The sole purpose of this post is to remember forever the night I cycled with Yurika through a country road. The uncontrollable green kept lashing my legs, seeking to slap my face, and the cars by our side were swerving, praying not to cause an accident. We slid downhill like drops of liquid pouring out of a bottle into the immensity of the rice paddies. If I were to remember only one thing about June, I thought while gazing at the charcoal-colored landscape around us, may it be this ride.

We ate at an almost empty restaurant where they asked us what language we were speaking in. “Many languages,” she said. Indeed, Spanish and Portuguese and Japanese and English were intermingling freely in our conversation.

When it was time to go back we took a different path, one I knew from my trips to the City Hall. It was extremely dark and quiet, but there was nothing to fear, just like in a dream. It was full of uncertain trees following us with their summery scent. During the day this road looks like those I saw in Vietnam. The exuberance of the vegetation defies all human advances, as the vines swiftly wrapped around wires would prove.

Sometimes Tsukuba overwhelms me with a beauty I could not fathom when I first set foot here. Perplexed and intoxicated, I ride on.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman

Silk

Indescribable beauty. Words being woven together like threads of silk to talk about silk. It’s hard to recover from this shock, so much beauty contained in 90 pages or so. It came in a bright green envelope, postmarked from Sweden. I can’t even write properly about it.

I devoured the book in about an hour. After I turned the last page and met that blank stare from the book that ended, I sat in silence in my room, images still dancing in my head. Paths and forests and eyes that meet. Eyes that meet. I’ve wandered those streets, I’ve heard those trees sing the wind. And yet they’ve been rendered magical by a hand thousands of kilometers away. I’m astounded.

Will I ever be able to ignite sparks from words like that?

Morning Has Broken

I love dawn. Everything starts anew from a touch of gold on the grass, a quiet fire in the sky. Being able to see sunrise from my window is one of my favorite things about this apartment. Sometimes I even get up early just to see the horizon come alive; I’ve been doing it quite often since I moved in here. The sight was even soothing in times of internal murk. I may have been left alone in a snowstorm all right, but the beauty of daybreak never failed.

I’ve been fixing things lately. The feeling of plenitude that struck me amid the water in Waikiki doesn’t seem to be leaving, and I’m glad it has managed to stay. All it took for the clouds to dissipate was a couple of huge decisions on the course of my life. When I met Prof. Lambert to discuss a few of them, I knew I was taking a huge step away from the shadows. Career prospects, foreign languages, what to do with my slowly reawakening creative drive, everything seems to have fallen into place all of a sudden. Who knew that staring at a radiotelescope could be so effective?

This weekend I went to Shibuya to meet one of my best friends and her boyfriend. We gathered at an Irish pub and ate shepherd’s pie and apple crumble. Then we walked around the familiar streets which had become so alien to me. Suddenly I realized that I was enjoying it pretty much like during my first days in Japan, when I would venture out of language school after class to walk around these packed streets and stare at all the little details decorating the whirling crowd. It’s like the world is coming back to shape, sunshine hitting strong again, a fresh coat of paint on this faded landscape.

It’s like daybreak after a long, cold night.