Early Tuesday morning in the staff room at Koyo. It is cool and damp outside, but the rain has stopped. I could not sleep again for a section of the night. This happened the previous night as well, and both times there were somethings to keep me up. On Sunday night it was an entire year of images--palpable and lucid--from the town of Kibi, my home for all of last year. When I woke up on Monday, these images had faded, as though the hour or so of deep sleep I managed to enjoy had washed them virtually clear of all color and life. Last night it was Megumi. I woke up at about 3:15, drank some tea, smoked, listened to the noise outside my building (which is like a conveyor belt, fluctuating in its production, but perpetually active). The only birds whose voices I hear are those of either the crows or pigeons. I watched the moon and pachinko lights with my foot throbbing in pain, my lungs short of breath--smoking and unable to let what had been on my mind the whole day pass from me. I have only felt this way once when, at 16, I could not live because "that would be Life"--and well, life was only where She was. Those days I remember the first time I spoke to Christina, as her locker was two down from mine. She came to our school only for one year, with an effortless way of making friends with everyone, including me. We had religion class together in the morning, mostly full of kids who were waiting for the day to end in order to smoke blunts and roll up to the hills to drink 40s and what not. Nothing was revealed to me in that class except what it was--the smells of perfumes and freshly-washed hair, the same cool mists as this morning's, the sleepiness of our most poignant moments (for they too are only intimations), and an oblivious thankfulness of being alive (bowing, not knowing to what); the routine that in some way is made to feel new by the presence of humans--who are new every day. Later that year I was pitched by myself into a 'Grenzsituation'--a moment on the threshold--which I lived through and which carved a presence of absence into my soul. In the circle of my friends, I knew, know, have known that there are always new seeds to scatter, a "resetting of a body of broken bones."

Too much "free" time at this job--I am not using it well. I am not using it. No, it is no use--this time.