The happier I feel…

 The more scared I get.

Saturday with Jinu was so much fun, maybe too much fun that I had so many emotional flashbacks on Sunday. 

I picked him up at 11am from his apartment (his apartment is about 600 meters away from mine). When he got into my car, he said he was excited, but he couldn’t look at me in my eyes at the beginning. Then he told me he didn’t sleep well the night before because he got too drunk at a party hosted by our coworkers. In the morning he was still a bit hungover. Then the traffic to “Ocean to table” was pretty bad so it took us about 2 hours to get to the restaurant. On our way there, we talked nonstop. When we stopped for gas, I asked him why his mom chose to marry his stepdad even though he was abusive to Jinu, he said, “I guess when you really like someone, you refuse to believe…” I said, “I get it. It’s easier to live in denial.” Then we talked about work, his friends at our school now, music, my brain etc. We also talked about the incident I had at the parking lot on Monday and he got so activated again. He said he can’t stand his friends being aggressed and if he was physically there he would have thrown a lot of f-words at him and called him fucking ugly, which I find really amusing because it was like he was regressing to a high schooler. I forgot the context but I told him that besides being intellectually gifted, I’m also very visual and I like art, and I also have perfect pitch. Then as we were on the highway, we decided to do karaoke because he was in a choir in high school and he thinks our taste in music is so similar, like 90s pop. So the number one karaoke song was obviously It’s My Life by Bon Jovi. We were singing so happily and there were just so much laughter from 11am to 9pm (we got home at 9pm). 

Our reservation was at 1:40pm and we arrived at the restaurant at 1pm so we decided to sing even more in the car. I showed him Chasing Time, the song written for me by Gen, and Jinu’s first question was, “are you dating him?” I said and laughed, “NO!!” I told him Gen was living in Tokyo and he asked, “no chance that he’s moving back?” I said, “No, no, no. I have never met him in person. There’s a website where people can share stories anonymously and he saw my story and told me I inspired him.” Jinu asked, “so you reached out to him?” I said, “no he reached out to me and wanted to write my story into a song.” When he saw Gen’s photo on Spotify, he thought Gen was good looking. When I showed him the version that had “Feel Better Kendra” at the start, he was suspicious and said there were a million Kendras in the world. Then I showed him another short video saying that the Chinese version was written by Kendra Johanson. I told him “frangipani by the tide” was completely my story. He first had to google what frangipani looked like, and then I explained at my wedding chapel in Bali, there were all these floor to ceiling glass windows and people could look out into the ocean and the entire floor was covered by frangipani petals. Then he said holy shit I think. He asked to see a photo of it so I showed him the music video I made with my photos and lyrics. 

At Ocean to Table, the dining experience was awesome. It was basically a show where the chef performed for the omakase teppanyaki. He found it incredible that he could have a dining experience like this on a work weekend and he had never had any dining experience like this before. It was good to dine with him because he’s very happy to spend big bucks on fine dining, unlike Angel, and he loves seafood like I do. With Angel, every time when I wanted to eat some seafood, I’d have to convince him that it was worth it or that he’d get his parents to pay for it. Jinu doesn’t have much family money but he has more of an abundance mentality like me; he’s very willing to spend big bucks on good food and good experiences. 

The thing that cracked us up at the table was some of the things the chef said. The chef would say things like, “I’m going to put black peppers in the fried rice so that it tastes like black peppers”, “this is called golden fried rice because it’s cooked with eggs and the egg yolks are yellow”, “the waiter will give everyone a napkin so that you can use it to wipe your hands.” He would even point at the lettuce of the burger and say to us, “this is lettuce”. I told him the two things that always get me are “stating the obvious” and redundancies and we were laughing so much. He also said that if anyone asked what he did for Saturday, he’d tell them “I had PD on Saturday” because I told him that dining experience was just like inquiry-based learning, in which the idea is to activate all of a student’s senses—verbal, visual, auditory, touch, smell and taste if you’d want to achieve “deep” learning. That’s what the chef did with us with his explanation and cooking, and we had a view of the mountains and rice fields, and all the utensils and plates’ colors were coordinated with the food.

Then this thing became our inside joke for the rest of the day. Then we went to a lake nearby for a walk. I told him I love the mountains in the rain because you’d always see the misty clouds around the mountains. At one point I laughed so hard that I was tearing up and my stomach was sore. Another joke that made us laugh really hard was that on Friday, our secretary told another teacher “You should check your junk” when the teacher told the secretary that he didn’t get her email. When the secretary replied like this, both Jinu and I laughed in the office, and no one else did. When we revisited the joke, we laughed so hard, and I told him that our secretary was afraid that she could be accused of sexual harassment for saying that. I told Jinu maybe it’s Jinu and I who’d be accused of that because we laughed. While we were walking around the lake, we talked about WASPs, and he seems to really hate WASPs, ideologically. When I told him the condescending things that Angel’s parents had said to me, he had the exact same response like Erik—it gave him chills. He asked, “why are the cheap like this even though they’re so rich?” I said, “I don’t know? Maybe it’s a Jewish thing? I’m don’t wanna be racist…” Jinu said, “Jewish is not a race” and I said, “I know. OK. I don’t wanna be anti-Semitic.”

The only time when we were quiet was at the hot springs. We had two separate private rooms and we did hot springs for 90 minutes so we didn’t talk during that time. Afterwards he said he was very relaxed and we went shopping for souvenirs for his parents; he’s going back to the US to see his parents for Christmas. He told me he’s a very different person when he’s in front of his family; he barely says anything in front of his family. He said when he was 5, he made a mistake and he was so upset, and his dad thought he was sad that he made a mistake, and I continued, “no, you were sad because you wanted to punish yourself before you were actually punished because you were terrified.” He said, “yes”. I told him I am the same way. We also gossiped about some coworkers. I asked him if he thought I was on the spectrum, and he said he’d be biased because he already knew I had a disability. I said “no i don’t have a disability. My car’s disability badge is my kids’.” He said when he first met me, he noticed that I’d go very deep about things, and at work I even had time to read other books so he suspected that I was on the spectrum. I told him I am neurodivergent because I have complex PTSD and intellectual giftedness, and those things these days count as neurodivergence. I also told him that when I was little I had speech impairment and I corrected myself without any intervention at age 6 in the first grade. He told me he had speech impairment when he was little too and he got speech therapy for that; he was a stutterer. I told him it was weird that we’re both so verbal and yet when we were little we had speech problems. Maybe we had too many things to say in our brain and our mouth couldn’t catch up yet. We weren’t patient enough to wait for the words to come out so we’d say those words improperly. 

At one point he asked me, “in a different life where I could be good at Econ, do you think we’d make great teammates? I think we would.” I thought for a second, “maybe. Who knows.” We also talked about people’s relationship with money—both of us are generous to others, but not to ourselves. I told him not many people are generous with me but when I value a connection I don’t care about the money.

When I dropped him off, he said, “I had a great time today” without looking at me in the eye at all again, and I said, “me too”. Then I drove away.

Today I had a lot of emotional flashbacks and cried a lot. I think the flashbacks of abandonment was when my parents left me in my grandparents’ house when I was 5. We visited my grandparents and my parents wanted to take us back to The City of Rain, but my uncle was going to take his family to the beach and I really wanted to go with them and kept crying. Then my parents let me go with them. I had so much fun, and I thought, “for the first time my parents finally let me be happy for once, but would they go home without me?” Then after my uncle dropped me off at my grandparents’ house, I saw my suitcase on the front porch of my grandparents’ house. My parents went back to the City of Rain without us. For the entire six months, I went to a kindergarten in the neighborhood of my grandparents’ house, raised by my grandparents, completely without my parents. I lived with neglect, abuse, and had to protect my younger brother because he was stubborn and difficult and often got into trouble with my grandparents. The abuse from my grandparents was obviously not as bad as my father’s abuse, but I really missed my mom. I remember clearly that she called me on the phone once, asking me if I missed her. It was the first time in my life that I lied about my feelings and suppressed my tears and said, “no I don’t miss you.”

On Saturday, Jinu made me laugh so hard and everything was so much fun, but I am terrified of being abandoned again, because it has happened too many times.

I saw the second half of Zootopia 2 today (long story short—I misremembered the time of the movie and arrived at the theater there with my family and could only see half of it) and Judy Hobbs and Nick Wilde were talking about that they are each other’s most important person in their life, that they were scared and insecure, and my tears just kept rolling down my face.