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OK. So we’ve established that in order for me to get back to the place I wanted to be in life, that I needed to grow up and get over myself and go to Europe to see what all the noise was about. So the lingering question for most people was, who is Mai?

To put it strangely. Mai was half of the 1 1/4 girlfriends I had for a period of 8 days during the middle of college playoffs. Sound confusing? It is. Just how I came up with that mixed-fraction is a story for another time, but it is necessary, I guess, for you to know that we were participles in yet another complicated run-on sentence from my senior year. Exactly who she is has been a persistent enigma for my friends and listeners. A la Yuki Saitoh, no sooner has she come into my life, had she become a mainstay of my anecdotes, only this time it didn’t suit either of us to advertise it too loudly. Most people simply know her as “the dancing girl”. So named, for the only thing most people seem to be able to recall about her, her nearly inexplicable membership in a Montreal hip-hop squad.

She stands about 5-foot tall, and dresses fairly unremarkably. She was born and raised in Kagawa (one of the 4 prefectures in that island south of Honshu that nobody every thinks about) and has a dirty southern accent to her that complements perfectly with her dirty southern mind. The kind of J-girl who overcompensates for her sallow cheeks with a little too much pink blush, and paints on her eyebrows on just little too thick. You wish she’d almost go without makeup sometimes, because the inorganic colors lend a strange sadness to the more or less singular expression of her face. Not confused, or frowning, but always wearing a slight and charming smile that seems to slowly pull your gaze in towards her inquisitive, pretty eyes. She had a very humble natural-prettiness too her, not to mention I guess, a well hidden set of C-cups. Both of which, were already starting to drown out in the weight she had put on from the food over here.

I don’t exactly paint the nicest picture of her, I guess, which is unusual for me. Generally I find my propensity for nostalgia in tandem with my predisposition to exaggerate would make Topps Baseball cards come out looking like Rembrandts by the time I write about them here. You might call it overhyping your stock, but when you run a small market team you have to make a lot of noise about your acquisitions to keep people tuning in. Especially, when you’re in a rebuilding year.

I wasn’t though. I was in major business both at the plate and in the dugout, but I was all hush-hush in the press boxes. I had a top pitcher in the lineup with 6 years of pro-ball experience, and it looked like she might be ready to take the ace-slot. I figured all I needed was a relief pitcher to hold me over until signing, or provide some insurance to the team if necessary as I geared up for the summer. So in all honesty, when I spoke with Mai-hime for the first time, I didn’t think that she was especially hot, or that she had a rareness too her that made her poor choice in clothing excusable. I only remember thinking that she looked like she’d be a freak in the sack; and getting turned on by her hilly little drawl of hers.


I put a lot of value in conversations, but I’m starting to realize that when it comes to girls, the right voice can make a really stupid broad seem like Virginia Woolf to me. In Mai’s case I guess it was more like Flannery O’connor, except replace all that “grotesque” with “the nasty”. - -And boy did she have stories. And just like Flannery’s most of them ended with some unwitting southerner getting shot in the face (if you extend the metaphor to it’s proper place here). The things that came out of her mouth were almost shocking to me. To ME. At any rate, my basic intuitions about her proved correct within two dates.

Of course, whatever could have been between us (and by my humble opinion, it could have been be-yu-tyful) was stifled almost instantly by the two complicating factors in our relationship: her boyfriend and the fact that I was in love with somebody else. I guess we’ll just leave it at that for the time being. Point is, she said she wanted to stay as friends, so that’s exactly what happened. And that’s what I assumed she meant when she asked me to come to Paris with her three months later: “Come [as my friend]!”. Either that or she had just broken up with her boyfriend...dare I ask?

I considered that question pretty much answered when the day after I agreed to go with her, she asked me to bring my laptop so we could “watch AVs together”. Admittedly, it was a proposition that made it difficult to concentrate for the next few minutes, but then again I didn’t put it past her to have meant she wanted me to bring it for our (separate) personal usages. After all, by my estimation she was exactly the kind of girl who would ask a single guy to turn on the pRon so she could hit the batting cages in the bed across from him.

What to do?

It’s not like I was going to Europe for the sex...

But then let’s be realistic, Teddo...would you have ever thought about going to France if you hadn’t been invited by an AZN girl?


Let’s see...The one and only time I ever pictured myself going to Paris? Tuesday May 7th, 2007: The day I struck out on the Takahashi Slider to end my greatest summer. I [only half-] facetiously offered to drop out and burn up all the college money me grandpa had put away for me if she’d quit her job and elope with me to travel the world. Only the thought about spending Paris with Miss Takahashi made it seem enticing: I could picture us watching around half drunk on the left bank, her hair- -and those vibrant eyes of hers lit up by the lights on the backside of Notre Dame. Maybe she’d be wearing a fur coat for some reason—it’d be like I was Ethan Hawke, only without that scrubby moustache; and she was July Delpy, only AZN. Except more like the first one where they’re young and still believe in true love because of the hormones.

Is that what Mai wanted? Had she finally capitulated to my obvious and irresistible amount of charm? Or perhaps only she wanted a steamy 10 day affair in Fitzgerald’s Babylon; either of us bound to return to a future that features not the other—A liminal space for a doomed love, sentenced to death by bad timing. ...Or she might just want a chaperone who’ll take her where she wants to get to and buy her most of her meals on the way.

Aside from AVs, the next request she made of me is that I find us a hostel, make an inquiry about transit, see if there are any bus tours to “Mont St. Michel” from Paris, and she was a little shocked and disappointed to find out I couldn’t speak any French. Why not after all? Hadn’t I been living in Montreal for 4 years for Pete’s Sake? Then I found out she was going to Quebec city the weekend I had planned to be back there, so she’d meet in Trudeau airport the day we flew, and by the way she was flying air Transat, so she’d be going to ORLY, not CDG (whatever that meant) and couldn’t I look up how to get from there to our hostel, once I figured out what hostel we were staying at please? OKseeyoutherebye.


To me, this seemed like it was going to prove interesting one way or the other. When I discussed it with others all I got was blank stares.
“Dude, sounds lame...seems like all she wants you to do is tour her around France and you don’t even know if she’s gonna put out for it. I would get that sh*t in writing before I agreed to go if I were you.”

Too late. Tickets already bought.
“What about- -Julia? Is that her name?”

The mention of it made me want to leave all the more.
“Wha’doyou think she’ll say about that? Shouldn’t you talk to it about her?”

Already did.


Have fun? Don’t get jealous or anything, it’s not like I’m cheating on you... have fun. Fine I will have fun. I’ll have so much fun, you’ll be sorry. B*tch. - -Hell, I didn’t care if Mai made me carry her around Paris all day and massage her stinky feet when we got back to the hotel room and sent me to bed with a jar of vaseline and a magazine. I just wanted to get out of here.

So leave I did.

I was in Montreal drinking up lighting and dancing up thunder. Dining up underclassmen, throwing sexy hotel parties and bragging about the complicated angles of my situation and my upcoming trip to whoever would listen. It didn’t occur to me that I was running away from something until the night we all tried to phone her.

My second night there Yuri, Yadongki and J-rock (you’ll learn about these characters later) were sitting around my hotel room, admiring the shower, drinking heinekens when it occurred to me that it was mid-afternoon in South Korea had the audacious idea to give Julia a call.

It was only a little thing I guess. But hearing her voice spark up when I offered to pass the phone to Yuri, and hearing her gab away with [Ya]Dongki at tone a pace that I was never able to bring out in her, and then hearing her convivially refuse the offer to speak to me again, well, it was enough to make me want to throw my scotch glass through the shower wall (the shower wall was glass and facing the bedroom, which is why it was so impressive).


It’s like every sin I’ve ever committed against women has doomed me to having it repeated upon myself. I avoided giving serious answers to important questions my entire life, now I was dangling from the butt end of joke instead of standing on firm promise. All the times I had equivocated myself out of a sticky situation, negotiated non-committal terms for myself to mutual agreements, the times played with a girls feelings and tossed her out when she became a nuisance to me, it was all coming back to me now. I had finally met a girl who was able to do the same to me.

And the worst part? I kind of liked it. That aside from my selfdestructive narcissism, I had bred within me a blend of herbaceous selfhate, and she was able to take down my ego in exactly the way the other side of me wanted it done. Perhaps because her behavior was so akin to mine, or at least the way I’ve come to view myself. Being around her was a kind of well deserved punishment and reward.

So, suddenly detached from my Vishnu, and neither able to receive her abuse nor her private empathy, I felt naked and angered. More like I lost, rather than having lost something.

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Partner / opponent: In Japanese, the same word 「相手」...I wonder if they have the equivalent term in Korean. Probably not hey? Another one of those irreconcilable cultural differences she was always citing...

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Dongki noticed my foul mood and spoke up to me in Korean (so as to prevent Yuri from understanding). We talked about things that nobody was supposed to know. J-rock, the other Korean speaker in the room, had been half out of the loop since April and joined in intently.

‘You should forget her.‘ said Dongki at last. ‘She doesn’t think of you as a boyfriend.’

Without hesitating, and unaware of the weight of the words ‘I know.’ I said.
The moment I spoke it, it hurt me so bad. And it made me think about Mai-hime.

Maybe it wasn’t her who needed me. Maybe I needed her. Maybe she could give me something that I was missing. Whether that was physical love, or the chance to be heard, or just a temporary escape from all the quandaries of “twenty-something modern life”.

Whatever that could be, I decided I ought to wait it out until we were safely in Paris and safely in the confines of our hotel room together to find out what that was.

＊　　　＊　　　＊　

I met her at Pierre Eliot Trudeau international airport on Monday August 24, 2009. We hadn’t seen each other since the day I left Montreal back in May. She was in slightly worse condition then last we spoke. She was also sweating through her shirt, laboring to carry her overstuffed back-pack. I had refused to adopt the conventional baggage of people my age on principle. I didn’t want to be associated in any way with the rest of North American Eurofan backpackers, so I was about to spend the next 10 days lugging a 26” suitcase around Paris on those crap-ass plastic wheels that never rotate properly. At least I would still had my touristly dignity.

We had barely enough time for greetings, because the goddamn cabby had taken me so far out of the way that I almost missed check-in. We hurried to check our bags and clear security, got split up in our lines and had only enough time to get refused entry to the duty-free shopping area (for reasons still unknown) and buy $7 gelatos, and go over our excitement and our tentative plans for the day we arrived. Her flight boarded 20 minutes before mine, so I’d see her on the other side of the Atlantic...

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