part 1: your body wasn’t anything special until it rebelled

content warning / injury? just kind of a gross medical thing.

i’m sitting in the lobby of the doctor’s office waiting to be seen about a growth on the side of my ankle that appeared about three months ago. it’s likely a ganglion cyst. i had one in a similar spot about eight, nine years ago, and it was deemed the result of overuse from competitive gymnastics. but now i am not a state-ranked athlete overexerting my body for twenty to twenty-five hours a week; i am a boring, working college student, so i am not sure why one has appeared again! i experience a decent amount of pain when it rubs against certain shoes, so maybe i can get it drained.

update: my doctor is out of town, so i spoke with a PA. she recommended that i get the cyst surgically removed rather than drained to avoid it regrowing. my mother, a medical professional herself, informed me that the doctor and her team likely wouldn’t do anything invasive—that i’d get sent home with an earful of good-hearted hope that it’ll go away on its own and instruction to compression bandage it—so i’m grateful that they are willing to do actually something about it. it hurts, and i’m tired of hurting. hopefully i can get the procedure scheduled for before i leave for school in a week.

second update: surgery is next thursday! it’s an in-office procedure, so hopefully the recovery time isn’t too long.

part 2: a flickering life

content warning / death

now, onto what i really wanted to write about. last night i had one of the most bizarre, heart-rending exchanges i’ve ever had with a customer—or maybe with anyone at all. i don’t know if i’ve ever had a conversation quite like it; the closest thing that comes to mind is when i served m, a resident at the assisted living facility i worked at in high school, a hard shell taco after her husband died.

a woman about ten years older than my mother came in with a woman about five years older than my brother. (this places them at about 60 and 30.) i assumed they were mother and daughter. i sat them at a comically large table in the back of the restaurant and took their orders about five minutes later than i would’ve liked. they complimented my japanese pronunciation and i remarked that my father was from outside of tokyo. i don’t speak fluently, i admitted, but i can hold a conversation well enough with a japanese customer. they laughed at that. i laughed back. it was the kind of joyous dialogue i needed at the end of my night.

eventually i went on my thirty-minute break and stopped thinking about them entirely. when i returned to work, it was about time for our last call, so i did a quick sweep of the restaurant and found that they were still sitting there, dessert finished, chatting softly. i informed them of our last call policy, took their payment at the sushi counter, and then showed the daughter who wasn’t a daughter to the restroom. then the mother who wasn’t a mother and i were left alone.

“you know, i wanted to tell you earlier…” she began, and i could’ve listed a dozen things right then and there that i thought she might say, and they’d have all been incorrect, because what she confided was: “… i wanted to tell you that my son died.”

my jaw went soft, slack. “i’m so sorry to hear that,” i responded, and i was.

i don’t want to write something cheesy like i know how death lingers in your bones or tucks itself in the pockets of your coat or leaves the door open, but people whom i love have lost people they loved—people they still love.

“that person i’m with was his girlfriend,” the woman continued, eyes glassy. “she still goes out to dinner with me.” judging by the way she spoke, i assumed some time had passed since her son’s death.

i blurted the only thing that came to mind: “my sister’s best friend died. at the end of this month, it’ll have been about a year.” the steadiness of my own voice was disarming. it felt like i was talking about the weather, or perhaps the sunday paper that no longer delivers to my childhood home. i thought about how i chose the word died instead of passed, wondered if i wasn’t being soft enough. “he was the second one of her close friends to die within the span of three years. they were both younger than twenty-one.”

“oh, i’m sorry for your sister. my son was thirty-one. he died of covid.” the woman shook her head, sad some. “no one even knew he had it.”

“wow,” i said, because wow. i wanted to give her a hug, but didn’t know if that was out of line since i was in my workplace, so i didn’t.

after some time, the customer asked, “how is your sister doing?”

“she’s growing around her grief,” i answered uncarefully, honestly. “what else can she do? this is our new normal now.”

the mother who wasn’t a mother but was a mother laughed, throwing her hands in the air in exasperation. “but what even is normal after something like this?”

i laughed too. “you’re right. it’s awful.”

“it’s awful,” she agreed, and then she said something that made me stop and think for a while. “but it’s also wonderful. because i got to see how many people love him. so many people just—ascended in the weeks after he passed.”

her choice of the word “ascend” here still strikes me stupid. ascend: to lift into the air. to climb. to succeed to. to rise into heaven. what an interesting decision she made when she said that sentence to me so calmly, so collectedly.

shortly after, the younger woman returned from the restroom. she took one look at the tears in her former future mother-in-law’s eyes and immediately enveloped her in the hug i wish i could’ve given her myself. it was kind of an awkward side hug though, and i wondered what that meant.

i thanked the women for dining in and then they were on their way, disappearing with the trill of wind chimes.

one of my favorite short stories is “the elephant vanishes” by haruki murakami from his short story collection by the same name. it ends like this:

｢象の広場に茂った 草は枯れ、あたりには既に冬の気配が感じとれる。 象と飼育係は消滅してしまったし、彼らはもう二度とはここに戻ってこないのだ。｣

in english, this roughly translates to:

the grass that took over the elephant enclosure has withered now, and the area has a feel of winter. the elephant and the keeper have vanished completely. they will never be coming back.

page 327 of the elephant vanishes

it sounds strange, but that’s how i feel about those two women. they felt faraway, almost fey-like, and i don’t think they will ever return. i don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

i have more things i’d like to write about: seeing the first boy i ever loved for the first time in eleven months + wondering where to go from there with him, rewatching the japanese film birthday card (2016) for the first time in five years + the immense emotion that came with that, going back to college, etc etc etc. but for now i’ll just throw out a few sentences that summarize life as of late.

our japanese house stay guest went home this morning. i miss her, but that doesn’t mean i want to see her again. harry teardrop retweeted my quote retweet about the color blue in relation to his new song, “blue numbers,” dropping. i pulled excerpts from a field guide to getting lost by rebecca solnit, parts of which my sister shared with me when she studied the text in a visual arts class in university. there are a few lines that really resonate with me, and even though i’d yet to hear “blue numbers,” lines that i figured might relate to the lyrics and ambience of the song. now that it’s released, i’d say they do:

the world is blue at its edges and in its depths. this blue is the light that got lost.

page 29

for many years, i have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. and the color of where you can never go. for the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

pages 29-30

for something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. something is always faraway.

pages 30-31

“something is always faraway,” she writes. i believe that.

a friend from college is spending the weekend and we’re going out to breakfast together tomorrow morning. tonight we watched short films, including one of my favorites: “when i’ve wanted to die” by anna akana. by next thursday, i’ll have finished both of my summer jobs. two nights ago, i finally listened to “august” by taylor swift for the first time this month and laughed and cried. i felt seventeen again, knowing that i couldn’t make the person who felt like the love of my life stay.

from “stay like this” by bittermilk:

there’s nothing i’d miss
more than whatever this is
all i need is this
because

you are so bright
oh you take me so high (you take me so high)
and i can’t risk the fall
if it means losing it all
will you stay with me if we
just stay like this?

and maybe that’s all there is to tell for now. maybe this is where i’ll leave you.

title of this newsletter update is taken from the song “angelina” by lizzy mcalpine. title of part 1 is taken from the empathy exams by leslie jamison. title of part 2 is taken from the newly-released song “a flickering life” by harry teardrop.