Before we shmommunicate with the Ocean

The door to Chaem’s room stood wide open. She was packing. When we entered the observatory’s living room, Chaem, kneeling, looked up from the giant cube-shaped black duffel the sides of which held three shoe compartments and one ball compartment, and eyed us. Out of the blue, I realized that I had no idea if beach volleyball was played barefoot. It probably was, right? But the sand could get so hot. Wouldn’t she get burns?

“You kids good?”

Still a tad breathless from the Climb, we produced a few affirmative noises.

Chaem gave a sly smirk, looking like she was about to inquire about something else.

I beat her to the punch. “I wanted to ask you. Out there, do you play barefoot?”

A couple of seconds later, I was reeling from an astonishing discovery.

“Sand ... socks?!”

“Yup.”

Apparently, there existed special socks invented for and used in beach volleyball only. Socks with padded and flexible soles, reinforced flat-lock stitching, and fine-mesh stretchy tops clinging to ankles harder than a codependent lover; miraculous socks capable of safeguarding the wearer’s feet from any sand that had the gall to be less than perfect, whether too cold, too hot, too wet, too soft, or too crushed-plastic-heavy.

Getting to know someone paid off in so many little ways.

“Wait, then why do you need shoe compartments?”

“For shoes,” said Chaem, squinting at my goggled eyes in particular and the lingering ‘whoah’ expression on my face in general. “Are you high?”

Chuckling, Wakuu headed for his room to pack the overnight bag like he’d planned.

“No.” Leaning on the doorframe, I considered. “Maybe. But not on drugs.”

“Sex?” she pitched.

I nodded, then shook my head. “Rock’n’Roll, mostly.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Just— You know,” I nodded towards the door to his room across the vast space, “being next to someone you really like being next to.”

“I do know.” She zipped up the side of the bag, straightened up, and cracked her shoulder blades. “So you kids are dating now.”

“Yeah. Doing the grown-up thing.”

“What about the—”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah, the stuff.”

“Eh. To hell with the stuff. We’ll try to make it work. I just really like him and— Look, I’m sorry for changing the subject back to, uh. But may I please, please see the socks?”

“Sure,” said Chaem and strode to an austere chest of drawers while pretending that her smile was sardonic and not actually brimming with compersion. “Wow, we’re bonding over clothes and men again.”

A couple of minutes later we were bonding over beach volleyball instead as I sat on the edge of her equally austere bed, asking one question after another. I had been missing out. Professional beach volleyball was fascinating, with a whole adjacent culture surrounding it.

“Oh well. It’s not like I spent much time near the sea.”

Meanwhile, Wakuu was rattling the dishware in the kitchen. I could see him through the doorway, appraising and comparing two rice bowls, with a look of utter concentration. He caught my gaze, and his frown flattened.

“Well, unlike you, I’ve never seen snow,” said Chaem in a hushed voice. Sharply, I turned my head towards her.

She sounded and looked vulnerable. I felt appreciative.

“Really?”

“Yeah. But maybe I will this year.” The third round was taking place in a city that stood by the ocean, in the shade of a snow-capped mountain. That city had cable cars.

She was going to be away for several months if things were destined to go well. Mostly for team training.

“We wanted to know if it would be okay for us to attend the play-in round?”

Her eyes lit up, but outwardly Chaem remained stern. “Sure. But you’re going to need to find transportation.”

“I think we’ve got that covered.”

A couple of hours later, Wakuu and I were in that grotto, hyperventilating and adjusting our swimwear, while the small wavelets rolled over our feet. The tide was low, so we didn’t have to worry about being swept away. Not by water.

“We’re not in the best of shapes, should we do yoga?”

“Maybe.” Thinking of the weekly Sunday yoga sessions on the square, I winced. “Or maybe we should go celibate for a couple of hours.”

A cold rock surface turned out to not be the best place to perform vigorous horizontal exercises, much less vertical ones. Admittedly, we’d managed to find ways to cope with the inconveniences, and the outcome was rather explosive. But we might have gotten sand into places that should have remained sand-free. We might have overstretched our muscles; they felt pleasantly languid now, but they would surely ache tomorrow. Also, we might have been romanticizing this place in our heads, forgetting about the moss, the damp and overly briny smell, and the hermit crabs. But that was okay. I wasn’t mad at reality for scuppering our romantic moment, because I preferred the romantic moments that were real.

We sat down on a smooth slab of black volcanic rock that served as a threshold, between the beach and the grotto. I watched him gazing out into the horizon, and felt a brief urge to jump his bones again. Even his stupid bandana was cute!

Glancing back, he mirrored my expression, but I knew that we were tapped out for now. The ocean was a beautiful and welcoming shade of pale blue today, but anything more laborious than wading in the water felt undoable. Even a long walk on the beach was out of the question. I rested my cheek on Wakuu’s shoulder, he wrapped his arm around me and lazily tilted me towards himself.

The mild weather was holding up quite well. By all indications, it would continue to be mild tomorrow.

For a while, we merely sat side-by-side, in a silence that was punctuated only by the waves, distant shrieking of seagulls, and our breathing. I was blissfully aware of the physical contact of my skin with Wakuu’s skin, and of his fingers touching my back, moving ever-so-slightly up and down, up and down. I was aware of how comfortable and pleasant this was. And how peaceful.

I’d always imagined myself as someone who would easily get bored by silence. Spending a prolonged amount of time doing nothing, being inactive, had felt unnatural, boring, or pointless. There’d been times when I had to forcefully remind myself: we humans needed to slow down from time to time. The reminders had worked only half of the time. Yet with Wakuu, even silence and inaction felt natural and purposeful. I wanted to sit next to him, I wanted to stay close. I wanted to not rush anywhere. I wanted to remain in the negative space, to listen to the rhythmic splashing of the surf on the shoreline and watch the seagulls gliding over the water. Right now, this was all I wanted.

We both had plenty to tell. We’d get to it later. Our silence was the silence between the notes which made the music.

The late-afternoon sun continued dancing on the ruffled water. I closed my eyes and listened to Wakuu’s heartbeat. And breathed in his scent. The island air was saturated with a bouquet of fragrances: a blend of salty wind, wet sand, the evicted algae drying in the sun, the faint sweetness of wildflowers carpeting the cliffs, and even the smell of frying oil wafting towards us from the Beach Shack cafe, all mingling together. But his lily-of-the-valley scent stood apart among the myriad others.

Eventually, he spoke up, making me realize that I’d been drifting away. “I just remembered something.”

My eyes snapped open; Wakuu kissed the top of my head, his nose briefly nestled into my damp hair, and his hand stopped stroking my back.

“Mmm?”

“In the onsen, you said, ‘I’ll explain later’. I just remembered that. But I can’t remember what exactly it was about.”

“Oh. Because I was laughing. You asked me why I was laughing.”

Wakuu's voice grew softer, more tender. “Why were you laughing?” His arm tightened around me once, then loosened.

Raising my head, I met his gaze. His face looked so calm and relaxed. So serenely happy. His face looked how I felt. Reaching up, I kissed the tip of his chin, then the corner of his mouth.

“Because I’d had an epiphany. You see, I think in punchlined structures. My thought process is arranged into segments each of which ends in a punchline,” I confessed, at the same time unsure of how to explain the notion, and not entirely capable of explaining it in my current state. All I could offer was some lousy metaphors. “It’s like a rhythm to my thoughts, from punchline to punchline. Or like running from cover to cover on a battlefield. Or like my brain builds up and drops the bass every now and then. Can you imagine?”

“Of course I can,” Wakuu said, huffing a quiet chuckle.

“What, your every thought includes arithmetic operators or—?”

“Something like that,” he replied. No punchlines and no elaborations.

“Thing is ... I was laughing because I realized that it’s different with you. It’s not as dire. Less measured. Less rhythmic. More human. Some of the punchlines just merge with the rest of the thought. I wonder if it could continue changing, if— But even now, it’s easier when I’m with you.”

“It’s easier when I’m with you,” Wakuu echoed. “All of it is. A little easier. With you.”

He gave me one of those dry, lingering, affirming kisses, then pulled me back towards him, and we sank back into the feathery-soft silence. The sun was dipping lower, painting the world outside the grotto in fiery hues. It was going to be a clear, starry night.

Later on, we ambled through the beach, talking. We got supper at the Beach Shack and ate it outside, by the fire pit, aiming to watch the sunset, and talked some more. Oliver showed up and brought us extra sauce for the fries and one cup of drip-coffee; he told us it was on the house, because we looked ‘super tired’, and I told him about the flowers on the observation deck above the town.

Throughout the rest of the weekend, we got nothing done. Not even each other. We drifted off like two exhausted kittens, then spent the entire Sunday continuing to do nothing. It was the best Sunday in years.

Our first weekend together.

~*~ Ollie was sketching a magenta aster, squatting at the edge of the paved deck. His overly long blonde strands were tucked under a peaked cap that sported a flashlight on a lanyard instead of a badge.

“By the way, these are not endemic to the island,” he told me, his eyes on the flowers.

“That shit is not endemic to the island either,” I said distractedly, looking up and pointing at the giant dish on top of the mountain.

“Language!” Ollie chided.

Suitably chastised and intimidated, I gulped. “S-sorry.”

Yesterday, when I had approached his parents and offered to take him to that viewing spot up on the mountain, Eleanor supported the overall idea, but noted that chaperoning was excessive, and Sunny agreed with her opinion yet informed me that it was VERY NICE OF ME TO OFFER NONETHELESS.

Ollie had been the most surprised of them all. “I’m almost eleven, I can go where I please.”

“I had you all wrong, Ollie. I had so many things all wrong.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s because of my biases. Are you familiar with the concept of cognitive biases?”

“Not really. I prefer botany.”

“A bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Most people don’t question biases in themselves. They aren’t self-aware enough for that.”

“Maybe they just don’t know about biases.”

“Hmmm. There is a specific bias that boils down to a person mistakenly believing that they can overcome a bias, or that they are immune to a bias if they know about it. Stereotyping is the most common cognitive bias. More specifically, it is a so-called false prior.”

“You could have just said so. You could have just said you were stereotyping.”

“I was stereotyping. I saw your scrawny build and assumed that you were six or five.”

“Of course I’m scrawny. My Mom had me when she was forty-six. Anyone would be scrawny.”

“See, that’s a bias. The ‘everyone’ part. Anyway, I’m scrawny, too, that’s not a problem and not the point. I like being scrawny.”

“I like being scrawny too. How old is your mom?”

“Well, she turned forty-six only a couple of years ago. She had me very early.”

“Way too early,” Oliver had told me.

Ultimately, he’d graciously agreed for me to accompany him — but only on the condition that Wakuu would let him watch ‘that big TV’.

When he was done sketching, he asked if he could go back to the observatory now and get a snack.

Wakuu was in the kitchen; he’d already gotten some ingredients out while waiting for our return. Announcing his intention, he set out to make a sandwich for Ollie.

“No, I want rice,” said Ollie, pointing at the sleek talking cooker that had brought us joyous news less than a minute ago.

Puzzled, Wakuu flapped two rectangular pieces of soft snow-white bread in either hand. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. The ‘wonder’ parts in this so-called bread are carbaryl, oil refinement byproducts, and hormones that cause prostate cancer.”

“That’s uh,” Wakuu cleared his throat and reached for a spoon while hiding a smile, “quite specific.”

“Extremely,” I agreed.

I wondered if there was an eloquent outraged relative behind these words, or if it was all Ollie.

All-ee No. No and no and no and no.

“Archie told me,” he added. Okay, so maybe it was not Oliver’s outraged relative, but his best friend’s. “I’ll watch that big TV while I eat. My show’s starting.”

Wakuu and I sat in the kitchen, sipping coffee, marinating in the Adult Stuff, and talking. Abstaining from food, because in about half an hour we would accompany Ollie back to the Beach Shack and meet Wataru there for lunch.

“The first observatory to give him tangible results receives a tangible sum right away,” said Wakuu, tapping his nails on the table in a nervous rhythm.

“But there will be no results.”

“No, of course there won’t be.”

“You know...” I inhaled some air, then some more coffee. “I’ve read everything about Da Bomb that I could find. And I think I know what he is likely going to do if an alien signal is found.”

“What?”

“Da Bomb is going to kill himself.”

“Really?” Wakuu breathed out.

“Really. Maybe. Most likely. He’s going to very happily kill himself because he—” I rubbed my eyes, groaning. “Because he believes that his soul will immediately depart towards the spaceship the aliens will send for him ... Is it possible to fake an alien signal?”

“No. Not from the surface of the planet.”

“What about, from orbit?”

Wakuu’s eyes widened in shock. “You’re not actually proposing—?”

“No. I’m not. Although it’s not entirely a joke, either. I’m going to be honest with you: if there was a way to pull this off without implicating anyone, I’d have said, go for it.”

“Isn’t this unethical?”

“Isn’t he unethical?”

“I meant, on your part. Professionally. Isn’t it unethical to say this?”

“Mega so. It’s highly unethical to even think this. And mere months ago thinking this would have been unthinkable to me. Yet here I am. Lately, I went from ‘everyone deserves help’ to ‘everyone except grandiose narcissists deserves help’.”

“How come?”

“It has to do with the only inflexible belief I hold. What, have I just lost all of your respect?”

“Actually,” Wakuu gave me a soft smile, “you might have just gained more of my respect.”

“I think you guys should totally kill him!” Ollie said from the doorway, and we flinched. He was indeed scrawny — and sneaky. “I bet there’s a way to make it look like an accident!”

Wakuu quirked an eyebrow at him and his excited smile.

I said, “Uhm.”

“I watch a lot of procedurals,” explained Ollie, gesturing towards the living room. He sniffled and wiped over his starry scattering of freckles with the sleeve of his oversized tee. “Also, I want to be a cop.”

“Uhm,” echoed Wakuu, growing paler.

“We can devise a plan and account for every single detail, and even Conan won’t be able to solve this one.”

Nobody was killing anyone, of course. We were a bunch of insignificant people living in an insignificant town. But it felt nice to come clean with Wakuu... and to find understanding and a lack of judgment. Even honest support, of all things. Albeit from an unexpected source.

“Why do you want him dead, anyway?” I asked Oliver.

Wakuu remained silent and flabbergasted.

“Because he hates nature.”

“That, he does.”

“Some people say he hates nature less than tech bros hate nature, but I think he hates it more.”

“I bet, as much as you hate the word ‘precocious’.”

“I do hate it,” agreed Ollie. “But not as much as Da Bomb hates nature.”

“Yeah. And himself.”

Wakuu shook his head at me, frowning. “I thought he loves himself. A bit too much.”

“Oh, that’s actually the main misconception about narcissists. They are incapable of loving themselves. Abso-friggin-lutely incapable of any healthy form of self-compassion. Thus, they need to fully outsource their validation, and procure it through any means necessary, and there is never ever ever enough of it. People who are kind to themselves are kind to others — but there is no one more viciously and hopelessly self-hating than a narc. Thus, there’s no one more dangerous.”

“The belief that you hold?” probed Wakuu, his expression growing curious.

“Every single dictator and warmonger in history, every—”

“The commercial break is almost over!” Ollie interrupted loudly, fidgeting in place. “Can I have more pickles?”

“Please, help yourself to all of them,” mumbled Wakuu, feeling for my fingers under the table.

Our second weekend together.

~*~

“Oh Eva, the apple of my pie! I implore you to hear my confection! I have reached my baking point and can’t hold bake any longer! And so, bready or not, here I crumb. Loafly maiden of freshly baked bread, as soon as I saw you for the frosting time, I thought: oh crêpe, I’m ruined! What a breadtaking sight you were. The glaze of your loafly eyes was unbaguettable. It might have blin loaf at first bite. Oh dough is me! Since then, I only had pies for you. Now, at all times, every day, you are in the rack of my mind, seven glaze a week. In love, we often need to take whisks. Sometimes you gotta whisk it for the biscuit, and I am a whisk taker. And some people say, no pain no grain. For so long, I have been muffinstering my courage to do this. So it is now my turon to be brave, and muffin will stop me, and here I am, baking like a leaf! Yearning to hold hands with you and kiss you in the pouring grain. I do believe that my fillings for you are baking the world a butter place! Also, I like your buns and I cannot rye, and you are so a-dough-rable! No, you are a work of tart! You are a rye of light amongst the darkness! You are my baye baye! There’s no one as bundterful as you! You cake my bread away! Muffin compares to you! I am hooked on a filling! Toastally the best, you look so fineapple buns! I knead you! My heart kneads you! I yema baking on my kneads! I swear to always be there for you whenever you knead me! The hope of seeing your heavenly smile is the raisin I get up in the morning! Eva, I would never rye to you! I believe that we are a batch baked in heaven. I bake of you, don’t go baking my heart. I implore you to tell me, yes or dough. Bake my day by—”

“Oke, I’ve heard enough,” she said in a firm and stern voice — a voice that was so not Eva. Her hand still raised in a ‘stop’ gesture, she appraised my standing on one knee. My arms remained spread, although they started sagging as soon as I trailed off.

My monologue had left me lighbreaded, uh, lightheaded. Throughout said monologue, starting from when I had cornered her on the boardwalk and ending in the present moment, Eva’s expression had been gradually and smoothly changing from amicable excitement to confusion, to apprehension, then to irritation — something just as incongruent with her temperament and usual manner as cold rigidity was.

“So... is this a prank? Are you mocking me?” she demanded, folding her slender arms on her chest. “I can hear him, you know.” She nodded towards Suki’s jasmine bushes. Another wheeze of laughter reached us from that lousy hiding place as Wakuu, crouching behind the shrubberies, lost it again. “Does he not know how loud he is?”

Well, fudge.

“Yeah, he’s not being subtle,” I agreed quietly, eyes cast down. “Eva, I’m sorry. Of course we would never prank or mock you, I swear. It’s not a prank, it’s like a dare and— We made a bet, and I lost, so I had to go first. But he needs to do this too. It’s sort of an exercise. A purge. To get puns out of my system. To get all of this crap out of our systems. A repentance, too. Mainly a repentance. In truth, we considered a bigger audience. Maaf.”

“Oh.” Eva’s arms unlocked.

Creaking, I straightened up and shook imaginary dirt off my cropped summer pants.

“Really, I’m so sorry, Eva, we didn’t specifically target you, we pulled out two names at random, and there was no baking uuuuh no backing away, I pinky-swore to do this,” I mumbled, with as much earnestness as I was able to lend my words — which were rapidly climbing atop each other.

Wakuu was no longer laughing. My neck and cheeks were boiling.

“It’s oke,” Eva said.

Forcing myself to raise my head, I looked into her face. Her expression had softened to almost-normal levels, yet I still felt like shit. Well, that had been the purported goal, right?

“Was it your idea?”

“Ours.”

With the corner of my eye, I saw Wakuu standing up to full height. No longer hidden behind the jasmine, he plunged his hands into his pockets and shuffled in place, restless, shaken by vicarious embarrassment.

“Which name did he pull?”

“Mark,” I breathed out.

Eva’s eyes widened as she looked from me to Wakuu and back. “Aduh!”

Ouch, indeed. Or maybe not? Maybe I’d pulled the shorter straw. Out of all our neighbors, Eva was the only one artless, naive, and soulful enough to take this over-the-top serenading act seriously and to continue enduring it for as long, and I’d feared this might happen, because I hated the idea of tricking her and Eva believing me, and this had happened, albeit for only a few initial seconds. Anybody else in her place would have been mistrustful from the start. I thought: Mark was probably going to halt Wakuu after the second pun, huff, and walk away. Well, we’d find out soon enough.

“But why do this? I don’t understand.”

A deal’s a deal.

“Because we both have this crappy ingrained habit of turning everything into a joke, and we keep on claiming that it’s a defense mechanism, and it is, in a way, but it also ends up being self-sabotage from time to time. We use it to evade. We evade all of the things all of the time, acting like obnoxious douches even with the people we like and respect, making said people feel uncomfortable. Chaem was the first to complain about this whole misplaced-jokes thing, but since then a few more townies came forward, so we decided to do something about it, to try and be more honest and straightforward with others, too, because we can be, we should be, and this is only the first step, and— Anyway, yeah,” I concluded, halting my rapid explanation, and pursed my lips.

Yet Eva kept silent, peering inquisitively and expecting me to continue.

“There’s something else,” I admitted with a heavy sigh. “About that night in the bathhouse, a couple of weeks ago, and about my hair.”

“I know. It’s oke,” she repeated. “You don’t have to. Like, I understand. I do.”  I inhaled to answer, but she interrupted me by asking, “What about the bouquet?”

“Oh.” I looked at the neat posy still clutched in my now-clammy right hand. Eight pink bulbs, held together by a silky pink ribbon. I might have forgotten about this prop Wakuu had insisted on. “Please, take it.”

“Thanks! I love peonies!” Eva said, accepting the bouquet from me.

There was an unfamiliar glimmer in her eyes, bordering on conspiratorial. As if she knew more than she let on. I was reminded of the expression that flashed through Wakuu’s face after I had given him the slippers. The thought was fleeting, and I let it slip away.

She pressed the bouquet to her chest, and I witnessed her usual friendly smile returning.

“I think it’s nice. What you’re trying to do. I think it’s nice that you’re doing it.”

For the umpteenth time, I thought of how this planet did not deserve her. Took me a few seconds to pull myself together; I was feeling a mix of gratitude, shame, guilt, and relief, and that acrid cocktail was stinging my throat and eyes.

Eva took a step forward and gently tucked a runaway strand of hair behind my ear. This gesture took me by surprise. To put it mildly.

“Really? So you’re, uh— No hard feelings?”

“No, of course not. By the way, you guys are cute together. But also,” she buried her button nose in the flowers and inhaled, before smiling wide at me and finishing the phrase, “you’re weir-doughs.”

Our third weekend together.

“No, you pulled the longest straw,” Wakuu argued, squirming on the sleek white couch and pressing the bag of frozen edamame harder to the side of his face, over the fresh bruise. “The safest straw.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, looking back into his one good eye.

The most surprising thing was that Mark had apologized, admitting he’d overreacted. And yet, what a spotted dick— Ahhhhh, craaaaap!

“Don’t be. It was worth it and worked like a charm. My punning days might be over for good.”

“I wish he’d punched me instead,” I lamented.

~*~ Our first weekend apart?

“At least he’s a man do you know they make people disembowel themselves for homosexualitism?!Is he rich or after your money?? Is he from a good family? He’s not one of those mafia men? You need to trick him into undressing and check for tattoos that’s how you learn. They only paint tattoos if they’re mafia.”

As I stared at that email FUCK YOU, MOM I envisioned my expression morphing into some variation of FUCK YOU, MOM ‘a character in a derek-land postmodern mockumentary stares into the camera while gripped by world-weary melancholy’. What I felt in actuality FUCK YOU, MOM was my face growing red with rage, my eyes bulging, my fingers FUCK YOU, MOM curling into white-knuckled fists, and the familiar battle in my head already concluding; another second or two FUCK YOU, MOM and the clowns’ gloved paws would raise the severed heads of their eternal enemies above the ultimate confetti-gore of the battlefield, and the clowns’ bloodied mouths would break into FUCK YOU, MOM evil toothy scowls.

Beating a deafening rhythm into my temples, my pulse was louder than the weather. I unclenched my fingers and laid them on the keyboard, imagining myself as a pianist about to unleash a solo of her lifetime. FUCK. YOU. MOM.

“You see, he was actually raised by a family of toucans in the equatorial jungle, and I can’t speak to them because I don’t speak Toucan, but they seem nice, except for the uncle twice removed who tried to burst my tummy with his beak during the annual mango devourment. All I can tell you for certain is that they’re not after my money, although they might be after my shiny bottle caps, and you’d totes love them because each of them has approximately as many brain cells as you do. As for tattoos I’m not sure how to get him naked and check, I’m going to need to come up with a clever plan, and I already hired a famous detective f—”

I halted myself. Forcefully. Not even with a record-scratch noise, no; with a screech that seemed audible and sharp and real, to the point where my ears throbbed with the phantom pain. My mouth spat out an involuntary sob.

Me sending this reply would mean: I was giving in to a childish and egotistical urge to punish my mother for her alleged shortcomings, through demonstrating that I considered her an idiot instead of a blameless product of her environment, and considered her opinion irrelevant and laughable — by dismissing it, dismissing her. Again.

As well as by dismissing my own growth. Had I not been making an effort, for years now, to get better, more mindful, more educated, more self-conscious and self-aware, to transcend beyond archaic bullshit and intergenerational trauma? Was I really this emotionally immature? Me sending this reply would mean: I was giving up on any chance of communicating and finding common ground with her. Was that what I wanted? Really, truly wanted deep inside — after looking past my surface-level grievances?

No. No, it wasn’t.

Box-breathing, I thought of my boyfriend and his now-continuous effort at direct communication with his father. The way Wakuu was bravely barreling through cringe, showing so much patience that its scope bordered on magical, triumphing over biases, and trusting my advice along the way. If he was capable of doing the right thing, then so was I. We. We were capable of doing the right thing.

I could not bring myself to stand up and take a break, although a break would have been the healthiest course of action. I could not bring myself to highlight the chunk and delete it, either. I just couldn’t. So I had to go word by word, letter by letter. Erasing every one of them felt like moving a boulder, like fighting a duel, like murder, like egocide, like a whole military campaign, yet I persevered, one after another, one after another, grinding my teeth so hard that my head vibrated. By the end of it, I was covered in sweat head-to-toe, three times colder than the storm raging outside.

Tamping down my irritation as I was rewriting the reply felt like moving a whole mountain. I wasn’t sure I’d succeeded; perhaps my words still came off as cold or a tad snobbish, but overall this was infinitely better than the previous version. Perhaps, after I was done hyperventilating, I could practice some mindfulness, look past my shortcomings and toxic perfectionism, and celebrate a personal victory. Small steps were better than no steps.

Although I remained painfully aware of the fact that I could not have pulled it off if I was in this alone.

“Yes, don’t worry, he is from a nice family and an academic. Smart, well-educated, and with good manners. He’s working on his PhD right now.

To be honest with you, I have seen him naked plenty of times. We are two consenting adults, if you know what I mean. We’re always using protection, though.

Mom, I’m sorry for going there, but I need to. You should know that saying this thing about tattoos, or generally stereotyping in this manner, is insensitive and xenophobic. I know it’s not your fault, but please don’t say things like this, please try to never think within these parameters. It’s hurtful and harmful, and here’s why: (link) (link). In my opinion, the same goes for questioning someone’s financial situation. By implying that someone is after my money — of which I don’t have much, either way — instead of being interested in me as a person, you are implying that I can’t tell the difference, or that you know better, and, whether subconsciously or not, actively or not, you are aiming to make me feel insecure about this person and about the situation. Please don’t do that. I’m happy, and that’s the only thing that should matter.

I will keep you posted. Right now I need to know how you’re doing and how everyone is doing.

PS They do not practice ritual suicide, and the death penalty/capital punishment was fully abolished in this hemisphere a long time ago: (link) (link)” I suspected what I would most likely receive in response. I suspected that the next email from her would be some run-of-the-mill variation of ‘How Dare You Talk To Your Mother In This Way’. But at least my own conscience would be clear. At least I would have tried, to the best of my current abilities.

At least I could retain some hope until the arrival of the next email.

After pressing the button, I sat panting for a little while. I needed to stuff some food into my contracting stomach. I needed to get over this petrified state. I needed to empty the bucket under that one (for now) leak-and-drip in the kitchen. I needed to find the earplugs before going to bed alone. I needed to— My phone chimed and vibrated in my pocket. My heart threw up. I opened my eyes and looked at the laptop’s screen, so panicked that I was failing to register that the inbox remained empty; so panicked that I was forgetting to rationalize by reminding myself that no more than five minutes had passed and she never answered emails faster than in three days. Certainly not on a Friday, never on a Friday.

Black thunder boomed outside, punching me in the face harder than Mark was able to punch anyone. I inhaled and plucked my phone out, noticing that my fingers were no longer shaking.

> It’s raining cats and tacos 😆 I exhaled, and my eyes expelled a few tears along with some of the dread. Oh motherforking non-existent God, I was missing him so much.

< Wakuu > What?

< I actually own a rain poncho.

> I do too. Mine is cooler < It is?

> Yes + I love rolling down mudslides > See you in 20 Our fourth weekend together.