How long overdue is this. Once again, I am the sailor. Goldmund era, I say.
Writing involves taking a step back. Maybe that’s why I haven’t done it in awhile. What is actually happening? What am I actually doing?
Summer. Koenji. Every street is littered with memories of an absent autumn, a dying romance. The loneliness is palpable. Who can I eat pancakes with, I wonder. Who lives in the tea house now? Who do I buy flowers for? There is a melodic timbre in the voices of the people speaking Japanese around me. I pass by the cafe where we played the Koln Concert and wrote down our kanji for the year, afraid to go in. I’d like that ukelele now, I think. I have a place to put it, a place to play it. I know it’ll feel hollow though.
In these same streets, I wander through the mirage of last season and in this mirage, I conjure up a ghost.
—
In an izakaya I’ve never been to before, I show up, drunk, to meet a man with the same name as the one that haunts me in this neighbourhood. Immediately, as an apology, I start to read the Japanese poem I wrote in class. Something about going north, something about me going into the earth. The ghost listens, the ghost laughs. In the morning he will tell me that he not only couldn’t hear it, he didn’t understand a word I said.
I share a language with no one, I think.
I go from living in memories to having none of that first meeting.