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. 

Today I feel failure.

My Japanese failure started when I went to the mormon chapel for the second week running. I arrived ten minutes early (as opposed to last weeks' twenty minutes late) and there was a guy standing in the hall. He started chatting at me and I had no idea what he was saying. No. Clue. I eventually made out that he had shared his name with me(don't know if I can say I forgot it since I didn't really understand it in the first place)and was asking for mine; that he had invited me to an as yet unplanned YSA activity in February (more confusing because it's apparently just SA here, even though this guy turned out to be 27); and (most awkwardly) that he was thanking me for accompanying the elders on a dinner meeting with an investigator last week.

Is that what that was? Whoops.

I didn't know how to assure him that it was not my intention to help convert anyone, so I just said "It was fun."

I understood maybe thirty percent of the first two talks (female speakers who gestured and spoke kinda slow) and ten percent of the last one (a male speaker who did not speak slowly or gesture at all). They were all on the word of wisdom, which was ironic because I enjoyed a cup of coffee with a friend on Friday day, a beer and a mixed drink with a friend on Friday night, and a cup of tea with a friend on Saturday. Still, I like the spirit of health consciousness behind the topic.

I left quickly after the meeting ended, and as soon as I rounded the corner I was asking myself why I'd gone at all.

• Sacrament meeting reminds me of my family. We sang "In Our Lovely Deseret" as the closing song, which in addition to being hilariously fast when you're reading the lyrics in Japanese script was my family's FHE theme song, sung at least twice a month for most of my childhood.
• There's a feeling of community there that I haven't felt anywhere else. Everyone (or the adults at least) is there because they want to be there. There's no pressure to learn, no tests or paychecks involved.
• It's safe. I can't really fail at mormonism, at least not the unorthodox way I'm engaging with it.
• Being there helps me see that I'm not spiritually battered guy I used to be. Where once I got panic attacks, now I have peace.
• The missionaries are thrilled to have me there. I feel like I'm making their day.
• The missionaries are there. This one I feel is dangerous. As lovely as it is to sit next to an American guy my age, to sing together and whisper occasional commentary back and forth, he's a missionary for a church I don't believe in. Our interaction is wholly dependent on my participation in the Mormon church. 

I don't regret going. I felt warm and fuzzy and special there. But I wonder if it isn't unsustainable, like drug happiness. The next few weeks will make it clear, I think. If it's the novelty, that'll wear off. Sometime the elders will bring more people to church and I'll sit by myself, or they'll get transferred out, or I don't know.  I awkwardly imagine what the conversation will be like if they try to get me to be more active than I want to be and it isn't pretty, full of righteous gay pity-party indignation. If I keep it up, I imagine someone will get close to the topic eventually and that will be messy. But for now, I don't regret going.

Oh yeah, this was about failure. After failing to understand Japanese there, I went to an extra kendo practice that my coach had set up for me because of the impending grade level tests. He doesn't speak English, so I failed Japanese some more with him. I also failed at politeness (arrived a few minutes late) remembering the forms (there are ten, and the names and steps are all new Japanese vocabulary), and, pleasing my Japanese teacher, who was there to translate and who ended the evening with the comment "Sometimes I forget how much you don't know," which I suppose might not have been intended as an insult but which still hurt because sometimes I forget too but not today.

But this is all angsty. To be honest, now that I'm a little removed from the events of the day and I can just think about them, it's been a pretty good day. I enjoyed the Mormon church and the train ride to and from. I chatted for a few minutes with my mom (who does not know about my chapel visits because I don't want her to get her hopes up), I enjoyed some lovely bakery snacks, and I finally got a written copy of the kendo form names so I can practice them. I didn't have to teach any classes. I slept in. I read some Michael Creighton and washed things.

I guess the angst is there because I feel like something's missing, and the whole Mormon-elder complex is similar to the missing thing but not it. That and the Japanese and the kendo all together feel like failure, even though on the whole today was good.

Anyway. If you were here I'd probably punch you in the shoulder and then act like I didn't do anything. Just to see what you'd do.

If you were here tonight, I'd tell you about how I went to the Mormon chapel today. We'd sit on the bed, I think, because there are a few days of clutter everywhere else and it's cozy up here. We could watch everything like lords of it all. Lords of the grocery bags and discarded jackets.

I found the chapel with the little map that the elders gave me some months ago—I think I mentioned it. On the way there I asked a woman about the correct train stop to get off at, and later a man about a park where I could eat my bakery-bought lunch. I understood half the words. That was enough though. I got off at the correct and tiny station in a depressing area of Atsugi where there was a factory smell and a lot of concrete and wires and cars. I found a garbage-strewn set of benches and a little shrine by the river and ate my lunch there.

I was anxious but not freaking out when I passed the chapel the first time. It sort of pops out at you with sudden white largeness. A spiral staircase, half of the first floor given over to parking, a couple of people walking out. I walked past them and past the Create drugstore across the street. (This is when I found the park and ate my curry roll, my tiny pizza, and my doughnut.)

I felt light and fizzy when I walked back and in. I lingered in the empty little front room and looked at a display of different language editions of the Book of Mormon. '80s era posters in English. Ads for the English classes the elders teach.

Up the stairs. They were narrowish, just enough room for a person going one way to pass a person going the other way. At the top, a Japanese woman saw me and said "Hello" in English. I tried to ask for the meeting schedule in Japanese, and she asked what meeting, and I had no idea how to say "sacrament meeting" and she didn't switch to English, so "Hello" was probably the extent of her abilities in that regard. She said there was a meeting going on then and held open a door right there in the narrow hallway and ushered me in.

This was at two thirty or three, by the way. "Baptism," I said to myself when I saw a little Latin American kid at the front and his family up there too and not exactly a full house in the rest of the folding chairs. Bingo. I sat down right by the door I'd come in and listened to the little guy thank everyone for coming. Someone in the column of chairs next to me went up to the front and told the elders I was there and they came back by me, smiling huge. I bet I made their day.

Are you from England? I'm guessing you're a member. How long have you been here?

American, actually, from California. Yeah, haven't come for a long time though. About nine months.

He gave me the schedule for the meetings. The bishop spoke a little. We sang "I Am A Child Of God" in Japanese and it felt warm in my head and then a prayer, a few more pleasantries, and I left.

"See you next week" he said, and maybe he will, I dunno. It felt good to sit there. It was familiar and comforting and I didn't feel suffocated. It was interesting to see how much I could understand. It was a baptism, though, and I arrived close to the end. Two of the three people I heard speak were adorable and Latin and simple and children. There was a lot of space. There was no sacrament ritual.

If you were here, I don't know if you'd ask why I'm going or not, but I ask myself. Answer: Mormonism is part of my heritage. I don't really want to cut it out of my life. Pain aside.

I imagine you'd raise an eyebrow if you were here, but maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Now I need to turn on the heat and wash the spoon I ate mango yogurt with earlier and brush my teeth and sleep. School starts again in a couple of days. I'd get up and we'd hug, if you were here.

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.

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.

Every Saturday I dread going to kendo. It looms at the end of my day, full of misunderstandings and sweat.

I usually end up going anyway, for various reasons. Sometimes it's because I told my Japanese teacher I would definitely see here there. Sometimes it's because I asked the assistant teacher to make a list of kendo terms for me to study and I already ducked out so I'd feel like a real heel if I did it again. Sometimes it's because I spent far too much money on the armor to let it sit in my closet in it's useless shiny immaculateness.

I never regret going. I feel elated at the end, and for the rest of the evening, and sometimes into the next day. Today I understood another word that the teacher used. ("Twist." I understood this because last week we taught "What's the matter? I have a fever/cold/sore throat" and the teacher wanted to also teach "I hurt my shoulder" and "I twisted my ankle," even though I don't think these things really go together in a grammar sort of way and it sort of confused the students.) I got that list of kendo terms from the assistant teacher, and, bonus, my Japanese teacher's mother was there again. She was there for the first time just after I started, about five months ago. She was extremely impressed by how much Japanese I can speak now, and even though it's not much and the Japanese are infamous for overpraising foreigners' language and chopstick skills, I was thrilled.

I don't know why that doesn't turn it into something I look forward to, but it doesn't. Probably it would be easier if I didn't still have those two herniated disks in my spine, but those bad boys will need surgery--and incidentally, now that I have decent health insurance and a job that pays pretty well for a single guy, I'm looking in to that again. From what I've read recently, the corrective surgeries have advanced enough that they don't carry six-month-bedrest price tags anymore.

Probably it would also be easier if I understood more of what people were saying, but duh.

I dunno.

Anyway. I climbed a mountain yesterday. I'm pretty beat. Tomorrow will be a hurts-so-good day all over me. I'm doin' okay.

Last week was hard. I felt bruised inside all the time.

This week I don't feel bruised anymore. A few things are clicking in my head, language-wise: Today a student asked where I was going, and I knew how to answer; I read the vocabulary assigned for my Japanese class and realized I already knew half of it;and just before I started writing this, I realized that the anime-theme-song-refrain that keeps getting stuck in my head means "I'm in a dream." (Or something close to that, at least.)

Give me a hug.

Today I half broke down in front of my Japanese teacher. Not understanding or being able to make myself understood makes me want to die a little; hide a little; kick in a little window with my bare right foot. It's been six months since my plane touched down in Tokyo and yes I understand much more than I did then, but even a two hundred percent increase isn't much when you start at one. Thus the tears.

The tears actually waited until I left her house, but they started welling up when she asked "How are you?"

Last night I was marveling at how awesome my life is. It's still awesome, but today I'm tired. Not depressed, just tired.

There was woodsmoke in the air on my walk home—the last night I'll ever walk up to this apartment—and I thought about my favorite date because that night there was also woodsmoke. It was back when I couldn't call a date a date without facing disciplinary action from BYU. We skewered bits of steak on sticks we'd sharpened. (Mostly he'd sharpened, I'm not handy with a knife.) We talked about dreams and hopes and what we'd done already. We didn't touch at all because we were both only half out of the closet and then there was BYU. I think probably we would touch now, if he weren't dating someone and I weren't in Japan and we were sitting by the fire roasting bits of steak in a park somewhere. Maybe not, though.

I love you.