The Scientist
Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry
You don't know how lovely you are
I had to find you
Tell you I need you
Tell you I set you apart
Years have a tendency to pass like water through fingers. It’s a sign that we have an eventful life, full of things that distract us from the minutes and the people that fill them. But there comes a point, somewhere in the abrupt future, when the minutes start to stand out, hidden stretches of time that start to appear in the day, the faces that you would bet your life on knowing in a crowd of millions now only faint impressions. Half formed smiles and vague colours and the whispers of fading voices. Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime to forget; I’m almost there in four short years.
I was lounging at home, watching the news analysts talk of the Tokyo stock exchange, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t talked to my family in nearly two years, and you for close on four. The thought stunned me, even more as I tried to recall our friends and couldn’t. It took me an hour of digging through my closet for my old photo albums and an afternoon of staring at their frozen faces to remember. And as I turned the last page there you were up close, half out of focus and smiling. You were always smiling.
You haunted me afterwards; everywhere I turned I thought I saw the back of your head, the slight curve of your nose, heard your voice in the empty halls of the office building. You followed around me like a ghost; I tried to shake you out of my head, but you wouldn’t leave. And when I’d shut the door to my apartment and fall onto the couch, you’d be there on the table still smiling for me.
I never realized the important place you held in my life, even from the early days when I hated you like I hated my mother. Even when I put my fist into your face and felt a giddy rush of smug satisfaction when you cried out in pain. In those days we were already too close. And afterwards, just like in a movie, we were best friends. Blood bonded, give up a kidney best friends. But I didn’t take the time to appreciate the fact, didn’t realize you were the loudest voice cheering me on at my first barely attended concert, the hands that held me up as I puked up the vestiges of my first after party, the shoulder I leaned on when Sora and I went our different ways.
How close we were and how far we’re from each other now. People drift I know; it happens all the time. I didn’t think that would be us, but it seems I had counted my eggs before they hatched. And it only took four years and 6,000 miles between us for me to understand that it was a natural foregone conclusion that I should have fought harder against. Because I only just realized how much I love you, and it’s a funny thought because even though I’m lonely without you, I know I’d be at your throat in two minutes flat.
But that makes me itch even more, makes me want to be near you. You were different from the others; I’ve accepted that now. You were the comfort I had looked for as a child in my parent’s failing marriage. And you were beautiful, in all the ways that people use the word.
The following night, with your two-dimensional self gleaming back up at me from the face of my palm, I overlooked the busy city streets and felt more loss than I’d ever known. You were out there somewhere and I had abandoned you. I grieved then, for the possibilities left unexplored in the tire marks of the airport runway.
Even in the half memories of misspent youth I can still recall our parting, even in the haziness I still hear our low farewells just barely over the noise of passengers and the loudspeaker. It was a standard goodbye in its own way, with all the necessary laughs and half started sentences that the parting of good friends deserved. But there was something else there, in your face and posture, the way you kept wanting to say something but never coming out with it. But I had never thought to ask what it was; my head was already in the clouds 30,000 feet above the ground and sea and years in the future after university with the new family that I would keep together with everything I had. The irony is that I was already drifting farther and farther from that family when I left with a confident toss of the head and a four finger wave. My back was already turned away from the one thing I was seeking before I had even heard the last of your goodbyes.
The day after that neon lit, tear filled night, I marched into work and quit. All of a sudden it didn’t seem so important, the first job I found after graduation last May, the trek up the corporate ladder or the cushy paychecks. The remains of breakfast were still on the table when I booked my one-way ticket home. And you were the only thought in my head as I uprooted my carefully planned life and ran around severing the ties to that bound me to New York. Because you outweighed them all.
Tell me your secrets
And nurse me your questions
Oh let's go back to the start
Running in circles
Coming up tails
Heads on a silence apart
The flight back was long and tiresome. The feverish thrill trembled in me as I thought about what I needed to do when I landed back on native soil. I would track you down and tell you everything that I had ever wanted to tell you, any small thing I had ever kept from you. I would hope that you would do the same for me, and then I could finally try to clean up the mess I’d left of our relationship.
After four years and more new experiences that most people could claim, I was now left back where I began, a stranger to you, emotionally farther from you than the widest expanse of the ocean. I would start anew with the solemn knowledge that this was my only chance. And I would grab it with both hands and undertake any hardship to make things right, because you are worth it, because I have too much that I owe you for.
When the first of the landing wheels bumped the ground and the darkening sky and flashing red lights surrounded me, looking exactly as it had when I had arrived in New York with the rest of my life ahead of me, it was as if I was still on American soil. Like starting a new life, and leaving you behind again. But as I left the plane with the overhead speakers calling in Japanese and the sudden murmur of my native tongue in the main terminal, I knew I was heading in the right direction and had cleared one more obstacle between us.
Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start
I had expected things to be hard; I was ready for a fight, to get my hands dirty and feel the sweat on my brow. I had expected everyone to have scattered like I had, but when I arrived at your old home and knocked, prepared to beg the new tenants for your family’s address, the door swung open and your mother appeared on the threshold, wiping her hands across her apron. She stared at me for only a moment and smiled warmly like the years hadn’t passed. And it was the easiest thing to greet her and pick up where we had left off. Easier still to find out where you were living, how you were only a short walk across the park away.
She invited me in for a welcome home dinner that I declined because the prospect of you so close nearby made me even more determined that the minutes should stop until you were in arms length.
The park was empty. No one saw me running towards you, sprinting as fast I could past the shadows and weaving in and out of the soft fluorescent lights along the path. I broke out of the trees breathless and dizzy with anticipation staring up at the building that had made up nearly 18 years of my life. You had moved into my old building, and it gave me hope and a skin crawlingly strong sense of homecoming.
I took the steps three at a time and I gripped the railing for support as I swung myself heedlessly around support columns, propelling myself up the flights of stairs. Your door was at the end of the hall and I forced my ragged breaths down into my stomach as I approached. The floor tingled and my head throbbed with you. My whole body thrummed, pumped and thundered so hard that I thought the world was breaking apart around me. I lifted a shaky fist and banged against the door. I was so focused on the moment I could even hear you shuffle to the door, could hear the loudness of the deadbolt being slid out of its socket and the oiled springs in the doorknob drawing the lock out.
We stood there frozen and silent for so long. You breathed my name once, with disbelief and rapture and fell still. I breathed out slow breaths and wet my lips with a dry tongue. You looked the same, perhaps a little older, a little sadder in your well-worn shirt and pajama pants. Sweat beaded at my temples and my heart squeezed hot streams of blood up into my head. I had been right; it wasn’t going to be easy.
I was just guessing
At numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart
Questions of science
Science and progress
Don’t speak as loud as my heart
You were still silently staring, and I felt like my body was disconnected from my head. I began to fill up the space with every disjointed thought I had wanted to tell you since on the plane. That I was wrong, wrong to treat our friendship as some temporary thing easily broken off, wrong for running to the other side of the world without a second glance back. I refused to meet your eyes and stumbled on, trying to get you to understand how I had believed that there was nothing here that I needed. New York seemed to hold everything that I felt was important: money, career, love. I was seduced by the lure of the new and the glamorous. I was thinking of myself in one of the cultural capitals of the world, one of the great, one of the privileged.
It was a crude adolescent ideal that I adhered to. That cutting out the people in my life from Odaiba was a sign of maturity and the first step in a long journey that would ultimately lead me to everything I wanted. And that I was fool to leave you behind, even worse for losing touch, for not believing that our relationship was worth it. I figured we would both move on, as everyone does at some point, that you had outlived your usefulness as a childhood friend and now I needed to grow up and find professional peers and colleagues.
I pushed on about how I had been so stupid in looking at our relationship as a business transaction, a friendship based on mutual pleasure that could easily be separated and given to others without consequence. But even with a university degree and all this worldly experience I found I hadn’t moved on, and knew now that what we had was non-transferable.
And finally, with my voice hoarse and breath short, I smiled a little bitterly at my hands wringing themselves, and told you that I loved you.
Tell me you love me
Come back and haunt me
Oh and I rush to the start
Running in circles
Chasing our tails
Coming back as we are
I stood frightened for the words I had just let slip. Your continued silence sunk uneasily in my stomach and slowly and apprehensively, I looked up at your face. You were bright with tears. You opened your mouth as if to respond but you fell into me instead, as much as I fell into you, and we hugged. And cried. And laughed through our tears at the idea of two full grown men weeping like lost children but we made no move to let each other go. You smelled of goodness and I gulped you in through tear-thickened breaths.
And when we finally regained our breaths, you pulled out of my arms and looked straight at me with wet red eyes, and smiled in a debilitatingly familiar way. And you reached out and took my hand and led me through the open doorway, into your dimly lit apartment. I stared at you for a while and you stared back, your smile never faltering, even as I closed the door behind us and the distance between our faces.
And when I kissed you, our four years apart never existed, and I was 18 again, staring at the beginning of a long hard journey, a journey I knew would end with you.
Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I'm going back to the start
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