죄송합니다

She told me she had just come back from Narita, where she was sending off her friend to Korea. I fell silent, keeping the day's events —the roller coasters, the sushi, the long walk back home— to myself. As I stared into her face I realized how little I had strived to transcend the stage of mere hellos, how questions and comments flourished in my mind but never made it to my tongue. I would have loved to know her more, yet words had always failed me. Even then, on the brink of the last goodbye, I was left looking uninterested and unfriendly, letting out muffled screams into a mask out of which she had never been able to see me.

I'm so sorry. And yet, you will never know it, for I am still being selfish enough to translate my feelings into a language other than our lingua franca.

죄송합니다. I hope life entitles me to another chance.

Mon Nouveau Copain

There is a new presence in my room. Tall, slender, smooth skin waiting to be touched on the bed... or the chair, or the floor—who cares about places when the remedy for madness has come home with me this morning. I can't believe I waited so long to bring happiness back into my life, to break the deadly silence that was already eating my heart away ever so slowly.

Unfortunately, my new companion cannot rub my cold feet in the night or interrupt an absorbing solitary activity with a kiss. I'll have to wait a long, long, long time to meet the one who's in charge of that.

今日本に住んでいます。

Chocoballs for Dinner

"Hiroshi "Chocoball" Mukai is a Japanese male porn star and professional wrestler."
—Wikipedia

Tiny brown imperfect spheres roll and roll on the desk.
They come to a dizzy stop,
Greeted by the light from the lamp,
Looking like gracious
Opaque pearls, like miniature
Polished dinosaur egg fossils.

It takes less than twelve seconds to turn
Views into memories,
Reflected light into
A subtle crunch.

The joys of life.

Chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Chocolate with crushed almonds
Like a seductive piece of
Plywood,
Bitter chocolate with sweet bits of orange,
Chocolate-flavored
Powder
Refusing to melt
In a bowl of cold milk.

Precious maroon liquid
Flowing into a paper cup
In cold metal hands,
Bashful boxes pucker up—
Give me a kiss,
Give me everything you've got—,
They die quenching a yearning
No Aztec king could picture
In the bitter seed trade.

Tiny imperfect spheres roll and roll in my mouth.
It takes less than twelve hours to turn
Memories into pain,
Beautiful opaque pearls into
Regret and flab.

The joys of life.

悔恨

I feel an incredible urge to write. I don't need to think, just write away, no matter how poor the grammar might come out, how evident the lack of practice might seem when read. And yet, I still pause and wonder whether I'm using the right words or if I can stop mixing Japanese terms with the suffix -ness. My room smells like burnt food, the window is open and cool wind comes in. I've mopped the floor, but it seems to need further cleaning. It's a cell, it's home, it's the beginning of a long journey.

I'm so much better than this, yet I have neglected so much of myself at the sight of endless effort. What for, I wondered, and only now that it's too late to wonder I find the answer. There's a voice in the back of my head telling me results could've been better, if only I had put more effort to it. Effort, effort, effort. Everything here is about effort.

I think of effort and my mind flutters away, a butterfly and its graceful dizziness stumbling over endless afternoons of Hawaiian bread and tangerine juice, over plump juicy peaches, over hot chocolate on Sundays, over my sleeping head on his lap in the bus.

I cannot write without thinking. I cannot help but overthink, overfeel, let the sights and sounds crush my shoulders and reduce me to a ball of insecurities and what-ifs. Why is writing my favorite pastime if it's so painful? Why do I want to make a living out of a rather masochistic activity? The quest for the perfect word, the neverending process of learning a language and not letting go of a couple more, the untimeliness of ideas... Is this what I want to do with my life? It seems so, although my excessive nonchalance speaks the contrary.

If I can't make it I can go back, I can always go back, I have people waiting for me. But I cannot afford to quit. This is not the end of the road, and this road is so much more than an adventure to get a couple of pictures and souvenirs. Maybe I should go back to coherence, to being consistent with my dreams. Or rather than that, I should remember that I do have dreams, and that this very chair I'm sitting on is the realization of a dream I believed unattainable.

The lonely fields of Tsukuba are nothing but the mental pictures I used to smile at when walking into the morning sun, out of a building whose eleventh floor waited for me every two weeks with paper dinosaurs and still dancers trapped in glass cages.