On Sunday April 17, 2016, I received the last messages from the lion.
11:12am: “hello Kokoro, can you please stop ignoring me for a few minutes so that we can figure out what’s best to do?”
2:44pm: “Ok so… Since I absolutely don’t know what to do, I asked Kei for some advice… Hope you don’t mind, but without you telling me what you would like me to do I don’t see any other solution. Bye”
He’d been messaging me for months about what we were going to do, or what I wanted him to do, but there was nothing more to say. I wanted him to be safe and do his work. I wanted me to be safe too. These things either didn’t make sense to him or didn’t constitute as answers to him, since my sentiments were ignored. He continued to ask the same questions.
The day I received these messages, Kei and I had gone to visit Audrey and her daughter, Aisha. I saw the second message while I was babysitting. Audrey and Kei had stepped out to pick up snacks for us all. I didn’t have long to wait for them to come home, and when I informed them of what happened, Kei checked her phone to find the message from him.
She read it out loud.
“Hi Kei, hope I find you good. Was great to see Shun [her partner] again and as I told him, if you don’t mind it would be great to see you too at some point. Sadly the situation is extremely complicated right now and I don’t know what to do to make things better for everybody. Honestly I’m actually desperate about that. You’ve been a great help and a kind ear for me at some point, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for that. It’s been a while I have wanted to talk to you and to ask you for some advice, but since I wanted to leave some space to Kokoro I prevented myself from doing it. Maybe it was yet another stupid mistake, and maybe right now is the worst moment for it. If so I’m deeply sorry for that. Well… that’s about it. Basically I’d love to talk with you at some pint if you have a bit of time or space for me, and I’m sorry for bothering you. Thank you for everything, have a good day.”
By the time she finished reading this, she was fuming. She was so angry she was shaking. She’d never been so angry.
Kei and Audrey decided they needed a drink. Together, they drank and composed a response to the lion. They wrote, swore, rewrote, laughed, swore, cried, drank some more, swore, and edited again. I played with Aisha during most of that time, sometimes listening to the rage, sometimes watching them talk, laugh, cry, drink, and write. This continued for about three hours until they were properly drunk, and had sent the response. We all hugged and cried.
I was supposed to go home to my own apartment that night (I’d been living at Kei’s), but after this, I wasn’t allowed. I had dirty laundry in my backpack that Audrey washed for me. It was agreed that Shun would escort me to work the next morning and Kei would pick me up by car in the evening. This continued for a few days, and even during the day, I didn’t leave the safety of the locked doors at work alone.
I felt so loved. I left like I was protected by a pack of wolves. It was totally new to me.
On the train heading home from Audrey’s, Kei was still drunk. Part way back, she got sick. Luckily, I had a plastic bag and a few towelettes. I had them ready to go, only to find out the bag had a hole in it. Laughing, I pulled out another plastic bag – it was pink, and came with a golden twist-tie – from my collection of random things in my backpack. I got Kei’s hands and jeans cleaned, the floor of the train all cleaned, and her vomit wrapped in the pink bag, closed off with the golden twist-tie. It looked like a gift. Once everything was out of her system, Kei was fine, and we got off the train laughing, threw out the bag, and walked back to her apartment as if nothing had happened.
It was a crazy day, but a very important day for me. I have a photo of Audrey and Kei, their heads back from laughing, sitting at Audrey’s dining table as they drink and compose the message they sent the lion. It’s a great photo.
Musings of a survivor 