Countdown

This is my final week in Japan.

A week-long farewell to what has been a five month-long affair, this is going to be manic. I'm actually trembling a little as I write this, because I know the intensity of what I'm going to feel over the coming days. Of course, I know this all sounds a little dramatic, as if I'll never see Japan again, which is absolutely rubbish. (I'm self-aware enough to know how much of a drama queen I can be, but I don't care.) Because I know I'll never see Japan again through this version of myself... What ends here this week, actually ends here. Next time will be different, it always is.

You see, I treat my endings very seriously. Like little deaths. Like walking into a funeral pyre. The end of existence, with nothing to follow. That's the only way I can reconcile with ending something while still feeling things as intensely as I do. Because, you know, someday one of these endings will actually be the actual one. 

So, yes, little deaths. Every farewell is a little death. Once you make your peace with that and feel it for what it is, the moment after the farewell opens up. Like a blank page. Things don't carry over, because you've already given everything you have to give. You're burnt to a crisp, you're just ashes. What follows a death? Birth, obviously. Glorious, fresh, untainted birth. 

But then, let me not get too ahead of myself. I'm still a week away from my next birth. I still have the intensity of this week-long death to feel.

And damn god, it's going to be painful and beautiful, which are often the same thing. 


***


I've got only six more nights left in this glorious country, but I have no idea where I will be tomorrow. Of course, there are the usual mechanisms to figure it out, tricks I use all the time when I travel. 

Flip coins to choose the direction to move in / choose from an existing wishlist built since childhood / engage with unwitting strangers to make the decision as an unbiased party / revisit old favourites and intensify existing relationships / or simply wait to get kicked out on the street and then move in the direction that's least uncomfortable... Shortcuts, really, to submit to fate/destiny/universe, whatever you want to call the thing outside of yourself. 

We'll see once I wake up tomorrow. That is if I sleep tonight, because Tokyo beckons, in all its neon-filled glory. I start in Nihonbashi tonight, a place that literally means "The bridge of Japan". The place where all distances in Japan originate, the point where they are all measured from... But sorry, this is not a history lesson, you can learn more on your own. 

I am surrounded by the ghosts of Hokusai's woodblock figures, and how comforting that is to have familiarity surround you. Alongside the skyscrapers. And the cemeteries. And the canals, and the gardens. And the parasols. And the layers and layers of history.

Tonight, the dying begins.