Red cheeks

I'm all better again, by which I mean: I'm back to being totally crap.

For nearly two years, only one man has existed for me. From the first minute (I was in love almost straight away) to long, long after I should have stopped, he was the only man I romantically cared about. Celebrities were of no interest. Male models were of no interest. When friends waxed lyrical about the various attractions of men on the street, it was as if they were invisible to me: I barely registered them as male, let alone desirable. When I read books, each romantic lead - no matter what the author told me they looked like - morphed into Him. When I watched films, I despaired at how dissimilar the heroes were, and how much of a mistake the director had made in not casting The Boy, or at least someone who looked vaguely like him. I congratulated myself daily on the fact that the most beautiful man in the world said he loved me, and showed pictures of the most beautiful man in the world to my friends and family on a minutely basis, so that they could confirm how lucky I was (they did: he was and is extraordinarily, almost surreally, handsome). No other man existed, as far as I was concerned: I was the cat with the cream, and I wasn't interested in milk anymore. So I was unbelievably hurt when he noticed other girls: not least because I didn't understand how the romantic and sexual world hadn't shrunk for him as it had for me.

Now that I'm healed - his looks haven't faded in my memory, but his goodness and kindness have and so his beauty is less - the world has suddenly opened up again. And I'm back to being absolutely ill equipped to deal with it, because I just spent fifteen minutes catapulting myself around a huge pharmacy, playing accidental hide and seek with a very good looking man.

Japanese men are gorgeous. Not all Japanese men, obviously: there are varieties of attractiveness as there are with any race, in any country, in any part of the world. Further, many of them are shorter than me, and a lot of Japanese men actively make themselves less attractive (in my westernized eyes) by chasing the Japanese ideal of male beauty: a feminine, soft skinned, waxed, whitened, made-up, pampered type of beauty that most Japanese women adore (all of the boy bands wear lipstick, for instance, pluck their eyebrows and spend longer on their hair than any woman I've ever seen). Those who do not, however - those who are happy to look like men, and sometimes grow facial hair, and let their hair and eyebrows roam freely, and perhaps go swimming even though it makes them browner - are often incredibly, stomach flippingly beautiful.

And when they are stomach flippingly beautiful, frankly, they should not be allowed to walk around large pharmacies, forcing unprepared and very shy girls to duck behind shelves of moisturisers and perform all sorts of embarrassing stunts so that they can hide.

It was ridiculous. In two days I'm 29, and yet I found myself focusing on the back of a packet of conditioner as he walked past, and then glancing at his retreating back only for him to turn around and look at me, causing the conditioner to become the most interesting thing I had ever read. I then ran to another aisle so he couldn't see me, and he inexplicably decided that he, too, wanted a moisturising face mask and stood next to me. I then scampered off as quickly as I could to the green tea section, and he decided that he was going to take a stroll along the aisle behind me, with his hands in his pockets. He didn't even have the kindness to openly gawp (this happens sometimes: less because I'm female, and more because I'm a different colour to everyone else), but simply glanced up now and then and continued very, very casually stalking me around the shop, like a real, proper man interested in a girl, instead of a Japanese boy intrigued by a foreigner.

Fifteen minutes, I ran away for. I couldn't even buy what I went in for, because I couldn't bring myself to buy a multipack of toilet roll in front of him. I considered making really snuffly noises so that he would assume I had a really, really bad cold, but there really is no way of buying toilet roll without conjuring up the inevitable image that you are going to be using them on the toilet, and I didn't want him to picture me anywhere near a toilet. So I simply focused very hard on innocuous, innocent things - moisturiser, tea, tofu - until he left me alone and went to the check-out. Even then, when I finally thought I was safe to enjoy looking at him and his scruffy handsomeness, when I glanced up he was still glancing at me from 50 metres away. I had to squat down under cover of needing a lip salve that was on the very bottom shelf, and stay there until he had gone.

I'm crap with the opposite sex. I always have been, and I can't see that changing, even as I head into my 30s. I'm too shy, and when I see somebody I genuinely like my immediate impulse is - and has always been, even as a little girl - to leg it, and run away as fast as I can.  Combined with the fact that I'm not ready for romance yet, that I really, really don't want to be hurt again, and that I don't speak Japanese well enough to conduct any kind of relationship, and the beautiful boy was quite lucky that I didn't lock myself in the pharmacy store cupboard and refuse to come back out until the shop was closed.

I can't spend my life running away from handsome men (although in a few years I will no longer have to: they simply won't be chasing me). But, even as I was ducking behind the moisturising shelves, it felt good: to be able to see somebody else, after two years. To be embarrassed by and for somebody else. Even when it doesn't go any further than that. Just to have my world open up a little bit more. Crack by crack, and inch by inch.

While I need to be on my own for a good while longer - to really enjoy the freedom I have found - I still want the world to be as big as it can be. I still want it to be a world that makes my cheeks turn red.

And, if my game of hide and seek today is anything to go by, it's now a world that can make my stomach flip again. And that is a very, very good thing.