We don't see things the way they are, we see them as we are.

It's like the steam rising off of that giant electric generator just North of the University Recreation Center in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska--my impressions and memories float away into the sky tumbling heels over head in a hasty ascent to the past, leaving nothing behind but a vague memory of their shape. You can of course remember the path and direction--start and destination too--but the contrails are gone, the details are hazy, there is no body.

That's the nightmare--the time when everything will disappear is coming.

Often I stare into the sky, perhaps some late night in Shinjuku after pausing momentarily in a throng of pedestrians. They wade around me like so much molasses. I'm searching for the stars, which are all but completely obscured by the bright lights, neon and exhaust.

Often I stare into the sky, and I look for those stars that were once so visible back in Nebraska, and I wonder what star I am part of now. I'm that kid who left for Japan, I'm that guy who you talk about over coffee on a breezy Tuesday night, I'm the one who left. I'm gone.

But where am I?

Amid the grotesquely large, heaving, gasping body that is Tokyo, I am part of something that I don't understand yet, perhaps cannot understand--something in me is changing rapidly, like a thunderstorm rolling across the plains, crashing and clanging harder and harder and faster and faster until it's upon you and you're completely soaked, wet, trembling.

And then it's over.

I've been shivering for about 8 weeks now, and I don't know what's going to happen next.

I have a splitting stomach ache. I move hungrily, like a pig. I have the appetite of ten-thousand monks. I have the impudent disposition to devour Tokyo.

Vacantly searching for something... searching for nothing, just existing, perfectly happy, perfectly tired, a ball of yarn I am--rapidly being used up, knit into something entirely new and considerably different, the same yet unlike anything I have ever touched. I'm an ephemeral thing, now, warmly floating from day to day, waking from a dream, dreaming from a wake. Awakening from what in Nebraska, I would have called yesterday.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

I'll be home soon.