燕

Here's a truly exotic location, at least by the standards of my journal . . . my hometown. Yep, that's just outside the local Greek restaurant in April of 2008. They have an AMAZING lamb kokkinisto, the dish that taught me that adding a pinch of cinnamon to your average tomato-based sauce results in awesome.

Picture taken to prove to a politely doubtful Japanese colleague that yes, there are blossoming cherry trees in the United States, and they are in fact beautiful-- as beautiful as their Japanese counterparts. The difference between cherry trees in Japan and cherry trees in the US is of course their extreme cultural significance in one place, and near total lack of cultural significance in the other. Sure, people in the US think that the cherry blossoms are pretty, but they're no more significant than other flowers, and a great deal less significant than some (the rose, for instance). Whereas I couldn't even begin to convey just how significant sakura are in Japanese culture.

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I find myself preoccupied with memories often lately-- I who have always been a child of the present moment. Always with me it has been today's dream, not yesterday's or tomorrow's. But again and again my thoughts drift backwards, and I wonder-- what am I seeking there? And why now?

Memories connect one to another, like beads on a string. I think of my brother, digging in the sand-- the sand at the pool that day we three escaped, trying to pass the painful hours-- the gritty, sticky sand at the Jersey shore, the drumming surf-- summer heat-- walking down from Kiyomizudera under the July sun--

Near my house in Japan, a street corner with a traffic light. I would ride my bike out to begin the day's adventure under a bright blue sky. Fly out across the street, standing on my pedals with the wind in my hair, swoop into the turn that would bring me arrowing down the road through the brilliant green of the rice fields. None happier than I, my heart singing inside of me--

A hundred times surely I did this, and now every time is one time, one moment, a single elation, an eternal singing joy.

( Endlessly looping on YouTube lately for lack of downloading capability . . . )

There are the dreams we have, and the dreams we are not allowed to have.

The dream that I have is not the dream that other people are allowed to have, I know. It takes me far from everything familiar, it throws me wingless into the void of the world, it tosses me beyond the gravitational pull of familiar stars. It is fullfillment, and also denial-- wandering monk-quester without a quest, prodigal without progress, seeker who has nothing to seek. I step forward without looking over my shoulder, so everyone behind me can see my back. I take this dream and make it my being, because this dream is the one I am allowed to have, and have it I will.

There are dreams that I am not allowed to have. The phone ringing, that is one. I can't even remember what it sounds like anymore. Nor can I remember the voices of my memories, the way the t's were crossed, or what it feels like to touch someone.

But those dreams at least I have the luxury of forgetting. That is part of the dream I am allowed to have. Allowed to have it, I chose it, and in choosing chose those dreams that I would forget.

I chose it, all of it, for the dreams that I am not allowed to have. I stepped forward without looking over my shoulder, so that the dreams I could not have would see only my back. So that they would know, as they rejected me, that I rejected them in turn. I chose pride and refused to reach for the dreams I could not have, so that they would never see me reaching. I chose my dream and the comfort of the knowledge that I had never reached.

All of this, I chose. And part of that choosing was knowing that I would not regret my choice, because I would put myself by my own will apart from the dreams I was not allowed to have. Choosing fate in order to be free.

But none of that can stop the wondering, the forgetting, the choosing. None of that can make me forget those dreams that I've forgotten. None of that can take away the desire for the dreams that I am not allowed to have, have chosen not to have, do not desire.

I sit in my apartment, at the now-unplugged kotatsu. Bach cello concertos, my companion for the past two evenings, fill the air with a timeless beauty not at all at odds with the hodgepodge of papers and eclecticism that is my apartment. I am the only rhyme and reason that exists in this place; logical, since it is mine for however long I stay here and continue paying for it.

I was in Kyoto-proper this evening, arranging my dinner for tomorrow. I am at the age where things only happen for your birthday if you do them yourself; as much as one might wish to remain quiet about the event and be pleasantly but predictably surprised by the thoughtfulness of one's friends, it is much wiser to make one's own arrangements and avoid the potential disappointment that could result from one's friends not actually doing anything. Because they have a plethora of distractions each, after all.

I can on occasion be wise, though the childish pride that still lives within me rails against it. But it's just that stubborn pride that causes us to hurt ourselves, and then rage at a sourceless Other.

If I am ever hurt, I cannot entirely free myself of blame. Of course it's wrong for someone to hurt me, but if they have managed it then I have left myself open to that hurt. I like to think of it as a warrior's mentality: to gaurd yourself.

Having nowhere in particular that I needed to be, I paused on the Sanjo Bridge. Below, on the bank of the Kamo River, fire spun and twirled in swift arcs around the twisting bodies of the dancers, serpents and orbiting comets of orange flame. Drummers pounded out a rhythm that was music all by itself, the familiar boom-tekka-tek an external heartbeat. I took off my shoes and perched on a stone piling to watch-- the dancers, the flames, the drummers, their various friends, the audience, the passers-by. Such a convocation of people, many of them young. Guitar-toting hopefuls waiting for discovery, businessmen sipping at beer cans, tourists staring in wonder, families on their way to or from restaurants. A thousand stories, walking to and fro, as the dancers whirled and leapt, tossing their flaming staffs into the air and catching them again, as artfully self-concious as they could be while handling fire. Well aware of their own allure and reveling in it.

I am a writer, which means that I move in a world of stories. My own life is not a story, it is a thousand stories, none of them mine. I assigned names and identities to the characters who passed me by, memorized faces and roles, and wondered vaguely what they saw when they looked at me. Nothing that invited intimacy of any sort, of course; sometimes I wonder if what I am comes through to the point that other people can sense it, and it keeps them away. Or is the unloveliness of my face sufficent to discourage any attention whatsoever? I have walked unmolested in the dark hours, in the questionable sections of various jagged cities. Lopsided face, a body at least four hundred years out of fashion, skin alternately mottled and spotted, any gold or red in my hair losing out to muddy brown, disproportionate limbs, short and stubbed fingers . . . a thousand beginnings that never came to fruition . . . every piece of me a broken promise . . . and the focal point of my being: a writer's eyes, shifting blue-green-grey, calm yet inconstant. Remote. Always watching, and somehow forbidding both desired and undesired attention. Set apart forever, whether I will it or no.

I can't win if I fight against myself. I can't remake my being, even if I should wish to. I can't move from story-maker to story, cannot become the main character when I am not myself a character at all. I am meant to tell stories, not to be them.

This is not my life, this is a search for stories. I am not a person, I am a thing which exists to find stories, and to tell them.

A particularly dismal practice session in preparation for tonight's lesson has left me defeated. Really, how long am I supposed to keep this up? I've been playing for nearly three months now, isn't that a little long to be trying and failing to produce consistant sound? When do I cross the line where patient persistance becomes stubborn stupidity? When should I just admit that I'm a hopeless failure? When do my efforts cease to be earnest and start to be pathetic?

Or did they already?

Or were they from the start?