Drinking low quality, blend coffee from a juice box purchased at the vending machine in my school’s hallway for a hundred yen suddenly fills me with the essence of Japan. All my feelings, all my memories, all my moods and swings, the sum of all my pictoviews gather together in full force just behind my forehead. It’s like brut cologne to junior high. One whiff of that aging bottle sitting in the top drawer of my dresser always brought me right back to 7th grade gym class. They say smell is the sense most closely linked with memory, and if that’s the case I’m headed for early senility. However, I have my words and I have the crushing weight of my feelings, so I’ll have to rely on this subjective history to get me through my nursing home years.
Juice Box Coffee. This isn’t even Can Coffee quality.
Through the thick of a year’s worth of memories, a single moment emerges. I’m standing on the sea wall and a breeze tugs at my back. The sound of a semi hangs there too; there’s the ever sleeping Easter Island mountain, and a sky almost matching the sea. This is how I know my Japan: where the hills kiss the water, where people sit at low tables, drinking to the ages just as they have done for a thousand years, where old women ride scooters and bicycles and buy their vegetables at convenience stores, where children bow to a stranger, their bodies bending even as their eyes stare in wonder; a place where concrete and iron push their way through the eonic surface, rising to the sky, where these very buildings are reclaimed by the land they once covered, now entangled in green. Time is all of history here and now is made up of all of then.
I discovered today I've been in love with a thought.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment