Guest post

When Adelle asked me to write a guest post last night, I thought, "oh, yeah, that'll be easy, I have so much to say." Which is true, but after a week of relative wordlessness, it is surprisingly hard to put my faith and feelings into language again.

In the beginning, all I could feel was the child-like vulnerability of illiteracy and cultural ignorance. I sat in a Euro-style cafe, after believing I might never eat again because I had no yen (until I found the citibank) and no communication skills, and just watched people. I stared at every person who walked by and tried to find something in their walk or in the way they looked around that I could understand. Finally, some comfort came when a young Japanese woman in the cafe casually threw her purse over her shoulder--"aha!" I thought, "that is a familiar gesture: this life is normal to her, she is on her lunch break and to her, this is nothing special." And seeing that was both comforting and eerie to me: comforting in that it was just circumstance that made Tokyo so unfamiliar to me, and eerie in that I could not possibly imagine in that moment the distance from where I was to that woman's casual acceptance.

When Adelle's work week ended and we began to be out in that cultural ocean together, I felt my emotional frequency level go down. Everything began to settle, and some semblence of peace and security entered my overwhelmed consciousness. In addition to the natural comfort of being with a good friend, (it becomes like family, I've found, these college friends we visit with--you know you need nothing and to do nothing extra in their company,) there was the fact that she DID know what was going on, and did know how to get around.

By today, sitting in her tiny Tokyo apartment, (with 'cubicle walls,' as a Navy boy we met described them,) I find that my focus is not on the strangeness of this foreign land, but on the beauty of the day-to-day life Adelle has created here. I've met many of her friends, and they are really good people. Lovely people, likeable people. She has that traveler's capacity for spontenaity and trust in strangers--exemplified by our going for a drink with a Japanese man we met in the train station last night--but also a solid base of people and things she knows well. She has found the balance between the sort of "fuck it all" free-spirited mentality of 18-year-old European backpackers and a more mature, liveable mindset that can support her whims and wanderlust. My Shakespeare teacher talks about technique as the trampoline on which you jump, to go higher than you thought you could. I think Adelle has a solid base for bounding up to the highest heavens of freedom in cultural exploration.

So, I will return to the States impressed with my friend and excited to know of one more world I do not yet understand. Some poet said, "What will you do with this one wild and wonderful life?" or something like that. I am marginally closer, because of this trip, to knowing what I might do, what is possible in this wild and wonderful world.

Oh! And I will miss Adelle! It has been so good to see her.