On leaving
Meditating on things that must be lost in order to be gained and remnants of a summer once lived
Home
Towards the beginning of summer you reach the precipice of half a year having passed—three months to rummage through all the sentiments left behind from February and March with their loosely taped boxes that have piled up beneath your bed. In an instant, I’ve chased these running thoughts into the second week of June. The mornings are crisp at first, but by the afternoon, I’ve sweat out all the happenings of the day, walking home under the late, dozing sun.
Since the beginning of the year, it’s felt like all I’ve written has been on the nature of self discovery. It’s typical in so far as this is exactly what one might expect a 27 year old to do. But even now, it’s something I feel like I do the least of—writing is a muscle I anticipate exercising, yet rarely find the chance to even stretch. I’m too tired after work and there are emails that need responding to or documents that need to be printed, filled out, scanned, and returned. There are meals to be planned and lessons to be written and groceries to be shopped. Afterwards, there are boxes to be packed and chairs to be measured and bookshelves to be sold on FB marketplace. Then, there are doctor’s appointments and prescriptions to be dropped off and glasses to be fixed. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the stagnant summer heat fills our apartment and I can never seem to focus in Japanese class. I skip my last week to go swim in the ocean one last time, feeling the cold water cradle my back as I drift in silence, staring up at the cloudless sky. Between every mundane moment I have—floating in the sea, on the way to work while reading on the bus—I ask myself whether I have any new insights; have I learnt my lessons here yet? where else do I want to eat? have I gone to a farmer’s market? have I accepted the ways which I’ll leave this time and the life that I’ll leave behind? For a minute, I dot the i’s along the mountains that move across the window before getting back to my book, and hours later on the walk home, I cross the t’s off of each crossing street.
Where I ended up wanting to eat:
It’s strange to live an entire year in anticipation of leaving. Fleeting moments are slowed by the weight of my sentimental grip and a constant fear that once they’ve passed, they’re no longer mine. I’m scared of forgetting and of being forgotten, but I live my life in a way that asks me to accept both. This has always been the crux of my experience, prefaced with the fact that someday I’ll leave. Nearly ten years ago, I left Vancouver for the first time to move to England. I remember being anxious at 18, but there was less to worry about at that age with fewer endings to confront. Still, the summer before you leave always feels the same—you lay in parks next to your best friends with sweat collecting under your knees and gnats swarming above you. You look out towards the mountains that tower above your childhood home and ask yourself if this sunset is the last you’ll watch together, knowing that if you return, you will have outlived the life before you now and sit on this bench a different person.
June and July dissolve into my skin like sweat and salt water and I write to remember what it feels like. The sun warms the shores along the west coast and I think of wanting to do little else than feel the flow of water—the ocean’s depths, the shallow streams, the running rivers—all that moves and what remains with me on the shore. Heraclitus writes that you never step in the same river twice, but I’ve lived this life once before. Back in the summer of 2017, those three weeks on Alexander street when the heat dragged into September. I felt as young then as I do now. A romance of day trips and ferry rides, cans of beer and smoking on the rocks, falling on my ass and slipping on wet stones into freezing water. Seven years later, on what feels like the same summer afternoon, I glimpse towards the windshield’s widening crack of time and the remnants of my past—its cyclical impermanence. The same song of summer about moving away plays in my head, and as we drive home from the river, I fall asleep in between conversations with friends in the backseat of the car. Bright flashes of afternoon sun pass across my closed eyelids like a zoetrope of memories at high speed revolution—the beautiful and awful year, New Year’s Eve in a mansion, belligerence and chaos, a strawberry Milk2Go bottle filled with tequila, a bedroom of moving boxes, pushing a couch up a narrow flight of stairs, a broken taillight, chocolate milk, brown sludge from a leaky ceiling, the corner between the couch and wall where I slept, a shattered jar of chili oil at 7 am, restaurant lines outside our apartment door, shots of chacha and silver earrings, the uphill towards our favourite grocery store, takeout pho containers in the recycling bin, the shortcomings of February, grief and diazepam, crawling into each other’s beds on Sunday mornings, Claire getting bit by a black widow on FaceTime, dry, heaving, gagging laughter, writing our heights on the kitchen wall in blue pen, a Chinese roast chicken and an old high school crush, crashing a party in the snow, shoes piled in the hall, the smell of cat piss and weed from the neighbour below, a graduation and new job, a climbing fall and brain injury, a very unlucky St. Patrick’s Day, a Russian citizenship in the middle of a war, chicken liver in a sippy cup, the great unboxing of our Onitsuka’s from Taiwan, the breakdown of friendships on account of true sincerity, sardine dip at 2 am to the sounds of quid pro quo Clarice, morning after pills, a rock concert at the Astoria, a brat themed ice cream cake with black food dye that stained our teeth, the integrity of “free” gym memberships, a studio party with an arm around my neck, a high school reunion, the smell of raw chicken factories, the northern lights on a Friday in May, pink sofa cushions in the alleyway, five minute car rides home, grassy school fields and courts, your feet against my back, cat scratches, garbage bags and pistachio shells, dj decks and parties of three, at home lash lifts and saran wrap, a laundry room balcony, an ashtray with roaches, espresso martinis, frozen towels during a heatwave, better Italian food upstairs, steep gravel paths to the beach, swimming to the centre of the ocean, the things I grew up doing and love the most, the sky-blue youth of July, sun-bleached grass, the bedroom where it all started, falling in love, holding onto the feeling of naivety and recklessness until my knuckles turn white. I open my eyes and we’re home.
Japan
The first time I had ever talked about moving to Japan was with L. We were 19 and in our second year of university. Years ago, he’d gone to Japan for a holiday with his family and soon after, committed himself to the idea that he’d live there one day. When I decided to take a year off of university and move back home, he applied to teach in Japan. In letters, he’d imagine us there, that despite our own periods of sadness, this was our happiness to come. He wrote of Albert Camus and the absurdity of the world, that love and happiness were rare and hard to keep. “These are the things that will save us”—an idea I held onto for years to come. The rain in Shibuya was thundering onto cars and everyone had their umbrellas out. L was sat in MOS burger with his notebook looking from the window down onto the crossing. Back then, he drew a picture of Shibuya Crossing and years later, gave it to me in a letter. Nearby, he wrote, there’s a shrine where you can get married. Meiji Jingu is his third favourite temple. He never ended up moving to Japan and instead left England for Berlin.
On my fifth day in Tokyo, I walk through the evergreen forest surrounding Meiji Jingu having forgotten all the letters we exchanged years ago. I’ve since eaten at MOS burger and realize now that him writing there in his notebook is much less romantic than I initially thought. Certain naiveties at 19 years old can’t be helped. There was a time when I thought about this future and those letters every day. During the years leading up to now, I wrote to him in emails about my teaching course, referencing A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, and how I submitted my application to the same program he applied to all those years ago. At one point, I thought that this would be the place where we’d meet again, but I’ve since stopped trying to write some version of this story, having forgotten what this dream sounded like when he spoke of it out loud. Now, when people ask me why I moved here, I tell them of my own version.
Nearby, I sit next to a sacred tree in the centre of Yoyogi Hachiman shrine. A moment of respite amongst the trees that shade me from the day’s oppressive heat. Sweat drips down my back and mosquito bites cover my legs. I can feel the vibration of cicadas, their pulsing rhythm of summer. A wedding takes place in a sanctuary of stillness away from the profane. In my solitude, I tell myself that this a prelude to the year I endeavour to live alone and press my palms against the tree.
Being in Tokyo feels limitless. Every day, an unfathomable sense of newness contrasting the life I lived before. For the past two weeks, I’ve been staying in my hotel room in Akabane waiting to move after a desperate search for a place to live—in the interim of moving—how does it all feel? Overwhelming and unfamiliar, but after two days, I begin to recognize the storefronts that lead me to the closest station, a relief because I’ve nearly used up all my phone’s data on Google Maps. In a notebook, I’ve written down the train lines and my address in case I get lost. It’s still summer, so I take the train down to a sleepy beachside town and swim in the ocean with Millie, biting into peaches and cucumbers while beads of sweat collect across our hairlines. Peach juice drips down my chin and we run into the ocean waves, still rough from the typhoon earlier in the week. Salt crystallizes in the creases of my forearms and my dress is damp from my wet skin. We take the train to a yakitori restaurant where smoke trails out of its open doors lit by a row of hanging red lanterns. Inside, the first sip of an ice cold Sapporo on a humid August evening, sweet chewy summer corn, plump Japanese siu mai, charred negi, soft tsukene, and a background of business men who are sweating through dress shirts at the bar. Back in my hotel room, I’m woken up in the middle of the night by rumbling thunder and electric lightning.
Between Shingashi and Arakawa river, the concrete steps are overgrown with wild grass. I sit alone with the birds, ants, and dragonflies, watching the wind blow and the water drift downstream as I write, living the August of another summer. At the end of the week, I meet my big adventure at the deep end and move into my apartment. My first meal is tomato hambagu rice from Matsuya, a seasonal set that I’ve been telling myself I need to recreate ever since. It’s 8:30 pm and I’m sitting on my mattress with my back against my bedroom wall. A new beginning in another empty room. I have no furniture except my red lamp from home that I packed in my suitcase. The excitement, anxiety, loneliness, and freedom all make for a similar kind of unpleasantness in the mind and body that you feel when you’re falling in love. Life is entirely consuming, sometimes painstakingly so, but it finally feels like my own to fall asleep with and wake up to in the morning.
Talk soon,
Alexa