Kaze No Machi

April 2nd, 2009.

I see her in my dreams.

Outside, the wind blows like the voice of God on a silent morning. It is cold and chilly, and I am inside, asleep in my bed. I am dreaming of driving through Japan. There are three cars, one with my family inside it, another with me and some people I don’t recognize, and her. In the dream, she isn’t really there, just her presence, but in this dream I hear she is pregnant. I am happy for her, and she smiles as we talk to our essences. The dream is quiet and peaceful, and I wake up after hearing the wind roar outside my apartment once more.

I want to be happy for her, but I am trapped by fear. I have had so many dreams and phantom conversations with her, so much anguish and physical stress from just thinking about her, that any sort of communication is unbearably frightening to me. These communicades are not just messages, they are re-entry points into my life.; reminders of her beauty, and of losing love.

I had no desires to travel to Japan and be thinking of anyone or anything in particular. I wanted to come here, live peacefully and see what I could learn about the near future. My spirit doesn’t agree with me.

I hop out of my bed and feel the cold wooden floor greet my bare soles. I slide the curtains shut, drowning out the last of the sun’s rays on this cool Japanese evening. I press a small red button on a white remote that rests in a plastic holder on the wall. A small engine whirrs to life with a beep, and within moments, warm arm flows throughout the room.

“I want to be happy for her.” I say to myself in my mind. “I want to be happy she is living her life…. But I am so afraid.”

A lot has changed for me over the last few years in terms of my self-perspective. No longer am I thrilled by the notion of being liked or disliked. Rather, I am solidly aware of the concept of being loved or not loved.

The life one lives when one merely is interested in people that like or dislike you, is much simpler. The dark nights aren’t as longer, things are more ephemeral, and you have less to lose. In the world of love, the stakes are much higher. Some might call this maturity, or back home they might just say “you are at that age now.”

Before I left Jamaica, my Grandmother slipped in a comment about a “wife” during one of my visits. All my life, she has never mentioned a wife to me. Maybe I am just at that age, the age where a human being has an acute sense of their mortality, and this increased awareness makes them want companionship even more.

But is that what I want? I’m not sure if traveling halfway across the globe will help me find out that which I seek. I have never traveled to find love before. I have traveled in an attempt to save love, but never to find it. But what you generally don’t search for always seems to come back to you.
I toy with the idea of putting some green tea on the stove, and decide not to. I flip open my laptop and lazily browse the internet. Outside, is a windy city I am not used to and a new life. Nothing in my body desires love, it fears losing it too much. But my body and mind are desiring something more than sexual, more meaningful than being liked.

I don’t know why, but this feeling has been spinning within my consciousness for the last two years, as I go from place to place it varies, but it is constant. I live in the world of the loved, and there may be some dark nights ahead.