If you were here, I'd just grin for a bit. Years ago one of my oldest friends called it my "crooked little grin," and then I started paying attention to it and notice that yes, it actually is crooked. I smile mostly with the left side of my face. I guess? Feel free to contradict me.

***

Kyle is in Japan. (Forgive me for not combing through the archives to see what I've said about Kyle before. Be content to know that we met when we were BYU students a few years ago and that he was the last person to hug me before I left California for Japan.) Right now he's up on the north island, Hokkaido, with another friend, but then he's coming here for a week. I'm incandescent about it.

***

The friend who told me my grin was crooked: I miss her. She and her husband, another old friend, live in Utah, as do so many of the people I care about. He works for the church; she's a hairstylist. Kyle and I crashed in their basement once. Once she and I walked around at night in the neighborhood around my parents house and talked about painful things that people don't talk about. I have emails I wrote to her when I was fifteen that are painful to read because I was trying way too hard to be witty. We post some variant of "I miss you!" on each others' Facebook walls every few months or so, but that's it. She's one reason I have to go to Utah after I finish here.

***

This weekend we're going to Kyoto. The last time I was there was with another friend who was visiting. But she was here on business and I didn't speak or read the language yet, so we sort of squandered the opportunity. This time will be different because I've had oh-so-much practice now, and Kyle has his own unspecified knowledge of the language gained through his major at university. Most of my days here are pretty average, full of work and commuting and internet TV, so I'm really looking forward to a big touristy trip. And the fall colors in Kyoto are supposed to be the kind of things that make poets give up.

***

I'm still happy. It's unusual. I don't remember the last time I've been steadily happy for months at a time without a deep trough somewhere in the middle, a cluster of days when I go about business as usual but hating everything. Maybe it's the wine? At a rate of about two weeks per bottle, I've gone through one sangria, one cabernet, one malbec, and just tonight I started a bottle of tempranillo. I don't know.

The abs are still in there somewhere, hiding behind donuts that I didn't resist.

***

Today as I was walking to the post office / bank, a tall, well-dressed young man walked past me. (I'm a saunterer.) He walked very well, and I enjoyed that for a minute. Then he bent down to tie his lovely leather shoe, and I walked past him. His footsteps resumed and I expected him to overtake me again, but he didn't. He just stayed behind me, his original pace be damned. I like to think he was enjoying the way I walked. The thought made me grin.

Note: I feel like I have to explain that while being followed by a tall stranger might be creepy or unsettling in the US, Japan is just so darn safe. That there could be nefarious reasons unrelated to aesthetics didn't cross my mind until I thought about you reading this.