She feels a dreadful sense of unreality encroaching upon her – well, it is only terrible not to be able to hold the moment and examine it. Dreams and unreal snatches of the day are as welcome as the moments of joy and banal contentment, they are all as one and part of a life, and yet the momentum of the last few months has finally barrelled over and past her and left her with a nagging sense that she's always forgetting something, like a misplaced sock or eggs for shakshuka, and all the minutes once occupied and considered fully are left unexamined and unrecorded. She feels the weight of unanswered correspondence. She is nearly 28 and still frustrated that she cannot do everything. At this point she is still trying to catch up to herself.
Who knows where this unreality has crept up from? It began one day on a train platform, when the staircases on the building opposite suddenly announced their even zig-zags. Sacks of sand bulged and barged into her field of vision, the blue and yellow and new charcoal grey of this new structure demanding to be seen.
Which factory made this chair? Who dreamt of the metal nubs jutting out from those roofs? Someone wove this carpet and before that entire forests and fields were given over to making fibres and threads. She wants to know when it began to unravel. Or why we think our time is not our own. Why is the city, the country, the world, changing in these ways? Who is driving this train wreck?
We could be brains in jars for all I care, he says.
Every morning, she wakes up not knowing who she is for half a minute. Distress seeps through her at losing the last vestiges of dreaming, visions and fragments that might coalesce into a narrative if she could just hold on to those moments for a few more minutes. Ten people in harnesses attached to balloons powerful enough to float through the stratosphere. Eight spiders weaving webs in a neat upwards diagonal. A bed in an alcove and a shelf stuffed with self-help books. A woman standing across a table saying, I hope you learned something. In the next room of this scene, an impending volcanic overflow.
(Tip: avoid visiting Walt Disney Resorts, where dreams come true.)
He tells her that the look on her face is one of abject confusion. Mornings are a struggle and her awakening is his morning entertainment. She is relieved that it is him there in the morning and not anyone else; it gives her space to return to her own body, it makes this city feel more like home and less like an obligation.
Ride the trains and you feel the undercurrents to this city. Mornings are defined by clenched shoulders and underslept faces, evenings by slumped bodies and exhaustion etched into their limbs. It’s a form of camaraderie. Everyone has the same bent necks losing themselves in smartphones but at least everyone seems to be playing the same meaningless game.
On weekdays everything is defined by lack, by insufficiency of the things we want most. In this city numbness is a form of defence. How else can one survive in such a teeming mass of people? People here are chastised for having barriers. Hardly surprising. Her friend said it was impossible to acknowledge the humanity of every single person you came across here. Not that you shouldn't but you tumbled too soon into the limits of your own capacity for other people. Normal is only as you define it. Stay anywhere too long and you could delude yourself into thinking this is how anything should be.
Humans complicate things. She wants the conveniences of a city without the inconveniences other people represent. The longer she is here the smaller the city feels. Or is it that her ambition shrinks as much as her exhaustion grows? You can't really know a city like this, she thinks, but you can grow tired of it, and sometimes that all adds up to needing a break from this place.
She has always wanted to disappear, or so she says. But what we say is not what we really mean, and even the sentences where we then upend our own claims and rephrase what we really mean, no, none of that is actually meant. She couldn't abandon her choices or she would already have done it. Can she reinvent herself? Dare she ask for the luxury of irresponsibility? Is it too late to do everything she dreamt of?
She writes in the third person to circle around things that might be true. She tells people things she has yet to believe herself. She thinks she wants to know what you think but wonders if she's better off not knowing.
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FLORY'S VENTURES (STUFF I'M UP TO)
ON BEING INTERVIEWED I sometimes think writing is like answering questions no one asked. But I fail to answer the most obvious questions, usually, so having the opportunity to do that is always welcome. Like when Joe Baur at Without A Path asked to include me in his Trailblazers series. (Joe’s hiking frequency is highly enviable.) No but seriously – I loved writing this down. Thank you so much, Joe! You can read the interview here.
EATING KYOTO One of the most satisfying work-related things I’ve done in the last few months is finishing two eating itineraries for Kyoto. One is for omnivores, and the other is vegetarian. No hyperbole. Only good food. Two years after leaving Kyoto, and it seems that I can’t stay away from this city. If you’re visiting, I hope it helps you find a good meal or three.
REAL LIFE I’ve spent more time on screens this month than I can remember, but very little posting on social media. The last few months are taking its toll: I feel a little like Bilbo this month, “like butter scraped over too much bread.” It’s equal parts unhealthy reluctance to take a break from work, juggling people, and necessary time spent on the million moving components of making a significant life decision happen. Vague, but it will be due an official announcement in the next month or two. All this is a way of saying: please forgive my laxness in correspondence to all!
EAT WITH ME As we’re steamrolling our way towards summer, autumn planning is coming in sight. I do eating and walking tours in Tokyo, and for at the right times, in Kyoto – so here's where you send your Japan-bound friends. (Or you can forward this newsletter to them.)
JAPAN TRAVEL CONSULTING This is exactly like it sounds. Need to ask me burning questions about interesting places, rail travel, or what to include in your holiday? Ask for me (or one of the other excellent folks) at Japan Travel Consulting.
She had no jutting collarbones to speak of so she was perpetually fascinated by people who did have them. People whose skeletons you could see, people who wore their bones like amulets, bones protruding on their face but never their thoughts nor minds nor moods which were far more impenetrable, like they had exchanged one kind of visibility for another. Or she was just poor at reading people. That was one way of looking at it, anyway. A story written on their bodies and another in the words they uttered. She tried to remember that people never say what they mean, only what they think they mean. Bodies betray their master. It was easier not to be disappointed if she left expectations at the door. She thought about placing her thumbs in the hollow of his collarbones when he took a breath and curled his shoulders forward. Did anyone ever fill them with oil just to watch them shimmer in the light? She liked the way he narrated the scars on his hands, describing small marks and burns. That was when I was being stupid. Took something out of the oven. He is too tall for her and she hadn’t known how much she liked that, how careful he has to be as though she is a small bird. She could inconvenience someone for a change. Someone else could jigsaw their limbs, go out of their way for her, decide not to hurt her. She keeps her eyes open the whole time and watches him feel her shut-eyed. In a way, she is grateful to be killing time with him. She likes that he is kind even if they don't fit. They are merely practicing for other people.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
The Book No One Read (Nautilus)
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. (New York Magazine)
Handwriting: an elegy (1843)
Before I Could Change the World, I Had to Change Myself (New York Times)
The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan (WIRED)
On Nighttime (Paris Review)
My Father’s Stack of Books (The New Yorker)
A FEW THINGS I'VE WRITTEN