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Year Two

August

Shizuoka

I moved into town. Took a 3:30. Didn’t get there ‘til Four. My mind raced around nothing, grabbing to the little pieces that were wisps, waiting for something to materialize. I was fallow and realized this happened some time ago. I beat the road, looking for cigarettes. The machines had since gone Taspo – you now needed a card to buy from them, even though the beer machines were left open to the world and open to the teens. Cigarettes were a bigger pull I guess. You looked cooler taking a smoky drag, more than a cool pull. Sunday. Where had Saturday gone? I always wish I had more time, always kicking myself for not starting earlier. Less than eight hours ‘til the last train. Had this been eight, I could have had the whole day. Hell, I could put in my day and still return to the sun and a messy apartment, maybe with a reserve of motivation to clean. I was living between work weeks, weeks spent away from home, my Japanese home. In this day I realized that I wanted my home back home – over oceans and half a continent – to the sweet center of the northern world where my ancestors settled, having crossed that opposite ocean. I stood on the dirt outside the station, stood on an exposed root, looking down. This was Minnesotan soil – I pictured the woods in my periphery, green and hollow, leaves lined parallel, seeing water through the gaps and sun behind it. The soil was beaten low, maybe trampled by that summer’s campers, all putting their tent in the same spot, the door facing the southern sun.

I could write, I knew it, if only I had a plan. I could play, I knew it, if only I had the drive, the discipline. The stick of a benny addict. Or the observation of a man with an eye. But I was seeing maimed, almost half of my senses gone. My nose didn’t work and my eyes only saw the inside workings of myself, those tired and worn from a year overseas, away from home. I could talk to anyone now, I knew it. I would ask all the questions that popped into my head.

God, I loved – loved every girl that walked by, yet I knew I was settling for Japanese women, their faces now softening to my eyes. I know I’ll end up with a Minnesota girl, blond hair and blue eyes with a smile of wintry beauty, a beauty that warms in the summer and turns to golden brown, hair that lightens with the brightness of her laugh, tanning in rolled down shorts and freckled shoulders, looking at me sideways as she lays on the lawn. Soft white eyelids, like silk on my lips. You don’t have to explain anything to your own kind, you just get each other. Someone who knows the grip of Cheez-its, the foul of lutefisk, the lethargy that comes with the sound of an organ playing somber Lutheran hymns. It sounds strange to you, but isn’t it so normal? Such a part of the grind? Heaven knows it and heaven is soft and bright – a soft edged whiteness drifting above it all and settling down upon the sharp-tipped world below, dulling its points and blurring its edges, the grey melting into rubbed charcoal into cream into white.

Run away and marry me. I will love you forever.