Letters from wonderland pt. II

Dear M,

I think of you almost every day. I think of what happened to you this past summer and how cruel it must have been. You’re in the cusp of changes and in the middle of it your body gave up. I hope your back is giving you less pain and there is some resolution in sight. I dread the day when I’ll be back to Madrid and you’ll tell me that you are moving away. There is nothing to say to change your mind because your thinking has been right all along. There’s not much left in this city to look forward to. Trying to brush away sadness and what this means for my own life I’m already planning my visits to Milan and our future trips together. I really hope we don’t give up on our word. Anyway, there’ll be time to talk about this soon. I tell you already though, I don’t like it.

We arrived to Hiroshima with P last night. Our usual last minute fashion didn’t prove so bad this time, we got ourselves a pretty good deal, staying at this beautiful hotel overlooking the city, which by the way is quite cute. I’m writing you now from this coffee shop that resembles an art gallery. It’s exterior is the image of autumn nature and a beautiful garden made probably by the divine or a human being very patient with time and tools at hand. The barrista looks like he opens the door for you at the Ritz and the woman that took our order is closer to a cyborg than a human in my eyes, just perfect. The tables are meticulously positioned next to each other except one long table next to the big window overlooking the garden which is set a tight bit diagonal. There are flowers in the middle of the space and a beautiful glass carafe that I’d like to have in my house but also wouldn’t know what to do with it.

There is this thing that I’m not so happy about my travel this time. It’s as if I’ve come somewhere different but also haven’t left anything behind at all. My world is in my phone and besides that which I understand is my choice to look at or not, everything else looks the same. What differentiates modern coffee shops or wine bars or record shops here in Japan from the same places in Europe is perhaps the extreme in which they take this modern sterile curation. Other than that, you can tell that there are global standards for everything now. The flower shops look exactly the same as the one in Fernando XI, the specialty coffee shops have equally uncomfortable chairs, maybe at least the prices here are more reasonable. You wouldn’t shout “Denunciable!” like you do in Madrid.

You know my need to find nice coffee and drinkable wine is always present but because of this repetitiveness in surroundings we find ourselves escaping to Japanese style coffee shops which copy from an American jazzy aesthetic that frankly right now feels better, at least different! The coffee sucks but we can melt ourselves in their sofas, get in a bit of a trance with their dim lights and jazz records playing and actually have a good conversation for hours. No one bothers you and you don’t need to look a certain way. Those places are also sometimes quite hidden so that adds up to the coziness. How we miss you here!

Would you be up to doing this trip with me? I bet I’ll be here again sometime soon. What if I tell you that they are mad about Snoopy here, like you? You’d probably need one whole suitcase for all the Snoopy things!

Today it’s only me and P in this curated coffee shop trying to settle down from this mornings heavy visit. I knew going to the A-bomb memorial museum would be a charged experience and we left it precisely for that reason for the end of our trip. Yet, M, the sorrow that wraps around my soul is not solely born from witnessing the grim capabilities of mankind. This, we have always known, right? Since the earliest chapters of human history, men have crafted horrors, leaving us in perpetual anticipation of the next dreadful act. The heaviness I feel comes from something quite encouraging but still bittersweet. People move on regardless and I’ve mostly felt so little, so uncourageous seeing their stories. There is the first room in the museum describing the city before the bomb dropped, the normality. Then the room which exhibits the results of the event, melted clothes and objects, horrific images of bodies… and then the room which caused all of us well up with tears. The room showing us the days of survival.

In an experience first of its time, with people experiencing rare sickness, dying in numbers with every day passing, people kept on. Nurses and doctors volunteering to what was probably their death bed. People who were superficially intact pushing through to help others who were cut in pieces. The days kept going with no one knowing what the hell was that. Why are people still dying, why are people getting sick. You would read the letters of survivors. Years after the bomb dropped. People writing that they feel weirdly tired, that they can’t focus, or study or do anything but how they need to keep going because no one knew to tell them that it’s normal to feel like that and that you should probably take a long vacation for the rest of your life. They kept on. Day after day. Less than a hundred years later, this city didn’t fall into nothingness. It’s now flourished, with little trace of the past and that trace is only for remembrance.

This is what we’ve been talking about M. We are here all of us because humanity goes on. The most beautiful thing is that none of those people thought about that far ahead. I’m certain that no one said “Well how about I make through the day so Hiroshima can have a specialty coffee shop sixty years later?”. I’m certain that they kept going because their kid, or their spouse or their parent or their friend needed them. They held on for the life just around them and that added up in ways beyond their understanding. In a way, this was a sacrifice they made.

There’s a lot I can tell you more about the history I learned from this. The world politics, the international relations, what the future holds but that quite impersonal for me at this point. When I’m crafting principles about how I’m living this life of mine this is one I’ve added after seeing the courage of those people. Keep moving forward. Take whatever role you’re playing at this point of history and play it well. As a friend, a neighbor, a partner, whatever that is. Don’t drown yourself in analysis or get yourself caught up in intellectual wars. Do the thing and then see where life takes you. We are just a small part of all this M.

These days, I’ve also been thinking about people who follow a similar principle that has led them to an unconventional route M. Take P’s friend for example. The one that dropped a fairly comfortable life in Germany to pursue a life of service in war zones. Having met him a couple of times I’m certain that this is where he is more comfortable though and I admire him for that. There’s a book we shared once, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. I still think of him and the life he lives and there’s a smile on my face knowing that he’s probably serving as a modern Usbek critiquing today’s society, not from the sidelines but fully immersed. I miss those types of people M, they make me frown but also make me think.

Anyway, that’s all for today. We return to Osaka this afternoon, in a couple of days back to Tokyo, then back to Madrid. We can talk more about our current Hiroshimas at an overpriced wine bar in Europe. Some things are ridiculously better in this lifetime of ours but some things are going to get worse M and that’s not a pessimistic or an exaggerated view. It is what it is. Alas, life goes on and we’ll figure it out.

All my love,

G.

ps. This is one of the of the many artifacts that brought me to tears. A death certificate of Kanji Toma age 33 who suffered severe injuries by the bombing. He was carried to a relief station. His relatives found Kanji on around August 18 and brought him home in Tsuyama City, Okayama perfecture where his wife and daughters were.
On August 24, Kanji called his wife to his bedside and said, “I’m not the only one who suffered from this war. Don’t be sad. Be strong.” Then he passed away

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