I am trying to break your heart

God, I am bad at breaking someone's heart. I just can't fucking do it. I have made my decision - that Kiyono and I are impossible long term because of language, because I need to talk all the fucking time and put simply, her English isn't nuanced; my Japanese can't stand on two legs; we can't fucking talk with ease and jokes and the coccoon of shared culture. Finally, today, I was able to stand back from it, leave her apartment strewn with my junk, with my tshirts untidy in her laundy basket, leave the nest and write an article for the magazine on autopilot, the question of Kiyono thrumming like blood in my ears and then walking towards the train, doing battle once more with the wide open question of her; her messy apartment, two packs a day, step above social drinker; her warmth; the snugness with which I fit into her back; the unaffected sensuality in her kisses; the resentful mewls with which she greets day; she of two faces, day and night, she with whom comfortable silence stretches out into realisation of impossibility; she who sings karaoke with real emotion; her scars and tattoos and quiet silence; her kanji poetry, beautiful, inscrutable, frustrating; she who fiercely independent apparently needs me to live as a supplement to breath, who needs to know I am hers, she who I either don't know at all or know too much to fool myself any longer that this will work out in Australia or Japan or the fucking air in between and then it comes like that, between one step and the next, and the answer is simple and the answer is no. The answer is that I cannot save her and I cannot love her any longer and I am grateful, enormously grateful but the answer is that I am fickle while she is devoted like abalone to stone, unquestioning. She doesn't even know who I am and she doesn't care in the slightest; she doesn't know the first thing about me, she doesn't ask unless I tell her, but she is content with the way I kiss her neck, the way I coax her sadness out and she thinks this is love beyond all knowing.

Japanese romances are wide-eyed; the promise of romantic love pure and true and whole is untainted by Western cynicism but I, we, the world weary know that love is nothing but a word for a feeling.

Moving in with her was unsurprisingly, a rather bad idea; it makes it even harder and I don't think I've done anything to quoteunquote help her get some meaning back in her life; all it has done is make me her personal, portable saviour, her one-man meaning of life. This is quite intimidating. I never thought I had messiah tendencies, not even latent. What makes me feel so small is that she accepts that her fate is in my hands; she is the one who made this suddenly abruptly deadly serious and yet she is ready to be thrown away. I know what she doesn't, that life will go on, and she knows what I don't, that she has the power to make life not go on because if there is one thing I have learnt here is that the word love is a very very very dangerous word, a word with a currency all its own, a word that floats between languages to mean more than I ever intended.

I'm sorry, Kiyono. If things were different. If things were different. Things would be different.