no 20

Have you accidentally looked into the sun or bright light, and then looked away, the image burned into your eyelids? That’s an afterimage.

Here's what I saw, heard, or sensed that has stayed with me in the past week. Let’s begin.

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What I Googled: 270 kilometers

On Monday, I drove 270 kilometers from home for the first time since 1995. Destination: Hakodate, a port town that saw its heyday at the turn of the 19th century, its cape jutting out into nothingness.

Incidentally, 270 kilometers is the equivalent to 167 miles, the same distance I regularly drove from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island, where I was a student in the mid-nineties.

It took me almost four hours, door to door, just like it did from my then-boyfriend’s loft to my student apartment on 185 Benefit Street.

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I drove this distance on Monday to meet a girlfriend. She took the five-hour bullet train from Tokyo to Hakodate. We planned this trip to celebrate our mutual friend who recently opened a restaurant.

Our friend's restaurant isn't a pop-up, nor is it permanent. It's a seasonal one. It sits on the lower part of Hakodate's hilly historical neighborhood. The houses on the street reminded me of the American Colonial houses on the far leafy end of Benefit Street in Providence.

The storm slowly arrived during dinnertime, giving the six other guests and us the feeling as if we were the only souls awake and alive on the Cape that evening. The warm and easy glow we had from the thoughtfully sumptuous food, the wine, and the good lighting sheltered us from the unforgiving weather outside.

Maybe this was life on the Cape into Nothingness, keeping the people who matter close to us when we can, loving them deeply when they are near, and maybe even a little more when we send them off. And celebrating the miracle of reunions.

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What I Saw: Angry Rivers, Optimizing for Safety

The following day, the roads were loud with pounding rain. Google told me to reverse the same route I took the day before. Once in the countryside, though, I saw rivers raging close to the bridge. Along the coastline, the ocean had taken on the agitated color of milky yellow topaz separated from the sky with a thin layer of turquoise, far in the distance.

Stopping at a gas station, I noticed an incoming text. A friend familiar with the local roads texted to give me a heads up. The roads Google suggested were now submerged. Cars were backed up against each other in a two-hour pile-up at a location fifteen minutes from my destination: home. I expected the traffic to get much worse before it got better.

Thanks to this tip, I looked for alternate routes. Usually, I would opt for the fastest way, but this time I opted for the least inundated. Hokkaido is vast and allows for dramatically significant detours. The route felt like driving along the circumference of a circle rather than taking the radius. I drove the circumference and cautiously wove my way down hairpin turns on the mountain road through torrential rain.

Torrential rain and gales of wind made what is typically a four-hour drive into one that took eight.

Sometimes the fastest route isn’t the best, especially if it’s going to force me to trace my steps backward to find an alternate path and exhaust me in the process.

I decided to cash in on the luxury of time and let an audiobook tell me a story in the rain. All I wanted was to feel safe as I inched my way home.

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Messages to the Universe: What Does it Hear?

Have you ever wished for something important and all-mighty: the one thing you thought would change your life for the better, the one thing you thought would make you happy or successful?

Maybe it's receiving an acceptance for admission from a particular school, a job offer, or a promotion.

Whispers

The Universe prefers listening to the secrets I whisper instead of my screaming demands.

Instead of bringing me The Thing I Want, the Universe does something that occasionally happens in restaurants: they get my order wrong. They bring me my sides, the one or two minor details I whispered in an afterthought, to fill out and dress up my order. They forget the main dish.

I thought about the time I screamed, "I want to go to Columbia!" I whispered I wanted to study something creative and be a part of a fantastic group of women at school. I got Barnard. (I went to RISD at the advice of a Barnard professor.)

I screamed, "I want to live and work in Paris!" I whispered it didn’t have to be forever, and I wanted just enough time in Paris to stay in love with it (and not get sick of it); I wanted a healthy balance that kept me feeling like I was good in my skin. Instead of a life in Paris, it gave me a job in Tokyo that required me to be in Paris for a third of the year. It gave me a French husband and in-laws who lived near Paris headquarters. Later, when the love turned toxic and started poisoning us both, it gave me a divorce. We left feeling defeated. But just as I'd whispered, I emerged years later, feeling good in my skin.

The Universe seems to get the order wrong, but it delivers.

This week, it ignored another scream and answered a whisper. I noticed something. Screams are the deafening Shoulds in my head- what I think I should want. Whispers are Desire's quiet, steady voice sitting in one of the chambers of my heart- what I know I want but don’t dare to claim.

Why I’m still whispering my heart’s desires, I don’t know. But the Universe always seems to meet me halfway and captures the essential part of my order. I’m always given what I need. Sometimes I wonder if the heart is a portal to the Universe, and my whispered desire its "Open Sesame."

How do I turn up the volume in a whisper without making it into a scream?

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What I’m listening to: Does Music Change the Dance?

Does listening to music or having a picture in my mind change what I write about and the overall tone of the writing?

For at least ten weeks, I’ve been writing in silence. Today, I wrote listening to Max Richter. I held in my mind the picture of a particular beach in New Zealand, the location of a film that took place in the 1800s.

The Saudade of the Cape and Tuesday's drive along the stormy coast made me think of the desolation people must have felt looking out at the water some two hundred years ago. It made me wonder what it feels like to know I'm on the other side of the world, thousands of miles beyond the point of no return.

Like this, music and visuals allow me to surrender to emotion and wander into imagination.

Writing is a form of dance. In dance, time is suspended. I let music and emotion move through me; it flows out and emerges from my body as shapes to music. In writing, the now is suspended. Writing is sensing the story inside, letting it pour out of me, and giving it a place to land.

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