I don't know what your work day is like. No doubt longer than mine, I spend 45 hours a week biking and sitting and talking for ------ High School.
People don't really talk deeply about work unless they are with people from work. Shallow questions of "How is work going?" only touch the surface of my 45 hour existence and your ? one.
Sometimes I wish everyone had pockets deep enough to carry people into the small details of their lives.
I bike past the same big-headed man wearing the same white shirt in front of the same Mini Cooper parking lot every morning.
I turn the corner and pass the same tall fat lazy man holding a leash to his small skinny lazy Chihuahua.
I take a picture of the same rice field.
Who do I tell these things to?
Conversations don't open up for such details.
I spend most days by myself because it is easier. I am part of the school, but I'm not with the rhythm of the language, homerooms, club obligations. I fit in because a space has been made for me here where I am allowed to stand out.
I work quietly and watch people speak and eat and move. I notice tensions between people - romances and enemies. I observe them like I would fish in a tank.
Except. I get to be inside the fish tank.
Except. This fish tank is my life.
Maybe from ------, you know I feel. It is not a bad feeling because I'm productive, and my school likes me, and most of the time I like to be alone anyways.
Maybe you immersed yourself better. English speakers have a bad habit of forcing people to bend to their language. Here, lots of Japanese people want to speak English.
I wonder if life would still feel like a fish tank if I learned Japanese better. It probably would be different. I want to get better. I think it every day.
If I spoke Japanese though, I wonder if I would miss the fish tank. It's so much easier to fill someone up with your life silently, through observations, than to get mixed up in words. Words lie. Words take so long to say.
Human sized pockets would be so useful.
Think of the kinds of vacations you could go on. Imagine being in Kim Jong-Il's pocket or Einstein's pocket or Van Gogh's pocket. Think of how different friends would be - so much less talking and so much more seeing.
Sometimes I meet people and want to know who they are and who they will become and what strangers they pass every day, but there is hardly ever enough time or space to learn these things.
You are one of these people. I hardly know you but I want to be pocket friends.
I'm not sure why I find you intriguing exactly. You aren't normal. It's hard to be independent in this country, in this series of islands, in this sea of working machines.
You were born and raised here but somehow you stand out.
What small things did you do and see every day to become this way?
How did you learn about the fish tank when you were born into it?
Maybe you don't even know. I want to know.
I'll be visiting --- sometime in the middle of ----.
If you have time, let's pretend pocket.
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
origamiaround