maybe the difference is just
that i can bring myself to talk about it, now,
without my whole body trying to relive it.
maybe the difference passed with the 10 year mark.
and the 11th, as it went by and I only had to blink it away,
rather than spend the whole time trying to think of anything else.
the only thing the rest of the world seems to remember
is the power plant explosion. Fukushima. Early 2010s, sometime --
(and it's almost funny, the way just about anyone at all can count through the major nuclear events in Japan: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima. Make it easy on all those people who didn't get stuck living with the consequences of them.)
I remember, 30 kilometers away from the epicenter,
the way our classroom shook on March 11th.
I remember books falling off shelves,
my classmates and I clutching at desk legs, at each other,
the floor shaking up and down, up and down, not just side to side.
I remember watching the broadcasts the next morning,
2011, and cars floating out in the ocean by Tohoku.
Homes, gone; Tsunami flood gates washed away,
High schools turning into evacuation centers,
Building ceilings collapsing as people tried to run away.
That night in Tokyo, the trains stopped.
Completely.
Phone networks went down as everyone flocked to use them,
The highways swarmed with cars,
the ground. kept. shaking.
In Tohoku, after the initial earthquake,
after the Tsunami that came up too high,
as people tried to run away fast enough, fires erupted.
And then we watched on the morning news, my family and I --
tired, but safe and sound, far enough away,
as the Fukushima Dai-ichi powerplant erupted,
killing its workers with it.
We, the fortunate foreigners outside the destruction area,
we flew out on a plane, came back a month later.
In Tokyo, where the worst of the damage
was the bent tip of Tokyo tower,
there was a water shortage,
a power outage, or two,
and the aftershocks
through the ground
didn't stop til July.
When I went up to an affected area of Tohoku -- two years later,
All of their dwellings were still temporary.
Their main export of fish, still deemed unsafe.
Their main grocery store, a 7/11 conbini.
Their population half a ghost town,
so I helped plant vegetables.
Watched, the next year, as they gained back some of their boats.
As the seas started to be safe again to fish.
As industry started to become permanent, again.
People came up with a lot of names,
for what happened on March 11th, 2011.
The Great Tohoku Earthquake
The Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami
The Triple Disasters
For all that I was safe, during it,
I still lived beside those events.
Still know that only now, over a decade later,
are people beginning (slowly) to re-inhabit
that ghost-town of radioactivity in Fukushima.
At 10, there is not much you can do, to stop an earthquake.
Or a tsunami.
Or a fire,
or a disastrous power plant explosion.
But I tried my hardest to do what I could, to help in the aftermath.
At 21, I hit the ground, go dizzy, or blackout
whenever something unexpectedly shakes:
a bridge, a bus shelter, a ladder.
The date is tethered onto me like a broken lifeboat,
something I will never be able to drift away from.
And in a way, I am furious at the world for forgetting.
For daring to look away -- but there are other events.
Other disasters, natural and man-made and in between.
And I can not keep them all scarred across my heart.
But I remember this one.
I'll keep remembering for everyone who doesn't.
And next time, I can only hope to be enough
to prevent some of the loss,
to learn and progress from the past,
until maybe
it never happens again, at all.
Aug 15, 2022
Aug 15, 2022 at 11:04 PM UTC
sometimes, I look at you in the mirror, and it's all I can do
to remember that you are not a ghost.
most days, though, it feels that way.
like everything repeats itself, over and over.
like we're the ones slowly fading away amidst it all.
I go to work and I go back to somewhere I can not call home --
and I sleep, and wake, and do it all over again.
sometimes, I remember to make food, to eat.
and this tired, endless cycle continues.
You have friends, of course. You have a family.
But I've started counting them away by distance.
By how many months or years it's been since I've last seen them.
By how many weeks since I've last heard them.
I feel haunted by the reminder of it:
By the echoes of memories in everything I see, or touch.
By the aching remnants of absence left behind.
If all you were was a mirage of other people's constructs,
you'd be gone, by now.
you'd have melded away into the background,
like unappealing drapery.
there'd be nothing left to keep you real.
But I still get up in the morning. Go into work.
React to the incidents around me as if I care.
I'm still here, listlessly drifting.
There are things I want to do, someday.
Someone I want to become, someday.
People I want to see again, someday.
so we're still here, you and I.
adrift, until we can find a stable anchor.
something concrete enough to stop you haunting me.
Jan 2, 2022
Jan 2, 2022 at 8:15 AM UTC
I think I will always be a little heartbroken by you.
Yet there is something to be said,
for learning to love something
before anyone can warn you away.
I like to think,
in a world where I found you
a little older, a little less naive,
little less ready to embrace things
with arms wide open and free --
I like to think someone would have cautioned me away.
*Do not become so enamored by something
that you become inseparable from it.
Do not give all of yourself away,
because there are pieces you will
want back.
They will tell you:
if you fall seven times, get up eight.
Remember:
the more you fall, the harder it is
to get back up. To stand tall.
And stand tall, you must.*
I was too young, though-
and the old, they let the young
make their own mistakes.
*(I like to think I would've dived in
headfirst, still, fallen anyway)*
So I got my heart crushed
put back together not a little intact,
and I figured out how best to keep it.
You aren't my first memory,
But you're in my second,
an afterthought.
And now you're a dark, shadowed cloud, hanging
just over my shoulder.
You are not a home that I can forget:
I loved you, I love you,
like a desert craves the rain.
I think I will always be a little heartbroken by you,
and yet it's something to hold close.
For the lessons learned,
For the things I came away with,
gained only because I refused
to fight against them.
The language I learned at your side
is like a siren song,
beckoning me back to the only place
I have ever been able to call home.
But I can learn to release my hold,
Loosen it until the storm forecast
hovers out of sight,
It presence distant
rather than looming.
In time, I think,
I can learn to let you go.
Oct 2, 2021
Oct 2, 2021 at 5:18 PM UTC
I stumbled over my words, today,
and it hurt.
Like nails, chipped off and dug in.
Like grief, slow and numb until it swallows, drowns you.
Like a culmination of things that has no good end.
It hurt, to feel a mess,
to stutter and restart,
to not quite have the right things come out.
It hurt, to hold my breath in,
to keep my ears open,
to not say: *slow down, slow down, please,
you're speaking too fast, please.*
To have to force the words through,
any that will come, on a day
where I hadn't wanted
to need to speak at all.
It. hurts.
Physically, under my chest.
A dull, hollow ache, that settles.
My head throbbing over it all.
It hurts, and nothing soothes it.
Not the feeling of inadequacy.
Not the bereft sense of loneliness.
Not the gnawing helplessness.
A cold comfort:
it's better, the next day -- easier.
to hide the uneasiness, to speak.
to keep face, match tone.
Easier, but not better.
I clench my hands into fists,
dig my nails into my skin,
and there is no one to notice that, either.
Oct 2, 2021
Oct 2, 2021 at 5:14 PM UTC
there's a sort of hope here,
sun shining through glass
warmth spreading throughout.
see, and this... this is the kind of thing i want to be able to grasp.
hold onto.
Jul 25, 2021
Jul 25, 2021 at 5:46 AM UTC
sometimes, you breathe, and you breathe, and nothing changes.
if you can just look outside
of yourself,
you find the suncast sky,
blue turning black, lit only be street lamps.
if you can just look outside,
the tears stop,
they still.
but things like pain --
things like hurt --
they linger.
in the words I try to form,
in the mistakes I try
not to make.
they tell you to breathe in, breathe out.
count your breaths, center yourself in the present.
an anchor, a tether.
I wish it could be enough
to stave off other things:
like sadness, a crescendoing echo in my heart;
like hurt, a tangent constant at the edges;
like love, because you can never hold them close
enough.
Jul 25, 2021
Jul 25, 2021 at 5:43 AM UTC
there is an art
to secrets
a necessity
to keeping them,
to hiding them away
like the dust under the rug
or the thing just Too Uncomfortable to talk about
that get hidden
under guilt
and shame
and fear
(this
is not
a reason
to keep them)
but there exists a thing
called protection
and something
more terrible:
love.
these are things you will die for.
sometimes, secrets fall into place
so you do not have to.
sometimes, yes, they will bury you whole
still alive, still breathing, but drowning --
there are days when they will save you
instead.
Jun 11, 2021
Jun 11, 2021 at 4:06 AM UTC
Winter snaps at your sleeves,
Cold chills making you shiver,
like a thing you are meant to
run away from --
But you have always loved
this part of the season, the wind
whipping through your clothes,
as if to say,
alive, alive, alive.
like a reminder, fresh off the bay:
don't you dare, it nudges at you,
Alive, it says, awake, awake, awake. &
(maybe you need it, sometimes,
that memory, that reminder:
don't you dare, it tells you,
and it's enough to hold onto.)
Until it rains as much as it pours,
until mud soaks your skin through.
And the night tries to eat at you,
**** away what little you have left.
So melancholy settles in,
the reminder that you have never
been weightless; the faintest echo of
I miss you never escapes you but
for helpless sobs in fading twilight;
the winter air is keeping you afloat,
still, is hanging all your readymade
promises like stop signs in your face,
but you feel tiredness like an ache
in your chest, in your bones, like
a thing about to break.
You learned how to lie
the same summer you learned
how not to eat, pieces of yourself
fading away the more you said
i'm not hungry, and meant it.
You learned how to lie
the same way you learned to be quiet,
the right people looking at you wrong,
the wrong people picking out pieces
to an asymmetric picture -- too late,
you learned how to lie like it was easy, the way breathing (maybe) wasn't.
And you stopped because people cared just fast enough to matter,
stopped because you looked at yourself, one day, all hollowed out,
stopped in an instant, like it was easy,
How, how, how, like the guilt pounding through you,
like it was enough:
How could you do this to yourself?
*Like the answer wasn't simple,
Like apathy and caring too much couldn't exist side by side,
Like you hadn't stopped pretending that everything didn't hurt years ago,
Like you believed yourself* when you promised it wouldn't happen again.
And yet here you are: be it winter, not spring; all alone again, so **** tired, again, the sadness unburied, spilling out.
And you should stop. yourself, take stock, remember what it is like to love to be alive before you go back to hating it, before you go back to not caring; but you are so tired, here, now, you think you might've skipped it: the part where you catch yourself. The part where you let someone else catch you. The part where it matters.
Alive, alive, alive, the wind hisses.
Don't you dare, it says, as your eyes water from the cold.
You are awake, it seems to be saying, alive, like you are still worth saving.
Maybe it will be enough.
Jan 1, 2021
Jan 1, 2021 at 7:03 PM UTC
This is the kind of loneliness you find yourself
afraid to succumb to,
As though not writing about it
means not Acknowledging it,
As though pretending it doesn’t exist
will translate across a void
Will make it stop,
*Stop hurting
Stop feeling empty
Stop* being an absence
you can’t control.
(it’s still there: lurking, ever-present.)
This loneliness, or grief, or depression, desperation
– this thing you are not sure how to name –
It is like
a cocoon
of desolateness.
tiredness (–or fatigue, maybe–) seeps into every inch
of you, so you go on walks until
you think you will collapse,
and it doesn’t help,
doesn’t go away;
this irritation,
a listless meander
of helplessness
a desire to do something, anything,
to escape this boredom; prison of your own making
to make your self useful somehow, instead of
this wallowing creature you’ve turned into,
braced in the cold and telling yourself
I am not kind
for all the good it doesn’t do:
you do not know what it is you have turned yourself into.
if you were the sort of person who could take kindness
before it became a necessity, a mercy—
you like to think you’d be able to rearrange your words,
just enough to ask for help.
but you’re bad at it.
there is independence, warring in your bones with responsibility,
another unshakeable part of you
you don’t know how to throw away.
you stumble over different words, over
will your read this and
can I hug you and
I miss you
like it will be an answer
but people are only people,
and you do not know how–
there is a lump in your throat,
and you never know how to cross it:
you just want to be better,
you just want to stop feeling like this—
is all.
Sep 22, 2020
Sep 22, 2020 at 4:15 PM UTC
You miss people like they are limbs,
as though writing to them will keep you close,
will keep them close to you,
a thing like friendship
strung out across oceans,
tethered with best-kept promises
with I miss yous
and I love yous
sent out in the night
written back in the dark
they might be your tether,
if only you’d let yourself
have one.
But you are afraid, of tethers,
You are a person ingrained with people leaving,
You know (barely) what it is like to watch them go
You know (far better) what it is to leave familiar shore
for unexplored land, unexplored treasure,
to carry longing in your chest
and unsteadiness in your heart
(you did not grow up knowing what it was:
to plant your roots in the ground
and stay.)
but missing is not the issue,
this half-ingrained part of you—
missing can not be the issue, not after a lifetime of it.
Missing is the thing you hold close to your chest,
That you hide and let yourself feel only
When you must think of home,
of home that means too many places
and not just one person, but many—
home that means something kept together in spite of things,
despite sleepless nights, shattered hearts, this separation called distance.
So you will tuck it inside,
because the aching is a part
of you, is a thing you understand, a thing
you have grown used to, like the way your
body continues to draw breath
no matter how things hurt.
Sep 4, 2020
Sep 4, 2020 at 1:09 PM UTC