In-between-ness

fermata 𝄐 am i a machine ?

Table of Contents

— Nap
— Improvisation
— Pending 
— NARRATOR IN A STATUE  (in title only) 
— It’s all right 
— Lines for other people 

in-between-ness

Nap  

9/21/23

This morning I had the pleasure of making and eating breakfast. Afterwards, I fell asleep, though I did so rather reluctantly. The nap was thinly veiled, but clean the way a moving river is clean: crisp, cold, and lifting the weight of mind. Somewhere between sleeping and waking, I spoke, and heard myself say something in the tiniest of voices. 

I was scared, not of the half-dream I was having, but of waking up. I was clinging to sleep, hoping it would hold me again. 

Once awake, I suppressed the small urge in my right hand to move towards my phone. My body stiffened from overriding the need to get out of bed and begin doing the things I needed to do. The effort to counter Busy-ness is an effort in itself. Locating where these tensions were in my body was helpful. I tried to loosen them, especially my shoulders, where all the contradictions and disorder seem to be kept, as if stored in a bank. 

Now, I sit at my desk. The balcony door is open, the window to my right is open. It's a windy day, and it’s been raining on and off every hour or so. I can hear my neighbor’s wind chimes from the street below. I untangled my wind chimes that hang from the balcony door, so they could chime too. 

---

Improvisation 

I find it increasingly interesting when people make plans and choices within certain frameworks of desire or value that they know will work for them—their own inner choreography. I suppose I must have a version of that too. But my stay here in Japan, all ten years of that stay, has never been made of something certain like belief. From other foreign residents, I’ve gathered that coming here and choosing to stay was usually a deliberate, sometimes premeditated choice. For many of them it was a dream, or a stumble into a dream. In a recent conversation with a writer friend, he said he felt “a pull.” “I’ve never had that pull.” I said, curiously. Being here always felt more like an accident. Nourishing, and challenging, yes. A different kind of pull, maybe, but never in a way that signaled always. 

I remember calling my mom after I left my first job in Sendai, and telling her I was going to try to stay for longer. For how much longer, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a number of years in mind, nor a way to measure or calculate what would potentially keep me here in the future, or let me go. I loved my friends in Sendai and simply wanted more time with them. I cherish this memory, and my reason for choosing to stay then. 

This might have been one of the only times I was able to make a decision with relative ease, and such a clear reason in mind. Almost everything else that came after was a pirouetted guess towards something warm and inviting, or a collapse onto the floor in order to withstand and ride-out difficult circumstances. 

---

Pending

The final date on my residence card is in October of this year—next month—and I have not [yet] found a definitive, sustainable solution to keep me here in Japan. I’m actually quite proud of how I have faced the frightening concept of not knowing what’s next. I am, of course, exhausted from living in states of prolonged uncertainty, but I was more exhausted and unwell when those realities didn’t belong to me. Meeting expectations, of many kinds and colors, did not protect me, nor give me what I needed. I look towards the expiration date now, not only with unease and a sense of urgency to mend it, but also with a kind of fondness; it brings with it a certainty and a sense of pending possibility I have missed, something I have not been able to afford for a long time.

---

NARRATOR IN A STATUE

[ I’m submitting NARRATOR IN A STATUE to a magazine to see if it can be published there. The written work can’t appear here, or anywhere else, until it is accepted or rejected. What is it until then?

Now we wait. ] 

---

It’s all right

---

Lines for other people  

(From an unpublished draft written in February, titled: More about lemons) 

Where is that moment when Doubt & Incorporated stops stopping you and you step into your power and everything is a montage of bliss bliss bliss—can it be sustained like a lasting whole note at the end of the last bar?

Fermata!

Am I a machine? Can I stop now even though I haven’t found the Whole All-Encompassing Solution? Permission to Rest granted by No-One because No-One-Knows how to rest well (yet). Beyond natural duration, we are here, enduring and/or embracing Formula.

And then we [must] “Capitalize to eat.” 

And play, because it feels good to play. Because feeling good is a human right we can’t afford. 

And-what-is-it-that-we-deserve-?-our-parents-were-told-they-should-have-a-house-someday

[ A house? ]

THE BODY IS MY HOUSE AND IT HAS BEEN BROKEN! 𝄐 

—A line from a play I’d like to write; put words to mouths just so they can fall out again in a different way. 

I like the way words come out somewhat differently on stage. Maybe this is what we call collaboration, co-existence, connection—maybe this is why we need other people. To play out a myriad of lives so we can see them and think: maybe This is what we look like. 

Do I sound like That? like that? 

How different your voice sounds on tape—on stage coming out of someone else’s mouth. Maybe we need people to play out our lives [in front of us] so we can remember that we [too] are allowed to exist. 

---

To continue, scroll up and repeat.