Ernest House—Navigating Betrayal Before the Imminent Breakup

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

—David Whyte

When I heard of his passing, I thought of the time when he asked me to marry him fourteen years ago. Had I said yes, I would have been a widow by now. I did not say no, but my silence was loud enough for him to hear.

It was not the real proposal you see in the movies. It happened during our drive to Shimoda, a seven-hour drive away from our home. It was only when we were driving that we got to talk about uncomfortable things. Maybe because with our eyes on the road, we were able to avoid each other’s eyes. So when he asked me if I wanted to marry him, his eyes on the road and not mine, I didn’t think anything of it other than a tasteless joke.

I’m sure that he knew my silence also meant something else other than a no. So we ended up talking about entirely different things like how old he was when Oasis released the album we were playing on the car stereo which then led to a conversation about our earliest childhood memories.

My earliest childhood memory is that of my brother and I playing at a park. We would go inside this dome-like structure that had a ceiling that seemed endless for a four-year-old child. We would climb its stairs and I would slide from the top, face down and eyes closed. Sometimes I would stand at the top for a while, tightly holding onto the rail. My legs would shake and the cold metal rail would seem warm against my ice-cold hands.

My brother has always been fearless and would try pretty much anything without thinking. He wouldn’t care about getting hurt so I didn’t really understand why he would always grow impatient every time I refused to do something I thought was unsafe. Come on, it’s not scary at all, he used to say.

He still says the same things every time I am faced with life-altering decisions, throwing in some surprisingly empowering cliches like whatever happens, happens. But the decisions you have to make when you are twenty-three are not the same as the decisions you had to make when you were four.

When you were four, you just had to choose whether you should do it now or later. It didn’t even matter which one you chose in the end because someone was always there to save the day just in case you made the wrong choice. As we get older, every move we make seems to carry a tinge of regret. Every choice not taken is a missed opportunity. The words of my brother do not sound so convincing anymore.

Anxiety or gut feeling?

The real reason why we decided to take that seven-hour drive to Shimoda is something I will never know for certain. But if I have to guess, it must be because I had found out about him fucking another girl. I did not tell him that I already knew. But of course, he would notice a change of attitude.

I was always restless, always looking for things to do just to avoid a conversation or sex. Because that’s what you do when you have so much to think about. You wash dirty clothes. Wash the dishes. Scrub the sink that you had just scrubbed the night before. Sometimes, I would hear myself saying, at least I have already cleaned that up and now I only have my life to worry about.

So how did I find out? Gut feeling.

I rummaged through his car while he was asleep to see if I could find some traces of this girl I initially made up in my head. I did not want to be perceived as a psycho girlfriend so I searched for something tangible that I could slap onto his face when it was time to confront him. Two minutes in I found a letter in the compartment of his car. It read:

Futoshi,

You’re working too hard. Take a break and look at Luffy’s face. I’m sure it will cheer you up.

Yui

 I looked for any sign of Luffy all over his car. It didn’t take me long to find a small Luffy stick-on figure tucked under a pile of paper trash in the compartment of his car door. I examined it and found her Docomo email address written on the removable sticker seal at the bottom. But I did not know what to do with it. I tilted the car seat back, sat there for a while, and looked at the sky.

I don’t remember what the weather was like as I was not really looking at the sky. But I remember thinking I was not ready for the truth. I knew our relationship was coming to an end but I had a very hard time admitting it to myself. So I buried Luffy back under the pile of paper trash and decided to not say anything about it. 

But it became an obsession. I would follow him to his work to see if he was really going there. Sometimes I would check his GPS history to see where he had been. I would even go through his phone every single night and read every single message, even those from his mother, just in case mother was his code name for Yui. I remember counting the number of condoms he had kept in his car, constantly checking if he had used any.

One time at a stoplight with both our eyes on the road, I decided to casually ask him if he was cheating on me. He said of course not, slightly raising his voice. I felt relieved that maybe I was just the psycho girlfriend that mothers warn their sons about. I was more than willing to assume the title of a psycho girlfriend if it meant that everything I presumed turned out to be nothing but a figment of my imagination.

But when I turned my head to him to ask who Yui was, I saw him choking on the next few words he was about to say. He forced himself to look me in the eye but he would anxiously blink, constantly checking if the traffic light had turned green. That was the last time I saw him as the man I would spend the rest of my life with.

When he asked me to go to Shimoda with him, I took it as a sign that he knew there was something wrong and that it needed to be addressed. I thought that maybe if he got down on his knees and told me how sorry he was, the little tenderness I had left for him would win against the disgust. But things didn’t turn out the way I expected.

We arrived at this beach house I found online. I chose it mainly because of its name, Ernest House. Their website says:

The name, Ernest House, comes from Ernest Hemingway, the great author who represents the “Lost Generation.” He poured himself into his creative works while relishing his life at the sea. Ernest House is intended to be the home where you can find your hideaway to spread your wings, to read, to chat away, or do creative activities. You are always welcome home with your family, your beloved one, your jolly peers, your lovely pets, and also by yourself.

I was already half-sold the moment I saw the name Ernest Hemingway. But what really sealed the deal was its promise of a hideaway where I could spread my wings. I made sure that we booked a room after the summer break to avoid the congested shores. This way we can have the peace that we drove seven hours for. The price was the chance of a downpour, as the season was already going towards fall.

On our first night, we decided to go to a beachfront restaurant. I thought if he did not want to start the conversation, I would. So I sought the aid of alcohol. Three drinks later I still could not tell him that I already knew.

I could not tell him that I knew she lived in Ashikaga because that was where his GPS would point me every time he told me he was just having drinks in Sano. I could not tell him that I knew he had been sending messages to her because although he had masterfully wiped out all of their messages to each other, he failed to delete his recently messaged contacts. I could not tell him that I knew he had been fucking her because there used to be eight condoms in his car and now there were only five. I could not tell him. And he did not dare speak about it either.

So we just sat there trying to act like nothing was wrong. Smiling at the waitress who brought our orders, letting our beer mugs clink as if we still deserved to be with each other.

On our walk back to our room, I felt the sudden urge to hold his hand and tell him that it is okay and that we can still make this work. That would have been the most rational thing to do given that we were at the beach–a place I thought was perfect for reconciliation.

But there was something in my gut that would not let me do it. Instead, I plunged my hands into the pockets of my jacket and looked at my feet as I dragged them along the sand. The silence between us was so pronounced that I could hear the distant sound of the waves slowly fading away, and the cry of the cicadas echoing through the whole lamp-lit walkway.

We drank some more on our room’s balcony, underneath the blanket of clouds with the stars and the small, yellow slice of moon occasionally peeking through. At this point, there was no attempt to talk about anything. We just drank, bobbing our heads to Nujabes, occasionally looking up at the sky, glancing at our burning cigarettes, and canned beers, and then back to the sky again, carefully avoiding each other’s eyes.

The next day was just like any other day after a night of drinking. I spent the first few hours rehydrating, complaining about a headache. The forecast said rain so we decided to stay in. But the Ernest House staff were thoughtful enough to leave a basket with our breakfast inside with a note that read: Just in case you want to have breakfast by the beach. Ernest House was only a three-minute walk away from the beach so we went despite the clouds warning us to stay in. 

Minutes after we finished our breakfast, we managed to take some photos before it started pouring. I wouldn’t have minded staying in the rain but I had my camera with me so we ran to the nearest restaurant, the same restaurant we went to the previous night.

They welcomed us with fresh towels to dry ourselves. The waitress guided us to a seat near the balcony and she left to get us our drinks. I could tell how she thought how lovely of a couple we were by the way she smiled at us without knowing how the bones of my neck terribly hurt every time I was compelled to turn and look at the man in front of me.

The heavy downpour lasted for what seemed like hours. We spent the whole time staring at the slew of raindrops gushing toward the Earth. He would say something like what a downpour as if we were strangers stuck in an elevator who had nothing better to talk about except the weather. I would gulp ounces of water to help me dilute the alcohol and push the offensive words back down my throat.

I looked around to see what other people might be doing but the restaurant was empty. It was just the ocean, the rain, and this person closest to me sitting across whom I thought was soon going to be a stranger. I remember wondering if he was aware of my sadness and how suffocating the air was becoming each time we attempted to say a word to each other.

An Unexpected Epiphany

I couldn’t name exactly how I felt but it felt like a form of anger, a very quiet one from an outsider’s perspective, but explosive and painful from the inside. I was not sure where it was coming from, like lightning just striking from everywhere, and not really know where it was supposed to be directed –him, Yui, or myself?

I remember feeling a knot in my stomach tightening, slowly moving up through my chest trying to make its way to my throat, until finally reaching my eyes which were now welling up with tears. I never allowed people to see me cry so I quickly wiped my face. The knot had nowhere else to go but up my head.

The idea of having a knot in your head is not welcomed by the brain. Even if it’s just a metaphorical knot, your brain still thinks it’s a real knot causing you to actually feel like your brain is getting heavier and heavier like it’s about to fall from your neck. Out of this desperate attempt to save the head from falling, the brain pumps more oxygen into itself, causing you to take in more breaths in the shortest possible amount of time. The way our brain sabotages itself is still something I have a hard time understanding.

I don’t know how it looked to him, but for a long time, it puzzled me how someone so close to me could have missed what was going on inside me. And for a long time, it puzzled me why it was so difficult for me to say the things I needed to say.

When the rain started to calm down, and with a little alcohol in my system, I got up and braved the cold rain to run back to the beach. I don’t remember if he said anything or not but none of it mattered anymore. I submerged myself in the ocean. This time, it was just me, the rain, and the ocean. That was the first time I discovered the mysterious miracles of plunging yourself into the cold ocean.

I thought about his proposal in the car. Then my thoughts carried me to how big the dome-like slide seemed when I was a child. I thought about how I always wanted to take a good look at whatever was on the ground before allowing gravity to pull me down. I thought about how I always wanted to make sure my mom was there waiting just in case I hurt myself on my way down.

Then I thought about the life that I was about to take without him. I took a long, hard look at it. He made it seem like Love was supposed to be a miserable thing and for a long time, I believed it was a miserable thing. The fact that I dedicated my life to him for the last three years made it hard for me to see my future without him. A bird with broken wings who didn’t even know she had wings until someone broke them. I was 23 and I was just as terrified as when it was my turn to slide down the giant dome. A very familiar terror, only this time with higher stakes.

But other than terror, I had all sorts of other complicated feelings I could not name, like grief over losing someone you regret loving. Grief and regret together is a type of pain like no other. So I decided to get rid of regret and deal with grief later. I realized I had no reason to stay other than fear so I knew I was ready to say goodbye to him forever.

Grieving someone you had already lost

Everything else died with him the day I finally left. I spent the next year grieving for someone who was well and alive. So when I heard of his passing a year later, I could no longer grieve. No matter how much I tried, I could not find any reason to be sad.

Now here I am in this obscure space between guilt and shamelessness for not feeling more than a slight ache, a selfish ache, an ache not even for him, but for myself who feels like those three years of her life have gone into the void with him. Being the only remaining witness of that life we shared is somehow a burden. Perhaps grief is really just a selfish thing.

I decided to find evidence of that memory by going through a few photographs I took of him during that trip. I saw one with him standing by the entrance door of Ernest House and judging by his gesture, it seemed like he was very eager for me to see something inside. There was also one with him jumping on the beach with the ocean in the background—the same ocean I ran away to—and he looked really happy. If I showed you those photographs without telling you what really happened in Shimoda, you would think it was a happy memory.

I don’t remember taking those photographs, let alone living through those moments. His smile doesn't mean anything to me anymore and these photographs are nothing but dead weight. All I remember is pain and regret and also complicated feelings of distress for feeling the way that I feel for someone who is dead.

And when I look at those photographs of me and him, I begin to wonder whether that was really me, or that was really him, ten-something years ago. But if there must be one thing that remains alive, let it be his definition of what it means to be truly happy:

楽しいは自分の好きなことやものがあること。幸せは誰かに愛されてるってことだよ！

“To possess the things one desires may bring temporary joy, but only by way of true love can one find true happiness.”