GOODBYE

I started this blog a month after Kenji left for New York. I guess it was my way to say "goodbye" to him.

It doesn't matter what I want

It doesn't matter what I need

It doesn't matter if I cry

Don't matter if I bleed

You've been on a road

Don't know where it goes

Or where it leads...

When he accepted the job, it left him with only six weeks to relocate to New York. We fought a couple of times in those early days as I tried to come to terms with what was suddenly happening. It ended when he said to me, "You can break up with me if you want." Because at that moment I understood what he was telling me. No matter what I did--even if I threatened to break up with him--he was going to New York anyway. New York was more important to him than me.

It doesn't matter what I want

It doesn't matter what I need

If you've made up your mind to go

I won't beg you to stay

You've been in a cage

Throw you to the wind

You fly away...

For the next few weeks, we did not fight, but we moved around each other like ghosts, trying to make as little noise as possible. For my part, it didn't register what was happening. Suddenly, for no reason at all, Kenji was leaving me. No one had cheated. No one had lied. There were no money problems. It was just all coming apart. Just like that.

I had changed my life for this boy, "The Boy." Meeting him had changed me. I had found someone I really thought I could spend the rest of my life with, and I had always thought he felt the same way. But I was wrong, and there was precious little I could do about it. It didn't matter to him what I wanted...he was going. So I decided to let him go with my dignity intact.

I watched the first couple of weeks as he struggled to find a place to live in New York. He searched several websites, but could find nothing in his price range. Kenji would never, of course, have asked my help, despite the fact I knew New York well. He knew it would have been too cruel. But at the time, I was on summer vacation, and had all day every day to myself while he went off to work. I decided to be a gentlemen about it. I wrote an ad in his name on Craig's List, looking for apartments. Within a day or two I had dozens of responses. I spent most of my summer vacation corresponding with these people on his behalf, until I found what I thought was the best apartment for him.

My friends all thought I was an idiot. "You are HELPING him leave you???" Maybe I was. But other than throwing a tantrum, I didn't know what else to do.

He cried the night before he left. I heard him sobbing in the bedroom. "I am so selfish," he wept. "I am leaving you alone."

I suppose I could have said "Yes, you are. You told me you loved me, and that you wanted to live with me. Then you changed your mind. You are going and I don't know if we will ever be together again. I don't know if I can ever trust you again."

Instead, I hugged him. "Shhh. Don't worry. Get some sleep. Everything will be fine."

That morning, his parents came to take him to the airport. It was nearly a two hour drive from our place, and I decided not to go with them to see him off. How could I? How could I ride back in the car with all of them after Kenji had just left me? What could I possibly say as I spent all that time trying to keep up a brave face? I wasn't that Japanese yet.

Instead, I hugged him briefly at the door. Unable to say "goodbye," I said "see you later." Then he was gone.

For days I rambled around our apartment alone. It suddenly seemed so big, so empty. I had left my friends all behind to live with him, and this is where it left me. Alone. I had no idea what the future held for me.

It doesn't matter what I want

It doesn't matter what I need

It doesn't matter if I cry

Don't matter if I bleed

Feel the sting of tears

Falling on this face

You've loved for years

GROWING PAINS

As I mentioned before, the trouble with dating a younger guy is that you suddenly have to vicariously live through all those growing pains again.

Shortly after we moved in together, Kenji had to make the transition from university life to the workplace. Certainly, he had it better than I. Despite graduating near the top of my class, I was shoved out into a severely depressed job market, and the best I could do was mixing paint in the hardware department of Sears. I lived in a little $400 a month apartment in West Philadelphia, chock full of cockroaches and the occasional rat, but entirely devoid of air conditioning. Each day and night, I drove back and forth to work up the Schuylkill Expressway, a vicious stretch of road that was constantly bumper-to-bumper traffic. I lived off of instant noodles and Hamburger Helper. But that was long ago. Now with me at his side, Kenji was able to move straight from school into a fashionable apartment, complete with all the amenities. We bought beautiful furniture, dishes, drapes. There was never a cockroach to be seen. And since I finished work a little before him, I bought and cooked dinner every night, waiting for him when he got home. Whenever his 20-something friends came around, they always commented with envy that he was living in a "real" apartment.

This might have softened the blow a little, but Kenji still had to go out into the world. Japan being a fairly conservative nation, the first thing he had to do was cut and dye his hair. In college, it had gotten long, and he lightened it to brown with streaks of blonde. This was unacceptable in much of the Japanese workplace. So he had it trimmed short, and colored pitch black. Even his mother said it didn't look like him any more.

His reward for the image change was a job in an electronics store, selling mobile phones. Though he never complained about it, I think it must have been hard for him to watch me work. As a teacher, I had holidays off all the time, got home much earlier in the day, and earned double what he was making. But then again he hadn't been around to see me suck up to Sears customers in that awful red vest. I had come a long way, baby, and was far ahead of him in the game of life. And of course I was more than happy to share everything I could with him.

For a guy who had spent years learning a second language (English), working in a phone shop was completely unrewarding for him. But no matter how many times he tried to get something where he could use his English skills--such as working at an airport or in a hotel--he was shot down. Watching him go through it all reminded me of my own frustration back then, when the harsh realities of the world completely dashed my adolescent expectations.

Things began marginally better when he landed an office job working for a telecommunications company. He still didn't get to use English, but he was now in an office environment. This was a blessing and a curse. Now he had to wear a suit everyday, and I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the cute young guy I started dating just two years before. In the "gentle" hands of the Japanese workforce, it didn't take long to turn him into a drained, overworked, salaryman husk. There were times when I even tried to convince him to quit, to just be my "kept" house boy. But he wouldn't have any of it. He'd been brought up too well.

Another area where harsh reality set in was "me." Kenji had never been in a relationship before, let alone lived with someone. The romantic ideals he might have had must have quickly burst when he saw how bleary-eyed and miserable I could be before my morning coffee. But in this area, at least, I think he learned to accept. His affection for me never seemed to wane, and after our occasional arguments, we always made up passionately.

The one area of living with "me" that was more difficult was keeping our relationship hidden. True, we'd gotten a two-bedroom apartment, but the fact that we were practically joined at the hip must have rang some alarms with his family. They were, as Kenji had told me they would be, very polite about it. I was warmly included in family functions; in fact, when Kenji's nephew was born I was right there at the hospital with the rest of the clan, no questions asked. But this bothered me. I had made the decision to "come out" back in the States, and being forced to relive life in the closet grated on my nerves. I could live with the little things (like when one of his female friends drunkenly confessed she was madly in love with my "housemate" but couldn't figure out why he never noticed her), but when it came to his family I felt like I was lying all the time. They were always so kind to me, and I was being increasingly dishonest. Kenji knew I was unhappy with it, but never dared to break taboo.

But he had been wrong about one thing; the discussion he had thought he'd never have with his parents did eventually come around. Unfortunately, it also heralded the end of "us."

Having lived together three years, and been together just shy of four, Kenji finally got the opportunity he'd been looking for. The telecommunications company he was working for was opening an office in New York City, a place I had brought him to twice to meet my family. After endless attempts to get a job where he could use English, one was finally dangling in front of him.

There had been a time I think, when he was still in college, that Kenji genuinely believed all he wanted out of life was me. And I had been a damn fool for falling for it. Your 20s are meant to be a roller coaster, the wild twists and turns, the ups and downs of discovering who you are. Kenji was discovering, apparently, that what he needed was a chance to use his skills and a chance to prove to himself he could do it on his own. He needed that more than me.

The discussion started with his mother. He explained that he wanted to go work in New York for a couple of years. She asked him if he would get married when he returned to Japan. Perhaps he was feeling brave because he thought he might be departing, perhaps it was just the opportunity he was looking for. Either way, he told her marriage was not in the cards, and that he was more than just my "housemate." The irony of him finally telling his mom about us, as he was contemplating leaving me, was not lost on me.

And as for me? Well, that was growing pains of a new sort. Ten years ago I would have thrown a fit. I would have begged him to stay. But I knew from my own experience that there comes a time when you have to stand on your own two feet, when you had to go out and face the world alone. How could I--the guy who had dropped everything to try the challenge of a life in Japan--deny him the right to do the same in the opposite direction? Wanting more than anything to stop him, I instead found myself supporting him in any way I could.

To my horror, I realized somewhere along the line I'd stopped thinking about myself and instead was thinking about my partner.

I had grown up.

The Apartment, Part One

By the end of the first year, Kenji and I were looking for a home together. My relationship with him was very different from any relationship I had ever had before. Kenji was so open and warm, so completely comfortable with his feelings, that years of scar tissue and defense mechanisms were slowly being washed away. I was in love with him, and I was starting to believe that maybe I had been wrong all those years. Maybe living "happily ever after" really was possible.

But of course no life is a fairy tale. Not even a gay one.

Getting a new apartment in Japan is a daunting task. Being such a relentlessly modern country, it is easy to forget that just a hundred and fifty years ago Japan was still a feudal state...at least until you rent. Landlords in Japan still live like the medieval aristocracy (accept they can't behead their tenants anymore). In a land were, well, land is the most precious commodity, they can demand anything and basically get away with it. Despite being extremely small, Japanese apartments are famously expensive, but that's just the start. To move in, you are expected to pay the first two months up front, and on top of that a "contract fee." This is, essentially, a "gift" to the landlord equal to a month's rent. If you are lucky, this gets you into a two or three-year rental contract. When that expires, in order to renew you need to give the landlord another "contract fee." With all all "gifts" to the landlord, you might expect an appliance or two. But apartments in Japan come completely empty, no appliances, no light fixtures, nothing. Thus moving in and setting up house can cost a hefty sum of cash.

By the end of our first year I had the money, and we started looking for a place together. For a gay couple, this is the closest most of us can come to actual marriage. It was an exciting time for me, despite the hurdles. And there were a lot of those.

For starters, as I mentioned, young Japanese men and women rarely moved out of their parents' house before marriage, and the idea of housemates is largely unheard of. When we told the first few real estate agencies we were looking for a two bedroom apartment together, they were not shy about telling us most landlords would reject that. Young married couples were perceived as stable, two unmarried guys sharing rent was not. And since landlords could cherry-pick the tenants they wanted, they wouldn't be shy about giving us the thumbs down.

We kept each other's spirits up, going from agency to agency, sure the next one would help us out. Hopes were dashed again and again. I began to get irritated. I had a great, stable job, good references, and plenty of money. Being rejected because I didn't fit the narrow parameters of the Japanese norm was ticking me off. In addition, the apartments we were seeing were less than stellar. I began to suspect the agents were showing us the bottom of the barrel to give us the brush off.

We moved slowly out of the center of the city into the suburbs. There we found an agency that--though skeptical--seemed willing to play ball. So long as my employers were willing to be my guarantor, and Kenji's father (a city official) was willing to be his, they saw no problems.

The first place they showed us was "the one," and I knew the moment I saw it that Kenji and I would live there together. It was a large (by Japan's standards), two bedroom apartment (two because he wanted to keep up the pretense to his family we were "just friends"). It had a decent kitchen, a great balcony, and plenty of space. This was going to be where Kenji and I really started our life together, and the first real home I had made in Japan.

Shopping for the apartment was a blast. Picking out the furniture, the lights, the drapes, really made us feel like a couple. And being able to see him every day, to have him in the center of my life, was the best feeling I had had in more years than I could remember. He was mine and I was his. We were for each other.

And this is how it was for three years. We had great Christmases together, with me buying a full-sized tree. We had our friends and his family over for dinners. Having a passion for making cocktails, I bought a large bar and was always having people over for drinks. Kenji's friends, as well as his older brother and wife, were frequent guests, and we would all laugh and drink late into the night. Looking back, those were the happiest three years of my life.

Until, suddenly, it all came to an end.