By Michael Pattinson

Yumi met Claire the way a mirror catches light: unexpectedly, naturally, and immediately revealing.

It was during an exhibition opening at a small gallery in Nakameguro, one that featured a collection themed around “Emotions with No Translation.” Claire stood quietly before a photograph of two people sitting back-to-back on a park bench, a long shadow connecting them like a thread. Yumi, staffing the reception desk, noticed her lingering.

“That one’s called saudade,” Yumi offered. “A kind of longing. Missing something that maybe never even fully happened.”

Claire turned. “So… like when you imagine a memory that hasn’t happened yet?”

Yumi tilted his head. “Exactly.”

That was the beginning: no spark, no thunderclap. Just the clean click of two ideas meeting.

Claire was already married to Hiroshi, a ceramicist with a gift for stillness and glaze. Yumi was living with Nalo, a software developer with careful hands and a vocabulary of small kindnesses. They were both happy, deeply so. Their relationships had roots. But the friendship that grew between them bloomed fast and strange, like a flower out of season.

It began with texts, shared playlists, quiet lunches in the back corners of bookstores. Then came the walks. No destination, no goal. Just motion and presence.

The discomfort didn’t start with them. It arrived as subtext.

Hiroshi once asked, gently, “Does Yumi know more about you than I do?”

Nalo didn’t ask anything. She just started noticing when Yumi laughed at his phone. He could feel her noticing.

They reassured their partners: This is friendship. Deep, yes. But not transgressive.

What they couldn’t articulate was that the world had already decided their closeness was suspicious, not because of anything they did, but because of what they refused to perform. Their friendship made people uncomfortable precisely because it didn’t follow the script.

Women were supposed to prioritise romantic love above all. They were supposed to reserve emotional intimacy for their partners, and if not, then at least for other women in appropriately codependent ways.

And then there was Nalo, caught in the tangle. She wasn’t angry. She didn’t accuse. But she had been taught to recognise threat in silence, in withheld stories, in inside jokes she wasn’t a part of.

Yumi would lie beside her and wonder if he was betraying something just by being understood elsewhere.

Claire would sit across from Hiroshi at dinner and wonder if honesty without full articulation still counted as honesty.

The thing is: they weren’t in love, not like that.

But they were something.

Once, during a shared weekend in Karuizawa with their partners, Claire and Yumi walked ahead of the others, steps syncing unconsciously.

“If we were two men, this would be called a brotherhood,” Claire said.

Yumi nodded. “Or if we were men and women and slept together once, they’d say it was complicated and move on.”

Claire kicked a stone into a stream. “But because we don’t sleep together, and we don’t want to, people don’t know where to put us.”

There was no rulebook for this.

They had no desire to replace their partners. But they also had no desire to shrink their bond into something palatable.

One afternoon, as they walked through Aoyama, Claire reading aloud from a small poetry book she’d picked up at a second-hand shop, Yumi reached out his arm instinctively, guiding her gently across the street as the signal changed.

His hand lingered for a second at the small of her back. She paused mid-sentence.

He drew his hand away quickly, apologetic, a flush rising to his face. “Sorry. That felt… presumptuous.”

Claire turned to look at him, neither annoyed nor surprised. Just present.

“No,” she said. “That was… kind.”

It struck Yumi like a hush in his chest: that physical intimacy didn’t have to tip toward hunger. That touch could mean presence, not desire, that he had been trained to read every contact as loaded. And that maybe, the final frontier of their friendship wasn’t emotional. It was this: comfort in the unguarded body.

Later that week, they sat by the river, the sun low and bruised against the sky. Claire reached out and touched the inside of Yumi’s forearm, where his sleeve had shifted to reveal a delicate tattoo of an abstract wave. Her finger traced the ink without asking.

“I’ve never noticed this,” she said.

He had no memory of the girl who poked the ink, but he remembered watching as his skin was stained forever.

He let her touch him, let the moment pass without tension. It didn’t feel charged. It felt… marked in a better way. More art, less scars.

Something in him softened. Not with desire. With permission.

Yumi once tried explaining it to Nalo. He said, “There’s a kind of companionship that doesn’t take anything away from you. That fills in corners you didn’t know were missing.”

She had nodded. She wanted to understand. But she had no framework. Male friendships rarely allowed for softness, for emotional fluency.

She didn’t know how to compete with something that didn’t compete.

Hiroshi tried too. He asked Claire, “Are you in love with him?”

“No,” Claire said. “But I love him. And I think it’s the kind of love that doesn’t need to be undone to be understood.”

It was hard on them all.

But still, the friendship endured.

They kept walking. Kept writing. Kept sharing quiet discoveries. When Hiroshi had his first solo exhibition in Kyoto, Yumi sent flowers with a card that read: A steady hand makes space for wild beauty.

When Nalo got promoted, Claire sent a bottle of sake with a note: Some stability deserves celebration.

They weren’t trying to infiltrate each other’s relationships. They were trying to prove a point, perhaps mostly to themselves: that love — the big, wild kind that doesn’t ask for possession — could coexist with structure.

One rainy evening, Claire and Yumi met alone in a half-empty diner. They didn’t talk about the unease, or the micro-jealousies, or the quiet drift their partners sometimes expressed. They just sat, sharing fries.

Yumi said, “I used to think that love had to look like architecture. Something you build, something that keeps the rain out.”

Claire leaned back. “But maybe it’s more like climate. Something you live inside.”

Neither spoke for a while. The jukebox changed songs. Outside, the rain kept falling, unbothered.

As years passed, the world didn’t get more forgiving. But Claire and Yumi learned to stop asking permission for the shape of their closeness. And best of all, their lovers didn’t ask them for permission.

They stayed best friends. They stayed faithful. They stayed seen.

And that, in the end, was the rebellion.

Because the discomfort was never theirs to carry.

It belonged to a world that couldn’t fathom that love could be full and non-romantic, that loyalty could stretch sideways instead of forward, that two people could see each other entirely and still yearn to go home to someone else.

They didn’t need to explain it anymore. They just lived it.

Sawbona. I see you.

And in seeing you, I remember I am seen.

Inspired by: Scratched, like a record | a poem | P.S. I Love You