▸ Column · Modern Konoha — grounded comic register, Hidden Leaf Village
JIRAIYA replies.
Replied to by Jiraiya, with a rebuttal from Orochimaru.
The letter
So I matched with this guy Ryota on a dating app about three weeks ago. By our second date he was already calling me his soulmate and asking which city we should raise kids in. We'd known each other maybe ten days. He texts "good morning, my whole world" at 6am every single morning, and the second I pull out of his driveway he's already sending "I miss you already." Last week he showed up at my office with flowers and a necklace because he "couldn't wait until the weekend to see my face."
My sister Aiko keeps telling me I'm crazy for even questioning it — a man this sure of you is rare, she says. But when I gently asked him to slow the pace down a little, he went completely silent and then told me he'd "never felt this way about anyone." Like me wanting some breathing room was something I'd done to him. (I only asked once. Gently.)
Honestly, part of me is flattered — I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But part of me feels like I'm being pulled under a current I never actually agreed to swim in. Is this just a really intense, romantic person? Or is my gut picking up on something real?
— Treading Water in Konoha
Jiraiya replies
I am the Gallant Jiraiya — the greatest, the most brilliant, and the most thoroughly banned from certain bathhouse establishments in three countries! I tell you this so you understand I've made choices that looked romantic and turned out to be someone else's horror story. I know the difference between devotion and possession.
Here it is, kid: real love expands you. It gives you room to breathe, to be strange, to have a bad day and not have it become his wound. What you're describing is someone who can't tolerate the idea of you having air.
I once watched someone very close to me — closer than I wish, some days — become someone who needed to own every beautiful thing he came near. He'd have called it love. He believed it. But love that needs to consume the other person isn't love yet; it's a hunger wearing love's clothes.
Now — you noticed the real tell yourself. You asked for breathing room. Once. Gently. And he made it about his pain. That's not a man who loves you. That's a man checking whether the leash holds.
I won't tell you he can't grow. Some people simply never learned what love is supposed to feel like from the inside. A little compassion for that.
But your job right now is not to teach him. Your job is to take care of the one in your own skin.
You used the word current. Something that pulls you under without asking. Kid, trust the word you chose.
— Jiraiya
Orochimaru weighs in
Kukukuku. My old friend counsels "protect your air" and "a little compassion" for the man pulling you under. He would. He extended that same courtesy toward me across several decades. I leave the results as an exercise for the reader.
What your sister and Jiraiya alike have missed: you said you were flattered. That word is the current's mouth, my dear. The 6am texts, the necklace, the reproachful silence — technically speaking, experiments. Each one calibrated to find what holds you in place. He is not romancing you. He is determining what you cost to keep.
You are not his soulmate. You are the thing he has decided not to lose.
I know that architecture. I know precisely where it leads. Study me accordingly — and do not, under any circumstances, become me.
— Orochimaru
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