The Perfect Stranger Myth

Safety pins are not so safe, my satin boxers lost the button on the fly a long long time ago. A safety pin would appear to fix everything but with my tossing and turning at night more than likely stab me in the genitals, and that would hurt.
A random thought but an appropriate analogy.
My hair has hit that shitful zone were it's just too short to tie back too long to look good prettied up. I mean I can tie it up but it's like a painful tumor at the top of my skull once I tuck all the skanky bits in.
So I was looking for all the elastics my sister brought back from Japan for me just before I spontaneously cut all my hair off last time. Problem is I have a million little Japanese gift bags cramed into every crack of my room filled with origami phalluses, beads, old old japanese candy, bookmarks, letters in broken english and not a fucking one with a hairtie elastics in it.
But I found something so much better! My wife, that is to say the answer to all my problems. I am of course kidding, but that is to say I wasn't thrilled to find a little slip of 4 x 2 print club stickers of me squating down on the brink of falling over next to the...(i think the difference in height was 27 cm from memory) 142 cm/4'7" japanese beauty Yoko Kimura, my perfect stranger.
I met Yoko in 2000-2001 summer which was winter at Seijoh High School. I don't know how it happened I really can't recall but I ended up alking to this girl with canine teeth that stuck out at right angles to her other teeth so her upper lip curled over them. She had eyes like a cat and otherwise was pretty much a run of the mill asian, you know silky black hair and olive complexion almond eyes blah blah blah smelt like rice and fish. (I'm kidding yoko)
A comment like that would solicit a severe beating which entailed the most hesitant slap you ever saw in your life that landed on my forearm with all the severity of a butterfly with food poisoning enduced dehydrated giddiness.
She could do no wrong and I knew not a fucking thing about her. She was yet another stomper and she wore these cute plastic green slippers that many of my associates would recognise from my wanderings around IH often accompanying my fluffy bogan raver shorts.
I still more often than not refer to her as my wife as I used to write home to mum and pop to say I'd knocked up this Japanese girl and now was getting married, which would have been funnier if it had actually happened.
So what this is pretty self indulgent Tom, you fuck, pretty boring to read. It was just a fixation a projection of my fantasy that I could cut my ties and shirk my responsibilities to the people who'd made me to live in fantasy land (japan is not fantasy land). Yoko has played a tremendously important role in my life and an entirely fictitious one. She gets me high, every time over the past 5 years I recieved a scrap of correspondance I'd be pretty giddy for days. When I was having a shit time of things I'd email her or write to ask her advice.
She was lovely too, she'd write such sweet things and such overprotective condescending (but genuinely innocent) advice to me that whether by the time I recieved it was of any use to me at all it was still touching and helped me keep perspective (ironically) on the bigger picture.
I read that infidelity often arises from a partner getting bored with their own life and creating a perfect stranger out of a perfect stranger setting themselves up for dissapointment (as you don't deal with your actual problems) and it truly is a situation where everyone gets hurt. Yoko is my perfect stranger even though every time I've seen her I've been heinously single AND I've never managed to get any action out of that due to my complete stupidity/lack of confidence in reading the signs (more on that later) and further more because I've often thought the key to my struggle for personal integrity is that I don't trust myself and I actually find Yoko as an unobtainable fantasy is more useful to me than pursuing an unrealistic relationship with no common language and no common interests (she wants to be an interior designer) smokes and likes shitty psuedo R&B music.
Yet when she drives me around town on her yellow booster cushion to help her see over the dashboard my face burns hot. I have an undeniable chemical response that if you read the white masai (don't) would be romantic if I decided to quit my job, my family, my country and move in with her.
But chemicals are just that. I was sitting in a park with my best friend a couple of weeks back and he put it beautifully 'You have emotional relationships and sexual relationships' but between us it was one of those half full half empty situations. He was saying you start a new relationship and its sexual, which I agree with and then over time the sexual side diminishes and it becomes emotional, which I also agree with, and then you still need the sexual side so you should then pursue a new sexual relationship. Which I agree with also but its a tradeoff and a bad one. And you have fucking choices too.
There is no surer path to misery than BLINDLY following your emotions, and we had civilised arguements over the likely hood of people actually being okay with being cuckholded and the true value of an emotional relationship. I can tell you that love and sex are complimentary but two different things. I like to have sex all the time, my rule and maybe it's a loser one is that I wouldn't have sex though if the act of sex was more important to me than the person it was with.
Yoko makes my face burn yes, she can give me three day giddies with a simple letter about what she's been up to. But we have nothing in common, we can't support eachother in any meaningful way and we don't think in the same language nor do I appreciate what she really believes in (tinkerbell and interior design [well actually I do appreciate it]) it's fun but its shallow.
I'd rather have a mate that was a mate in the true sense of the word (or maybe in the colloquial sense) who I can share a laugh and just chill with rather than magical feelings for no reason.
But still I found this little set of photo stickers and it made me pretty happy. Its really just a good luck charm that happens to be a walking talking human being. I lost touch with her over the last year I always send her a birthday card. But last time I was in Japan she had just finished year 12 (and I was in 2nd year uni but she's a month older than me I don't get it) and was waiting to hear her results to see if she got into interior design. I went to a shinto shrine on one of my morning runs, I have a lot of time for shinto, like native american beliefs everything in the natural world has gaurdian spirits whom you can pray to, Japan itself is holy land and you can go to shrines, clap your hands and throw some coins in a box. I ran into this shrine, I had no money so I promised I'd spend 3 months in service to a shrine if she got into her course. A deal with the kami I intend to fulfill but I never heard if she did or not. If anyone knows I'll get round to it I promised after all.