Pointed days

Skills lost and found

It’s the twelfth, but not last, new moon of the year.

I’ve reoriented.

The closest I’ve come to “having direction” was in early adulthood, when life was clearly oriented toward seeing as many new things for as close to zero dollars as possible. (Two years ago while stuck in my childhood bedroom with covid, I wrote about this, about love, god, pain, and other unwavering heart needles.) Chi Hai recently told me about a “round the world” plane ticket, through which you could visit six different cities in a week. Sounds exhausting, I said, even though I’m younger by 14 years and have no kids and am not a multiple home owner. Some part of me has lost the taste for constant movement and novelty, some part disillusioned by the aimless, pure accumulation of experience.

Instead I move my dresser from the middle of the room until it’s flush against the wall, and move my desk from that wall to the eastern-facing window opposite. These days the sun is so weak by 3pm, and as I write this thin gold and blue light is scattered through the teeth-like prism of the glass blocks. It’s a window but not one for looking out of, instead the whole wall is a lamp that fades on and off at will. As I prop up books and plants throughout the apartment, slowly filling it with long-term investments in short-term pleasures, shadows form little cities. The room, “for whom light is an inexhaustible magician.”

I’m having difficulty writing this because I went to bed at 4am, after a long night of spilling drinks and shouting to be heard. I was the first person at the party and the last to leave. I’m in denial, I think we’ll do this again next weekend, unable to realize the truth of this night: It’s a farewell party for two of the brightest lights in my city life. We stand in a circle, I avoid talking about what direction the country is going in now that the Republican mandate is so clear. Instead three Milanese discuss navigation back home: Street names on street names on street names, it’s on Via Manfredo Fanti, where’s that, it’s between Via Pietro Micca and Via Sant Bla Bla. I think of LA, there’s no such thing as absolute distance, everything is multiplied by a factor of traffic, and of Manhattan, how the grid allows extreme precision in telling people where things are, so long as you’re in on the ruse, that “north” is a baldfaced lie.

I can’t list the names of even five streets in Tokyo. If your phone’s dead and you’ve only got the string of nonsense numbers for where you’re going, you better bone up on your polite Japanese because you’ll be relying on shop keepers and police people to find your way. Orientation begins with the name of a train station, which exit, the south one or the new south one, is it near L-Breath, the vexingly named camping goods store, no it’s on the other side, by the Lucky Spot, you know the one, I’ve always wondered what that was for, is it a meeting place for lovers, no, they sell lottery tickets.

El and I go south to a town on the coast and turn off our phones, determined to navigate without them. G gave me a compass for my birthday, and I’ve become very attached to it, using it to get out of the subterranean maze of Shibuya Station without having to consult Google Maps’ convoluted exit strategies, but of course it’s detached itself from me just when I need it most, lost in a pocket somewhere back home. I’ve been pathetically scrolling through navigation quizzes on Instagram, here’s a picture of moonlight casting shadows on some gravestones; what direction are we facing? So much of childhood life was spent indoors, books and homework and video games and CDs and piano lessons and dance recitals. A sealed world with screened windows for recently mobile refugees from the old country, where outside was so bright and alive that I imagined rice left unattended would cook itself.

So when we need information we query people and maps, usually both. Each person produces a new map and by evening I’ve got a thick booklet of printed matter. It takes longer to do everything, to find a place to eat, to locate the e-bike rental, to climb down into the right secret beach. As we jump into the mid-November sea we see Fuji and a heron, the two icons of Japan high-five each other as the sun goes down, my toes would be numb if we were facing anywhere but west. It feels like young adulthood, just on the cusp of independence, when life is something to stare at through goggles on a long summer afternoon.

Later El shows me a photo she took, of me biking off into the blue day. I’m wearing a black high school-era bomber jacket from H&M — fighter pilots wore fast fashion in the early aughts — and I look like an actual child, jacket and hair flying. I find it amusing how determined and sure I look, that I seem to know exactly which direction to go, certainty is funny, don’t you think, kind of like a joke.