🌄 English letters 002: Ready for to fade

Takamatsu, Japan

Hey there, 

it’s been a while.

How are you? I hope you are doing fine. I hope your days are calm.

That’s much hoping, I know. We are living difficult days.

I was thinking about you, you know? I have been thinking about you for some time now. I think… yeah, since the beginning of Autumn. That’s what happens to me in Autumn. I reflect more. On relationships, on friendship, on love. Autumn is the season of inner warmth, I feel. It’s when the warmth gifted upon our skin from the summer sun starts to soak in. Like gathering provisions for the cold winter ahead.

I am in Japan, did I tell you? It’s been a month since I landed, more or less. When I look at the people coming and going on the streets here I feel they are doing the same as me. I feel they are rushing in quietness to gather warmth before the snow. It’s a pleasant feeling. I feel accompanied somehow. Even if when I talk to them there’s no way for us to connect. I don’t think it’s the language, solely. I think they can’t understand me. As much as I can’t understand them. Our ways of living, I mean. Our ways of moving through this world. It’s a difficult feeling to express. I feel I can’t translate it into words without losing much of it in the process. Without feeling everything will be misinterpreted.

You see, it’s like a silence, I’d say.

Like the silence you may feel if you submerge your whole self under the hot water of a bathtub. Feeling enfolded, secure. Because there is nowhere else to go. That somewhere is as warm as it can get. A comforting feeling. As if you were connected to something. Even though you wouldn’t know what that something is.

But every bathtub gets its water cold, eventually. If you wait long enough.

This is how I feel. My water is cold. My skin is quivering. My feet are wrinkled. I feel… Let me try to put it somehow else. There is this feeling I connect to; it may make you understand.

Imagine you are in a city, in a big, busy, bustling and vivid city. A city like Tokyo. A city that may not have any limits to it, even if you try to put them up, or print them down. Imagine you wake up one night from a really deep sleep, a sleep full of dreams you could never understand, that you will forget once your eyes open. You can not sleep anymore, even if you are tired, even if the next morning is a workday, and you have to pay your daily tribute to human life as it is. The insomnia is one of such kind that will push you away from bed, out of your room. That will make you desire for the day to begin already, to get on with it, already. But there are many hours left for the alarm to ring, even more for the sun to rise. So you put on some trousers, a sweater, boots, a coat, because the nights are chilly by now. It’s almost November, after all. You get out of your house, and instead of going for a walk around the block, instead of passing by the park nearby, you decide to walk to the city centre. Your legs, pushed by a raw feeling, a deep impulse, like wheels of a locomotive following down the rails, move you towards the busiest of the busiest of streets from that big city of yours. It takes you some time, maybe hours, but the night is still fresh and dark and quiet. So you go. Before you can figure out how, you are there. In the middle of this wide street, surrounded by big buildings that cover the dark skies with light. A street that every day bursts in liveliness, like a river swamped by fish. But the place is empty. It is silent. You take a look around you. You may see a taxi passing by with its quiet green light. You may see one or two men, cramped down with their chins under their coat collars, their hands inside their pockets, their eyes looking down somewhere but there, walking fast. Even at night, walking fast. Imagine you take that moment, and silence your mind completely, and silence yourself completely. Until your self becomes something like a camera for feelings, perhaps. A camera recording that empty avenue, with its empty brightful buildings, and its empty sky. Imagine that image, looking everywhere at once, in silence. Imagine what you would feel, if you saw that.

That’s about it.

If it makes any sense. Maybe just that, I hope. Just a little bit of sense.

Anyway, enough of it now. Tell me about yourself. How has it been since we last talked?

I’ve missed you.

With love,

p.

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