Can you imagine being covered in ashes?

They're itchy all over your skin and every few seconds another one falls from your hair. You huff in reverse to get them out of your nose. You can smell, everywhere, the aftermath of burning.

***

I'm waiting for an email from an FBI agent. Honest truth. I'm looking at post-Japan careers, and it turns out that a friend of a friend of a friend is a recruiter for them. At BYU there was an FBI recruiting seminar once, and it sounded interesting to me then, but they don't hire anyone who isn't at least twenty-three, and since I was only nineteen at the time (I graduated at twenty) I didn't think about it seriously.

So there's that.

Staying here is also an option, one that's becoming more attractive as I get the language kind of down and make a few more social ties. Possibly staying here-here, in the same city, or possibly moving to Yokohama to work in the branch office. I'm getting pretty comfortable here, so if they could just up my pay by half I think I'd be sold. (Sold on one more year, that is.)

Passing my kendo test last weekend went a long way toward making me feel at home here, I think. And last night, sparring at the boxing gym, I also felt like I belonged. (I hit a personal record for continuous jump rope time, among other things.) As nice as it was to live in the US, I was too worried about money or school or Mormonism or The Gay to feel that belonging most of the time, so even with the language barrier, what I'm feeling here is valuable.

I've been able to keep in touch with many of my friends, mostly through letters, some through Facebook. We keep each other posted, we talk about curiosities and boys and jobs and hobbies. My model for letter writing has always been Pride and Prejudice. I think I'm coming into it more.

I wrote another several pages of novel the other day.

***

Things you burn: flags; corpses; phoenixes; fields; houses; fuses; forests; incense; evidence. 

I'd say "Holy crap don't touch my forearm, it's bruised all over."

I went to a martial arts dojo today with a fellow teacher and her sons. It was a painful blast. They grappled the heck out of my wrist. It was odd to be punching and yet not be boxing. It was odd to kick.

My default when someone speaks to me here is to nod and smile and make little affirmative grunting noises, and generally this works. Sometimes I understand what people are saying, but mostly I watch what's going on and guess. The people bent over backwards to help me out, with the sensei or undersensei chilling with me the whole time, as well as a few other people. There was much praise for my punches (they are pretty awesome these days) and much good-natured ribbing for how my hands kept floating up into a boxing-style guard. They threw me around and let me throw them, and then the sensei told me to lay down and gave me a massage in the middle of the dojo.

That was a little weird.

Not unpleasant, though. No one touches me here, except in my violent sports and sometimes my students. I'm not sure what to do when it's my students. Sometimes they grab my balls and my instinct is to hit their faces. Sometimes they take my hand or wrap my arm around them and I feel like someone's gonna call me a pedophile. I was pleasantly surprised to be touched so much, with such good intentions, by the man who'd thrown me across the floor a few minutes earlier. In the rest of the room, people kept practicing. Next to us, a kendo club started hitting each other with sticks.

I don't know what adult relationships are supposed to look like, but apparently sometimes they look like gentle hands pressing into my back in the middle of a dojo.

I'm learning so much here.

After boxing this evening I ran into the Mormon missionaries. This was the third time since coming to Japan and the first of those three times when I wasn't running to catch a train. They were in my train station's bakery, which was where I wanted to buy dinner. (Curry rolls.)

Long story short: When they gave me a little map to the church I felt wanted by a decent looking American man within a couple of years of my age, which was strange and wonderful and then depressing. I miss tall, clean-cut white boys. Missionaries are even better because they come in pairs and without women. No offense, women. Unfortunately, they don't want me to come to their church because they like me; they want me to come because they believe a theology that I don't.

Gosh I felt sad after that. Not too sad—boxing endorphins—but sad. Probably I'll never stop being sad, at least a little, not about these particular men but about the Mormon life I didn't lead. Like the best storybooks, that Mormon life was so beautiful that it hurts that I can't believe it's true.

I'm pretty sure I'll visit the church sometime soon, maybe even this weekend. I'm such a sucker.


**********

There were cutie-patootie eight year olds at the boxing gym today. They asked me my name, and where I was from, and how old I was. One kept going "Pchiew!" and fake punching toward me. One kept showing off on the climbing rope, calling me over to make sure I was watching.

We laid there for an hour watching the sky. Yellowcard in my head, and on my lips too because you know how I am about singing. She played Mae on her iPhone. We watched the sky.

What should have been the north star (it was the brightest) was actually Jupiter, she said.

Oh, I said. I faked my way through astronomy at boy scout camp.

The clouds moved in to stay. We packed up the blankets and walked away along the river.

***

It's time to condense and focus. I'm stopping my ikebana classes at the end of this month. I'm going to a couple of kendo matches so I can get a feel for how they're run—the plan is that I'll compete in the city tournament next July. The plan is that I'll join in with my schools' practices once I understand enough Japanese. The plan is that I'll make my teacher smile again like he did last Saturday when I pulled off the rapid head strike six times in a row.

Boxing will continue. I should have picked that up earlier in life but if I had I probably wouldn't have liked it much because, whether you believe it or not, I was timid. Haha, not now. No, not now.

Two more months of loan payments. A few months of credit card bills. Then freedom and wealth beyond my wildest dreams, if I had a dream transplant with a child from Mongolia.

Look, it's not that I don't like you. It's just . . . this is what I'm doing now. There are hopes and dreams but they don't feel right now. This feels right now.

We're hang gliders. Life is wind.

Blog hug. Email hug. Skype hug.