Then, nothing. No call, no text, no visit. Silence where Owen should have been. I knew something was wrong for him not to contact me at all, but I couldn’t imagine what. For two days I was ill with dread, on the verge of vomiting. Owen and I had deepened our relationship during the past month and though it had been a bit off at times, I dreamed of everything. Not just sex with Owen at some point, but a life with Owen, a future in Japan with him. What happened in his fort was because we were nervous. We had already started to fix it with our lovely walk, hadn’t we? But the following days, which should have held more whispers and kisses, were barren. I struggled with the impulse to run to a package store and buy bottles of wine, and instead passed the weekend sulking inside.
And then it was Monday and he didn’t show up for English class. “Where’s Owen?” Rose said, and I shrugged, wouldn’t look at her. Reluctantly, I presented our paper to the class and read our haiku aloud by myself. I fought back tears as my concerned peers looked on.
That afternoon I texted and called Owen, but he didn’t answer. I started to walk to his house but turned back. Instead, I hid in my room and tried to concentrate on homework but mostly half-watched Japanese music videos on my computer. In the early evening, after an eon of waiting, I finally got a text from Owen. “I’m downstairs.”
I hurried down and found him near the dorm’s concrete courtyard fountain. Students walked and talked around us, ridiculously upbeat and happy. The evening air was chilling down. Fall had tiptoed in to replace summer all in one sad afternoon as I hid in my bedroom.
Owen stared at the ground, pushed browning leaves around with his foot, and then said, “I have to move back to Tokyo. Now.” A pile of dead branches blew across the courtyard, scattering across the stone.
“Oh.” A strum, like a discordant guitar chord, rippled through my gut. “But you just got here.” I sounded stupid and small.
“My mom is quitting her job to run the Ota family’s media businesses. My dad won’t let me stay.”
Not understanding, I said, “But, it’s not like you can run the company.”
“My father says I have to go back. He already dislikes me. I have to do what he says.” Owen sounded defeated, older, deflated.
I hesitated, then, “Why does your father dislike you?”
“I’m just different….” His voice trailed off. “A gaijin in my own family.”
“You’ve said that before, but it’s not true. I’ve seen how your mother loves you.”
“In Japan, father’s approval is most important.”
The chilly breeze tousled my hair and I shuddered. “I’ll visit soon, or take a study abroad program,” I said, repeating the ideas we’d discussed, though I hadn’t any idea of how one could get to Japan from Evanston or Oakville. I didn’t even know if there was an academic program from Northwestern to Japan. Everything had happened so fast I hadn’t had time to research the possibilities.
“My life in Japan is complicated.” His vulnerability was palpable. “Just know, I do love you.” Again, he’d said it. “It’s just, I’m sorry.” Another apology. For being so affectionate and awkward by turns? For being about to leave me? He stared past me into the distance and pain floated behind his eyes.
“Owen, I don’t want you to go…” I started, and he stopped me.
“I can’t. I can’t discuss anything more,” he said. “Sorry, Lu.” Then, a quick, hard half-hug and he drove away, gone in the same startling way he’d arrived a month earlier.
I stood for a time in the cool stone courtyard and felt lonelier than the empty year after my dad died. Upstairs I burrowed into my bed. I was flooded with regret and my chest was needled with pain. Why hadn’t I soothed Owen in the fort when he was obviously distressed? Why didn’t I make him explain why he had to leave? And anyway, why would he woo me, entice me with poetry, and exotic food and tidbits of the life we might share, the gleaming wonderland of Japan, and then abruptly leave me? Owen’s departure left me in pieces, with the throbbing regret of lost potential and a list of unanswered questions. He had mesmerized me while he was with me, then snapped me in half with his impersonal brush-off.
Over the next weeks I slipped from sad to inconsolable. Owen inhabited both my waking thoughts and my subconscious, especially as I fell asleep each night. Owen came to me as a semi-illuminated figure in his fort, hovering over me as I tried to sleep, both alluring and threatening. Several times I reached up to touch him only to be stunned awake by the chilled dormitory air blowing on my outstretched fingers.
I had dealt with the death of my dad. But Owen vanished and I didn’t understand. He was gone, yet still here, alive on the other side of the earth. His vanishing could be undone, he could come back, or I could go there, not like my father who was nowhere or somewhere I couldn’t access. Owen had given me a lame excuse for why he was returning to Japan, something to do with his mom being called back to the family business. But why couldn’t he have stayed at Northwestern to finish college? There had to be some real reason for his hasty departure, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Why would his rejecting magnate dad call him back to Tokyo so soon after he’d arrived in Evanston?
I refused to text, email or look him up on social media. I’d be damned if I was going to be one of those girls who chased after guys who showed no interest. I slogged through my classes and homework for the rest of the semester. All young women fall in love, but for me, my love was magnified and intertwined with an exotic foreigner who was out of my reach, in a faraway place, one that up until recently, I hadn’t thought of at all and now, thought about constantly. Owen. Owen in Japan. Owen and me in Japan together. And now a layer of mystery. Was the family business the real reason for their sudden departure? Why did his father disapprove of him? And why all the push-pull, hot-cold behavior with me? He said he loved me, but, even those simple words seemed more complicated than they should have been.
I walked around aimlessly one evening as the semester drew to an end. The bitter wind from Lake Michigan cut through campus. I thought about how deliberate Owen had been about holding my hand until his mother saw. And our time in his fort, not only the abrupt end to our kissing, but also the strange aggressive way he’d grasped my neck. Had I felt anger oozing from him? Maybe it was chemistry I’d felt, burning through his fingers on my neck.
He contacted me once, two months after he left Illinois, by text. “Sorry Lu. Sorry.” Another apology, but no explanation of why he hadn’t been in touch. Nothing hopeful or promising, just those sparse fragments of sentences. I texted him back, asking when I could visit. He didn’t reply. I was destroyed. I’d believed him and now, more silence. Thoughts of Owen clutched at my chest and burrowed into some side space of my brain, where they remained, confounding me. I grieved again as I’d done after my father died, but this time my sorrow was tinged with shame at the incomprehensible way he’d abandoned me. I hoped his grandmother’s tea set had gotten smashed to bits on the trip back to Japan.
My pain lingered into the holidays, until Rose threatened to call my mom or take me to a psychiatrist. When Chris Tidy, the captain of the men’s tennis team, asked me to a New Year’s party I accepted. Since Rose thought that was normal behavior, she didn’t force me to visit the campus shrink. But I only went out with Chris one time. I hated dancing close to him and I jumped back when he tried to kiss me on the dorm’s snowy doorstep at the end of the night. I could only imagine two kisses I’d ever want again, from my father or from Owen. All others seemed irrelevant, wrong.
It was the same story for the other dates during my last year of college. When a boy tried to hold my hand or give a goodnight kiss, I turned to ice. Rose dated, went to parties and movies and dinners out, told me about her kisses and more. She snapped sexy selfies and posted them online or sent them to boyfriends. But I was not only celibate after Owen left, I was utterly uninterested. Nothing in my Illinois world could live up to the mysterious appeal of Japan, the memory of Owen and the fire I felt when he touched me.
It was the mystery of Owen’s departure and the alluring, alarming nature of my love for him, comingled with the appeal of exotic Japan, of Owen and me in Japan together, that drove my decisions, good and bad, for the following years. A catalyst, I guess that’s what you’d call it, a force powerful enough to alter the trajectory of my life. Like the mist that rises off of Lake Michigan and dissipates into the open sky, magnetic Owen and his beautiful mom had flown off into the ether, away from Evanston toward their rising sun homeland, the place where I longed to be. Without fully or even partially comprehending all the “whys” of my behavior, I was driven forward by Owen Ota.
Partly, it might have been that the raw combination of losses, losing my father then losing Owen in such quick succession, pushed me over the edge into obsession about Owen, about Japan. Or that Owen’s and my shared status as fatherless—me, because my father was dead, him, because his father disapproved of him—caused me to fixate on him as my male “other,” a man to fill my emotional void, while I believed I could fill his need for love and respect.
On a snowy evening before my last semester I tried to look up the haiku Owen had published, to find it online, but couldn’t. Each promising link said, “content removed,” or “link broken.” Frustrated I told myself I didn’t care what he wrote in his stupid haiku. But the fact was I couldn’t stop caring. And in my memory, more than the fancy dinner at his house, or the hand holding, kisses or the time we spent in his musty, rose-scented fort, the heat of his fingers on my neck is what stuck with me most. Owen Ota had burned himself into me.