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.