The Shape of Love: Ten Years Later

I was trying to escape.

That was the honest summary of my afternoon. Lunch with Becca, lovely as it was, followed by twenty minutes of attempting to extract myself from Covent Garden in London’s West End, was not going well, the tourist density having reached critical mass, selfie sticks everywhere, a group of American teenagers blocking the entire central walkway to photograph a street performer who had been doing the same act since approximately 1980.

I had my earbuds in. The music made the crowd bearable, turned it into something I was moving through rather than trapped inside.

I’d been listening to the playlist on repeat. It had become part of my ordinary days. Every day. Finn’s playlist, the one he’d made for my twenty-sixth birthday and played through a speaker in my apartment on a December night while I sat in the reading chair and the first notes of Girl on Fire came through.

I still had it. Ten years later, on my phone, every song still intact. I’d never deleted it.

I was thinking about the quality of it, the songs he’d chosen and the ones he’d deliberately left off, when I walked straight into a giant wall of human mass.

Hard. I nearly dropped my laptop bag.

“Fuck, sorry,” I started, pulling out one earbud.

“Christ, my fault,” he said simultaneously.

I looked up to apologize properly.

And froze.

Finn.

Standing in front of me in Covent Garden, in London, in the middle of a tourist hellscape, ten years older, taller somehow, or maybe I’d forgotten, broader through the shoulders, the angles of his face sharper, lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there.

But the same. Fundamentally, completely, impossibly the same.

We stared at each other.

A tour group flowed around us like water around rocks, entirely uninterested.

“Maya?” he said finally. His voice was deeper than I remembered. But still his. Entirely his.

“Finn.”

His name felt strange in my mouth. Foreign after so many years of not saying it out loud, of only saying it in the quiet of my own head.

We continued staring.

A street performer started juggling fire somewhere behind us. Tourists applauded.

“What are you,” he started.

“I live here,” I said. “Five years. You?”

“Three years.” He shook his head slightly, like he was trying to arrange the information into something that made sense. “I can’t believe, I mean, nine million people in this city and—”

He stopped. His eyes dropped to the earbud still in my hand, the one I’d pulled out. The one that had been playing the playlist.

“What were you listening to?” he said.

I looked at the earbud. At him.

“A playlist,” I said.

His face came close to the full grin, the lines around his eyes deepening. He was trying to decide whether to be amused or moved.

“What playlist?” he said.

I held his gaze. “An old one.”

He stared at me. What the departure hall at Narita had started, ten years of separate living had not, apparently, finished.

“Do you have time for coffee?” he said. “Somewhere that’s not here. Somewhere actual Londoners go.”

Every sensible instinct I had said no.

“I have an hour,” I heard myself say.

“I know a place in Neal’s Yard,” he said. “Two minutes. Quiet. No tourists.”

I put the earbud in my pocket.

“Lead the way,” I said.

We walked in silence. Side by side, not touching. Careful distance.

“I forgot how much I hate this place,” Finn muttered as we squeezed past a family of six in matching I heart London shirts.

“You’ve only been here three years. I’ve been avoiding it for five.”

“So why today?”

“Becca. She’s relentless. You remember Becca? From Akita?”

“The one who organized everything.”

“She’s in London now. Works for the NHS. Still relentless.”

“And she made you come to Covent Garden.”

“Said I was being a snob.”

“You are being a snob.”

“So are you.”

“Never said I wasn’t.”

We reached Neal’s Yard. Small, colorful, quiet. No tourists. We ordered coffee for me, tea for him, and sat by the window. Rain started outside.

He looked at me steadily. “You look great.”

“You too. More grown up.”

He laughed. “I’m thirty-three. I should hope so.”

I sipped my coffee. I needed something to do with my hands.

“I read your books,” he said quietly. “All of them.”

My stomach dropped. “You did?”

“The travel writing first. The pieces from Bangkok, from India, from Istanbul. I found them online.” He stopped. “I was looking for you. I won’t pretend I wasn’t.”

I looked at my coffee.

“They were extraordinary,” he said. “The Bangkok piece especially. The one about being alone in a city of ten million people and feeling, for the first time, entirely yourself. I read that one probably a dozen times.”

“Finn.”

“Then the memoir about Japan. I bought it the day it came out. Read it in one sitting. About the people. About leaving.” He stopped.

“You found yourself in it?” I said quietly.

“Yes.”

“I should have told you it was coming. Should have asked.”

“Don’t apologize. It was your story to tell. And you told it well.” He drank his tea. “I was hurt for years, but reading it, I finally understood.”

I pressed my lips together. Held them.

“The essays,” he continued. “About displacement and belonging. About the loneliness of people who have lived everywhere and belonged nowhere. I recognized myself in that one too. The years after Akita. Tokyo. The Olympics, competing, then London. Never quite belonging anywhere.”

“And the novel?” I said.

“The novel was the hardest.” He said it simply. “Because I knew who it was about. I knew every room. Every city. Every version of her. But it was also the most beautiful thing I’d read in years.”

“What happened to you? After I left.”

He leaned back. “Trained. Made the squad for good. The Olympics.”

“It was everything I’d worked toward. And afterward I didn’t know what to do with myself. That I hadn’t expected.”

“I watched,” I said quietly.

He looked up. “You did?”

“I told you I would. I was in Barcelona. Found a bar with the coverage.” I looked at the table. “When you won. When they put the medal around your neck.” I stopped.

“You cried,” he said.

“I sobbed in front of strangers in a bar in Barcelona watching rugby sevens.”

“I looked for you,” he said. “In the crowd. Stupid. But I did.”

“I wanted to reach out. I didn’t know if you’d want to hear from me.”

“I would have. Always. I retired from playing two years ago. Coaching now. A rugby academy here in London, part of the pathway program.” He stopped. Smiled slightly. “It turns out I enjoy teaching more than competing. Building other people up. Watching them become what they’re capable of.”

The rain intensified outside. A proper London downpour.

“Are you happy?” he said.

My flat in Bloomsbury. The cat named Murakami who judged everything. The freelance editing and the writing and the fourth book that was almost finished. The small circle of friends, the life that was quiet and independent and full. The nights I still stood at my window and felt something I didn’t have a precise word for. Not loneliness. More like the awareness of a space, the shape of something.

“Yes,” I said honestly. “Well, mostly. You?”

“Getting there.” He looked at his tea. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“No. A few people over the years, nothing that stuck. You?”

“Same. Turns out I’m good at coaching and not good at relationships. I kept comparing. Wasn’t fair to anyone.”

I held his gaze. “Comparing to what?”

He looked at me steadily. “You know what.”

The rain picked up outside. Neither of us moved.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Anything.”

“Do you regret it? Leaving?”

I’d been asked this a thousand times in interviews, from friends, my family. From Finn, it felt entirely different. More important. More real.

“No, it was the right choice. For me. At that time. I became who I needed to be, but I regret how I did it. I regret the clean break. Even though I thought it was right at the time. I thought I was doing the right thing for you and your training.”

“Would it have been easier? Staying in touch?”

“I don’t know. Harder, probably. And easier. Both. Your coach told me that he didn’t want you divided. He said that being divided was worse than being broken-hearted.”

He reached across the table. Stopped just short of my hand. “I forgave you years ago. I was hurt, then sad. Then I read your books, and I let it go.”

“How?”

“Therapy. Lots of therapy.”

I laughed despite the tears. “Me too. So much therapy.”

“Very London of us.”

“Extremely London.”

We sat in comfortable silence. We had always been good at those.

“I should go,” I said finally, though I didn’t move. “I have a meeting with my editor.”

“Right. Of course.”

Neither of us stood.

“Finn?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad we ran into each other. Even in Covent Garden.”

“Me too. Though if we tell anyone, we have to lie about where it happened. Say it was somewhere cool. Brick Lane, maybe.”

“Deal. We met in Brick Lane. Very hip. Very authentic.”

“Much better story.”

We finally stood. Walked to the door. The rain had eased to drizzle.

“Maya?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we do this again? Coffee somewhere equally pretentious. As friends. I’d like to know who you are now.”

Every instinct said be careful. Said keep the past where it belongs.

But this man I had loved. This man who’d read every word I’d written and forgiven me and was offering something simple and real.

“I’d like that,” I said.

We exchanged numbers. Modern ritual, ten years in the making.

“I’ll text you,” he said.

“Okay.”

We stood in the drizzle of Neal’s Yard, two people who had loved each other once, finding each other again in the last place either of us would choose to be.

“Bye, Finn.”

“Bye, Maya.”

I walked toward the Tube. Didn’t look back. But smiled the whole way.

Made a mental note to thank Becca.

I put my earbud back in.

The playlist started again where I’d left it.

I let it play.