After dinner I walk. Not far. Through the kitchen, past the dining table, into the living room and back. The dishwasher hums. The girls’ voices come from somewhere upstairs. Saathi is at the table with his laptop, working through tennis schedules.
I stop at the window.
Some nights the moon is a sliver, almost erased. Some nights a crescent. Some nights it is full and so close it looks staged. Some nights the sky is gray and there is nothing to see, and even then, I stop, because the absence is also an answer.
When I find it, I call.
Laddu. Come look.
She comes. Sometimes she rolls her eyes first. Sometimes she pretends she is busy. She comes anyway. We stand at the window and look up together. If she is not around I call Saathi. If neither of them answer I send a photo to whoever will receive it.
The moon is not for keeping to yourself.
· · ·
Years ago, before any of this, I was watching a Korean drama called Romance is a Bonus Book. I wrote about it on this site, back when it first found me. It was the first time I came across the line.
A man and a woman are standing on the front porch of a beautiful house, his. He is in love with her. He cannot say it, or will not. He looks up and says: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it.
The phrase comes from Natsume Sōseki, the Japanese novelist. The story goes that Sōseki was teaching English and a student translated I love you directly. Sōseki corrected him. A Japanese person, he said, would not say it that way. They would say: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it. Tsuki ga kirei desu ne.
The story may be apocryphal. To stand beside someone and look at the same thing, and to mean by it: I love you, I am here, I see what you see. Love crafted from attention, from gazing in the same direction.
In the K-dramas the trope returns and returns. Two characters on a bench. A balcony. A roof. They do not face each other. They face the same horizon. The camera holds. Whatever is between them passes through the moon and arrives on the other side.
What makes the line work, I think, is the refusal to say the other thing. The man on the bench could say I love you. He does not. He says something about the moon. The substitution is the love. To replace one sentence with another and trust the listener to follow you across the gap is itself a kind of intimacy. The line is not tender because of the moon. It is tender because of what is being chosen instead.
· · ·
The first time Saathi and I met seriously, we sat on a low wall at a temple in Bangalore. We had agreed to marry each other. I remember the setting sun, the light breeze, telling him I did not want him to lead or to follow, just walk by my side and be my friend. He nodded.
He has been living out that sentiment since.
I have been watching the moon with him for twenty-five years now.
Most nights he looks up only because I asked him to. What I keep is the lifting of his head from the laptop, the small turn toward the window, the half second before he sees what I am pointing at.
· · ·
I have a collection of moons on my phone. The ones from my side porch, the moon being the primary focus. The ones by the driveway, framed between the towering pines. The one from Austin, surrounded by extended family. One from California, on a vacation immersed in beauty. The one from Las Cruces, on a winter night, when my heart was breaking. One from Albuquerque, when I was holding too much. They are the notches on the tree of my life.
In every new city I look up first. Before I orient to streets, before I find the food, I find the moon. It tells me where I am. Or rather, it tells me I am still where I am, only the ground has changed.
Whoever I am with knows by now. Look, I say. They look. A pointing. A turning of two faces in the same direction.
· · ·
Sōseki was Japanese. He wrote Kokoro and I Am a Cat and a great deal more, and he died in 1916. His name reaches me through a Korean drama I happened to watch on a streaming service in Pennsylvania, where I now live, having left Tamil Nadu and then Bangalore to arrive here. After dinner I walk to the window and look up and call my daughter, who was born in this country and has never lived in any other.
The phrase is Japanese. The drama is Korean. The marriage began in Bangalore. The window is in Exton. The moon is the same moon.
The hyphen in my life has so many sides it stopped being a hyphen long ago. It is a smudge. The moon stands above it and says nothing.
Tsuki ga kirei desu ne.
· · ·
I first wrote about Romance is a Bonus Book, and the line that started all of this, here.
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