Going

Take a bus. Do not think you are going nowhere. You are going somewhere. Somewhere you do not yet know, but it is not foreign because no place is foreign. It does not matter what you do or do not understand. The best things happen when you do not understand: you love, you dream. Everything is new and strange. It was the same way at birth, when you cried because you did not want to stay. You must forget the objectives. Success is a weird sort of measurement. Can you tell me what this means?  Do you even know? We must all forget the ending in order to figure out a new meaning, but it is nearly impossible. It would require for us to stop being humans. You need me to take your hand and walk with you, but that seems sentimental, childish, too much work for you, for me. 

Politics

I meet the mayor of the town in his office. We are served tea with a cube of ice. I forget the speech in Japanese and instead I just bow, accept his card, remember the etiquette workshop, how to hold it, how to place it on the table. I say it is great meeting him. He tells me his son lives in New York City and that many Japanese went to DR during WWII. I find him a very nice man. Perhaps if we spoke the same language we would be friends. 

Shodoshima

The shock of the new, the unwillingness to change. Learning to be a child again: to use the first words, to mispronounce, to apologize, to get lost and not find the way, to ask for help though I know you won’t understand, to not know how to read, to apologize again, to be afraid, to smile all the time. Don’t run away. Learning the basic ways, deciphering symbols, sitting properly, bowing, understanding the importance of a thank you, of a laugh. If I can’t laugh with me, then no one will. To stare at the Inland Sea and think it is home.

I buy groceries and make my first meal. The pride of one’s own creation. Maybe this will work. Life is all one big maybe. I cannot miss you, you are too far away. It is too late for the no, the oh well, the past and the tomorrow.