Let me paint you a picture. 

I walk out of my apartment, down the stairs, and onto the wet glossy streets. There’s a fine drizzle in the air and the temperature is well below zero. All I’m wearing is a camel colored jacket, a stole, jeans, and navy walkers. I light up a stick to keep warm while I figure out where to go. I was supposed to go out and drink with a friend, but that didn’t quite work out. I’m alone, looking to get intoxicated, with no place to go. 

I keep walking. 

The cigarette is old and stale. The taste lingers in my mouth like an old sock being burned. I smoke it anyway. It’s my first smoke in a while. 

Cigarette in hand I walk, past street lights and cars and the few people unlucky enough to be out at midnight on a Sunday night. I choose my location. I small izakaya down the road I haunted not so frequently. As I walk I realize it will be one of the many lasts. I breathe in the cold air into my lungs, let the cold spread until I can’t keep it any longer. 

I pray for company even though I know I won’t get any. I enter, greeted with a knowing hello. I order a beer. I take out another stale stick and light it up while watching the man cook food in front of me. The taste..I don’t even know why I’m bothering. Old, done, over. I need to take a hint. 

The old matron flirts with me, tells me we haven’t gone out yet. I say sorry, I’m leaving soon. Where, she asks. To New York, I say in reply. She looks surprised and then somber. So it’s the last time. I say nothing. 

I light up another stick. I make a wish on it. That all will be well and that wishes on stale sticks don’t bite me in the ass. I put it out, finish my food, and ask for the bill. I say good bye and walk back out into the cold night, wondering where I’ll be going next. 

And so I begin my 2013 jobless, with a touch of panic and regret. A good year started methinks. Nothing like cleaning out the old cobwebs, opening the windows and letting the light in. 

Although in approximately 2 weeks I won’t have any windows to open nor any cobwebs to call my open. I am moving out. Japan is no more. I am about to leave the land of the rising sun before those warm rays even touch my cheek. 

I’ve been spending days dazed, sick, and lifeless. What’s changed, I begin to think. Nothing’s changed. I am a casualty of my own weakness and infirmity. And so I must pick myself up. I draw, I write if only occasionally, and I breathe slowly to keep the panic from rising to my head. I need a clear head. I can’t seem to get a hold of it. I wake up in a mist these days. The mist never clears. My eyes seem to be covered in film. I do not see what I used to see. I cannot feel what I used to feel. 

I am moving to New York, with nothing, and no one. I’m separating myself once more from all things familiar and diving into the unknown. Sometimes I think I might take life too seriously, but then I find most people living in a narrow and dark place. With their hands in their wallets and their brains perpetually turned off. Some are on, thoughts of worth never vibrantly swim to the surface. What are we and what have we become. We work, we jump into a routine, we live~ for what? For the purpose of waking up the next day? For little or no purpose at all to be exact. This appears to be our reality. We work, we earn money, we spend money, we live or better yet we perpetuate. I would rather cease. 

Sometimes all I can think about is going home. Go back to all that is warm and familiar. But I can’t. Not just yet. 

There comes a (insert title here) when you realize that you can, in fact, do what you want to do. People impinging on your freedom isn’t that big a deal these days in good old 2012, generally speaking of course. All you have are grown men acting like 3rd grade bullies and temperamental babies. As tricky as it may be, all you need is scare the bejesus out of them. Show a little claw and fang here and there that’ll be the end of it, (generally speaking of course). 

The real lesson though, is to not act that way methinks. Not to say “be the better man” or any of that hypocritical narcissistic piece of literature, but rather just simply not repeating what you found unnecessary. Just be. And while this world does undoubtedly run on man-made-before-you-were-born-precepts-and-whatnot, it’s not at all impossible to let the person next to you be as well.

Cheers to letting people be. 

fin

If you’re not ready, don’t. 

If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.