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Crowded Loneliness

My pleasures in this foreign land have been many, chased and threatened only by my great fears. Now I am left with the pain and the delay of mourning. This does not bring me down. Or – it does, but in a way that sparkles and refreshes. I welcome the break from exaltation.

I find myself unable to string my words together in a sensical manner. I start speaking, and then stop. Start again, and then trail off. Finally, I can only crease my brow and say, “That’s not it.”

Particular pleasures resonate as of late. I read a book with a protagonist named after a man I desire. He is lonely, full of need. His unrest keeps him up at night, so he pours himself a whiskey, puts his Miles Davis album on repeat and watches the city flicker and shine out his window. The passage chills me to the bone – an almost perfect description of my night one day before. Only, I poured wine instead of whiskey and my copy of "Kind of Blue" spins on a CD.

Later, at work, I sit with one of my students in the hallway. He struggles through his English interview. I ask the required questions – then ask one more. “Why did you sit alone during the break today?”

My student turns red and looks at his feet. He looks at back at me, forehead wrinkled and mouth opened in a comic “O”. He cannot form the sentence in English. He says only a name – Shimanaka.

I know that boy. He is bright and popular. He torments the slower students mercilessly.

“Hmm,” I say, maintaining my serious sensei demeanor. “Well, Shimanaka is an ass.”

“What?” my student says, ashamed once more that he didn’t understand the new vocabulary.

“Shimanaka… is… an… ass.” I rise off the bench and point at the roundest part of my anatomy for emphasis.

“Oh,” my student says. He still looks confused. Then his eyes circle wide as grapefruits and he lets out a loud snort.

I laugh back and he laughs again. Suddenly, we are lost in laughter, our guffaws echoing through the empty hallway so loudly that we draw the uptight history teacher out of his classroom. He is red-faced and ready to yell. He stops short when he sees me with the student. He slams the door to his classroom on his way back in – smacking the frame. My student and I look at each other. We see the shock in each other’s faces. Our laughter begins again. Unruly.

The history teacher won’t be able to look me in the eyes for a week.

Much later, I stand on the train platform at the bottom of my hill. It’s the afternoon. I am headed deep into Osaka to sit by myself in a café that serves absinthe so I may drink and draw. I am looking for my friend. I almost miss him, but then, just before I step onto the crowded train, I see him. In the office building across the street, the curtains in the fourth floor window twitch and then part. A large German Shepard presses his long face against the plate glass window. My friend. He barks his muted good-byes as my train rumbles away.

So now I am tired. I lay myself in my bed without a novel or a man to accompany me. I fall to sleep with some difficulty and then dream of earthquakes, tidal waves and my father’s old apartment. My father. The time we spend together in my dream is the first time I’ve seen him in months. I wake up missing him and place an overseas call to his cell. He does not answer. I leave a message saying that it was me and that I was thinking of him. He has three daughters with strikingly similar phone voices, but I do not doubt that he will able to identify the “me” in an instant.

If only I could say the same of all the men in my life.

posted by Scribbler @ Saturday, October 01, 2005