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Restless for Ritual


The air in my new bedroom is cold, where a mixture of musk, sulfur, and incense hang. I sit still. The muscles in my legs throb, having hauled this body up the hill not two hours ago. Quiet reigns. And yet, it is not calm. Like the inside of a woman’s belly before her contractions, life shifts and fidgets. Restless.
In this room, my active mind has already begun to shed the attachments that it clung to since I crash landed in Japan. The charm of a park next door where I seldom went, then-bathed in sakura petals that now have all but gone, has passed. The mystery that I felt lingering farther north, out by the bay, has not. The spooky chill of black sea will beckon my restlessness again. Home is where the heart is, they say. Home is also where you lay your head, they also say. (Maybe different people.) In that apartment in Oita City, though, my head has not laid there for nearly two months. My heart has already relinquished it.
As wisps of smoke dance above me, carried by streams of cold air that hide themselves as they seep through the seams of this little room under the Arm of the Mountain, I feel as though this room receives a baptism. 
Under who’s authority? Certainly not my own. 
Am I part of the ritual, too? I hope so.
from 15 April, 2020



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