The city and her aloneness

When I was four or five my grandfather’s younger brother died. His name was Uncle Emil. Despite the very little time I spent with him before he passed away, I still have memories of what he was like. Though I can’t say my recollections are altogether accurate. 

He was soft spoken, I think. Like my grandfather. He played the alto saxophone, an instrument both my younger brother and I chose to play too. I imagined the instrument speaking for him, as an extension of voice, a disembodied thought that did for him, and for us, what speaking could not. 

On the way to Uncle Emil’s funeral in New York City, I threw up in the backseat. I remember the color of the cooler I threw up into—it was blue and white. The motion sickness felt like it lived in my bones, like it came from me. Somebody told me to look out the window and focus there instead. 

I saw buildings. So far up that I could barely exist with them. I remember noticing my breath, how it was inside a hollow body. The air moved in and out, without me telling it to do so. But the buildings. They were reaching. Solid, sure things. All-knowing in their muteness. I believed they understood what I would never be able to understand. 

I felt similarly about other things too. Trees, radio stations with slow voices, old books with a distinct smell, and some adults were godlike in the way they existed as something self-possessed and separate from chaos. Something beyond needing comprehension from anything outside themselves.

It turns out we never drove through New York City that day. We drove instead to Albany, New York. I wasn’t four or five, I was six or seven. But the cooler was blue and white, and I did throw up in it. And I did look out of the car window in the backseat, hoping it would heal the unrest in my body, to find buildings that swallowed my thoughts, and abstracted my sense of scale and self. 

It’s possible this memory has blended with old memories of driving through Boston, another place of tall buildings that left me feeling different—altered, when we left it. 

It was a two hour drive home from Boston, a four hour drive from Albany, but drives were equivalent to any number of decades back then. I’d know we were almost home when the car slowed down to 30 miles per hour—not from any ability to measure how time had elapsed.

There were physical landmarks, too. After some hills, a graveyard, and a small farm, we’d take a left onto our driveway. We’d drive up slowly, sometimes animal eyes glowed green or yellow in the headlights as we passed. Finally, we’d park. I’d hear the sound of the emergency brake, the engine going quiet, then keys jingling as someone put them in a jacket pocket. The door would open, the lights turning on, a parent would help me out of the backseat. It was night and I’d be sleepy. There’d be crickets if it was summer, icy wind or silence if it was winter. My eyes would open and close, either feigning tiredness or embodying it. I’d walk up the steps, hear the squeak of our front door as it opened. When I blinked it was morning, and I was under the covers of my bed. Birds were chirping outside, and I’d stare out the window, turning the familiar shapes of the trees into people I’d never meet. 

Growing up in the forest may render one prone to seeing the city through a lens of allure. The city as alive, as someone withholding secrets you’re meant to know. It’s possible I’ve mistaken the concrete and the glass of Tokyo for the sensitive, breathing bark that it isn’t. My friends and family often ask me why I’m still here, lighting matches after much of the glow goes out. 

Last night I went for a run in Yoyogi park and came upon a familiar saxophonist. We’d met once before in 2020 in the same place. It was much quieter then. He sometimes plays by the fountain, and for no reason in particular. I stopped running and stood by the fountain for a few minutes, listening to his sound. When the song finished I thanked him, then left. I was about a quarter of a kilometer away when I heard the saxophonist begin playing again. Alone, and without an audience—not one that he could see. I remembered Uncle Emil then. The city. His funeral. The ways we merge with things we don’t understand, nor quite remember. 

I’ve long been haunted by the desire to make sense of my surroundings. Of then and now, of here and there. There’s this craving to crack open the landscape; to break it apart and see what’s inside. I imagine broken shells and egg yolks dripping down lips, I think of what it’s like to taste wet and sticky truths on tongues. To have also tasted things that are not true; moments of pain and raw confusion that, at first, have no taste at all. 

The city and her aloneness doesn’t feel solvable. Neither does the forest I came from. But in me I find them both taking up residence. I will attempt to document them here. I had forgotten that this was my original intention, for the world to swallow me up and tell me everything. To look outside windows, and have a sense of self, somewhere in the belly of things. I believe this is precisely how this project exists, episodic in nature, fertile and fragile, but in the belly of things—swallowed—as something eaten and yet it eats. 

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Press Play: Swallow (a video introduction)

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Introducing ‘Swallow’: a documentation project playing with memory & location. Pictured above: a hand almost touching the street near Shinjuku. Pictured below, a skirt blowing in the wind in a forest near the base of Mt. Fuji. 

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From the archives:

Emil Kalled (standing) with jazz band at The Petit Paris in Albany, NY, 1967. 

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Swallow is a newsletter based in Tokyo, unfolding in your inbox twice a month. Swallow has just hatched. Subscribe below, and consider sharing this publication to support its growth.

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