In school, people tend to drape ordinary things in ceremony. A confession is one of them.
The only ritual I ever seemed to have as a student was telling my friends that I probably wouldn’t live past thirty.
I’ve never been especially romantic, so I usually explain myself with a joke: I’m just too lazy. But last year, when I was hospitalized, my wife came back from speaking to the doctor and told me—while I was barely conscious—that my condition was severe, with a mortality rate of over 30 percent. I probably wasn’t fully aware of anything in that moment, but later she told me that I cried and said I wanted to live.
So there it is: the instinct to survive will betray all those absurd little rituals a person invents in adolescence.
Back in school, I witnessed a lot of confessions, mostly as an observer. Even then, I had already realized that I was unusually sensitive to tiny emotional shifts. I could tell when one person liked another, or when someone had started to dislike someone else. That was also how I noticed the faint, unspoken feeling between our homeroom teacher and a student.
Seen from where I stand now, that kind of relationship may not automatically be "illegal," but a teacher and a student are bound by something delicate and unequal, a kind of contract. And hidden inside that contract is an unwritten clause: they are not supposed to be together, and they are not allowed to be together.
That subtle feeling existed for a long time, and I noticed it. Eventually, a few students who were close to the teacher started sensing that something was off too. A couple of times, when we were together, they casually brought up the possibility. I was the only one who stayed calm. When they pressed me, I said, "I figured it out a long time ago."
After that, I was isolated.
Maybe the teacher suddenly realized I was a frightening kind of student.
I ended up caught in the middle, because the boy involved was my deskmate. He once showed me a plan for a confession. He never said who it was for, but I kept trying, indirectly, to persuade him to give it up. Later, I never found out what happened between them. Once the teacher started shutting me out, I no longer knew anything about what came after.
The last thing I ever heard was that the boy got married, and his wife was definitely not that teacher.
I’m not entirely sure why this memory came back to me. During the period when I was recovering from that serious illness, it kept surfacing from somewhere deep in my mind. Since I’ve never really made a confession of my own, I think I was trying desperately to assemble some kind of memory about confession from this strange old story.
Oh, right—the confession plan was something I helped him think up. But the moment I realized the person he wanted to confess to was our teacher, I suddenly felt assigned a kind of guilt.
There was another story too, one I came across in someone’s social media post.
A man was driving a much younger person—more than ten years younger than him—to the airport. The younger one was a relative of his friend. Before they said goodbye, that younger person was ready to have sex with him in the car. He stopped it.
It wasn’t because he didn’t like them. He said he did like them. But he didn’t want to maintain a relationship. He was already well into his forties, and to him, that kind of thing felt troublesome.
The other person said that was fine, that it could just be a one-night stand.
So he asked, "Why do you want a one-night stand with me?"
The answer was simple: "Because it seems fun. I’m happy when I talk to you."
He asked again: "If you sleep with me this time, will you still want to talk to me and sleep with me again?"
"Of course."
"Then that isn’t a one-night stand," he said. "That means we like each other."
The younger person, already sounding tearful, asked, "Then what do we do? I really do like you."
He answered helplessly, "That contradicts what I wanted in the first place. I like you too, but I can’t be irresponsible."
Then the other person cried and said, "I’ve never met someone like me before. If only I were younger."
He tried to lighten the mood with a joke: "Talk properly. I’m not that old."
The reply came immediately: "Then if only I’d been born a few years earlier."
He patted their head. He didn’t even intend to leave behind a kiss. In that moment, he said, he truly felt like a middle-aged man—someone who had to take responsibility for every single thing he did.
For some reason, that story moved me deeply too. Like that odd memory from school, it was also about confession. And in a way, the two stories mirrored each other. One confession came too early, the other too late.
One happened at an age when one person could still be swept away by the heat of being confessed to. The other happened at an age when one person could no longer be swept away by that heat at all.
When I was at the age of writing melodramatic pieces about pain, I probably once wrote a line like this:
Confession is something that always contains regret, because it is always spoken either too early or too late.
It sounds like the open ending of some youthful romance novel. We never quite learn whether the protagonist ever confesses, but that blank space keeps the imagination alive. In the end, perhaps only regret can make something feel perfect.
I think I remember now why this memory kept appearing while I was recovering.
It was because I had understood, very clearly, that some confessions are either too early or too late.
That’s why, after I woke up, I kept saying to you, over and over:
I love you.