I loathed the place from the first hour — indeed, I loathed it even before I had stepped across its threshold, which should tell you something about the mind’s sick propensity for prophecy.
The ferry had barely docked when the heat struck me like an open palm. Siquijor — God, even the name tastes of myth! They call it bewitched, cursed, a land of witches who sell love potions in plastic bottles, of spirits knotted in tree trunks, of stray dogs who walk upright after dark.
There is power in such places, power untouched by men and their systems, and it presses against the chest, forces you to remember your smallness. And man — modern man, God forgive us — cannot bear smallness. So of course we make a mockery of it.
And what had they built here? A “wellness retreat,” so they called it. A paradise for the weary. A sacred space. In truth it was a makeshift colony of huts — wooden beams slouched like drunken men, roofs of tin sheeting that rattled with every breeze, sand tracking into every crevice of one’s person — and yet somehow it all passed for sanctified ground. It was arranged in a circle, of course. Utopias are always circular. In the middle, a yoga shala that stank faintly of mildew and lemongrass, where the enlightened stretched their limbs into the heavens and moaned softly.
At the entrance, a board welcomed you home with psychedelic lettering that might have delighted a madman. Shoes were forbidden. Anklets were not. Especially not the jangling, beaded sort that white women wear when trying to seem tribal.
And in this space — this fever dream of light-beings and lemongrass — there I was. Me! Sweeping sand, brewing vegan curries, and attempting to contort my body into shapes no God had ever intended.
And I hated it. I hated it all. I hated their didgeridoos, their chakra charts, their breathwork rituals that turned even breathing — the most elemental act — into performance. I hated their softness — not gentleness, no, but softness — the kind that comes not from empathy but from a lifelong practice of turning away.
They spoke of joy while the world burned. They sipped coconut water and said all suffering was sacred — as if they had ever knelt before it! When I brought it up — once, only once, and with trembling caution — a silence fell over the room like a funeral cloth. A girl with a crescent moon tattoo on her chest placed her hand upon her heart (the gesture of the passive tyrant!) and said we should not “bring politics into the space.”
Politics! What a word. What a brilliant shield. I nodded, of course.
They spoke of peace, but they meant numbness. Of presence, but they meant detachment. They called it spiritual, this refusal to look. They had taken a place alive with spirits and fed it to commerce, made it a stage for the hollow rituals of the comfortable.
But the hatred — that quiet, insidious loathing — it turned inward as well. What kind of person remains in a place she detests? What kind of coward smiles through yoga ceremonies while the news screams of death? I told myself it was the discount. The budget. The bargain of two weeks’ labor in exchange for a few pesos off per night. But lies are never so simple. They grow tendrils.
They root in your soul.
****
I did not speak to him the first night. Nor the second. Nor, I believe, did I intend to.
He rode barefoot — yes, barefoot! — on his motorbike, a sack slung across his chest like some vagabond prophet from a Slavic tale. And when he returned, he brought fruit. Mango, mostly.
One morning, over a coffee made with oat milk (for here, whole milk is considered a kind of sin — though why, I could not say), I made some trivial remark about astrology. Something about Mercury’s retrograde, some idle cruelty disguised as wit. A few around us chuckled. He did not.
Later that same evening, we both lingered by the fire pit. The others had already drifted to their mushrooms and their tantric dreams. We remained. I lay on a mat; he sat cross-legged across from me, like a monk examining a heretic.
“You don’t really believe in all this, do you?” he asked, not cruelly, but not gently either.
“God, no,” I said at once. “I think they’re high on incense and ego.”
He smiled. It was the barest thing. The kind of smile one might mistake for wind. But I saw it. And something inside me — some horrible, fragile part — lurched toward it.
We spoke, cautiously. He asked where I was from. What I believed. I gave him answers I had rehearsed so often they felt fraudulent even as I spoke them: Amsterdam, Atlanta, Tokyo, New York; no gods, no ghosts, only neurons and accidents. Well — gods sometimes, but only as metaphor. Spirits, too, but only when I was feeling particularly generous or poetic.
I told him I believed that belief itself was the only magic. That what we think is what becomes us. That fate is just meaning rearranged. That mostly, I believed in people and in the present moment, yes, this one, this miserable one.
He listened. He didn’t nod. He didn’t wait for his turn to speak, as most do — God, how quickly we all retreat into the performance of attention while our minds scribble replies! No. He listened. As though my words were food. As though he had been hungry for them.
And in that moment — I felt it. That unbearable thing. To be seen. Truly. Not for the face I had practiced, not for the name I wore like clothing, but for the shivering something underneath.
I did not tell him — not yet, at least. I did not tell him about the corporate interview I had abandoned to come here, a doorway to a life I once pretended to want but could never name without tasting iron in my mouth. Not about the nights I sold my myself — not out of desperation, no, I cannot claim such nobility, but out of fatigue, survival, an almost imperceptible submission to the appetites of the city — once, twice, ten times, who’s counting anymore? New York will consume anything if you stay long enough.
I did not tell him about my friends entombed alive in their towers of glass, who mistook their captivity for triumph, who bartered their youth for salaries and called it freedom, who drank themselves to death on weekends and named it relief, named it life, named it worth the slow decay of their souls.
Nor did I tell him that I wore my poverty like a badge, proof that I could suffer beautifully, even while still craving the approval of the empire I pretended to reject. Yes, I said I didn’t care for things. But the truth? The truth was worse.
I did not know how to assign meaning to existence unless I could brand it, sculpt it, bleed it into a sentence. I shaped my days into artifacts. I assigned value the way I had been taught — through exposure, through labor, through visibility. I had forgotten how to be, unless someone else could see me doing it.
And most shamefully — I did not tell him that at twenty-two, I was already afraid of myself. I feared I was already rotting from the inside, unable to tell if the heaviness in me was fatigue or a hollowing.
Instead, I said — absurdly, stupidly:
“I wanted to see if I could slow down.”
And he nodded.
****
From then on, there were nights. Long ones. Quiet ones. We sat beside each other on the yoga platform’s steps — our legs swinging into darkness like children before the Fall — arguing about things no one else in the hostel dared to mention: politics (he was irritatingly conservative, though I suspect he performed it more than believed it), belief (he insisted the devil was real; I insisted humans were worse), grief (he kept his grief folded tightly; I mourned aloud).
He told me he’d once seen a girl possessed by a demon at a spiritual festival. I told him I’d seen girls possessed by trauma in classrooms and bathrooms and boardrooms and nobody ever called it that.
He did not laugh. He said that was fair.
We circled each other like stray planets. Unmoored. Entangled. I kept waiting to be repulsed. To discover some unbearable affectation. I didn’t. He saved me a seat on his bike. Peeled mangoes for me with his hands and said, “This one is for you.” He began to notice what I didn’t say. Waited for me after meals. Brought me beer, local and bitter, and when he saw me wince, fetched a mule the next night instead. Small gestures, yes. But it is always the smallest gestures that undo the soul.
And then — ah, then! One night, beneath that monstrous butterfly sculpture suspended from the ceiling like an idol, obscene in its witness to all our becoming — I sat one meter away from him, knees bent but not touching, and we spoke of love. Of jealousy. Of monogamy. Of structures we neither trusted nor understood.
He said, with absurd calm: “Kind of like our relationship.”
I turned. “What relationship?”
And he — God help me — he smiled and said, “I think we like each other.”
He said it like fact. Like an old shoe one finally recognizes as their own.
And I said nothing. Because what could I say? The fist inside me had already unclenched.
****
And from then on — what? We drifted, yes. But not like leaves on water. No, it was something more deliberate than that. We drifted toward one another the way the soul drifts toward temptation: Cautious at first — always cautious, because who is not cautious before surrendering? — but soon with the doomed inevitability of all things human.
Our days melted into each other like candle wax. We began waking with the sun — him always first, me trailing soon after, as though my body had begun to orbit his of its own volition. I no longer asked where we were going when I climbed onto his motorbike. I simply wrapped my arms around his waist and allowed the road to choose for us.
And so we roamed — without destination, without purpose, without even the decency of pretending to have one. The island! May God curse it, bless it — it was delirium. A fever dream of green and gold: mangoes vibrating with flies, beaches so silent they seemed indecent, waterfalls hidden behind thorns. Once we came upon a river so clear it might as well have been air.
We stripped and swam — of course we did. What else was there to do when the world peeled itself open so generously?
And then, the rain.
Oh, the rain! Not the tired drizzle of Tokyo. Not the gray weeping of Ljubljana. No. This was something else. It fell with the force of judgment, sudden and blinding, as if the heavens themselves had ruptured in agony. We fled to the nearest cover — a tarp slung low between two banana trees — and huddled beneath it. He sat behind me, arms around my waist, and the heat of him — God forgive me — was unbearable. Not lust. Not quite. Something worse. Something gentler.
He whispered: “In Slovenia, the rain is slow.”
Here, he said, it was alive.
We stayed like that for an hour. Maybe more. Did the rain stop? Did time? I could not tell.
When we finally emerged, the whole island glittered as though washed of sin. Everything smelled new. Even my own skin.
We returned to the water, soaked already, so what did it matter? He spun me in circles and I laughed, and then — was I crying? Or had the rain changed direction?
He told me he wanted to show me the “slow life.” I said nothing. What was there to say? Words are so clumsy in the presence of beauty. Instead, I let him.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, my body began to change.
I woke earlier. I ate with my fingers. I let silence bloom where shame used to fester. I let myself want — God help me, I wanted. Him, yes. But also quiet. Softness. A life without edge.
I told him things. Things I had buried so deep I’d forgotten their names. About the men who had taken without asking. About the years spent performing normalcy until I could no longer tell if I was living or mimicking life. About the night I tried to kill myself in high school.
He just held my hand, simply, as though there were no alternative, as though it was obvious — self-evident — that this is what one does when faced with another’s ruin.
****
We had sex — yes, I shall name it plainly, for there is no use in dressing it up with the ribbons they favor here. We had sex. Once. Only once. And even that — how do I describe it? It was not rapture. Nor revelation. It was simply: skin on skin. Sticky with sweat. Unremarkable in its choreography and yet, somehow, it hollowed me out completely.
The fan was broken. I remember that. Or perhaps it was simply not turned on — who can say? The air did not move. It clung to us, thick and wet. The mattress was thin, just foam laid on wood, and it wheezed beneath us with every shift of weight, as if exhausted by our attempts at connection. The floor creaked. A mosquito hummed its ceaseless liturgy near my ear. Outside, chickens — those damned chickens — muttered and clawed in the dirt like spectators bored of the drama.
There were no candles, no incense. Just me, my body — a thing I have loved and loathed in equal measure — and him, in silence.
He kissed my back. Not out of passion, but care. Not with hunger, but something closer to grief. As if he were trying to apologize to every vertebra for the life I had lived inside it. And oh, the absurdity of it all! That such gentleness could undo me more completely than any cruelty ever had.
I fell asleep in his arms. Not because I was tired — though I was, always — but because something in me unclenched, as if my body no longer needed to guard itself against the world. I slept without fear. Without flinching. Do you understand the magnitude of that? I did not, not fully. Not until morning, when I woke still tucked inside the curve of him, and realized I had not dreamt of falling.
His breath on my spine was — how shall I say it? — it was the only theology I could accept. Proof that I could be held without breaking. Proof that I could still be warm.
Later, when the sun had found us through the cracked slats in the wall and my skin had begun to stick to his in that faintly embarrassing way bodies do, he touched my shoulder, slow, reverent, and said:
“If my touch were a brush, your skin would be wholly covered in paint.”
And I — God forgive me — I wanted to weep. Not because of the words themselves, which were foolish, sentimental, almost laughable. But because he meant them. That was the unbearable part. He meant them.
To be known like that. To be touched not with lust, but with comprehension. As if my body were not merely flesh, but text. Something to be read. Studied. Translated.
I stayed in his hut every night after that. Not out of lust. Not even, I think, out of longing. But because I could no longer bear to sleep without that breath, that stillness, that almost-miraculous reprieve from the noise of my own mind. It became sheer habit. And what is love, in the end, if not the habits we choose to keep?
****
An hour before I left the island for good, I crashed my motorbike.
Yes, like that. Just a stupid mistake, the kind that ought to mean nothing and yet — in retrospect — seems to signify everything.
I had not ridden alone all week. I had no business doing so. My body, foolish creature that it is, had grown used to his. His balance. His instincts. His rhythm. I had forgotten how to steer.
The road was nothing. Flat, dry, a lazy curve. And yet, I missed it. A truck pulled out from a side street, and my hands froze. I veered. The gravel slid beneath me. My right knee struck first, then, my shoulder.
Everything blurred. Not into darkness — oh, I wished it had! — but into light. Blinding, searing, indifferent light.
He came to get me. Him and another from the hostel — both barefoot, both half-dressed, both looking at me like I was something precious and broken and possibly dying.
Back at the hostel, he crouched beside me on the stone steps. His eyes scanned my wound — the knee already swelling, split open like a fruit, blood and dust mixing in obscene colors — and he said nothing. Not at first. Only reached into the first aid kit — a kit he had assembled with his own hands, because in his real life he was a medic, a man accustomed to wounds that are supposed to happen to someone else — and drew out gauze and antiseptic.
He cleaned the wound slowly. Deliberately. I hissed once — when the alcohol touched raw flesh — and he stopped, eyes flickering with fury.
Not at me, I think. Not at the wound. At the fact of it.
And oh — oh, my God — what a staggering thing it is, to be loved in anger. To be someone’s fragile thing.
And I sat there, filthy, shaking, knees bloodied and skirt torn, and felt — what? Shame? Gratitude? No, something stranger.
I felt chosen.
****
I left him a letter the day I left. I had written it the night before, hunched on the floor of the hut while he slept just feet away. I wrote:
“Thank you for reminding me that it’s okay to believe in love again — to feel deeply without hesitation, the way I haven’t let myself in a long time.”
And then I packed.
If there is anything more humiliating than folding clothes you have worn while being loved, I have not found it. The scent of him clung to my shirt like an accusation.
I told everyone I had to go. I said the words with conviction, even. Classes, work, responsibilities, the real world clawing at my inbox. All true. And yet — untrue. For the truth, the real truth, is that I think I would have stayed.
I would have stayed. For him.
I would have scrubbed latrines. I would have stirred turmeric into vats of lentils until my fingernails turned yellow. I would have danced barefoot to the same three ecstatic songs every Tuesday if it meant another morning of mango juice on my fingers and his hand resting idly on my thigh.
But I left.
He drove me to the port. We rode in silence, but it was not empty. His hand remained on my knee the entire ride, fingers curled not possessively, but like he was holding on to something he already knew he would have to release.
At the ferry terminal, he parked the bike and helped with my pack. His fingers fumbled at the zipper. Slowly. As if he believed — perhaps rightly — that if he delayed long enough, time might fold, might halt, might be merciful.
We didn’t say goodbye. We said “see you soon.”
What else was there to say? Words were suddenly pitiful things, unfit for the violence of what was happening.
I cried in the terminal, loud enough to turn heads. A security guard asked if I needed medical attention. An older woman waved him off, placed her hand on my back and said, “Did you leave someone you loved in Siquijor?”
And I — I nodded. Because yes. Yes, I think I did.
****
We kept in touch. Naturally, we did. That is the perverse joke of our age: love does not die anymore. It does not decompose with dignity, as it did for our fathers and mothers, whose partings vanished into silence, their letters burned, their footsteps swallowed by distance. No — now, even silence is an accusation: timestamps scream louder than words, and each unanswered message stands like an open grave. There is no death, there is only half life.
We wrote each other daily. Photos, updates, fragments of ordinary life dressed in longing. He told me about the hostel, the new volunteers, the mango tree finally dropping its fruit. I replied like a wife who had simply stepped out of the room.
He said he missed me. He said he wanted to show me his country, Lake Bled, the mountains, the childhood beach where the water was “clear and freezing.” And I believed him — not merely believed, but surrendered, like an idiot, like a believer kneeling before a false god.
I built scaffolding upon those words; I built a home on that air. I bought the flight to Slovenia. I chose a dress for his best friend’s wedding. I envisioned it all: bare feet on cobblestone, slow dancing beneath string lights, that small, careful smile blooming into permanence.
And I saw more still. I saw him meeting my mother. I saw life slowing, uncoiling from the steel coil of labor and ambition, releasing me from the glass tower where I was grinding my body into dust for the illusion of security. Home is not geography; it is flesh. It is breath. And I thought I had found it — in him. My mother said I looked different. “Softer,” she said.
But softness is a liability. And I — I, who have always known this — forgot.
Two weeks after I left, he called.
I knew before he spoke. There is a particular tone people use when they are about to slaughter something they once fed.
We spoke for two and a half hours. He said he did not know how to explain, that it was senseless, that it was awful. And then he said it.
He had met someone else.
No, he assured me, there had been no touch, no trespass of flesh. He insisted upon this, as though fidelity were merely anatomical. But something had “clicked.” That was the word he used, like hearts are machinery, and love is only a matter of fitting parts.
It was easier, he said. More natural. Right.
And then — oh, how the world laughs at us — he said he still cared for me, that I “mattered.” That none of it had been false. But this new thing — this unfolding — was “too real to ignore.”
She was there, you see. Present, immediate, physical. Breathing the same thick island air. Her fingers could reach him. Mine could not.
And I — what was I?
I remember sitting on the floor of my Tokyo apartment, hair wet from a shower I hadn’t finished, knee bandaged and oozing through the gauze. The pain in my leg felt reasonable. The pain in my chest did not.
“So you want to end things with me,” I asked, “to pursue something with her?”
A pause. That awful, breathless pause.
“Yes.”
I do not remember all of it. Only bits.
Me, saying I hated it, but understood.
Him, saying he hadn’t meant for this to happen, that it just did, that it all made more sense than it should have.
Me, whispering, “I would have followed you anywhere.”
Him, after a silence so long I thought the world might split open, saying, “I know.” And still — I did not scream. I did not beg. I did not perform heartbreak in the operatic fashion of women in novels, in wailing and tearing hair, in cryptic online lamentations. I simply cried, quietly, pathetically, like an animal bleeding under a porch, ashamed even of its own dying.
I asked, “What if I had stayed longer?”
And he — oh, what cruelty masquerading as tenderness! — said he had thought of that too. That maybe it would have changed everything.
And then he said: “I don’t know.”
I don’t know.
Tell me — what does a person do with that? What does one do with a love that was real, but not enough?
*****
I have asked myself this each morning. Not out of indulgence, no — I am no romantic. I do not weep into tea. But the mind, like a wound, festers in silence. And mine festers.
Because it was real. This is the unbearable part. It was not delusion. It happened: his hands held me, our words tangled, our lives touched. And still — it ended.
Why? The ease of her life over the burden of mine? Shared dogma? Or merely the coincidence of her physical proximity?
Or perhaps something worse. I once told him that I believed people could create meaning simply by choosing it, by insisting upon it. That love, if believed in fiercely enough, could make itself real.
I told him this because I wanted it to be true.
But what does it mean, then, that his faith bent elsewhere? That all his conviction — all those words of wanting, of missing, of futures dreamed aloud — shifted like sand under a changing tide? What does it mean when a person who swore they saw you, who touched you as if reading scripture, can — after just two weeks — turn and face another?
I have been trying to understand.
What does it mean to love in a liminal space? To fall — not in the sturdy world of documents and obligations, but in the floating space between ferries, between selves, between versions of one’s life? A place where no one is entirely real, and therefore everyone is permitted to be truer than usual.
It means that love becomes religion. Temporary, fragile, ecstatic religion. A kind of erotic mysticism, even — not of bodies, but of being — where the beloved becomes a temporary god, and you the trembling votive. You kneel not out of obedience, but because something in you demands to be unmade. You believe harder because the altar is built on sand. You pray faster because you know the sun is setting. You give everything because you believe the giving cannot possibly matter when the ferry leaves.
But then it does.
And the haunting begins.
Not of them — no. He is not the ghost. I am. I am the one who lingers. My laughter still echoes in the corners of the kitchen where we cooked that coconut curry, hands sticky with garlic and sweetness. My towel still hangs on the bamboo hook of the hut where we slept together. My body still walks barefoot across the memory — no, the hope — of what might have been.
It is I who believed. And it is belief that haunts.
I understand now why people fall in love while traveling. It is not the scenery. It is not the illusion of time slowing. It is because when the world you know grows too sharp — too cruel — too ordered — you will seek softness wherever you can. Even if it is temporary. Even if it is false. You will enter the liminal not to find yourself, but to lose the version of you that has become unbearable.
And sometimes — if the gods are feeling particularly cruel — you are seen there. In that naked, borderless state. And that seeing becomes salvation. That is what happened. He saw me.
I must now return to the world where that version of me — the one who was held, who was soft, who was real — does not belong. I must put the costume back on. I must learn, again, how to be unreadable.
****
My knee is still wrapped in gauze. It sticks to the sheets when I sleep. I peel it back in the mornings like old skin, raw and resentful. The scab is healing too fast. Flattening into dull memory. And I — I hate it for that. It is the only proof I have left. That I was touched. That I loved. That I bled, briefly, in a place where nothing was meant to last.
Soon, the wound will scar.
Wakaba is a writer and journalist based in Tokyo and New York City, with bylines in The Japan Times, Matador Network, and more. She also writes essays, fiction, and the occasional treatise-on-loss-posing-as-memoir. You can find her work at wakabaoto.com.