I could be sitting in a cafe, with the plates clattering as I’m supposed to be reading a book. Or I’m out with a friend — the evening is abnormally brisk as it’s always been the past few months and there’s a lull in conversation as we stare at the trees in the dark. There’s this gap for the mind to intervene in the rivers of should-do, must-say, coordinate what’s being seen, reassess-mental-models, and an older vision captivates me.
We got off the train, walking into Nagasaki for the first time, in this huge pavillion (that I would later realise looked a lot like Kumamoto’s). We had been on the train for 5 or so hours straight from Tokyo and the sun is already threatening to go down. The air is colder than it should’ve been and we climb up and down stairs and realise the trams are far older than anything we’d ever seen before in the country, and as we stare out at the sky before the next one arrives to go to Sofukuji —
I come back, someone’s said something, but I’m not quite aware what. I have to ask them to repeat it again. Why was I thinking of that? Why is that particular moment here, now? They say it again and I’ve lost it again.
It’s the morning now, and I’m in the middle of my routine: I get up, I’m in a nightgown and it’s probably a touch too late in the morning. I cook eggs now, though I used to only have oatmeal the past few years; the hallway in the morning is pleasantly beiged by the incoming sunlight through the faint breaks in the walls of the triplex. I scramble the eggs, and get the toast ready in the toaster-oven-air-fryer-thing, and get ready to parallelise an espresso pull. We have a break where everything’s being processed and there’s no intervention necessary on my part as the whole thing sizzles and whirrs…
The tourist train, themed in this wooden decor after a late-19c railroad car, stops at a small town. We’re going to find these fruit-themed bus stops, but we haven’t yet. We’re trying to find an enormous shrine to Inari, a parallel to the one in Kyoto, far into Kyushu here, but when it stops, all these older Japanese people are waving hello and selling local goods. Like gift sets, or sake, but also just food you can eat here and now. So we politely say hi and we get these pastries to tide us over and then walk out of the station. The sky is so, so gray, and it feels positively rural. No cars for ages, but it’s definitely car-centric design, with residential homes along a yellowed embankment with no sound at all in any direction. The shrine is, we think, south another 18 minutes. Another set of domestic tourists get on their bikes and one points out they’re wearing the same shoes I have. I smile and say yea and wish them a good day and they scatter off and we’re just walking through what feels like a ghost town, something I can only compare to Persona 4, hating myself for making video game comparisons, just staring at the half-full riverway and unsure how this could go anywhere. But the yellow of the grass, the deep gray of the sky threatening its own awful capacity, the stones along the river, the brown houses, the sheer unknownness of where I could possibly be on Earth right now, can’t readily be integrated for whatever reason, and I feel shocked, somehow…
Hmm. They haven’t burned, but they’re slightly more cooked than I wanted. I usually leave them a little liquid and stir them into white rice with Kewpie, though today I was trying for ketchup on the toast. I’m not sure why I had to think about that now.
I had this faint memory of coming back the last time, in October, sleeping at 8pm and getting up at 5am, and just nursing canned coffee as a self-soothe aid as I listened to new ambient records — this one the Mark Mothersbaugh “Muzik for Insomniaks” one — and feeling like all was well, and yet a deep unstillness lingered from within me like the peaceful first bubbles of a boil.
It was the instant displacement that shocked me into evaluating the lives I did and didn’t choose. I hated myself, because was this novelty? Was I so lost in samsara that I collected the scenery like a distraction from the things I couldn’t now change? That felt wrong, untrue — it was as though the breaks in my consciousness were reaching back and looking at all the colours left hanging inside of me, unpainted. The slow work of memory let me still go back and live in the moments I had lived, now peaceful — now untouched by the anxiety and guilt that oftened wrecked the experiences of being in those zones. In the work of nostalgia is the promise that its fake present did work out, and so in turn here and now you can assert that all will be well, if only you can stay amongst the lotus, in every thing you already did.
And in every upcoming moment is the threat that it may not work out, that despair and pain will leave you, that you will be alone, that you will be destitute, that not everything floats to the surface. You may still break apart. What’s left of the past is the idea that in those times you still remained as what you are. In the memory is the link to a once-wholeness that feels like a promised grace insofar as it still speaks to the one remembering.
What marks the images of the places I’ve been? I was with a then-girlfriend in the winter of the west coast; yet another rainy day along the English Bay as we meandered into the Pacific Centre. I was wearing a raincoat — I think she had an umbrella that plainly didn’t make it. Either way we were both far too wet, sitting in this mall where neither of us could afford anything, going there for no reason at all, if only to keep walking.
The experience sits like a place I could visit. I should talk to her. Talking about the time we shared feels akin to trying to emerge a mutual comfort. We were whole in that place — do you remember? We may have fought or cursed or felt things we didn’t want to feel, but we’re here now, and somehow by that mutual memory we know each other.
My girlfriend and I walk along the summit of western Montreal here and now. The houses are immaculate. We keep imagining how big the families must be to be there — what’s their life like? — where are we going? What’s next? And the weather is finally nice. I look into the backyard of a brick house, emerging through a half-size woven fence, seeing a bright yellow light shining lonesome onto a patio lot, and I can already see a dark blue sky inside of it, a dinner party going far too late. A hypothetical husband releasing his fifteenth book in a sedate historiography. A life I don’t know very well, but I often thought about when I was in Toronto so young, fantasising about New England, about reading the classics by a fireplace in a Massachussetts winter, and I realise I’ve fantasised about fantasies where I fantasise about other fantasies in turn …
Is my mind just reaching for the resting place where life makes sense — and finding in every moment sorry nausea, a tiny dread, what might be lost … how this moment is already gone, and the next one, and the next one…