Last last last

It is my last day in my apartment. Everything is the last. Last time I walk through Inokashira park. The cherry blossoms fill the place with merry makers, who, with practiced ease ignore me and Tina and our efforts to move my last swollen bags. Last time I eat sashimi. Last time I travel on the Chuo line. Last, last, last.

My head is in compartments. Separate sections that do not overlap. The worries from one carefully kept out of the worries or the excitement of the other. I cannot look at the whole picture. Perspective, I realise, is a choice. For the moment, I don’t choose it. I don’t have time for it.

Instead I am baddazled by moments, both the good and the bad. They are carefully allotted a few minutes, before being reshuffled. Each gets a turn so brief that none can quite take over; the visa, leaving Japan, the graduation speech, whether I can make my money last out til the first pay check, the newspaper and the ethical decisions involved in it, Bangkok and the host of interoductions arranged for it, my first ten days of travelling once I arrive Yangon, the Referendum in May.

The standardised jazz of this café as 8.30 roles by and my morning coffee stares blackly up at me. Lists are ticked off and re-written. Goodbyes are said, awkwardly, beautifully, with an absence of words that can quite express, an absence that we don’t understand as yet. An interview, hastily conducted by phone in an anonymous station in the Korean part of town, lunch in the calm laid back simplicity of a slow food café, tears blinked to bursting as a lump swells in the throat – re-affirming some truth to all those bad novels that mention lumps in throats.

And under it all I guess I have already said goodbye to Japan. Already boarded the plane and faced the fact that this city is no longer mine.

I am ready to leave. I am ready to face somewhere different. I hardly know what the last year and a half has been – some brief interlude, a meandering road off the main path. Or perhaps the foundations of where I want to be. It’s led me in some round about way to stay in Asia.

I eat the massive hunk of white toast the café staff has just brought me. It tastes of nothing.