Okinawa Prefecture
2016, March 19th

The kiss tastes sour. It tastes like the crystalized sugar dust from those Lawson gummy worms he tucks right into his cheek as a habit. It tastes like the way he’d pull me up the familiar grassy slope to wedge our shadows between skinny bungalows, of how he’d grin when I would finally decide to smile back at him like I didn’t understand why he’s doing this. It tastes like settling, like something back-heavy crawling right under my stomach. Almost like the guilt glossing his eyes whenever he leans in. Almost like my splintered hands circling his waist and getting caught up in his pockets full of candy wrapper. Almost like it didn’t sting in this tropical weather.

The way hopeless romantics and poets described kisses were nothing less than magical — but as I’ve began to understand with him, this isn’t magic. This is just two mouths finding each other. No reason, no sparks of light behind closed lids, just moving lips and decay.

My heart’s thumping, but not in a way that made my feet back up and fall off of the edge. It’s in my ears. I feel like my face could be felt pulsing with him so close. It feels strange — how we can both feel how warm my neck is getting, how I can feel his hands clench on the damp wall behind my back. How I sometimes feel like I’m drowning.

“Do you like me?” He once asked, hands busy with his camera propped on his knees, bag dropped next to me on the sand. His eyes don’t meet mine. The air remains sweltering, the salt carried by the Pacific sticking against my cheeks. He angles his camera towards my face, a way to momentarily fix his evasive gaze on me.

I don’t hear the shutter. No click. 

“I don’t know,” I say, looking at the lens. “Would it matter?”

He doesn’t answer, instead he calmly leans in to slot his lips against mine. The offhanded kiss feels out of place. His camera is still in his hands. I know, because this time my eyes are open. I watch his closed eyes flutter ever so slightly, eyelashes brushing my cheek, like the butterfly wings that should’ve been in my stomach — like the flying insects in the cheesy excerpts I write about during lazy afternoons; bugs crowding insides to describe something good, even when it sounds like the exact opposite.

When he moves away, he smirks and I sit there quietly for a while as he fiddles with his camera. The sun disappears, but we stay tucked near the sea wall. The isolating darkness blankets the coast and our backs, turned away and refusing to face the streets that knew our faces.

“Would you die for love?” I muse under my breath, looking up at the sky, at the stars that looked at me every night as I slowly waste away in my grandfather’s town. An island detached from everything else, from everything I could’ve been if I hadn’t settled.

“What a stupid thing to ask.”

I chuckle at his hiss. Always so moody. It’s dark and we can’t see a thing but the distant lights on the shoreline’s curve and each other’s ghostly silhouettes. I feel him sigh through the noise of the waves that are beginning to caress our feet.

“Even if it’s foolish, I would like to die for someone I love,” I mutter, moving to lay down on his lap. My hands blindly find his pockets. They’re empty. “I think it’s the closest to a martyred path when leaving this planet.”

“What do you mean?”

A long sigh escapes me, his hand grabbing my burrowing hands to hold me in place. “I’m saying that I want to love someone enough that I could die.”

“Wanting to die and dying for someone are two different things.”

“What’s the difference?” I breathe out a laugh, playing with one of his uniform buttons next to where he has my hands pinned, the gold glimmering against his camera’s dim screen.

“Devotion.” He states, eyes focusing on the opposite curve of the island, at everything else but me. “One is self serving, while the other is self sacrificial. But you— you just want to die.”

“Is that why you kiss me?” I ask, the teasing edge quiet enough that it drowns under my blunt question and the mellow current slapping the shore. It sits in a moment of silence too long, just staring at him look at me past the screen obscuring my face. Like I’m something lost that he found. Some poor misunderstood thing he took pity on.

“No.” He almost falters. “I kiss you because I like it.”

“But do you like me?”

“I–” He stops moving, the conversation feeling like deja vu. “I don’t dislike you.”

“Yeah, you do.” I scoff, pulling one of the buttons loose. He doesn’t notice. I clench the cold piece of metal in my fist. “I thought you didn’t like people who ask you stupid questions?”

“Hmm,” He bares his teeth, that all knowing grin. He leans down, but he doesn’t kiss me, just blocks the stars from my view. “I do dislike fools who make me listen to their philosophical rambling. Like you.”

I laugh.

“Would you hate me if I die for you?”

The question catches him off guard that it ricochets between our faces. He doesn’t answer. I smile at him through the darkness, and he looks at me for the first time that day. I don’t let the silence linger for long.

“I’m going home.” I stand up, dusting off the sand clinging to my clothes as he stares at me blankly, still on the ground. His camera is turned off. I smile a thin line. “I’ll see you around.”

He doesn’t say a thing, not that I expect him to.

On my way home, I take the long route back and stop by at a Lawson’s to buy myself something cold. That night I bought it lemon flavored for the first time. Something sour. Something that tastes like discreet kisses that mean nothing, something that stings. As I grab my change, my eyes catch the packets of gummy worms displayed on the counter.

The button from his uniform is still cold in my palm, colder that the ice cream that’s melting through my lips that were caught between his just a few hours ago. The night, despite the metal bite of the coastal breeze, remains warm. It’s quiet, the only other presence around the occasional uptown salary men walking by on their way home and a few local housewives beelining to grab sweet potatoes from Granny Saku whose son works in a farm somewhere in Chiba.

I don’t know how many minutes passed like that as I sat there, just zeroed in to the locals and the occasional tourists walking by the narrow back streets of this town. My fingernails absentmindedly scratch at his school’s crest indented onto the metal, eyes trailing after the flies circling the convenience store sign hanging above my head. 

The store door jingles open, snapping me out of my trance. “I thought you said you were going home?” 

I turn my head to look at him, standing tall and staring at me blankly, plastic bag in hand. The gummy wrappers poke through the brim of the bag, heavy with cans of beer for his unemployed slacker of an older brother. 

“I’m going home right after I finish this,” I inform in a bland tone, turning my face away as I nibble on my melting creamsicle. He steps over and squats next to me on the empty parking space. I wait for him to say something, but he remains quiet, staying put right beside me as if he’s keeping me company. This grates on a bruise beginning to form, a weight from the sight of his face that constantly spells I know you’re lonely. I sigh. “What?”

“What?” He echoes flatly, continuing to scroll on his phone, the light illuminating the faint aquiline slope of his nose. I drag my eyes away from him and look back down at the concrete that’s beginning to crack under our shoes.

The buzzing of the fluorescent lights start to ring in my ears, every crunch of the plastic bag hanging on his arm heavy on my lungs with each stray breeze that blew past us as a reminder. I click my tongue, throwing the rest of the ice cream away.

“Where are you going?” He asks, eyes still anywhere but me.

“I’m going home.”

His head snaps from his phone to my back already rounding the street, my pace growing faster as he tails after me with an air around him like he has something more to say. I resist the urge to sprint back home, to give anything away. I don’t want to hear it.

“Wait!”

Reluctantly, I stop walking, almost at the clustered maze of my neighborhood’s winding streets. His steps grow lighter. I keep my back to him, the button beginning to dig. He grabs my elbow and turns me around to face him.

“About what you said earlier–” He pauses when my eyes meet his, looks straight into me, with as much conviction as a boy who’s lived for eighteen years on this island can muster. “I’d hate you. I’d hate you if you died for me.”

I crack a smile, and his hand softens. We stand there. It’s quiet. I move his hand away from my arm and he holds my fingers instead, intertwines them so I couldn’t leave. I look at our hands, then up at him, then at the way he’s looking at one of my fists that’s clenched — oblivious that it’s holding onto a part of him that’s stolen.

“I’d hate you so much that even in my next life I’ll still hate you.” He announces softly that I would’ve thought the wind whispered it to me instead.

“I doubt you’d even remember me in ten years…” I laugh at the way his eyebrows are knitted together like I’m on the verge of life and death. It almost moves me out of balance, but it doesn’t.

“I’m serious.” He snaps as I take my hand back.

“It was just a stupid question. You’ve never taken me seriously, so why now?” It’s gentle, the way the realization comes to me. He looks confused, eyebrows furrowed as he settles in the afterthought.

His distraught appearance turns my face sour, but before he catches my expression, my free hand finds the collar of his shirt. I reel him closer, shaky with unease, and for the first time, decide to plant a soft kiss on him instead — returning the sour taste of his misplaced charity back to where it belongs.

I’m not the one that’s lonely. You are.

A butterfly blooms somewhere between the cracks under our shoes.

The night remains warm. The weight of the cans breaks through the plastic. Silver beer drenches our socks and stings all the open wounds.

“Don’t worry about what I said,” I smile up at him, slowly walking backwards as he looks at me with an emotion, at the time, I couldn’t yet describe. 

He doesn’t move. Not an inch. He lets me walk away with his uniform button and his sad face burned behind my eyelids. He lets me walk away with the sour aftertaste of sticky lemon in my mouth.

“Because I don’t love you.” 

Where the Earth Splits in Half

2020

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© Rizu Lu

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