Of the overgrowth in places not meant for planting

For a moment I wished I could write him all down, so as to keep the memory. Though futile and wildly unnecessary, the endeavor felt essential for a few minutes. It could be given a title: The Book of F¹. A short page was written instead. 

I wrote it while sitting on the steps of Shinjuku Chuo Kōen, next to a man playing Let It Be on his guitar. The musician was interrupted by a park official who was blowing leaves. When the music stopped, those of us listening stiffened and looked up. The guitarist waited for some kind of nonverbal cue. A dramatic pause followed that seemed meant to demonstrate the park official’s control over the silence. Finally, he made a nonchalant move with his free hand and allowed the guitarist to keep playing. Sometimes musicians are asked to leave the park, but this one was permitted to stay. I felt us all collectively exhale because of it. 

My student told me she believed in body language today. She said it the way someone says they believe in God, or ghosts. I believe in body language. She’s a ballroom dancer, and she and her partner rent a studio so they can move their bodies. A friend and I also do the same. Our studio space is right next to the Yamanote² line, which we can hear roaring by on our left when we’re facing the mirror. There are no clocks in the studio. But there are painted paper plates whose shape trick us into thinking they are keeping time. We often look up at them thinking they will give us answers. The trains also keep time, but only if you count how many go by. We don’t. We just focus on our bodies and their language. 

A friend recently took me to the Tokyo Mosque in Yoyogi Uehara. It was quite crowded because people had gathered there for iftar.³ The pictures on the wall inside dated back to the 1930’s. On the way to the mosque we passed under a bridge with art painted on the walls. The murals depicted several kinds of birds. I searched for a swallow, hoping one was painted there. It was. I took it as a good omen. Bird language. I tapped my friend on their shoulder to show them. It means I’m going the right way. I said. My friend just smiled. 

I called F this evening to ask him how things were going. He is staying at a friend’s house, and was lying on their couch when he called back. It still hasn’t been decided whether or not he is going to stay in Japan. If he does leave, it will be very soon. While talking, we experimented with the filters on our phones. At one point I was broccoli and he was a puppy. We talked about hugging houses goodbye—he has already moved out of his. The normalcy of these interactions are such a contrast to our reality that at times I find it staggering, other times I find it pleasant. 

F smiles through the phone, transient and unbothered, and as if he can see every emotion and every thought that passes through me. I cannot help but smile back; the strings in my chest loosen then snap, and for a second I no longer feel trapped by circumstance. 

But the relationship will end. There are worlds and ideas deemed bigger than us that make it so. This is an absolute that affects everything. It’s why our relationship grew around the ending—was built on it—in an in-between place that is temporary for us both. Not knowing when the ending will come, if or when he will leave Japan, has drained us of certainty. Our relationship hinges on these uncomfortable things, twisting and compromising its form in an attempt to forget its own impermanence. Have you ever seen how flowers grow through pavement? Sprouting through the cracks they’ve created with white and yellow petals. Do you know the way ivy wraps itself around a building, regardless of its dilapidated state? Expectations have come to bloom here in more than one color. So where to cut them on their stems? At this hour, I do not know where to let the love grow, or where to tell it to stop. 

There have been recent junctures where my stomach folds in on itself, forgets itself. Some mornings have brought with them a blanket of panic that wraps around limbs. It’s a strange sensation that interrupts the natural quality of waking—that gentle disposition of shifting into the day without really understanding what the day is. When we first open our eyes, we can have thoughts like what is a window? The presence of fear in the morning can be faint at first. But when it arrives it is centerpiece; it learns how to maintain eye contact, disrupt patterns and foster new ones. A window is second to this character who comes without invitation.

I wonder if F encounters the same kind of morning, though the matter of leaving is different from the substance of being left. I tried to tell him the other day in a moment of desperation that we have different roles; that there is a centerfold and I only fleetingly fill the frame. I don’t know if he understood. There is something of an uncertain guest living in my body, and I don’t completely know her language. 

For now I’m watching everything shrink in real time. Though I can’t say for sure that it is really shrinking, nor that it will. The paper plates on the walls of the studio near the Yamanote line taunt those who look at them. Their faces are blank and handless. I don’t own a watch. A ladybug lands on my hand, and the balcony door slams shut from the wind, and The trains go by, The trains go by, The trains go by, and they don’t say where. I wonder about body language and how I can use it to translate. Is that where faith is placed? Maybe if I bow—tell someone, something, To Tell F, something, To Ask What’s Next, or, 

Ask How To 
Say 
Goodbye, 
To Stand in A Different Light
of shadow
To Find Comfort there 
in ambiguity 
because that is what this has always been

What are the words, the words of needs 
the un-stifling of
Where is The Book of Not Knowing? 

I’m trying to embody the grace of letting oneself be left, to embrace the reality that the unknown is happening, always. But I am of more than one shape; I sit in the overgrowth of things we have planted in a temporary place. 

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A Page of F 

Sometimes I like listening to only music. He means music without lyrics. Instrumental. 

Am I a drink holder? He asked, smiling when I handed him his cup of coffee after taking a sip.

I may not show you directly, but I show the people behind you. He means his acts of love towards me are seen by his friends. And that I’m meant to believe in a love that I can’t always see.

Sometimes I’m alone in my room and I get sad. I listen to music and I see your face. I don’t even mean to bring you, you just come. He seems surprised about each time it happens. 

Do you know the chin is a sign of beauty? Do you know your eyebrows are a sign of beauty? Do you know your eyes are a sign of beauty? Do you know your nose is a sign of beauty? In this moment I am crying and he wipes the tears from my face and puts them onto his face because he is not crying. 

We have no future. He was sitting across the table and his face had that expression of deadened resolve. Like he is inhabiting a body that is not really his, an attitude he has to put on like clothing. A robe. To redeliver headlines; reminders of things we already know. 

What should we do? He asked gently, when I told him I didn’t know what to do—our fractured state of present. 

I like it when your hair is parted to the side. Said in an affected voice that hides his real thought, which is: I don’t like the way you styled your hair today. I imagine he first noticed he didn’t like it when I sent him a video earlier that evening. I felt self conscious but mostly just mad.  

I know one thing, and one thing only. His body shakes slightly. He’s looking forward, out the windshield into the night of nothing. And it’s that I love you. I know that I love you. It felt like one of those true things that people say.

Do you love me? He asks softly, unable to look up. I tell him I do. 

1. F is the name of my significant other. Read on in Birds and bread and honey.

2. The Yamanote line 山手線 (Yamanote-sen) is one of the most vital train lines in Tokyo. It’s known for its signature green loop around the city. An old friend of mine once fell asleep on this loop of 30 stations. He went around in circles several times before waking to get off the train.

3. Iftar is the evening meal that ends the daily fast during Ramadan. This takes place after the sun has set.

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Swallow was born in March, 2022. If you find value in this project and want to see it grow, please support by subscribing and sharing it with others. Planting the seeds of overgrowth means to water and let the sunlight in.