reflections on an image of a place we once called home
It’s what we see (some tail-end specter of evening’s dying light, brown wood trimming form, dust bunnies like bruises up-close); it’s what we don’t see (night’s ritual of pacing, the constant open-close sliding of the doors, fat roaches hiding in tatami mat seams). Inside the Polaroid—taken near the end, when the apartment held half-empty—we see a wall: its eggshell color holds (me), and holds (us), until the eye’s caught moving toward the doorway where we see the old wall’s turning fully, quick, to yellow. We see its creeping back in time: our eye scans slow to meet a vertical dark stripe, a sudden break in the light, and in this (we think) we see disruption. Inside the Polaroid, we see how the end of that light travels, trails off, and shaves, sharp, into a point that aims at what we don’t—what we can’t ever—see:
thick paint like paper peeling up from the white wall’s bottom edge, black mold spreading just beneath. We don’t see, too, light’s entryway: the heavy set of sliding doors, thick glass, inside the room that’s just beyond the picture’s border. We don’t see the many beer cans, translucent shochu bottles, tipped and emptied on their sides, the floor, or how two stumbling forms escape from the apartment to humidity. (Where, here, in Kagoshima, one wears the weather like a blanket, and hot or cold is heavy either way.) Where there’s a short step down onto the balcony outside. Where cigarettes like unlit birthday candles stand crushed on hardened soil inside the pots of long-dead plants. We don’t see the American boy (so close) beside the Irish boy in the dark, the latter’s face lit orange behind a sometimes flame clicked on, his accent smoothed and slurred and dreamy. We don’t see how the Irish boy sings hymns out loud between his breaks of smoke, or how he asks the American for a song (just a line) of his own. How the American simply smiles, shy, says no. We don’t see him (the Irish boy, the American) run a finger smooth across the surface of the balcony’s edge, trace shapes in settled soot. And the American—for just a moment, the length of time it takes to see it: not at all—he thinks of reaching out to spread a line of black across his singing friend’s face, his cheek, those lips, but this, he knows, could only lead to trouble. We don’t see this. Just like we can’t move even further out of frame to see
the glass recycling center (so close) across the alleyway. We can’t see below the balcony, down on the street, the late-nightly daydreaming of the Japanese worker between his work—tossed bottles, silver kegs—can’t hear these worker’s swings, his golf club striking sharply into gravel again, again (and again), so that, each time, the many blooming sparks shine out in bursts like simple magic, in sounds like picking ice. We can’t see the battered horde of alley cats in heat or hear their yowling—loud, unbroken misery—their holding still or running from the worker’s chipping at the road. We can’t see the nearby glow of the vending machine in the stairwell next door or in the stairwell across the street or in the stairwell down the street, can’t see how each one’s light—electric, baby blue—flees itself to bleed into the shadows of this place. We can’t see from here the reflection of this alley’s scene on each glass surface: that swinging man, those cats, a neighbor lost or shuffling home. And the tenement he shuffles to, at alley’s end: the one that looms above it all. The one the upstairs neighbor calls (a joke but not) the suicide apartments. (We can’t see the jumpers jumping from the roof because we never did.) And farther down, away, we miss the emptiness of crisscrossed city streets, the snail-pace changing of the lights from green to yellow, red, and back again. We miss where street and sidewalk meet the sea, where cargo ships, ferries, rest, rocking, on the waves. We miss the hollowness of sky, the monstrous outline of volcano there: Sakurajima, this city’s constant keeper, its ash clouds blooming, blending with another lonely night, and drifting down like memory to coat us—(make us)—speechless, in its image.
