Alien
I remember what it was like to be anonymous, and I miss it in the way that lovers miss each other.
Anonymity in Tokyo was a bipolar experience. On the one side there was very little chance of anyone knowing who I was, yet on the other my gleaming white skin attracted nearly every pair of eyes whenever I went outside of the foreign enclaves. In the ten years of taking the trains and running up and down hundreds of side-streets, stairwells, and escalators not once did I hear someone call my name, tap me on the shoulder with a "hey, Jack", or later remark that they'd seen me going somewhere in a hurry and hadn't bothered to stop me on my way.
I was also bereft of my own ego, crippled in positive ways. I learned the numbing pain of non-competition, for how could I ever even dream of competing there? The things I worked for I got, certainly, but so much more was walled off, out of sight and out of reach to all but the native inhabitants. My skin was wrong, my eyes were wrong, my voice was wrong, my culture and behavior all wrong, and I was fine with that. You had to be, in order to maintain some semblance of sanity. To keep your faculties intact you had to adopt the position you were forced into from all sides: that of the foreigner. The gaijin, or gaikokujin if you're fancy.
I'd spent the prior 23 years of my life pushing myself to the outskirts of the society I'd been born into, and yet there in Tokyo I'd found myself forcibly placed into that position of isolation by the simple virtue of being an outsider. I reveled in it. I played the part to the hilt, and now all I have is the memory, like a faded and blurry after-image of a crowd that's been obliterated by a flashbulb.
Such is the way with old glory.
First draft: 140512
Published: 230117