South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,71

staring at the ceiling.

“I was thinking about a desert,” I said.

“A desert?” she asked. She’d sat down next to my feet and was looking at me. “What kind of desert?”

“Just a regular desert. With sand dunes and a few cactuses. Lots of things are there, living there.”

“Am I included in this desert too?” she asked.

“Of course you are,” I said. “All of us are living there. But actually what’s really living is the desert itself. Like in the movie.”

“What movie?”

“The Disney film The Living Desert. A documentary about the desert. Didn’t you see it when you were little?”

“No,” she said. I thought that was a bit strange. Everybody in my elementary school had been herded off to the movie theater to watch it. But Yukiko was five years younger than me. She might have been too young to see it when it came out

“Why don’t we rent it next Sunday and watch it together? It’s a good movie. The scenery’s beautiful, and there’re all sorts of animals and flowers. The kids will like it.”

Yukiko smiled at me. It had been such a long time since I’d seen her smile.

“Do you want to leave me?” she asked.

“Yukiko, I love you,” I said.

“Maybe you do, but I’m asking you whether you want to leave me. The answer is either yes or no. I won’t accept any other.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” I said. I shook my head. “I probably don’t have the right to say this, but I don’t want to leave you. If I left you now, I don’t know what would happen to me. I don’t want to be lonely ever again. I’d rather die.”

She stretched out a hand and placed it on my chest. And looked deep into my eyes. “Forget about rights. I don’t think anyone has those kinds of rights,” she said.

Feeling the warmth of her hand on my chest, I thought of death. I might very well have died on that day on the highway with Shimamoto. If I had, my body would not exist I would be gone, lost forever. Like so many other things. But here I am. And here is Yukiko’s warm hand on my chest

“Yukiko,” I said, “I love you very much. I loved you from the first day I met you, and I still feel the same. If I hadn’t met you, my life would have been unbearable. For that I am grateful beyond words. Yet here I am, hurting you. Because I’m a selfish, hopeless, worthless human being. For no apparent reason, I hurt the people around me and end up hurting myself. Ruining someone else’s life and my own. Not because I like to. But that’s how it ends up.”

“No argument there,” Yukiko said quietly. Traces of her smile remained at the corners of her mouth. “You are definitely a selfish, hopeless person, and yes, you have hurt me.”

I looked at her for a while. Nothing in her words seemed to blame me. She was neither angry nor sad. She was merely explaining the obvious.

I took my time, trying to find the right words. “I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself. For your sake, I’d like to become a new person. It may not be easy, but if I give it my best shot, perhaps I can manage to change. The truth is, though, if put in the same situation again, I might very well do the same thing all over. I might very well hurt you all over again. I can’t promise anything. That’s what I meant when I said I had no right I just don’t have the confidence to win over that force in me.”

“And you’ve always been trying to escape that force?”

“I think so,” I said.

Her hand still rested on my chest “You poor