What Tokyo Couldn't Hold

Episode 7: Someone Else’s Timing

There are people we choose not because we love them, but because we are afraid of what we might feel if we choose no one at all.



After Renn, there was Dion.

I met him too quickly. That was the first problem. The second was that I knew it was too quick and chose him anyway, the way you order food you don’t want because the waiter is standing there and silence feels worse than a bad decision.

He appeared during the worst stretch of the aftermath those weeks when the apartment still smelled faintly of someone else’s shampoo and I kept finding small things that no longer belonged to me. A charger cable behind the nightstand. A receipt in a jacket pocket. A hair tie on the bathroom shelf. Each one a small detonation of memory I hadn’t prepared for.

Dion was kind. I want to say that clearly, because what follows might suggest otherwise. He was warm, attentive, and genuinely interested in me at a time when I could not remember the last person who had been genuinely interested in anything I had to say. He listened when I spoke and asked questions that showed he was paying attention, which is rarer than it should be and more valuable than I realized at the time.

But I was not ready for him. I was not ready for anyone.

The relationship began as a reaction. I didn’t choose Dion because I wanted to move forward. I chose him because I couldn’t bear to be still. The apartment was too quiet. The evenings stretched too long. My phone held no one’s name I wanted to see. And Dion filled those spaces with a presence that was gentle and consistent and completely undeserved, because I was giving him only the surface of a person while the rest of me remained somewhere he couldn’t reach.

We dated for a few months. He moved carefully around me, as if he could sense the fragile edges of something he hadn’t been told about. He didn’t ask about Renn. I didn’t volunteer. We existed in a kind of pleasant avoidance two people sharing meals and evenings without ever arriving at the part of a relationship where you let someone see what’s actually underneath.

There were moments of warmth. I don’t want to erase those. A dinner where he laughed so hard he spilled his beer across the table and neither of us cleaned it up for ten minutes because we were still laughing. A Sunday in Yoyogi Park where he pointed at a cat sleeping on a bench and said it looked like a loaf of bread, and for reasons I cannot explain, that struck me as the funniest observation I’d heard in weeks.

But warmth is not the same as presence. And I was not present. I was still measuring every conversation against a standard set by someone who was no longer there. I was still waking at six-thirty because an alarm Renn had set still governed my mornings. I was still reaching for my phone at night, not hoping to find Dion’s name, but searching for a shape of comfort that had been removed and not yet replaced.

I ended it on a Thursday evening. We were sitting on a bench near his apartment, and I told him I wasn’t being fair. That I cared about him but couldn’t be what he needed. That the timing was wrong, and wrong timing was not something either of us could fix by waiting.

He didn’t argue. He nodded slowly, looked at the ground, and said, "I kind of knew."

That made it worse. Not because I wanted him to fight for us, but because the gentleness of his acceptance revealed how little of myself I had offered him. He had known all along that I wasn’t fully there. And he had stayed anyway, hoping I might eventually arrive. The patience of that the quiet, unrewarded patience was more painful to acknowledge than anything Renn had said during our final conversation.

I walked home feeling something I couldn’t name. Not quite guilt, not quite relief. Something in between, like the lightness after setting down a weight you had no right to carry.

The apartment waited for me. One pair of shoes at the door. The kitchen light clicking on to illuminate the same empty counter, the same single mug, the same quiet that had become so familiar it almost felt like company. I removed my shoes, stood in the doorway, and let the silence settle around me.

Alone again. But this time, the aloneness felt chosen. Not comfortable, not welcome. Just honest. And honesty, even when it hurt, was better than the particular dishonesty of loving someone while looking over their shoulder for someone who wasn’t there.