October 20th, 2005
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Wake me up when October ends
It’s Thursday morning in America, and this is the first time I’ve been alone for a moment since I came home. In the past week I’ve driven over six hundred and fifty miles, and met over seven distinct groups of people. I feel like the last several days have been a highlight reel from a season’s worth of syndicated episodes: blurring, stopping, and starting, all melting over each other in an 8mm soup.
I think Dad was supposed to take off and we were going to hang out today, maybe play some golf. But after fighting to stay awake and see the Astros clinch the NLCS last night, I woke up to an empty house some eight hours later; finding the first overcast morning since I arrived. He’s had a pretty rough cold this week and been working from home a lot. I suppose he had to go to the office.
So now I’m sitting in a split and creaking vinyl-padded office chair, looking out the basement window over the crabapple tree and trying to grab hold of the things I said I’d do before I went back to Japan, which is only seventy-two hours away.
A mass of omiyage (gifts) have been bought for everyone in the office and friends back home, I’ve [nearly] satisfied my craving for cheap used video games, having purchased Silent Hill 3, Ico, Katamari Damacy, and Star Ocean 3 all for less than thirty dollars (thanks to my mom). I also hit up Wonderbook and Video on the Golden Mile yesterday because no trip to America is complete without buying more brain food. I was looking for Buddhism and Dances with Wolves, but struck out on both and settled for The Book of the Hopi and a 1966 edition of Ikebana.
My teeth were cleaned at my mother’s office, with diligence and detail that far exceeded my last visit to a Japanese dentist. It was more of the same, no cavities or signs of periaortits, three millimeter recession of my gums on a few select teeth, and one questionable filling from 1988. However, this time I had the wakeup call of finding that my upper right cuspid has a hairline vertical fracture, possibly from serious impact. It made me shiver as the horrible night last month sprung back into my mind, and the possibility of a future root canal for my blind recklessness was a further reinforcement to just how at risk I am for catastrophe.
My days are forcibly eating three to four large meals a day and walking through rooms emptied and devoid of the smiling plastic baubles I fumbled through adolescence with. The autumn sun seems foreign to me– at the latitude of my childhood mockingly more amber and hazy. It’s not a trip home for vacation but beating an old, thinly sewn pillow and watching other people stepping progress and regression, mostly progress, brisk strides down the roads and into clouds, farther and faster than I had imagined. Your idea of a person is like a VCR, and you go away to get something from upstairs, putting it on pause. Then you get distracted and come back much later than you planned to find the waiting had ended and it started again while you were gone. Now you’re thrust into the middle of the third season of a show you were just starting to get into. Why are all the characters forever getting cooler?
I’m really starting to feel the tides rising above me again. It’s time to sink into the floor, or fight back to the surface and tread. Wake me up when October ends.
