J
J entered JoaFruit through a locked door. After our first weekend together, I announced that “A LOT happened” and sent readers towards the password-protected Jump. The following week contained 5am nights, films, animated shorts and an “opportunity for intimacy”. I described him as “fantastic, beautiful, charming, a great dancer, a good conversationalist”. He was American and spent Christmas visiting family in Okinawa, a detail I repeated because readers evidently required an accurate international boyfriend index. He was due home to the US in February. The romance arrived with an expiry date. Enter through the surviving fragments of our first weekends →
Before then, J persuaded me to try Burger King. Other North-American-ish English speakers in Asia had assured me it was astonishingly high-quality junk food. It still tasted like grilled cardboard. Next came a poignant final weekend in Daejeon, the fairly grim city at the centre of Korea. On Sunday we “decided very calmly to break up”. I concluded that I needed several months of uncomplicated single life, something I should probably have realised after Kenken. 6 weeks later, I joined J and his pals for birthday drinks in Seoul. Ex-lovers in JoaFruit could become disasters, legends, enemies or ghosts. J became somebody whose birthday you could still attend. Years later in Tokyo, we resumed a friendship now more than 20 years old, including 2 further chapters of living in the same big city. Reach the civilised breakup → Join J’s birthday drinks →