[5] Today I have learned a Japanese phrase: koi no yokan.

[inked on 03 january 2024]

They say, “it is the feeling when you meet someone and know you will fall in love with them.” I read some more, a passage states:

It doesn't mean love at first sight. It's closer to love at second sight.

It's the feeling when you meet someone that you're going to fall in love with them.

I see it as the inevitability of longing for someone’s presence. One day, you are shadowed by a dark cloud, when suddenly, it is as if the wind has blown the cloud when your eyes meet. To me, it captures the one thing that lovers who fall out tend to forget about: curiosity. Who is this person I am locking eyes with? Why is my heart thumping fast and my breath in an unsynced rhythm? Why do I want to ask for her name? Why do I hold her hand?

The initial stages... and then after a while this curiosity loosens, even becomes unbearable. Why does she leave the dishes unwashed? Why can he never hold the door for me? Why can't they remember that my favorite song is by The Smiths?

To which, it becomes stale. Will she grow tired of me? Have I done something wrong again? Why is he ignoring me all of a sudden? Does she still desire to be with me? Am I falling out of love? This is when koi no yokan shifts a distraught turn.

But as with any couple, of course I will announce that ours will never traverse such a path.

When I met you, I had no intention of falling in love—with you, or someone else that I am yet to meet—at all. I have long given up on the idea of "love," if not as an excuse made up by cruel people to pass their grievance and heartache to another, intentionally breaking hearts to bandage their wounded parts. I saw it in films, I heard it in love songs, and witnessed it in my parents' eyes.

I saw you and hoped to strike a conversation. Honestly, I never thought much of it except that perhaps you have a charm that brings people in by your existence. But that pull grew day by day, until I realized, I want you in my life—not romantically, no. Just that your presence brings me immense joy and the will to live the day as if there is to be alive for—two things I have lost sight of after a succession of immense pain that does not seem to stop.

Perhaps it is the company, or I was drawn by something else—I never thought of it because I made a pact. I will never fall in love if it means stumbling and bleeding once more. But for some inexplicable reason, I wrote your name in my journal in a phrase I have read to you over a hundred times. If I am not being treated the way you treat me, I deserve better.

Unknowingly, I will live the rest of my life with only your “treatment”—whatever it means. I know I was just a friend, not a special someone, I was just of the others—but I think we both felt more.

Initially, I brushed it off. I did not think it through as I was afraid of acting a fool, that it was nothing and to you, I was just like everybody else. Maybe I was, but I will never truly know.

But I finally realized that the pull was fate. That the most unimaginable would happen to me.

I have kept a journal over four years ago, saying I am glad I have finally found you. It was a silly hopeless romantic gesture for a high school student—so I never thought a time would come that I would fill it to the brim with my memories and thoughts of you. The gravity that kept us toward each other, both understanding and not understanding at the same time; the curiosity of our fate, of our future, of whether or not I can hold your hand and touch your lips. It all made sense now. It was a curiosity that grew the more I fell in love with you.

When I sank into my bed, I grasped this curiosity; will you listen to the same songs I do? What is your favorite snack with coffee? Am I doing enough to open up? Will you ever trust me? Should I say I can feel that I will fall in love?

The stages beyond koi no yokan is admitting that I have loved you, and will always do—and that we have fallen in love with each other that whenever I see a mirror a piece of you is left in my reflection, and of me to yours. Even if I never knew I would. Even if I thought you never will.

I love you, I love you.

Even if I did not know when it began, I know—truly—that my love shall never end.