I experienced a period of contentment that little had prepared me for. My friends were happy around me. My colleagues and customers were satisfied with me. I was a good listener, I was efficient, I was attentive. I enjoyed giving more than receiving. I discovered my virtuous cycle of happiness, a merry wheel of pleasing others while retaining my own cheerful disposition, a wheel that little could dent or buckle until Sebastian spoke, one Monday evening, his voice hesitant, emanating from the tousled blue bed sheets we lay recovering under, to announce that he would soon be leaving for Japan.
For a few days? A week? ‘Have a nice time,’ I mumbled.
Sebastian placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘You haven’t understood. I’m leaving. I’m relocating. I’m going to live in Tokyo.’ He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at me. ‘Say something.’
I could think of only two things. The first was that I might have fallen in love with Sebastian and that it had taken the prospect of his leaving me for me to realise it. The second was that he had said I and not we and that my dismissal was implicit in that I. Maybe the invitation for me to join him in Japan was to come. My bubble of joy was punctured. I felt rejected, dejected, desperate to hear him wonder aloud whether I might like to live in Tokyo. I thought I would. I decided there and then that I would.
‘Say something.’ Sebastian blew a hair from my face. He sighed and sought to explain. ‘It’s a promotion. I’m going to manage the derivatives desk in the Tokyo office. Three years, probably.’
‘I am going to Tokyo, not we are going?’ My voice was small.
‘Oh, come on!’ Sebastian opened his mouth as though to say something more, but then decided against it. He appeared embarrassed. He sat up and held the sheets to his chin and looked cautiously at me over them. ‘I leave next week.’
I wondered if he’d had the vanity to choose sheets that so precisely matched his eye colour intentionally. I made an effort to speak. ‘That explains it. I thought your flat was looking a bit tidy. Well, bare. You’ve packed some things away.’
‘You’re not too upset?’
‘Upset at what? That you tell me now and not before, not when we got here? Or that after three years of a relationship, you’re happy for it to end just like that?’
‘Oh, come on!’ He tried to make light of it. ‘It’s hardly been a relationship. More like, you know, just a bit of fun. A diversion. For us both. Hasn’t it? Sorry.’ He held his hands up. ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’
‘What did you mean?’ I could only just hear my voice.
‘Did you really think –’ He tried again. ‘We’re not really compatible, are we? I mean, we have a great time together and everything, when we see each other –’
I raised my hand to stop him. I didn’t want to hear it.
Sebastian was right. He was intelligent and intellectual and I wasn’t. He was better travelled, better read and more interested and informed than I could ever hope to be. He had self-knowledge and a degree of self-possession that I envied. I wasn’t so stupid, though, that I couldn’t understand what he, perhaps, could only feel, or couldn’t bring himself to tell me. That the effort of his completing me wasn’t worth it. The reward, simply, would be poor compensation for the bother. If I couldn’t love myself – if there was nothing to love – I could hardly blame him for not loving me. He must have, all this time we’d been seeing each other, been seeing me for what I was: nothing.
To my surprise and, I think, Sebastian’s, we found ourselves hugging each other and then weeping and kissing, as he tried to comfort me and I, perhaps, to persuade him of his mistake, to remind him of what he would be leaving behind and might miss. Our imminent separation added a spice to our lovemaking, a quality whereby we were simultaneously with a familiar and a stranger, an excitement and yet an underlying sadness that accompanies the most intimate of exchanges when it’s undertaken without consequence.