Japan is transparent. What I remember is liquid, a warm rush through my veins and arteries. Rows upon rows of technicolor green rice fields growing farther and closer away from the window. My palms are stretched across the pane, yearning to cover every inch of the land.
My senses are heightened. A fish picked up from the local market, its left eye still bulging between my chopsticks. It is ripe with salty ocean brine. Handpicked peaches wrapped in netting wind around the dining table, plump and inviting. I pass my fingers through the air, pushing back and forth soft waves. Pocks of rice tangle in my hair, now dry and crisp.
I wake up on an embroidered sofa, one hand over an arm, one hand skimming the length of the floor. The floor is decorated with scratches and a freshly vacuumed scent. A knife is quickly chopping onions and okra against a cutting board. Following is the hiss of a frying pan, my grandmother humming along to the tv. Ripples coast across the room.
After my grandfather died, my uncle, my cousin, and their dog took a visit to a garden full of jaundiced yellow flowers. I can’t remember their name, but they have placed themselves somewhere between poetry and the crinkle of tissue paper that is my grandmother’s smile. We walked through them in honor of his passing. Our dog walked slower these days, lay down frequently, and his barks became spaced out, almost as if he were giving us rest to rest himself.
My grandfather loved our dog, Sunny. He would always nuzzle himself against grandpa’s chest when his eyes hurt, or his back, or if he slept. Sunny now was dying himself, among these flowers and leaves. Among the skies and in the very place the crook of my neck met my shoulder. Sunny never let me carry him in my arms before, and now I cradle him like a newborn babe, one hand running a thumb over his plush ears, the other feeling the warmth of skin under fur, the smell of pet underneath soap.
I loved myself there. It wasn’t the kind of love spoken about in chants or in an effort to believe. It was just there, and it was palpable. I loved it when I took slow steps, walking in tandem with my grandmother’s. I loved breathing in marked calendars in kanji, and I loved the reverberating of my squealing limbs as my grandmother opened her clasped hands, revealing a small cicada she found on a walk.
What was once so vivid to me in school, my room, under my sweater, I could see tenfold within the four walls of my grandmother’s house. It is on her winding staircase. It is below the rose trellises and within the skin of my feet sticking to the hardwood floor. The days before I would leave felt like tall blades of grass sliding up and down the grooves on my hands, slipping into the distance, a distance far more than my palms could hold.