Partings

They cry so beautifully in mascara in the movies. An elegant trail of black, usually down only one cheek. A solitary tear. There is a Hollywood glamour about the thing, as glassy-eyed starlets passively allow their surroundings to crumble.

I'd stopped writing anything at all a few days before the move. That always means something's wrong. It was too much pressure every time I opened a blank page. Write your future. Prove it to yourself that you are making the correct decision, in elegant, confident prose. Such a waste, not to write at least something. But there was too much stress and shittiness that saw me fail financially, geographically and emotionally. Watching my possessions dwindle down to what could be posted or carried. I send a washing machine to the wrong friend's house and someone else mistakenly gets a microwave. I didn't want any of my deposit back anyway.

In the end, it is the note I write to M that opens me up again. She is supposed to be coming with me to the airport, but lies sleeping feverishly in bed while I pack. I sit down to write the kind of goodbye that is too rushed and written in scratchy pencil and conveys only 2% of what you love about the person. But it makes me cry anyway, by myself and then onto her white duvet as I lean over her wakened body and crush it with a hug. She tells me off for crying: tomorrow it will be sunshine and sea and men again and for all the tomorrows I choose.

In the cab through Yoyogi Uehara, I check my face in the mirror, and even in the dark, there is a smudged cloud under each eye, glassy and dazed. A gig is letting out at Shibuya O East, and the cab has to stop while we are thronged with goth lites in green hair. That morning, I'd gone to a photo exhibition in Ebisu, and it had seemed so exactly like a normal Sunday in Tokyo, with a matcha frappuccino afterwards, to celebrate the beginning of the summer. Nothing that gave the sense of an ending. On the bus away from the city there's "Little Red Corvette" by Prince, another questionable selection from the ipod to soundtrack this moment. There is no sense of release, only loss. Not even that, just nothing. I feel like writing about though, so things can't be so strange, but only in teenage melodramatic tones.

I look forward to descending into the flippancies of Travel Bitching, what I should have really named my blog. I know soon I will shrug off this emo mourning and I will want to write about the place I am in, beautiful men I latch on to and the heinous ones that take a shine to me. There will be mediocre sex and sunburn and lower back tattoos and banana daiquiris I pour into the pool when I get bored with them. The Romance of travel/adventure/exploration and solitude. There will be endless questions about Japan. People want to hear about green kit kats and false exoticism. Perhaps I will avoid mentioning it and let people think I have come from London. Nobody wants to hear my version of Japan while I am still sulking: land of instructions and some of the worst pizza I have ever eaten.

It would seem that a lot of people agree with me, as the flight is packed. The inflight magazine has an article on the Japanese cherry blossom, but I saw them a few days ago, on M's birthday, when she skived off work and we went and laid in Yoyogi under the first trees. So I don't need to read it. Finish. Tick.

Endings

Some things I will miss about Japan, Part 29c

• The chocolate peanut butter pie at that cafe in Sakuragicho that looks out over the big wheel in Yokohama. But then, everywhere looks out over the big wheel in Yokohama. It's the cafe that plays Nine Inch Nails followed by Bob Dylan and then the Spice Girls. Unasked for western nostalgia, whisking you back to another time without permission. You need time to prepare when you go back.
• At school, that kid who always writes "Fin" at the end of all his journals. God knows where he picked that up from. I see him in the corridors, having walking-backwards competitions with his friends, and at lunch, hiding his vegetables in his neighbour's carbohydrate.
• The Toyoko line. You should really stand at the front of the train to get off at Kikuna, but you have a better chance of getting a seat if you remain at the back and walk up. I always forget to walk up. On the way to shows, I am that crazy girl in the corner, silently mouthing the words to my set, or out loud if I'm really worried. On the way to conversation lessons with salarymen, I prep with articles about sweatshop workers in China, floods in Bangkok, collapse in Europe. The Toyoko line home from Nakameg.
• Mimi, a ball of unaffected energy and unconditional love.
• Dean & Delucca, Marunouchi. Your coffee always gave me epiphanies.
• The tedious everyday minutia that added up to a life for me and I thank it for that. At the end, during the packing and the almost ritualistic binning, I am left with just a dress that I can't bear to part with because it's so special or the pattern is beautiful or that I was so happy in it, and a pile of notebooks attempting to document My Life In Japan. A ¥6000 package sent home, and a little bag for the road. This is a little or a lot or nothing.
• The urban, yuppie cleanliness and disposable income I'm going to trade for unemployed, wandering homelessness. In these final days, I wonder whether I should get some kind of trinket to serve as a trophy. This is what it meant. But this is when people are most vulnerable to getting tattoos.
• It's difficult to summarise an experience until you are well out of it. How this is not how life works for most people, who don't have the luxury of A London Phase, The Japanese Phase and endless Malaysian Days. Most people just continue on, from day to day, in the same place with the same things, not needing anything to reflect on/from. "Japan" as some finite experience, now finished and neatly tied with a bow at its fruition. It's ongoing. You aren't allowed to have several lives, or even two. You have to drag around the same lead character wherever you go, moving from plot to plot, with the same tired old flaws that occasionally lessen and improve.
• It began with 12 simple kanji. Tree. Power. Man. Soil. Car. Emergency Exit.
• To have all my hopes and fears either confirmed or pacified by spending time with all those other people doing exactly the same thing as me. Travel in the hope of finding a narrative thread.
• Talking with a British guy, in a bar in Tokyo, who hasn't been home in a while, and that look they give you that says: "Oh yeah....I remember what you British girls are like!" and suddenly my personality has currency again.