badly.
But as loudly as that horrible voice in his head berates him for not making you stay, he’s happy. He’s happy that you left, and he’s happy that you’re chasing your dream, no matter where it takes you. He’s happy that your dream is at your fingertips, even if you aren’t at his anymore.
And he’ll keep telling himself that until he truly believes it.