emi

god, sometimes i miss the hot pavement and the walking and the concrete mountains and neverending maze of brightly lit steel perfectly disrupted by temples of wood and the creaking metal of the train tracks. the ramen shop in sumiyoshi and dissappear and die on the densha. youmesaito and amu plaza especially although youmesaito was where i sank my heart into mad shopping sprees and lazy days by the harbor setting off fireworks for no one but me and the fisherman and those immense oil ships and navy boys from sasebo that would wave at the only gaijin girl they've seen in months. isahaya and my dirty disobedient children that couldn't grasp how to say "blue" always shouting "buru!" proudly at their mothers coming half to retrieve their ridiculous offspring and half to inspect this towering western kyoosi that somehow ended up right there and then. shianbashi, lounge marine, loosening ties, explaining that nohsu karorina was right between furorida and nyu yo-ku, chocolate cigarettes, mama san, horse meat, oil fires in kenichi's kitchen, the yoshida family, the matsuzoe family, the kimuras who taught me manners and had a haunted room in their house, motonori for breaking my naive and incapable heart. i was at the age of 19 functioning perfectly and understanding the beauty and absolute terror of a place with a culture an inch wide but miles deep.