沉默的男朋友 My quiet boyfriend

沉默的男朋友 My quiet boyfriend

新井一二三 Xinjing Yiersan

From: 123成人式 : Seijun Shiki (Coming of Age Ceremony)

Part 1: 现实和远景 Reality and a Vision

When we were in high school we’d spend hang out for hours together every day..

When I was 18 I graduated high school, but I didn’t get into college.

In April of that year my classmates were wearing light makeup and wearing pink, pastel green and other kinds of light colors. They were starting to enjoy the perks of being a college student. I started taking classes at a cram school in Yoyogi wearing the same old dark clothes of winter.

Cram school cost just about as much as college. Since I didn’t dare ask my parents for any spending money or consider getting a job, I had no way to buy new clothes. Every day I went to class wearing the same jeans I wore in high school. And when I say jeans, I mean overalls. I paired them with blue and red argyle flannels. I looked a lot like a female auto mechanic from the American Midwest.

Wearing those big pants, I got fatter and fatter every day. Cram school students are under a lot of pressure and they don’t have many opportunities to relax. Unconsciously I started eating a lot more. Bu, more importantly, cram school isn’t a real school: there’s no gym class and there’s no playground. If you take in a lot of calories and you don’t burn them off, you’ll inevitably get fat.

So, is laziness the root of obesity? Or is laziness the result of obesity? For a whole year I didn’t bother to check my weight. Cram school students have no standing in society, they are simply looked down upon. My life consisted of nothing more than putting on my big overalls everyday and going to class. If I gained a little weight, so what?

I was shocked. After only a year I had gained 25 pounds. That spring when I finally got into college and saw my old classmates their response was uniform, “How’d you get so fat? ‘I’ doesn’t mind?”

So it turns out that fat cram school student had a boyfriend. ‘I’ was a high school classmate of mine. During senior year we would cut class together, leading to my failure to get into college. ‘I’, on the other hand, got accepted into the not very prestigious engineering school at "C" University.

‘I’ loved to read books and listen to music, but he loved being alone more than anything else. I was his only close friend. Almost every day when I got out of cram school, ‘I’ would come pick me up and take me home. To keep my spirits up he’d write me letters. That year I received over one hundred letters from him.

Although his girlfriend gained 25 pounds, he never once said a word. Later, when I lost it all in a matter of months and started wearing makeup he still didn’t say anything. That kind of silence in a man is very rare.

When we were in high school we’d hang out for hours together every day. Only later did we start off on separate paths. After I started college every day brought new experiences and new friends. When I got home and read his letters he was still talking about whatever new book he had read. It simply wasn’t enough for me.

By summer vacation I had lost all the weight I had put on. Wearing a cool new t-shirt, I went camping for a few days. When I got back I didn’t call ‘I’. A few days later he called my house but I pretended I wasn’t home. After that I went to a park and burned all the letters he ever wrote to me. A two year relationship and that was how it ended.

After that I never saw him, wrote him or talked to him ever again. It’s been over 20 years since then, but to this day I still feel guilty. ‘I’ accepted me more than anyone else I ever met, but in the end, I ended our relationship without any reason or cause, without a single word of explanation.