Category: Life

Woman-in-trouble

I’m alone for the week. I impulse-buy peach soju and run a bath. Sitting in the blur of the water, a slight buzz at my temples, I think, a little giddily: Clear signs of the woman-in-trouble. “Woman-in-trouble” is my favorite game to play. I am not this decade’s arcade champion, but still I am a competent player. I know the rules better than most.

Boot up “woman-in-trouble” and from the corner of the screen, fear approaches, fast. It bears the stony mask of the crusader. I bat it away. Fear bounces off my rusted blade. I watch it depart in a curved line, like an arrow. It is only momentarily deterred. As its shadow defaces the moon, as hope crests the ridge of my ribs, it boomerangs. I don’t have time to mourn, to rage. I prepare my sword arm again. Angel relentless, pathfinder eternal, it knows its target. It needn’t best me, only wear me down.

Indulgent childishness can pause the game, for a time. I splash in the tub like a goldfish in a clawfoot bowl. Fear hovers in the background, annoyed but not discouraged, knowing it is blocked only by the power of a temporary enchantment. A circle of chalk, smudged. It stands by the cross of the window and awaits its opportunity. The silhouette of the sorceress, idle in the tub, visible through a crack in the glass. Fear bends in half, folding like a paper doll. From adult-sized to child-sized. It folds again; now it is the length of an arm. Then a hand, a finger, a thimble. A trillion times, until it is a scintillating point, embedded too deep in the cystic pancreas of the world to ever find. It puts out invisible vapors that enter the room, that disturb the air, that dirty the breath, that penetrate the skin and the eyes. I walk around with every fear in every cell.

Drop in another bloodied coin for the endgame cut-scene. The screen glitters in irritation. In front of you is a smooth and angled surface. You begin to descend this surface, having prepared and provisioned adequately, with every intention of measuring your steps, of mustering your courage. But you are a wobbly, imperfectly round marble, so this can be no hero’s journey. You understand this, but only too late. You begin to roll, to pick up speed. Pure physics will strip you of your breath. Nothing will break your fall.

What’s the opposite of fear? Is it calm, joy, freedom, peace, or courage? I raise my camera at the edge of a crater in a desert. Eye through the viewfinder, finger on the trigger, I feel like a funnel. The top of my mind is wide, sprawling, dense with grass—then it narrows, suddenly, severely. I could blink and find myself lying within its single, dark channel like a trapped spelunker. Standing at the mouth of a crater, looking beyond the rash of grass, into the throat of the woman-in-trouble, the fear gulps in my ear and knows what I know.

I am about to fling myself off the edge when the boatman, soapy around the hairline, gets into the bathtub with me. He holds my hand underneath the flicker of the water.

“If the sky were a sink with a drain,” I ask him, musingly, “what could I use to stopper the heavens?”

He laughs. I watch the stray strands of hair in the water wind around my limbs, braiding into dark Gordian knots from which I will later cut myself free.

Easy does it now

I love how the bright winter light lays over the landscape. Like precision-cut puzzle pieces, extracted from the blonde wood of another world. In strong angles across building facades. Through windows, shimmering. Over interior walls, awash over floors of poured concrete. Scattered light—a heart-rending oblation to Osiris, courtesy of physics. Near noon, the color of the light is a blend of yellow, white and blue, somewhere between the stained glass of shallow water and a low-saturation, darkly devoted goldenrod. Shyly, then with increasing boldness, shadows approach. Anubis, around the corner. Shadows, on the cool, wet-to-the-touch walls of the cave, in concave degrees. A pillar’s shadow, long on the floor. A signpost’s angular twin, like a flag on the skin-colored sidewalk. Shadows cast against the many surfaces of the neighborhood. Shadows on the pockmarked roads, the cracked traffic lights, the thin and sickly patches of grass. None of it is made newly beautiful. But like an organ shifting, sighing, shimmying down the length of my spirit in a trail of blood, I feel that change in the frame of my mind, christened by light and shadow. A new ability to pay attention to different things. On the train platform, I watch the shadows and the light, coupled, moving sideways together—and I imagine moving like that too, through the world in two dimensions, like a figure in a mural of the ancient world, haughty face only in profile, arms and wings extended. Eyes and fingernails of inlaid gemstone.

Oh, to walk through this paradise of light and shadow and to resist, with an almost violent intensity, the urge to pull out a phone. If I were a painter, I’d drag out all my oily colors instead—haunting blue, sedate gray, hopeless white—over to the canvas of the window and start now. Start what? Well, that’s the beauty of it. If I were a musician, I’d dart back inside the apartment and then back out, violin case in hand, to play something limpid and twisted amid all this metamorphosis. Easy does it, now. I watch the light move and the shadows follow as time passes, slowing down to a secret rhythm. I feel it do something to my thoughts. Strip them, and then reclothe them in something new. Toeing the ground outside the supermarket, examining my face in the bedroom mirror, jogging up the stairs of the station, dragging a carry-on through a terminal. I look around and notice the lines of shadow—slicing the ceiling, cutting across the path ahead—and, in that tiny clear pool of time, something sprouts. I’m looking at something, then at nothing at all. My mind ventures off-circuit. Silver bicycle, ribbons tied to the handles, upside down in the luxurious grass, wheels spinning.

Horus in flight, I swing my legs and change direction. Underneath me, a hundred-thousand paths, carved in dirt, in air, in water, crisscrossing. All of them as least as long as longing is long. Look, there’s the path of least resistance. And there, the path of most fruitlessness. Blink away the tears; let your vision clear. Are they same? They fade into one another, in parts, and then they part, definitively. A path hosting a ceremonial procession. A path heavy with bristling undergrowth. A path swarming with pedestrians. A path at deepest and most tender midnight. Shadowless. I squint, blurry-eyed, into the horizon. I lean forward. I don’t know what I’m looking at. Stars start in surprise. Eyes of the sylphs, past and future. Light and shadow. Spiral and line. False and true. Friction and intention. Cave and crater. Flush and fade. No, not quite there yet. Truth and truth. Light and shadow.

Mean something, mean something, mean something

I am feeling—not thinking—something so sad and so needy and as this feeling widens within me and begins to bubble at my edges, like the frothy tide, my hand jerks in reaction, toward the squareish tombstone of the keyboard where my fingers fidget over the plastic corners crusted with dust and begin then to speedily type out the name of that paradise where I can watch an unceasing parade of numbing short videos but I remember myself just in time. I remember myself, I catch myself in the act—and then I stop, fingers frozen above my face because I know that the last thing I want is to lose this feeling of being sad. I do not want to will it away via entertaining distraction, disturbed, high-contrast, funny and technicolor ennui. The laptop whirs a gentle question against my thighs and belly. Its baby blue brightness is like an inadequate jacket, beveled edges like shoulders in flimsy velvet corduroy, bunched up against the vampiric kiss of the cold outside. Digital technology and my own desire to escape, entwined, a peach-and-white braid of tendon and gore, in an unholy alliance, draining away every last drop of blood, undoing every stitch of flesh until I lie in a clumpy puddle, straining uselessly for the boundary between here and there—

It’s too easy to run from a sad feeling. I want to try something else, this time. I want to try to keep it with me, to stay with it in a way that confers solace but not intimacy. To get intimate with sadness is dangerous, and worse—self-indulgent. I don’t want to be led back into the familiarly damp and dark pit of my worst tendencies. No, I want to be in its constant company but not accompany my sadness. I want to be like the moon and stars, who travel with us humans so faithfully, so doggedly, but always with their own secret and cruel knowledge of fate, always able to spin away along those long lines of orbit traced in the black and silver sands of endless space. Who can say, in that relationship, who leads and who follows? Gold-blue Aquila, the giant eagle, or the astronomer, gemmed sleeves against a parchment map of the sky, who gave her that name? Not she, and not him.

But the more I write the farther I get from the feeling, not because writing interrupts the feeling but because thinking about writing puts distance between me and the feeling. Too much effort will kill the delicate uneasiness of emotion. Worse, it will twist its ineffableness into something labored, something tortured, something conventional. Like trying to capture and collar a dream, rushing to describe its traits on paper as you watch its wings beat fitfully through the thin metal pins and glass. Such shapes of grace do not respond well to overintellectualized trophy hunting. They don’t speak in that language. So I let go of the attempt to make sense of the feeling, to extract its marrow. I blink and find myself in a bathtub of rapidly cooling water, a room of stucco walls that are inching closer with every shallow breath. I lift my hands from out of the water and I pray, with no words at first. Later, I will remember it as a strange and plaintive mantra: Mean something, mean something, mean something, I beg.

Memory of the memory of the memory of the memory

In the land of my father, as I recall, there was a pink Ganesha Scotch-taped to the back of the door. I pushed the door open, one hand parallel to the face of the idol, into the twisted light of a blue winter morning and saw him waiting for me there, on the stone steps. He did not have the comic humility of a playful divinity; he did not doff his cap with his ringed fuchsia trunk. But neither was there any tedious, studied seriousness in his manner. He was only there, and he waited, with a diamond-cut patience that spiraled out into infinity, for me to speak.

I can’t remember the last time someone listened, not just with the fullness of their attention, but without their assumption of me superimposed on top, like a blind over my eyes. I used to be able to endure that, graciously, gracefully, but not anymore. Now, I just let my mind filter away, down the cracks in the floor, to the house of hell.

At the breakfast table, I chew my food and swallow too quickly; it trembles in my throat, a lump of pulp, and I nearly panic. I, the first child of a hypochondriac, seize with the memory of the million visits to the infirmary—leaping onto a cot like a tiny gymnast, insufficiently shielded by thin curtains running on metal rings, scrambling to find purchase on the scratchy cotton and then swiftly arranging myself on it, my hands folded over my still chest and my eyes closed. Over the imagined grave, the grass was damp and green and fetid. I was a morbid, unduly ambitious child. I believed that I could know my own death, could snatch it from the sky and hold it like a coin in my pink hand, could maneuver around it tidily, like stepping over a toy train chugging down plastic tracks. But the years haven’t humbled me so much as terrified me. Today, I have no beliefs, only fears.

January is a tough month. I work on a story laboriously, fruitlessly. It fights me every step of the way. I am cynical and sad—a deadly combination. I get my hands bloody. I get scammed at a bazaar. I forgive him—because what other choice do I have? I zip and unzip, over and over, the clamshell suitcase of my mind. I get overly self-congratulatory, then overly self-deprecatory. Nothing in balance. I don’t forgive myself—was that ever a choice I had? Everything taking on water, just at different speeds.

In the half-moon gaze of my grandmother, black-and-gray in the photograph, I can see a pain rooted so far down I could dig a hole as deep as the world itself and never find its true origin. The blood from which she drank was of the darkest kind. But as I grow older, I come to wonder—was it real pain, or only a grudge? What would be the difference? Was it her dreams that were lost, or only her delusions? What would be difference? I’m sure that, to her, there was none. The bearer of a sword cannot distinguish between carmine glass or carved ruby embedded in its hilt; she swings just the same, she cuts just the same. But in the faces of her progeny, I see the stiff, stilted half-smiles of difficult emotion and I remember again, the danger of assumption, the ricochet, through time, of the articles of our faith, long-held.

Stream-of-consciousness under the pitiless full moon

Forlorn, a foal in a cheap two-piece suit. You’re a baby, and then you’re an ancient. You’re a pink tear, glistening like Venus, sliding down the glass, drop-shaped and delicate, until you’re a tear in the paper, irreparable, needy, marring a tower of manuscripts in your brokenness. You’re growing potential, then you’re wasted talent.

A square peg in a round hole, forcing the entry until the edges of me are all sawn off. No one is born to be Senior Marketing Manager. No one can manage to reshape the abyss in their image. The knife of life is something sharp and stupid. Wait, what?

Everything sounds right in my head, and then I have to go and say it loud. I hear my own voice echoing through the room and I recoil. Blood on a bullet in a chamber in a gun in a hand. Hand on the gun, outstretched arm aloft in a signal. Get away. Stay away.

It’s not my fault you’re not a frontiersman. It’s not my fault you’re trapped in your own life like a wet-eyed beaver in a newspaper-lined cage. I didn’t descend from on high to save your soul. I didn’t. I didn’t.

Sitting in the tub, wearing a coat of sable fur over my mind. Across from me, perched on the windowsill, the skinned animal. In the living room, toweling off my hair, I stand in the doorway; freeze the frame and the tableau, dismayed, stares back at me. The television, wearing my face, blinks blandly. It says: All my love and desperation to you, stranger. I say: All my contempt, all my sympathy, to you.

If only I could only do those things that enrich me, rather than numb me, if only I could do those things that warp me, rather than dull me, if only I could capture all those rays of light, all those fragments of planets that spin by and graze my fingertips like so many million missed chances.

Koukai City, 2024

Crying piteously in the back of a taxicab that is ferrying me, with the discrete resoluteness of death’s own boatman, across expressways wet with melting snow. A chunk of ice breaks off a sign above and, in an overdramatic show of overdramatic destiny, slams down, hard, onto the hood of the car. The driver and I jump in our seats; he meets my eyes in the rearview mirror and we both laugh, a little shakily. Are we both imagining it—the swerve off the road? The shattering of the blue eggshell over the water, the smash-cut to red and then the fade-out to black? A lonely deformation of metal, bone and blood among the breakwaters of the freezing Yellow Sea?

I flip through books at the library, my eye catching on the repeated use of the word stars: shrug of stars, wheel of stars. The carpet has the flocked texture of a teddy bear. The fist lobbing between my ribs opens like a chest; a furred key, bronze teeth. I take it, hard. I let it bite into my palm. I drag myself through the mud; I lope across a field, only to hit a wall. Nothing comes easy. I take that hard. Moonrise, 2024. I lie on a stiff bed in an unfortunate Best Western, my mind purpling with hives. Mooncalf, 2024. Alive with a swarm of thoughts, I am alone but not alone. Obsessive worry is its own kind of possession and, in a way, its own kind of perverse comfort. How bad can I be, if I worry so much? Bad people surely don’t worry like this, do they? Outside the window, the snow blankets the tar.

The closest thing I have to religion is this: We’re born with nothing and have nothing throughout our lives. Only when we die do we finally latch onto something—a realization of roses, a dream of snow—and then, in a flash, it’s gone. In the meantime, I hold you like the water holds all us sharks and waves.

The first time

(A companion of sorts to: Hypercritical; Love it if we made it)

Here we are again, having a different version of the same conversation. The first time we did this, it felt like playing in a tropical greenhouse, the red, green and orange reflected on the glass like something from a gilt-edged fairytale. In the background, the blue-winged butterflies trembled, then soared. We tiptoed across walkways strewn with nettles and yellow leaves. We let our hands rest on balustrades of twisted metal. I met your eyes from between the pink, purple and white petals. The intimacy was strange and new and welcomed.

This version of the conversation, a million years later, lies between us like a neglected hotel pool: greenish, milky, off-putting. But it is a part of this, a part of things. Entry into the water is already included in the bill, and therefore we are obliged to wade in, to feel its discomfiting warmth. We do a few laps, unwillingly, and then towel ourselves off with our backs to each other. I sit across from you at the breakfast buffet, my hair still wet at the ends. I hold the fork and knife stiffly, in lieu of sword and shield. The happy chatter of the other guests is overwhelming. We agree, in silence, to pretend this never happened.

If I cleaved myself in half, so that the chunks I inherited at birth fell away in perfect synchronicity, like the boosters falling off a rocket blasting into space, what would be left? What pound of dust, what cracked fistful of red-ribbed stone might be mine? Sometimes I think there’s nothing original to be found here, in this flesh that is less flesh and more an accretion of tendernesses, but that’s a paradox, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that mean we’re all just duplicates of the rotted body of the original Eve? What a curse, indeed. Each new duplication, a lessening of the first soul. But it fits. I do feel less, I do feel lesser. Every year that passes, I feel myself diminish. I feel that something is being slowly eroded away. Then I look at you and feel almost unendurably embarrassed, at the totality of the selfishness that is inherent to my self-loathing, at the vanity of my paranoia.

Let’s get on a train, you and I. Let’s leave this behind. The world flashes by too quickly, as though trying to escape being framed for a crime. But what sin could the branching light, the fallow fields, the crowded houses have committed? Come back, I want to say, my face pressed against the glass. I didn’t get a good look at you, the first time. What is all this, then, but a series of imprecise, half-formed, poorly-informed glances? Sometimes we catch the light but most of the time, we don’t.

Disembarking, late at night, we turn to each other. The dusk that has fallen is proud and unrepentant, the curtain to end the play. I came after you, so I have your hair, your eyes, your bony wrists and ankles. No, that’s not quite right, is it? You came after me, didn’t you? And what did you keep of mine, when you raided the attic of our shared memory? What blue baby blanket, what blistered personality trait, what shred of thread from a scrapbook? You are my past, but I am not quite your future. I never met your expectations. Our legacy is not one of trust, because we don’t have that between us, and never have. Our legacy is one of regret. But I have to laugh, at you, at myself. It annoys you, I know—I was you. A lidded pot of blood put to boil.

If we were both strapped to a polygraph, would we have the same answers? Would we make the same mistakes? I have to cry, at you, at myself. If we were free to go, would we run to the same places, the same pleasures? Writing like this to a past self, I have a sense that I am launching myself into the atmosphere, the stars wheeling around in panic as I fling the pages of our mildewed diary onto the ground below, letting the secrets fertilize the soil, then poison the water. But when I plummet back down, hands clinging numbly to the parachute cords, I open my eyes against the sting of the wind and feel the weakness drain out of me, as though a purifying needle had punctured some putrefying chamber of the soul and released something there, something from the charnel pit there that could never hear the God in the predawn mountain, in the tiny grace of a budding magnolia, that refused to try. This weakness is not immediately replaced by strength, true—that doesn’t come so easily. But, alone in the freezing air, a patchwork of snow and tides beneath me, suddenly I have the feeling that, though I am no swimmer, I could stand to cross any river, if only I could know that you were on the other side. It’s not newfound courage that motivates me, but the realization that you are not just a fantasy, not just an exit wound for the past. You are real to me. Arms folded across my chest, hands cupping my shoulders, I fall back down to the earth in a blaze of lilies. I see your heart-shaped face behind my eyes. Yes, you are real to me. We’ll have this conversation again. It’s not the last time.

Ruled by the ram

About a hundred meters away from my apartment, between two groves of trees and a red-shingled temple, is a bakery that has been shuttered for eight years, ever since the owner hung herself from a second-floor beam. This revelation is available to unsuspecting members of the public in the form of a brutally crude, unpunctuated, one-star online review. Oh, Google Maps, how did it end up like this? Did you expect to be the bearer of such news? Huffing, puffing, energetic information engine, then giant of advertising, and now painful prophet, dressed in babyish, primary colors.

At the local sushi joint, sat on a bar stool upholstered in soft-touch, brown plastic, I read the specials: fatty tuna, sweet shrimp, abalone. I strip the paper packaging from a pair of disposable chopsticks. A cracked speaker above a humming fridge bleeds floaty, 2000s-style synth-pop. I order shochu and watch my ego deflate on the counter. An octogenarian in a square white cap scrapes scales off a body and then hoses down the counter. The restaurant swims with odors.

I watch myself in the mirrored wall opposite. I watch myself, watching myself.

Online, I look up photos: cropped bob on a long face, crown of thorns. Lying on the couch, my feet against the wall, I nurse a tension headache. I feel like I’ve swallowed the full moon. It bumps up against the crevices inside my skull, unhappily. It has the beady eyes of a Lovecraftian infant, peering wetly from over the bassinet. “Can saints be made in these circumstances? Can souls be saved?” it hisses contemptuously. I pat its tender head. So much fear is disguised as scorn. Don’t ask me how I know. Wait, please come back. I’m dying for someone to ask me this question, or any question.

On the weekend, walking under the triple-laned overpass that connects Tokyo Bay’s manmade islands to the mainland, feeling the breeze and the blue-toned light compete for my attention. The gray concrete beams that hold up the road are unashamed of their unconventional beauty. The asphalt is painted in black, white and goldenrod. In this city, hours like these are ruled by the ram, ruled by the red planet, as I am. I have a feeling like I’m playing hide-and-seek, and have yet to be found.

Ecstasies of Persephone

Finally, fall. I roll the bike out of storage. Like the grass underfoot, the air is cool to the touch. I ride down a maple-lined street to the corner store, where I buy freshly roasted coffee beans and freshly baked bread. The sun sets between four and five. I climb up a paved hill, to the bridge over the tracks. I watch the cloud banks recede into the distance. I lean against the railing. I give it time.

I remember how easily I could fall in love. As an adolescent pustule, any glance in my direction was immediately captured, bathed in preservative, pinned between two jeweled panes of glass, then catalogued and forever hoarded in a sharp-edged, silver Rolodex. I never talked to anyone in the flesh world, but, in the paradise inside my brain, I was as voluble as a hyena, as capacious as the moon. Anything could vex me. Anything could captivate me. There was some quality that I locked onto—not beauty, not intelligence. Some grist of identity. In the chilled air of the basement, framed in the wooden doorway, one shoe on the bench, a turn of the head. Against the low bed, the early evening in late summer, a certain angle of the light on a bottle-green eye. A stray comment that could be interpreted, charitably, in my favor; only years later, sleeping with our hands and feet pressed together, do I realize it was never intended for me. Now, if the mood is right, I can depersonalize this same inclination for easy infatuation and bring it, instead, to the linked and varied charms of the world. I walk home, feeling a cherry-red hand lingering on my back. I take a breath. Its fingers trace a wobbly heart over my shirt.

I get older. It’s a truism, but pay attention. Every day that passes, I get older. I refuse to think of this as anything other than a privilege. I’m a woman, not a nymph. I am determined to resist any call to fetishize my own youth, which was emaciated then and is rotten now. You know that I am not nostalgic. My adolescence was documented in unsmiling photos, pained videos, and here, in tragic diary entries. When I relive it in dream, we, my heart and I, understand that it was nothing to celebrate. I’m a woman, not a calyx. I’m a woman, not a chalice. I will happily age, but I won’t be devoured by time. It’s a futile complaint, but make no mistake. I’m not a mother; it’s hard enough to be a daughter, a wife. Of blood plasma, of the skin of the dauphine, of green meconium fluid, I know nothing. I have ten good years left, and then, once those years are gone, once the petals have all wilted, I’ll have the rest of my life, which will be fully mine. Good riddance.

I grasp at the reeds. I rip them out. Handfuls of straw-like, saffron-colored light. I don’t respect nature. What? I don’t. I trample over it with the all the peachy, preachy eagerness of ignorance. But I can’t discard the influences that made me so easily. Cheek against the cold dirt, lying in the dew-wet grass, yellowing already, I am close enough to the signs to finally read them. They are dug into the ground. They are carved into every brick of my body. I can’t scratch them out without risking the foundation. Can I live with all these emblems of vice, virtue and sacrifice? Can I bear them without resorting to terror, to prayer? The rest of my life. Oh. Oh, no. What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What I would give to be free of this specific, shining pain. I’ve been waiting nearly a decade for the knife to drop. When it does, I imagine I’ll feel relief, then grief, then relief, again. The blade will lie uselessly on the floor. But then again, let’s be honest. Take my face into your hands. It’s more likely, isn’t it, that the hurt will be grander and fiercer than I can even imagine today. It will pierce me in a way that I cannot picture. If that’s the case, then what could be the point of all this waiting-in-preparation?

The light sighs, then chokes. Red, orange and pink run across my view, long, faint, flecked, like spittle. The temperature of the air, the rumbling of the train below, the twisted color of the sky, the flushed luster on everything. For a second, the stiches open. The door yawns wide enough for me to latch tightly onto a specific feeling. What I feel, then, is the power and the brevity of my life. I feel its madness, its divinity, its profound stupidity. I feel it tumble over me, like a playful wave. I feel its scarred simplicity. Then, as though struck, the feeling snaps away, and, lacking the instinct to fight for it, I lose it immediately. The wind takes it over the railing, the tracks, the bridge, into the distance.

When did I start writing this like a manifesto? Will the pretensions of my ego, many-winged, never cease? Finally, fall.

Flawed pendulum

I read back my writing and find it uneven, like a mislaid path. Cobblestones, ruddy with rusty moss. But the unevenness doesn’t bother me. In the gaps between sentences, where the rhythm breaks and disperses, where traces of it are cast irregularly over rocky paragraphs, like a varnished wave smeared wetly against the shore, I glimpse something glittering, something close to feeling. That leak of light is a comfort. You must understand that I grew up among extremes of emotion: Perplexing, knotted, treacherous. Every step on the knitted ecru carpet, a tripwire. Now, years later, when I go hunting for feeling in the briars of my being, I can’t make sense of the tracks laid there. The footprints double-back, then crisscross. I can’t follow them to their source. Only in probing my past writing, in examining its tempo—occasional adagio, occasional allegro—am I able to spot, in the underbrush, the large, wet eye, the chipped fang, the blurred expression. Sometimes, if I wait by the foot of the hill, I even see her, half-monster, half-girl, face smeared with dirt, tears, and green phlegm. Howling, she crawls out of the cave, raw and new and filled with a panic that spurts like a fresh wound, weak to the many pains, the various joys, the intermittent horrors—

I travel an hour to a bookstore on the opposite side of the city. It’s nighttime, and I feel Tokyo‘s disregard fall over me like a shroud. Anonymity is this city’s gift. It’s not that I fit in, or don’t. You must understand that I grew up caught between cultures, and now, when I go searching in the brambles of birthright, no branches part to reveal a hidden pool of rippling water, of mossy, rusty relics half-buried in the silt, recovered by my hand, mine by inheritance. Sometimes, I hear someone talk about going home and I see how their blood trickles down their body, through the floor, and back through corrugated stone, to a lightless aquifer where their bones will one day go. I grew up in too many places; I am the product of two already uprooted people. I don’t long for belonging, but I have sometimes felt like I am supposed to. Only in Tokyo does that need seem undesirable, unnecessary. This city does not think of me, and I am therefore free to find untethered relief in its iron-colored rain; its encircling neon glows; its dirty shadows; its million gaudy lights like broken rubies; its clouds of cherry-like sweetness that, in maroon October, can be traced back to the orange-petalled osmanthus tree blossoming in the alleyways.

In the many years I’ve lived in this body, I like to think I’ve never misunderstood myself. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as self-confident, but I am almost obsessively self-aware. I have a sense of watching myself from a third perspective at all times. I watch myself watching myself. Feet propped up on the sofa, trying to find the words. Squinting at the yolk of the setting sun. Leaping up the stairs at the train station, two at a time. Standing in my blue bathing suit, the rain leaving coin-sized dimples on the water, feeling, under my plastic flip-flops, the forking, copper-colored twigs wince, then split, like wishbones. Counting down the seconds between the seam of light and the answering thunder. Sitting in a scoop of fiberglass, twisting a rope around my hand as a flock of birds dart through the dusky blue. They abruptly dissolve their formation and descend, pointed and bulletlike, towards the lake, pulling up at the last moment—my breath caught in my throat like a lie—to land soundlessly on its surface. When it comes to telluric landings in late summer, an angel might try but could do no better.