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it has just been waiting for me |
02 July 2008
((written some time ago and finally posted now i'm in japan))Having checked my Blogger account, I was unsurprised yet slightly disappointed with myself to find that I haven’t written anything in about a month – a situation which obviously needed to be remedied. And what better time to do so than at night when I’m unable to sleep? Well... perhaps there are better times. But it’s all the same really, and more productive than just lying in the dark listening to music. I’ve just completed the Wednesday of my final week in Qingdao. Today has been fairly productive, despite rising at an hour which would doubtless cause screams of horror from my M and P dearest. This afternoon I succeeded in posting an outrageously large parcel of my belongings homewards: 30 kilos in total, which really is quite impressive considering I still have stuff left to carry around with me, and my original baggage limit on the aeroplane to China was 20 kilos. But I’d like to meet the person who spends four months somewhere and doesn’t acquire anything. And tell them they’re ridiculous. The other thing I managed to get done which deserves a metaphorical cookie is booking some more of my accommodation for the extensive jaunt through Japan that I will be embarking upon next week. It’s all rather exciting, particularly as now I’ve got a good amount of the accommodation sorted out the anxiety factor has decreased significantly. The boat trip itself should be something of an adventure, if a drawn-out one. It takes a long time, but it’s one of those unusual things to tuck away in the scrapbook of experience… and it’s cheaper than flying. I will arrive in Shimonoseki, Western Japan, and spend two nights there before going Eastwards by train to Hiroshima for several days sightseeing. Then Okayama, followed by Takamatsu, and then hopefully to Osaka by a short hydrofoil journey. This much I have loosely planned/booked. After that, it’s on to Tokyo via somewhere that I haven’t decided on yet, but which might be Yokohama as although it’s close to the big T, the other main place on the JR line seems to be totally missing from the guidebook’s listings (whether intentionally or not I don’t really know). I’m not totally sure how I feel about leaving China. In some ways I can’t wait – all of the frustrations and sadnesses I’ve felt over the past four months rise up in me sometimes as if they’ll choke me, and I long to be away from here. But it would be a lie to say there aren’t parts of me that hold affection for aspects of this place, these ways, these people. When I go, there won’t be tears, but despite how I have felt from time to time while here, I don’t think there will be laughter either. And of course it’s impossible to spend time somewhere without it making its impression on you in myriad little ways. Although the circumstances of my time here have been far from ideal, I do feel that it has had a positive effect. It has given me time out – literally – time away from everything in my life, so far away and removed from any of it, to become less caught up in a tangle of heavy, complicated things. I’m not sure I have found perspective or anything even remotely as trite as that, but it has distracted me, perhaps. In some ways I think it’s that same old feeling of becoming less and less sure of things with age, but more and more comfortable with that lack of absolute anything. As I write this I’m also acutely aware that this time away has also been the first time in almost my entire conscious/self-conscious life (which, I believe, begins somewhere around the age of 11… or did for me) during which I haven’t committed to paper or screen any deep feelings at all. I have barely let anything permeate – I’m a little frozen, perhaps, all of it pushed beneath the surface, or forgotten, or something. I don’t know where it’s gone. Perhaps it will come flooding back in a rush of European air, heavy and familiar and newly noticeable like anything subconsciously integral to the day-to-day when it returns from an unnoticed absence. utterly utter [
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