The Ninth, and final, Farewell: Nihonbashi, Tokyo

It had to be here. Nowhere but here.
The bridge where all distances begin and end, where all roads converge and diverge. This is where the farewells began, and this is where they end.

What do I say when there is, simultaneously, too little and too much to say?

Five months of purposeless magnificence in this ancient culture, driven by nothing but curiosity. I was a vagrant, moving on local trains, buses, resting wherever I found a pillow and a shower, often not knowing where that would be until the sky darkened. I had no interest in the present, the living, because it was a distraction. 

I was obsessed with the past and I just wanted to get to it. I walked all day and all night in cities, towns, highways, hilly forests, neon-filled alleys, foggy beaches, moon-lit cemeteries… Whatever was ahead of me, I walked through it. That is all I wanted to do, really, to walk, to walk until I moved not just through space, but through time. I wanted to walk until the world fell apart under my feet and opened up a path into the heart of this ancient land.

I don’t know where or when that happened, but it did happen, somewhere along the 2064 kilometres my feet dragged me through. I gazed, gazed and gazed until one moment, Japan gazed back. No words can describe the brilliance and darkness of that gaze and it swallowed me whole.

This place, it is home to some of humanity’s greatest accomplishments and some of its darkest. I let everything pass through me, eyes open every waking moment, looking up, looking down, looking ahead and looking behind with every step I took. Attention is the purest form of love, and I loved Japan with everything I had. It leaves me battered, bruised and bent out of shape, and I will make poetry of it for the rest of my time. 

Farewell, Nihon.
I am ready to walk into the light now.