There are three bright spots worth looking for on cloudy days.
In the morning, it’s coffee with you. We find our silver lining in a hole-in-the-wall cafe near the market where fish fly, talking vividly about what we dreamed as muted light finds its way through the window where we sit. We save the moment, but say bye too fast as if we had flights of our own to catch. And we loose sight of each other in the never-ending current of strangers rushing past. The sky reverts to its stone grey self, and I drift in the company of office buildings, weightless as the clouds from my breath.
We meet again, at a walk-up noodle joint on the pier. We share a steaming bowl of tonkatsu ramen and gaze at the mist-covered bay, talking about the jobs that keep us from waking up. The sun peeks through a blanket of overcast to find us. We take a selfie: in it, we are beaming. We say bye again, this time, with an embrace as warm as the soup on our lips. We save the moment, floating alongside the edge of the water with a glow that will see us through the chilly night ahead.
The last bright spot is the golden hour. It gets dark far too early here, so there is no time to waste. We spend what’s left of it together, over a drink that burns when swallowed in a dimly lit bar beneath a stairwell. It begins to rain. We say nothing this time, and instead, share an unspoken understanding of who we are at the end of cloudy days. We put a finger on it, and promise that we’ll see each other again no matter how heavy the fog may get. We’ll find our way through. We save one last moment and slip into the wintery mist, seeing clear.
In a place with as much grey area as this, the word ‘alone’ looks blurred: it’s ‘all’ and ‘one’ put together, where nothing is missing. The selfie we took comes into focus: it was myself, a complete stranger in my own company. Now, when it's cloudy outside, we see each other through it, filling whatever is empty like a glass, toasting to the brightness found within.
