#rotate men in your head like Tetris

[ohbeffinitely]

✨ hello fellow diablo gamers ✨

[youremarvelous]

yoi lit mag preview: Young Folks

Hi all! At long last it’s time to post my preview for the @yoilitmag ! Please support the project if you can, everyone has put forth a ton of effort towards making some really wonderful pieces for issue 2 (theme: time).

Summary: After thirty years of living in California, working as a travel agent to drum up business for his family’s onsen, Yuuri finds himself out of the job, completely alone, and surviving his day to day life, rather than ever really living it. It’s not the right time to find love, but like the rotation of the earth around the sun—relentless in its projected course—Yuuri finds he might not have a say in the matter.

Yuuri squints at the hours of operation sign peeling off the one-way mirror door of his nearby neighborhood bar. The late August sun peers over his shoulder—a judgmental interloper—scrawling the fine lines around his eyes and mouth in deep wells of inky shadow and sticking his shirt to his back with sweat.

He wipes his forehead with his arm, checks the time on his phone. 11:34. The bar has barely opened. The thought of being labeled a pathetic Tuesday morning drunk burns the back of Yuuri’s neck like a branding iron, but his shame seesaws with a surge of heart-squeezing anxiety. He pushes his way inside before reason has time to settle, the specter of Yuuko’s inevitable disappointment trailing hot on his heels.  

She corralled him into her apartment only a few days earlier.

“We need to talk.”

“Uh oh.” Yuuri lowers himself onto the triplet’s old stepping stool, one of the few remaining furniture pieces not wrapped up in bubble wrap and piled Tetris-tight into Yuuko and Takeshi’s station wagon. “Are you breaking up with me?”

Yuuko lobs a balled up real estate ad at his head. “Be serious.”

“You better listen to her,” Takeshi warns from the kitchen. He’s facing away from them at the stove—hip cocked to one side, stirring the curry for tonight’s dinner. “She’s been in planning mode for months trying to figure out how to mother you from Japan.”

Yuuri rubs his sweaty palms on his thighs. He’s dizzy from the smell of spices, the heat of the apartment crowding in on all sides. He picks up a business card from the pile of past graduation programs and long-expired warranties Yuuko’s sorting, runs his finger across the gold embossed lettering. ‘Onsen Travel Services,’ a relic of his former life.

“You should be worrying about how to keep up with the girls.”

“The girls call me every day,” Yuuko says. She tucks a newspaper-wrapped framed nursing certificate into the box at her foot and settles back into her chair, tucks a loose strand of silver-threaded hair behind her ear. “You’ve lived next door since we were kids and you won’t even respond to a text.”

“It’s hard for me to read the screen.”

“You read off a screen all day.”

“That’s not reading, that’s...” Yuuri pushes a hand up under his glasses, presses his fingers into his eyelid. “So...socializing?”

“Arguing with strangers over the delivery date of their shower beer caddies isn’t socializing.”

“But arguing with you about this is?”

“This isn’t an argument,” Yuuko clarifies with a finality that exemplifies her thirty-odd years raising three headstrong future lawyers. “It’s a discussion. When’s the last time you left your apartment?”

“Yesterday.”

“For something other than groceries.”

Yuuri feels a trickle of sweat drip down his spine. He stares at a phone number scrawled on the back of the business card, a Rorschach blot of ultramarine where the ink has bled out from sweat or maybe tears.

“I’m not trying to criticize.” Yuuko leans forward to touch his knee. “I know it’s been a hard year. I just...I don’t want you to end up one of those old men who die in their apartment without anyone knowing.”

Yuuri flinches.

“Which is why...” Yuuko waits patiently, lets her intentions hang until Yuuri lifts his eyes to meet hers. “I set up a date for you.”

The words settle into Yuuri’s brain one by one. Separate, at first, ‘date, what about the date, how can she set up anything when she’s leaving tomorrow morning?’ Then all at once—a disorienting deluge. “You...what?” Yuuri asks when he’s recovered enough to speak.

Takeshi whistles low from the kitchen.

“He’s from my seniors’ yoga class. He’s nice. And handsome. You’ll like him.”

Yuuri clenches the business card in his hand. The sharp cardstock edges crease his palm. “You’ve got to cancel it.”

“It’s not that serious,” Yuuko insists. “You can go to the park, maybe the aquarium…”

“What if he’s a murderer?” Takeshi offers wryly.   

“Right, one of those yoga-loving serial killers they’re always talking about in the news.” Yuuko bats off the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “He dresses his dog in sweaters. He’s completely harmless.”

“What if he doesn’t like me?” Yuuri’s lungs cave in, his breathing stilted and uncomfortable. “I’m...it’s been years. What do you even wear on a date?”

“You look fine in what you have on,” Yuuko says. Yuuri looks down at his tattered sweatpants in disbelief. “Takeshi, tell him he looks good.”

Takeshi sets two bowls of rice on the table, the third nestled in the crook of his arm. “You’re sexy and you know it.”

Yuuri doesn’t know it. He clenches his fingers into his greying temples on the morning of the ‘date’—a Tuesday because Yuuri had hoped the odd hour would dissuade his mystery suitor from showing. He paces the length of his living room like an animal in a cage, his thunderous heartbeat shaking his hands, pushing into his throat.

Yuuri has spent the past year bleeding out his days in a stagnant cycle of meaningless work and sleep, but now he feels the pulse of every second ticking in the back of his mind like a countdown—the overwhelming need to move.

He’ll go on a quick walk, he decides, to get some air, clear his head. It isn’t until he’s a mile down the road, pushing his way out of the overbearing heat into the damp, air-conditioned cold of a nearby bar that reality descends.

There’s another patron inside. Yuuri sits two stools over from him, staring hard into the depressing depths of his third early afternoon screwdriver. He wants not to care, but he keeps catching pieces of him in his periphery. The pink cuff of his rolled sleeve, the length of his thigh straining the seams of his slate grey slacks.

Yuuri glances over for a better look, to complete the Picassian puzzle of Eastern European cheekbones and manicured fingers poised around a half-empty vodka tonic. He’s met with clear blue eyes—beauty that’s only sharpened by the influence of time pushing against his hairline, wrinkling his forehead like a silk sheet.

“The loneliest men in town, right?” The man lifts his drink, toasts the open air with a wink. “You can sit closer, you know. No need to be a stranger.”

Yuuri would normally turn away, pretend not to have heard, but he’s been staring. Still is. A rare breeze plays at his back. He stands because it feels less awkward than the alternative.

“There we go,” the man says when Yuuri settles in next to him.

Yuuri swallows a mouthful of his drink. The vodka loosens the words from his throat. “I don’t normally do this.”

“Do what?” The man asks with a lax smile.

“Come here,” Yuuri clarifies. “Drink before twelve.”

The man raises his eyebrows, his smile curves down almost imperceptibly before righting itself again. “Should we leave then?”

Yuuri chokes into his screwdriver.