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 started the second draft of my novel today. My sister and I both enjoy writing, and she's working on her second manuscript, so we made a pact to prod one another. I keep her most recent prod in my email inbox. It stares at me accusingly every time I use the internet. (Gmail is my homepage. And my homeboy.) I put down three hundred words and a few more while I waited for my rice to finish. So, page one or so. A good start. My goal is to have the second draft (the draft I'm willing to show people) finished by my birthday, in December. Can do.

Sometimes you meet somebody and there are butterflies. Butterflies made of lightning. On meth.

The last time I met such a butterfly maker was before I left for Japan. The week before, actually. It was the weirdest thing. By objective standards is was an "eh" grade date, just fast food and walking and talking, but there were butterflies and I still don't understand why. He wasn't even legally an adult yet, which I'm going to count as not scuzzy on my part because I was only twenty-two and see above about fast food-walking-talking.

He wants to be a dentist. I don't know what my butterflies are thinking.

He's on my mind because we keep in touch, and we Skyped last week. There were butterflies again. They got me thinking about life and what's maybe next and what it will be like to not be single, to make job and life decisions while not being single, about being married, having kids. Probably not with him (because persistent butterflies aren't enough . . . right?), but with someone, someday. Maybe in the next few years. Someone will give me butterflies who doesn't want to be a dentist and who is maybe finished with school already.

I was telling my mom about this because yes, I tell my mom and my sister about my crushes, and she mentioned the recent Washington state gay marriage decision. She said the gay guys who were witnessing it were pictured with some adorable children. She seemed happy for them. I'm looking forward to sharing my excellent family.

Tomorrow is my level test for kendo. I'm anxious almost to the point of hyperventilation. When it comes to words I'm moderately talented and when it comes to sports I'm not talented at all. Everyone will be watching. If I perform like I did at the dry run this evening, I'll make a lot of mistakes.

But it's ok. It's a game. It's a sport. It's for fun and exercise and ok, also bragging rights because kendo is impressive. It's okay to make mistakes. (But that doesn't mean I like it.)

And if you were here, after telling you all this, I'd sniffle and rock back and forth like a slightly crazy person because I think it's time to just be with what I'm feeling, now that I've expressed it.

If you were here I wouldn't feel so bad because we'd have been talking over the past couple of weeks, when I wasn't angsty. As it is, I feel like I'm a bit of a downer, only talking to you when there's a snarfy feeling in the back of my skull.

The problem is that I feel incompetent here all the time. Next week is my kendo level test. Today was a trial run. I made so many mistakes that the sensei stopped counting. I still don't understand half the directions. I got there late because I got lost, asked directions from an old woman, and ended up getting on the wrong bus. Downer.

The evening after that was pretty great, though. A performing group called the Young Americans had a show tonight. The first half is a medley of "American culture" things (90's hip hop, Shenandoah, swing, blues, etc.) and the second half was a children's program. It was super cute. I . . . well, I should describe it. And I could. But the back of my skull is snarfy so many I actually can't just now.

And after, my kendo sensei took me out for soba. We managed a mangled but fairly uninterrupted conversation for the whole meal. Which was delicious.

I'm listening to the soundtrack to Hairspray and feeling intense nostalgia waves. One of my favorite roommates was crazy about that movie. Gosh I miss him. And the others we shared the house with. And so many other things. Grease. (The movie.) Being good at things.

Look, I know this passes. Being here is a good thing. I want to be doing what I'm doing, difficult as it is. But tonight, there's snarf and I can't think and . . . other emo things.

You know, I'm kind of glad you're not here tonight. I'd be grumpy company.

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.

Tonight would be a good night for cuddling. (Ha! As if most nights aren't.) It's cold out. My Christmas playlist is going strong, and my hair is still wet from cleaning up after kendo practice.

We're having practice next week too. Christmas Eve. It's surreal how not-a-big-deal Christmas is here, and I do not like it. I feel strongly that Christmas should be surrounded with blinking lights and the smell of pine and pie. There should be stockings, my parents, and a large fake tree weighted down with their collected ornaments. All I have is a tiny poinsettia and the Christmas playlist.

I'm a little irrationally upset about the way this holiday season is unfolding. It will be a good Christmas. I'll be with nice people who mostly speak English even. Still though.

To be honest, life is going well. Mainly as I planned.

And then, if you were here, I'd begin to talk about Orson Scott Card's books and how they're infuriating and disappointing. I just read the Ender saga. I'd peter off after a bit. Coldplay in the background. We'd both be quiet for a minute, and then a little awkwardly we'd go to our beds and fall asleep. 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.

Today I think I'd have to sit by you quietly for a while before saying anything. I'm listening to "Alejate" by Josh Groban, which just now is the most beautiful and heartbreaking song I know of. I'm not heartbroken, but I just finished a book that involved an opera singer and Spanish, so it's appropriate.

I broke up with my ikebana teacher today. I have a bad habit of making people think I'm interested in things I'm not interested in, or I'm bad at communicating when my interest wanes. In this case it waned two months ago, but she kept doing nice things for me and smiling and talking like we'd be together forever and I didn't know how to end it. But I did, today, over coffee at Starbucks, after a flower exhibition in Tokyo. It was awkward and ugly to me although she probably is just irritated I didn't tell her sooner. She had just introduced me to three of her fellow teachers, and I could see the pride ooze out of her when she said, "Yes, this is my American student. He comes all the way from Kanagawa (two hours away by train)." I was burning up with embarrassment as she said this because I'd already planned to tell her today that, yeah, two hours each way is really too much and I'm not coming anymore.

There's more to it, but the story bores me, so I imagine you're not enthralled either.

My students had a chorus festival yesterday, and when the first group of third graders (U.S. high school freshmen) began singing a Capella, I got big time shivers. They were spectacular. I watched from the teachers' row of chairs, and I tell you what, when I was in college I couldn't have imagined myself watching these awkwardly adolescent people belt out these shocking notes. It makes me think that there's absolutely no point in planning more than a year or so into the future. In the past few months, I've been seriously considering joining the Navy when I finish up here, now that DADT isn't there anymore. I'd never contemplated that before, just like I'd never contemplated the vigor of a fourteen year old conductor leading his class through a set of ominous and slightly anime-sounding vibrations. I guess my vision is broken.

Yeah, the Navy. As a cryptology officer. It's safe to assume that I'll be trilingual by the time I finish up here. I can see myself translating, and I can't see myself doing much else. But it's just an idea, and there are eighteen months between then and now. I have one other goal I'm requiring of myself before I apply, too: I want to finish massage school. That idea's been dogging me for too long (since I was seventeen) and if I keep putting it off I'll always wonder why it keeps popping into my mind and whether I would have taken to the reality as readily as the idea.

Probably I should focus more on life here and now instead of projecting. I will. I'll work harder on here and now. Now that ikebana's not in the way.

Well, hugs. It's bedtime.

--

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.