ALEX H NICHOLS
JOURNAL ENTRY
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I’m on the train between places. Between Tokyo and Kyoto. Strangely, time has been folded. Two corners of paper folded and now touching each other. And the width of paper, all that life written in columns across history becomes folded. T and I are next to each other and it feels like no time. No distance. It is a feeling. It would take time to tell the stories of twenty years. And maybe as the stories are told, time would unfold. The paper would unfold and we would find ourselves at two distant ends of a paper.
EACH PERSON IN OUR LIVES BRINGS OUT ASPECTS OF OURSELVES
The strange thing about work, family, living our lives according to schedules and meetings is that being present–having time–for friendship–for lingering–gets eclipsed.
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In Tokyo, I suddenly stop, maybe because I can’t speak the language or decipher the characters and customs, I don't want to look at maps, I want to wander out my door and walk for hours through the parks, tiny streets, tiny bars. T orders food, it arrives like a surprise, because I can’t speak, I copy him, because this is his home, his customs, his language, his country. And because I know him from my past and time has been folded so has the distance of two cultures been folded into the familiarity of a face, a hand gesture, a laugh.
Something in Tokyo, about me that was lost was found. T touched his chin with his long fingers the way he did when he was nineteen, when I was eighteen, and it was a familiar gesture, it was me looking at this gesture from my eyes, in Tokyo a place I have never been. A place that he has only left once. In that gesture, the stories of our lives, the story of my life got folded and the two edges touched. Me in College, me now. And because the edges were so close a part of me left far in the distance just leaped across as the two edges of time touched.
TOKYO DRAWINGS
