Wednesday Sept 3, 2025
We arrived at the tail end of a heat wave. The tail scooped us up and embraced us with a cloying hug at the Nagasaki airport, introducing itself. Me, and Hadleigh, and the heatwave. We would become intimately known to each other over the next few weeks - the heatwave following us around, keeping us a bit over the edge of what could politely be called “toasty.” Somewhere around Osaka, the heatwave began to calm, to cool, and things became more mellow. September inched along the edges of the leaves on the trees in the parks, and wafted from the waters of the ponds, and knocked faintly on the door of Autumn. By the time we reached Tokyo, the heatwave was being lulled into a drowsy doze, and people had stopped carrying small towels to dry their foreheads.
But on that first night, that first shock meeting, at 32.7-something latitude and 129.8-something longitude, a tropical summer was doing its very best to live on forever into the sunset.
So, we ran with it! The sun, that is!
Dropping our stuff at the hotel, washing away the flights and trains and buses from our skin, and setting our heads towards the hills, we followed the peach-sun up the mountainside, through the clouds, and onto a mountaintop overlooking a promontory, which itself had a great view of the ocean beyond.
We went in a small cable car. I watched the city of Nagasaki turn to a toy-town below, the air tight and hot with other bodies, all of us trying not to invade each other’s personal space or time. And there was Hadleigh, standing patiently behind me; till I was pulling his hand, excited, spying the sun again, and we were out in the open air with a breeze on our sweaty backs, and there was the sun in her fancy dress of pinks and golds and crimson jewels. I watched as she lowered herself into the ocean. Mesmerised. The cicadas in the forest played on.
Entranced by the sunset and the ocean and the pinkness of it all, I lost track of time.. A bubble of joy rising in my throat, leftover snippets of the songs from my chosen plane-movie, La La Land, floating in my mind. Wonder, and awe, and happiness, and sweaty discomfort, and unfamiliarity, and familiarity all at once. There she was, the very same moon, and here I was, in a new-to-me country, on the edge of my first adventure in years. And this being an especially meaningful one. It was then that Hadleigh came back, to lead me on to see the moon!
⋆⁺₊⋆ ☽ ⋆⁺₊⋆
Ahead…
a radio tower, shaped from painted iron bars, like the Eiffel, or like those structures that are used to launch rockets into space.
Above…
a bouncing moon, friendly, soft rounded edges waxing imperceptibly between breaks in the clouds. Sailing.
Below…
a city of stars, layered with history, and full of life!
People going about the moment, living, rooted, precious, whole.
I felt that once-scary floating feeling that comes with traveling: that loosening of self, becoming a stranger in a land that is not-at-all strange to those who live there.
Uprooted from my own story, floating amongst a million stories,
like an astronaut in the middle of a breathing, spinning galaxy.
. ܁₊ ⊹ . ܁ ⟡ ܁ . ⊹ ₊ ܁.
🎶
City of stars
there’s so much that I can’t see.
Who knows?
I felt it from the first embrace I shared with you…
…there in the bars
and through the smokescreen of the crowded restaurants
It’s love.~ La La Land (2016)
