Everyday Miracles, Dreams, & The Gym

It rains all night, steadily.

The cloudy sky is a grayish purple that draws my attention. I sleep with the balcony door and one window open. It is cold. Ben says fall here lasts a week and I’m beginning to believe him. In two weeks, everyone has gone from short pants and t-shirts to jackets and boots.

I walk to the gym in the rain.

Two years ago, Dr. Loker commented on his daughter’s wanting to move to Portland. He said, “She grew up in New Mexico and I don’t think she’s able to take into account how the weather will affect her psychologically.” I have been a storm chaser all my life. Rain and snow--water falling from the sky--has always drawn my attention, my admiration. Here, the steady drone of rain day after day begins to speak to the parts of my psyche that I fear waking. Here, I change my wish for rain for wishes for clear days, cold as they may be.

The extraordinary, of course, over time becomes ordinary.

The restaurant where we drink has a seasonal menu that includes horse sashimi (raw horse) and matcha ice cream with mochi. “Don’t order the chicken cartilage,” Seth says. “I hate that shit.” Instead we order kara-age and chicken hearts with mayo dressing. We order whitefish sashimi and beer.

Each machine at the gym has a small towel on a hook attached. This is for wiping sweat off the machine when you are finished using it. At first, I was a bit annoyed at this, but fastidiousness Japanese-style fast becomes a habit, drawn as I am to that OCD vibe.

I wake some days and my existence seems so ordinary that I wonder why I ever left New Mexico. I wake some days and America seems like a dream that I had once and I keep reminding myself that it is a real place, where my real friends and family live. I wake some days and The Brain reminds me that we live in a place called Tokyo now, in a place that I thought was a dream until I moved here and every day things sometimes insist on being very real here. I wake some days into the dream that is my waking life to find myself on the subway, sitting across from women in kimono and men who live 1952 over and over, trapped.

Jun says that he looks at all those businessmen and is disgusted. They’re all the same in their suits and ties. They’re all the same with their briefcases and cell phones. Then he looks at himself, catches sight of himself and sees a man in a suit and tie, a man with a briefcase and cell phone. He says he hates what he’s becoming.

I am feverish when I get to the gym. I’ve picked up some kind of virus and my body has been trying all day to get me to sleep it off. I do sleep for hours and hours and the dreams I have leave me in a disquieted mood when I wake. I take vitamin C and remind myself that night after night of drinking is not good. I’ve put on weight and sleeping won’t take it off. I wrestle with myself about going or not going to the gym and I finally just fling myself out the door, saying the way parents say to reluctant, willful children: “I said, you’re going.”

At the gym, the trainer with the bad hair greets me with a hearty “Konnichiwa!” I greet her with the same and a smile. There are several new kids working the counter and weight room, and they are more hesitant to speak to me. I am scary foreign woman again. I am the woman who comes in alone and who lifts more than the men do and whose face shows a battle with demons that seems, on the machines, to be touch and go at times. I am the woman who wears headphones on the elliptical trainer and who mouths the words to hip-hop songs while she does cardio. I am used to being this woman because I have been this woman in every gym I have ever been too. At UNM, I was too old and everyone knew the story of fat-to-thin me. At the last gym I went to (American?) I was the too-thin scary one who lifted like some animated skeleton. I felt like I could climb the walls some days and I was often high on hunger. (I won’t talk about those days when I began to acquire the demons who’d convinced me that I was better so long as I could see each rib and fit three fingers between my thighs when I was standing. I still battle those demons even here.)

I am telling Ben that sometimes this place feels like a dream to me. “Tokyo--all of Japan--is like a dream. None of it seems real,” I say. His response, “That’s just ethnocentrism,” shocks me. (And I even had to feed him the word “ethnocentrism.”) It so shocks me that I forget to tell him that my American life had felt exactly the same way.