Exiting the Airport into Different Air
Poetry-prose without the prose. I went to Japan in September of this year, visiting a dear friend and revisiting my own memories. New air new air new air new air
A friend is in in a white white car, in an endless stream of cars, an immediate sweet drink, immediate new air new sights new trees and road. The sweet potato is dry, it must’ve been left in the hot case all day, but the inari is fresh, rice soaked with flavor and vinegar. What was the music they were playing over the supermarket speakers? How many packs of figs should I buy? I love figs and chestnuts and pumpkin, purple, brown, orange and Halloween candy. It’s so hot outside, hotter than I’m comfortable with but I’m here and Billy Joel is going to be here too in the new year according to 7-11. How long has it been since I slept, how long has it been since I breathed new air new pollution and farm animal? Fig ice cream and fig leaf cream in purple, green, white this time. What new colors and new air can I have today please? New water, new bed, new milk. Same plastic. My hands wrap around the shopping cart and pretend to read characters I spent months learning. Nothing prepares me for the new mundane and new water and recycling. Can I ask you to drive a little slower? Can I ask you to roll the windows down? Can we turn the music up higher? It’s cooler up north with the monkeys. It gets cold in the car. It’s cloudier up in the clouds the car is winding through in wet pavement soaked with days of rain, cool, cool rain new air new water.
In the next moment I take in log cabins and breathe in new air, chocolate, music, rainbow glistening glasses spoons dipping into. We make jazz with our hands and mouths with characters I spent months learning and days stumbling over. Any air that is old is new with the car’s open windows, moss walls and trees tumbling down holding horizontal in their shingled roofs sheltering us from the oncoming storm, cool almost cold. The road is slick on the way down from the mountains, slick like the river the map makes out the road to be, looping in and of itself like threads being sewn into new cloth, new alterations new crafts and new air I breathe constantly even into the ocean where air breathes into me. The bath water was too hot, too eggy for me but the rain cooled us down, brought cool new air down to the sulfur deposits crystalizing on my bare thighs. Fish jump out of the whitecaps, or so it seems to me, trash washing up onto the shore, not sand but rocks and salty sulfuric air that brings fish into my lungs, I thought I saw them jump out of the white churning waves but that must’ve been the trash or the sun. It’s so hot. It’s so hot and wet I bathe in baking soda and draw my knees to my chest looking at the flies the spiders have eaten, mosquitos crawling on bubbly glass. The water is soft and hot, my thighs soft and hot and not crystallized anymore. That did not last very long. I spend the whole day cooking and only like half of what I make, hot, gloopy tofu that sticks to your fork and teeth and tongue, garlic perfuming your breath for the rest of the day. I eat my burned eggplant in silence, its smoky water washing down the garlic grease with starchy soba I overcooked. Soba clumps together so quickly, starch and water binding the delicate noodles that require very little heat, soft and hot and wet. You can turn spaghetti into ramen with a little bit of baking soda which is convenient because you can find only a little bit of baking soda. The baking soda is hidden in small green boxes that assume you will only need a little bit of baking soda, in characters I tried to learn for months before this but my phone does it better. There isn’t much to do but look at the bugs and eat sweet cream from cardboard pastry boxes. The praying mantis in the train station looks back at me, turning its triangular bulbed head as I pace back and forth in this tiny booth on the very much incorrect side of the tracks. The praying mantis is huge, bigger than I remember praying mantises to be, which is lovely because things are always smaller than I remember them to be. It’s just me and this bug on the wrong track, which is okay because I eventually course-correct (it’s usually best to go to the side with the most people on it, she told me). I say goodbye to the bug and tug at my shirt, which is crystallizing in the wrong ways into the wrong joints. It’s so hot, and the ocean is a way’s away. I can still smell the salt vividly, even as I enter an empty train back to Tokyo and take videos I think my friends and strangers in my phone will like. Choosing music will forever set a memory in jell-o, so I often sit in silence and pretend to read advertisements and links being sent to me that speak on the current state of the world. The current state is sweet cream hiding in eggy buns being sold for 200 yen at the end of the day, and my grease-soaked paper bag wetting the office table of my gray business hotel room. The current state is a sadness that I couldn’t share this gray business hotel room with someone, and instead have to wipe mayonnaise off my own face. I pour baking soda into another hot bath and let my legs turn from bread into spaghetti. Flimsy is the only way to be on an airplane with stiff air that is anything but new, thighs locked into place and elbow drooping over the borderline. Salt fizzes in my mouth and I see fish jumping in the air again, whitecaps knocking against my teeth and slick roads traveling down my tongue. I have nuts to keep me full and arrive in another storm, roads more than slick, soaked, rivers and New York warnings that take me straight, on its course to home.
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