A Comparison of Emails, or on daydreams and emails that recognise furniture

From imagining that purely by the power of my imagination I could make people walk and live along my streets and in my life, to a feeling that no one can ever really understand anyone and certainly not just through my own power of thought and a few conversations on skype. Twenty Four hours. And the power of perspective.

Yesterday:

"It is strange the way that people can exist somewhere, even when they have never set foot in a place. Just by me wondering around Nishitokyo imagining how you would feel or think about certain things places you firmly in amongst its bridges and metros and fish market stalls. In that way, I have so many of you, .... ...... and ..... walking beside me along the streets and through the second hand book shops, or occassionally frantically running next to me as I ride my bike, or stopping to listen to the guitarists singing drunkenly, late at night to no one in particular."

Today:

"It's getting late again - and I must be up in 5 hours - but I'm full up with speaking on skype since early evening - and feel all disconcerted - broken into little bits - I haven't spoken so much english in one stretch for weeks - or atleast english to people who don't understand japanese - - and it breaks my head up into slow patterns - thanks maybe to the energy that I need to reach out across the world to them. And partly because whereas once I enjoyed that feeling of speaking with people who knew me and were familiar (and of course I still do)- those people that you don't have to explain things to - that they just get it are changing. The familiar is shifting - and Tokyo and her metros and saying 'sanen' when upset, or bowing to
greet people seem much more real than imagining life in Hull or Oxford. And I have to explain the other way instead. I guess Tokyo's becoming home - of course not home in a real, cultural way - I still have no hope of being able to read a paper or speak to most people on the streets about anything very much. But, it's a sort of home. And it requires explanantion to those people who've never been here.

I guess it's made me realise how hard it is to explain my every day. And for me to understand yours. And although it makes me happy to realise that Tokyo is indeed becoming somewhere that has a place for me in it. I realise the inadequacy of emails and skype chats to understand people elsewhere. An email is a nice part of the day - but it doesn't breath and stretch and mould itself to the furniture in which it sits, it can't take account of the sunshine of the room its received in, or the hint of a smile, or a glare in the listeners eye. It can't help you feel someones beating pulse beneath your skin. Or exist in companionable silence. Maybe this is also the limits of the media and the power to make people care about people far away.

I write to you because I want you to get it. I want to believe that if I write and tell you that I sit in a room empty of everything, that I am about to crawl into my mattress on the floor (no sheets, as they have already been taken to my new apartment) with a novel about India and dream of this coming week and the presentation I should have written, that you'll close your eyes in that far away room, I can't even begin to picture, and you'll get it. You'll see a little bit of this fuzzy one in the morning feeling, my flatmates sleeping next door, the air con humming. And maybe that is just a vivid and ridiculous dream - thought up by my overactive imagination, that hates to let go of people and, like everyone else, wants the world to understand her - even though none of us, whether we exist in the same geographical location or not can ever truly understand anyone else.

I don't know - I don't know why it is that I sit here and want to write to you about it -as though by writing it to you - you'll get it - and rush across here in some sunday afternoon daydream and sit beside me as I sleep. Maybe I just want to believe that that truly is possible and that you really could do that - catch me in between my dreams. And maybe that is possible. Maybe the power of human thought and imagination is a stronger force than any of us can truly contemplate and I can really sit here and pour my heart into this email and you will collect it in an hour or two and understand what I mean - and feed your own thoughts and ideas and reflections into it from across such distances...It all depends on the day."