Seven boxes

'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' Mark 8:36

In my parents' house, in Gurnee, Illinois, there are seven boxes with my things: the dark matter of life. In its concrete sense, dark matter is a thing that we think is there, but we can't see. We infer its presence from its effects. When you are standing at the top of a hill in Harborne in Birmingham in the United Kingdom where I live, at three in the morning because you can't sleep and the church bells are ringing, the things in those boxes, they speak through time to you: you know what's there, or what you think might be there. Your journals. Your empty CD cases. Your Bible awards. You stand and look up at the ringing church bells, how many thousands of miles away, and you can feel it pulling on you.

Chicago is my lost city: I come back and remember a time in my life I made plans to stay and be here forever. In my senior year at Knox, I was going to do research at the Newberry Library. I was going to have a small studio apartment near Washington Square Park. And then, the next year, I interviewed for a job in the Aon Center. I wore a black suit.

The dark matter of those years, when I left high school and went to college, is piled up in short stories I wrote for writing classes and in textbooks. Poems about hands and breasts. In a lunchbox I bought as a joke in 2001 before the towers exploded, there are all the pictures of my band. The fire red Gibson SG with those pickups. (They make such a fat sound, I say to Yoko in Japanese and ask if that metaphor works: if I say the sound is fat, do you understand?)

Before I came back home for Christmas this year with Yoko, my wife, and my three children, I made a plan to finally deal with my things, to throw away and give away all that I could. All the books. My papers. My past as an Evangelical and conservative Republican. Most of it was comedy, my letters to the editor I wrote as jokes when I was 12 and 13. A response from Oprah Winfrey to a letter I had written her (I had written Oprah a letter). But there was also the dark, dark matter. The dark matter of a high school relationship, with the girl I thought for some time I might marry and who had followed me for many years after, despite having gone to the other side of the world, to Japan, to Yoko and the girls. There were things I was unable to throw away the last times I had been home. I didn't know what they were exactly until I was holding them, swallowing, travelling in time. A box of Virginia Slims, cigarettes I had taken from my girlfriend in a fit of self-righteous rage. When I was consumed with worry. When I had faith. There were layers and layers of artefacts, her things, things I had made about her, things she had given me: cigarettes, a pair of socks, and photos.

I thought I might also see her finally after all these years to catch up and reminice for a bit, but I felt guilty about wanting that, some embedded Evangelical belief about guarding your heart and never putting yourself in a place where you think you might sin. When I had been back some years before, we had planned to meet and I had cancelled at the last minute, afraid that someone might see us, that my parents would find out, that everyone would find out, and that my desire for her would still be there, that something would happen that I couldn't undo. 

This time I had told Yoko, who didn't seem to care one way or another but I had not told anyone else. I made plans around it so I would have to leave at some point, go meet up with friends for a show at Second City later, still going through the motions of following the rules, whatever the rules were, even though I am in my thirties and haven't believed in anything resembling Christian belief for years and years. I took the train into the city and it was snowing, and I went to the De Paul University bookstore alone and then up to where we were meant to meet, a Lebanese restaurant because I don't eat meat now. When the time came and I took my seat and ordered tea, I almost panicked again like I needed to escape. What was I doing, what sort of complex lie was I telling myself. But this time, I managed it: I sat waiting with tea and let myself remember, look out into the snowy darkness, the cars passing, all of Chicago aware that the lost son has come home for the night and looking back at me like an absence, a Tolstoyan void. And then she was there. 

Chicago, I lost you, but I gained the world. Istanbul, yes, and Paris. London and Dhaka. A Sunday morning in Moscow and then Seoul and then Seoul again. Madrid. Amsterdam, when I was drunk on that bike. Rome, of course. Tokyo, and the night I smoked outside the walls of the palace. Fukuoka. Kuala Lumpur. Vientiane, and the Mekong River. Bangkok. In the absence of god's perfect plan for my life, I had set out to gain the world, the parts of it I could at least. We have to, don't we. We have no choice but to make our own path when we are led into the thicket. When we are stuck, when we have no way out, we must take risks. We must say the things to the absences in our lives that we mean to say to ourselves. You don't need to implicate others, do you. We want forgiveness, but we can only forgive ourselves. We want understanding, but then we only need to understand ourselves. When finally you can say the things you needed to say, you are just speaking out loud to yourself. You look back at yourself when you were young and you say, don't worry. It's okay. You're okay.

Standing ankle-deep in snow slush on North Wells, I finally realise this. After all these years. Our time together is over and her car is stuck in the snow. She gets in, after we have hugged goodbye and said it was lovely to catch up. I tell her I will give her a push and the ritual of moving a car out of the snow comes back to me, in muscle memory. The tyres spin in the ice and I push. A man comes out of nowhere to push with me. And then another and another. The car rocks back and forth and back and forth without going anywhere. Back and forth and back and forth and then the feeling you have when you are pushing a car and it breaks free. You are suddenly pushing against nothing. You are standing there with your bag. You are alone after having not been alone, but you can do anything, can't you. The world is yours.

Giving up on 2015

After the party last night, I walked home from the city centre, stopping at Morrison's to buy cigarillos. I didn't have my pipe, but I wanted to smoke, the way you do when you've drunk three-quarters of bottle of wine. I bought Hamlets, five for five pounds almost exactly and stood outside in the mist and lit one, a kind of time machine back to the night I came back from Malaysia and smoked at the service area on the M1. That was the end of 2013, of course, right at the end, I remember thinking that from that point on, things would be okay, that I had a hold on things.

The girls have been inundated with parties and events — Mei excitedly told me about her performance of the nativity and how there had been a donkey, a real donkey, at the school. We watched a video together and she assured me that the donkey was just out of the frame and she scolded Yoko for missing the most important bit of the video, the donkey, not her dressed as an angel. Mei and Naomi came too as I watched the video on the camera and they crowded around chattering and full of stories, until I shut it off: it's time to eat, you need to eat before swimming.

The year has been a non-stop series of things for the girls to go to, one after another, another party, another swimming lesson, an art lesson. Yoko has been subsumed by it in a way that I haven't, and I'm somewhere on the periphery, watching, but not present in the way they are. I'm working five jobs now, that I can count. I'm writing a book. I'm sleeping on the sofa.

I woke up again on the sofa at 2:30. I had gotten up at 10:30 and 12:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. I made coffee and cooked two eggs which I ate with chopsticks. I made coffee and turned on the computer to send e-mails: please don't check the timestamp, I wasn't working that early I swear. I should work on the book a bit. I have a couple of things I wanted to get down. A thought as I was smoking the night before, as I was walking back to the house. The light upstairs was on when I got back, but I didn't go up. I answered e-mails and when it was time to brush my teeth, I noticed the light was off.

So it goes. 2016 will be another year on the periphery. At some point you get legitimacy, you get welcomed back in. Not now though. Not this year or next. Sometime in the future.

She holds a smile

The sun did not come up on Saturday before I had to leave; the man at the hostel opened the iron gates for me and I left into a morning that was still night. At the park where I had been running, I turned up towards the sea and the building I was supposed to stand in front of I assumed, where the minibus would pick me up. It was still very early and the wind was blowing: a British kid with red trainers and skinny jeans was walking in front of me on an iPhone. I stopped and stood where I thought I needed to: if the minibus didn't come, I would get a cab. But like it had been planned, a woman appeared suddenly from the dark across the street, pulling a suitcase and speaking Spanish at me: I said I didn't understand. She smiled and was suddenly Welsh: was this where the minibus was supposed to come. Yes, I thought so, I didn't know.

We stood and chatted and then she went up to the wall to light a cigarette and tell me about her uncle who had died in bed, almost in his sleep and the funeral she was going back for. I wanted to ask for a cigarette.

The flight left from an airport built on corruption in the middle of the desert: it looked like the Southwest. The airport had been built and left empty. The Welsh woman with the dead uncle told me that until Ryanair had decided to fly in and out of it twice a week it had just been sat there. I was annoyed with everyone — all I wanted was some coffee. I heard: Se habla español? and was angry with the woman: no, of course not, look at me. There was a vending machine that didn't work, and no coffee: I sat at the end of a bench on the plastic and thought about nothing in particular, how I had lost control of my eating again, and was bloated.

As I've been away the last month, both in body and spirit, the kids have grown up. Naomi is not a little girl anymore: she feels responsibility and can cook sometimes. Mei lets me brush her hair and then has her mother fix it after I turn away. Mia can chat about anything in English, about sweeties and the birthday parties she's been invited too. At one party on Sunday, I stood outside a disco room while the earnest 4 and 5 year-olds danced with a woman in a giant cat costume. A German man, one of the kid's father, stood out with me, looking in and said, 'It's very surreal.' Mia was dancing by bending her legs and watching the cat carefully. She didn't look happy, but afterwards, telling her sisters about it, she was proud and smiling broadly. 

The girls put on warm clothes in the morning to walk to school with Yoko although I haven't been there for a week now. I am looking for work, but I don't need to say anything about that. I'll say something when I leave: until then, this year of failure and heated up chick peas in pasta sauce can continue on. I wake up, go to sleep, wake up again. A surprise cigarette with a friend, waiting for a bus. Another bus or train taking me somewhere.

Forgiveness

The park that snakes the edge of Valencia is paved with stone, so when you run, you feel it. I brought my shoes with the expressed purpose of running: I looked on the map and thought the park was a place I could run. When the alarm went off though in the morning, at 6:30, I balked, fat again and bloated from stress eating and failure. And it was dark too, so dark for the morning. I remembered that time we were all in Torremolinos, now four years ago, and Yoko had wanted to take the kids to the beach to take pictures with the sun coming up.

Somewhere in my gut memory, the Spanish language floats around. I can remember it, bits of it, when I'm pressed, although so much has been supplanted by Japanese. The numbers are still there, and the things you say when you leave. The Spanish accent, when I hear it again, always surprises me and my first reflex is to laugh at it. I remember my sister and me on a train to Paris when the Spanish announcement came on and we laughed. We looked at each other and laughed. 

There are so many things to remember if you travel to Europe. When Paris got shot up, all the insufferable digital memory of my generation appeared: the digital photographs and the narratives of being right there. We all have been, of course — who hasn't been to Paris and taken the picture of the Eiffel Tower and had some story to tell about it. There was first the story of the trip I took with my little sister, my younger sister. That trip we said goodbye to each other in a way: she grew up suddenly. My story: we sat on the top of the tower, typical of our generation, amazed at how we had gotten there, buying into the lie of Paris like believing Disneyland is real. We sat and we looked out over the city, having the experience that is not at all unique, but which millennials like me think is unique.

Then another time, with the girls, with Mei and Naomi, when they were so young and it rained and rained and we soldiered on in the rain. We traveled those years because we had planned to go back to Japan and knew that Paris and London would evaporate if we didn't take the chance when we had it. We had a completely different imagined future, full of Japanese paid tours and university professorships at out-of-the-way Japanese universities in the mountains. Yoko getting older, her spine bending and me getting fatter, but happier, my polite Japanese developed from years of committee meetings.

No, none of that came true. The real future was me in Valencia for a couple of days, a conference to attend but starting the day by looking in the mirror and realising my hair was falling out, and that I was getting fat again and I needed to run in the dark. I set out, imagining gunmen in the dark streets and Europe falling apart around me; please, all we want is for our happy fantasy to go on and on. I ran into the park and back again, the sun coming up and the well-dressed Spanish runners speaking in that accent. I showered and went to my conference, bloated and angry about this year of failure.

The pictures hang on like a memory as I run out into the dark. The girls were so young then. I had ideas then that hadn't yet failed. The sidewalks were marble there too, shining in the darkness.

Kissing the relics

After the mass on the first Sunday of the month at the Birmingham Oratory, in the side chapel, the shrine of Blessed John Henry Newman, people gather to pray. John Henry Newman is the same Newman as Newman where I teach Stylistics: the fourth or fifth university in Birmingham, depending on how you count it. You can get into Newman with two Es, a guy tells me at a comedy night in Cradley Heath and I say, That's not exactly true.

I sat in the back of the shrine, though the woman I was with had gestured for me to sit next to her. One miracle has been attributed to Blessed John Henry Newman now: a crippled deacon in America prayed and was healed — he could walk again. The Catholic church verified this miracle with a team of investigators. Newman was beatified. He intercedes for the faithful: it is an empirical fact. In the shrine, people pray for a second miracle: they write the requests on papers that the priest reads out loud.

When I hear a Hail Mary prayed, I think of my Grandmother who died on the first floor of our house in America, north of Chicago, in the winter of 1999. I was just 16 then, and Grandma Tootsie came, the cancer growing through the months. We had Christmas in her room because she couldn't come downstairs to the tree and she was hollowed out by the cancer. I remember being angry when, after her death, the priest said that the rosary, the Hail Marys, had brought her comfort in the last days. I righteously thought, bullshit, we brought her comfort in her death. My mother bathing her. My father helping her up and down the stairs with the oxygen tank. Bullshit. 

Now, my own faith vetted, the Hail Mary is the prayer I most want to pray: I want Mary to pray for me in the hour of my death even though I don't or won't or can't believe that she will.

In the shrine, the priest raised his voice to say, with confidence in his heavenly intercession, we make the following petitions and read off the requests — for a man to come back to the sacraments, for a terminally ill someone, for another terminally ill someone, for a deformed baby, for peace, for the poor. I sat watching, seated, not kneeling like the others — for the recently passed mother, for the terminally ill brother, the chronically ill sister, for the unemployed son.

And then we stood to kiss the relics and I remembered suddenly the miracle. I was in the jungle, wasn't I, just two years ago today when the e-mail came that they would interview me for a job at a university I had never heard of named after a famous Catholic intellectual. I had given up at that point; I had resigned myself to a future of traffic jams and heat. Then an interview and that night an e-mail, Newman calling me out of my exile, back to the West. I remember wanting to cry: why did I want to cry. It wasn't ever that bad.

The man healed through his prayers to Newman, who could miraculously walk was struck down again after three years. The article in the Telegraph highlights this point, but that part of the story can and should be left out. What does it matter how it ends. Newman was buried in wood and moss, his body completely decomposed. We are making up a story about him anyway: say whatever you want and leave it at that.

I asked, Should I kiss the relic too? and she nodded. I stood and waited and put my lips on the gold. For his insight into the mysteries of the kingdom, his zealous defence of the teachings of the Church, and his priestly love for each of your children, we pray that he may soon be numbered among the Saints. Yes. I am not one of the children, am I. I am one who lights the candles and buys the cards with the pictures of the saints because I like candles and images and prayer cards. I like to look at the people who gaze into the void and can see something. Never mind what I cannot see.

A kind of exhaustion

The days continue to get shorter in Birmingham. The time changed like a metaphor and then it was dark in the middle of the day again and I run home now in the dark. Because it is dark all the time, my insomnia came back to me and I got up this morning at 2AM and thought I couldn't sleep anymore. I can't sleep in my clothes — I start to sweat. Yoko and the girls are asleep and fine, and I am fine too. I just can't sleep.

I can't write either: I try to not write about writing unless I can't write and then I have to, until I can find the next story, or pick up the narrative thread wherever it left off. The fact that I can't find that moment, I can't follow the thread back to some point suggests that I've lost the plot and I need to start a new story to find it. New stories don't just generate themselves. You have to go out and find them. Or you have to mine them from your experience. Find something to talk about in the flow of the days and days of the same thing. Like you're an ox walking in a circle, pulling the yoke.

Nothing is ever that bad. The girls are all well. Jun, their Korean friend, comes in the morning and walk them all to school, scolding them for walking slowly. We drop off Naomi and Jun and they stand at the window and wave goodbye to us. Then I walk Mei and Mia through the cemetery to the infants school on the other side of the church. All the parents are around and we all pretend to be good parents. No one is ever harsh with their children in front of the other parents. I walk home on the wet leaves that have fallen. Winter is coming, but so is spring.

The girls are all well. All I want is that, I guess. Yoko says we have bought Christmas presents for them, the exact thing they want. There is nothing better than knowing the exact thing you want.

Back and forth

Today, I walked through St Peter's, through the cemetery surrounding the church and school and looked up at the walkway that comes through the cricket greens and into the town centre of Harborne. I thought I might take a picture. The leaves are coming down and the path glows from above with the orange light. You feel something. I walked up to the town to get £50 for Naomi for her school trip and £20 for Yoko to have curry tonight with some friends and £10 for myself, in case I needed cash. I got free coffee at Waitrose and 3 for 2 Cox Apples. I walked home, opened and shut the door and went back to work.

That is the day. Walking up and back. Money in and out. The kids to school and back. Yoko sitting drinking tea and another Skype meeting or job application sent out. All this talk of the precipice this last month and nothing. No one wants to hear about my visa.

So I plod on and find myself in silly, disastrous situations. I tried stand-up comedy in a club, but got a minute into the set and realised I didn't know what I was doing. It was palpable. I said, 'I don't think I'm supposed to do this' handed the mic to the organiser and walked out. I still don't believe it happened. Maybe it didn't.

If there was anything else to say, I would say it. I don't think there is.

One night

The kids are going to school again every morning in yellow polo shirts and black jumpers — the summer rolled up like a rug you and the man with the van hoist on your shoulders. I am standing or sitting in front of a class again. After the crises of wondering what's next or why we are on the path, there is less time to reflect when you're working — you just have to go forward with all the things you need to do. It's not will or desire, although you need both will and desire, but it is habitual and ritual and seasonal.

Yoko and I have been together for ten years now. The anniversary of that night in September, walking towards the Sea of Japan, when I spoke English out of the blue to her. We sat on the beach that night and looked out into the darkness. I put my arm behind her and she rested back on it. That place where the Agano River came out into the Sea. What was this really: just two people smiling at each other and joking about my bad Japanese. This will be fun, at least for a little while. 

Then, ten years later: I am trying to iron my shirt this morning and the breaker keeps blowing. The washing machine has stopped — I know, I know, Jesus Christ. I wait outside the toilet door as Mei finishes. I rush through the shower, the baby pigeon that Yoko is nursing back to health looking at me with disdain. Naomi's Korean friend — Korean by way of Germany — comes in the morning now and we all go to school together. It's a rush, 8:25, we have to go now, ladies, now, and I kiss Yoko and Naomi hugs and kisses Yoko and we all rush out, up the hill, towards St Peter's, politely, smiles, greeting all the women dropping off the kids.

And then it starts raining. The real autumn has come now. I'm in London again.

Madness, but never real madness

The days tick off at the same weight, 75.2 kgs. I get up every morning and get up at different times, but still I get the same number. Three in the morning or four or five, I peel off all my clothes in the dark — Yoko still doesn't want the light on in the toilet as it might wake the orphaned bird she is nursing back to health — and listen for the beeping. 75.2. Good. Good enough.

Of course, if you feel like you are unstable, you are not unstable. You are insufferable — the sort of white, middle-class, millennial navel-gazing that is the consequence of the screen and digital histories. A guy said to me today that he was getting older, and he was just in his late twenties. Yes, you are getting older. We are all getting older. Saying that to someone older than you is insufferable. There is always someone older than you until you are actually old. Then you are only as old as you feel. My grandfather takes all of his meals in his room now. He can't or doesn't want to leave the room because of the madness of all the old people in the home. He's not old, he doesn't feel it, he says. He's still 17, 18, the landing craft door slamming down and all the bloody water of Normandy.

I still feel fat, as fat as I've ever felt, until just now when I went to the toilet and looked in the mirror. The number, 75.2, is accurate of course, but losing weight, after you have lost weight is hard to judge by numbers. You remember numbers, though. I was 71.5 for a long time. Even 69.9 once, one morning in 2011. That's too much for me, probably. It's hard to tell. Hard to tie whatever it is you're eating now — how you feel, how hungry you are — to that number. It's just a number.

Nietzsche is said to have gone mad seeing a horse being beaten. I'm always happy to think that this is something I won't ever see. The other day, we went to the toy shop and the children were like they had been shot up with adrenaline. This they wanted and then that and then that. I wandered around feeling a sudden rush of regret, thinking of all the boxes here and then in all the stores in the mall and then in the city and then in the country and then in the world. All these toys to be played with for a moment and then thrown away forever. I felt an odd sense of panic, one that you can't explain, but need to get away from suddenly, leave the mall, leave the city, leave it all. Mei wanted something, it was only a pound. She knows that something is good if it is cheap: who taught her that? I did, didn't I. No, no, let's go. Let's go now.

You can feel fat, but have moments of thinness. I did intervals this week, on a time preset called Tabata for some reason. You work — the euphemism for intense exercise in interval training —  for twenty seconds and have ten seconds rest. I did a bunch of different exercises, one including throwing a weighted ball at the ground as hard as you can again and again. The cut on my hand from my fall over my bicycle last week started to bleed and blood speckled the ground, a little more with each throw. The set finished and my heart was racing. I put my fingers on my pulse and took three deep breaths. My heart came back down in a moment, like it had been told to stop, like I had switched something off.

When I lie in bed, dying in 58 years like my grandfather, I hope that my children are around me like birds. And their children and their children's children, all women. I hope they haven't forsaken me like I have forsaken mine. I didn't intend to, of course, but it seems that if you follow the path too far, you can't come back. There is no way back — you just keep going forward. Whatever time you wake up, whatever that number is in the dark. You just keep going forward.

Coming to port

The leaves change colours from the edges, but you can see the creep up and inevitably inwards. The girls started school in new uniforms, and the first day, Yoko and I took them all, walking back holding hands to the house. It's colder but not yet cold and I made a couple of fires with wood I bought from a man in Quinton. The night is coming more quickly, and you cannot sleep with the window open, under the duvet, because it is too cold now. The girls found an injured bird on the way home from school one day, and Yoko is nursing it back to health. I asked her what she wanted to do now that the kids are in school, and there was no answer. The passage of time is suddenly obvious: there are no children in the house in the morning. Just like that: a kind of empty nest.

This is the first year I have come back to the same university in the autumn to work full-time. At Middlesex, when I was working at the Trent Park campus in the middle of that forest reserve, there were two years that I went back to teach, but it was different. I rolled over all my teaching materials and instead of counting the hours that I had to teach, I felt like I wouldn't have enough time with the students. Only three hours a week for 11 weeks, less than that really. The term will be over before it begins if I'm not careful. 

I can't sleep again, getting up at three or four to tend to the part-time work that I have piled up around me suddenly. It's good work, work that doesn't take long — it's well-paid and takes the edge off the things I am afraid of, like paying whatever fees they will levy on us to stay in this country another year or two or three or twenty. I'm willing to pay, it turns out. Every little helps, the British supermarket says. I get paid to write feedback on MA essays and dissertations, something I am good at doing quickly, my only skill, I said to Yoko as a joke that wasn't really a joke. You copy this sentence here, write that there, praise this and criticise that and you're done. £45 or £35 or £100 in your pocket. The sun comes up and I run sometimes, or go to work, or the library, or stay at home. The kids go to school and come back.

The bicycle has also played a sort of soothing role in my life. After I had it fixed for £60 and bought new tyres for £20 and a kickstand for £3 and a mirror for £4, the thing rode like a dream. I float down through the university to Canon Hill Park and then up to Moseley, the whole way thinking that I would ride as slow as possible, like I was drunk. Like I was walking, or trotting along. Nothing to rush to or away from, and the boulevards, the wide ones that you find in Birmingham sometimes, lined with trees. All inviting, the leaves, like I said, with touches of red. I thought, as is a rare grace every now and then, this was what I wanted all along without knowing. The autumn in this country, on this bike. My 29 year-old body back under me, but with another four years in my head. Things only get better as you get older. At least some things. Mei and Mia hug and kiss me goodbye. I set out again: there's still more to do, of course.

Bikes

When I went to Japan as a missionary in 2003, I had a red bike. Dan and I bought one a piece, paid for by his grandfather, ten thousand yen each. The bike, I realise now, was a beach bike. It was meant for cruising up and down the boardwalk, where there was one in Fukuoka, but we used them to commute. We looked silly, I'm sure, gaijin peddling around town on the brightest red bikes, the Word of God fresh and alive in us like fish. I liked that bike and how you sat on it, not like a mountain bike, but like you were on a motorbike almost. I rode it in ways it wasn't meant to be ridden, out to the ocean and back through the mountains. I needed to get away and it took me away.

The beach bike was left in Fukuoka when I left the ministry for my job in Niigata City. My dad brought me my mountain bike from the States and I rode that for years. Then the Louis Garneau bike which I loved and rode in Shibata for miles and miles and then in Milton Keynes. It was stolen in Belgium some years later, I'm told. And then when I came back to England, another bike I bought off a man who had obviously stolen it. I felt guilty as it occurred to me that I was buying a bike taken from someone's back garden. I fell off it earlier this summer, when I was still fat, and it broke, and I disassembled it.

Now, with the autumn here and the need to get around faster than I can walk, I've needed another bike, and have been looking for one that is old and like the beach bike. With bikes, you just need to find one and commit to it, and given that I don't want to buy anything new at the moment, if I can avoid it, I looked online and found one quickly on Gumtree. £45, and I asked £40. It looked okay in the pictures. I went to pick it up and was given an address, and told to call when I arrived. I went and called and an Eastern European man, thin and old and covered in grease, appeared with the bike. He clearly did not live there, this was clearly not his bike, but it was very old and if it was stolen, it wasn't in this country or in the last ten years. I got flustered, rode it a bit and gave him the money. If you have problem, you call me, he said. I don't want to see you again, of course, but if problem,and he disappeared into the back alley.

Of course, the bike had all the potential of being a lemon, but I thought that if it was, it would serve me right: things have been going too well recently. So I rode it home, sure it would fall apart. The shifter made more noise than it should, and I was certain that the back tyre was losing air. It was fine though, and I got it home without any trouble, moving some of the parts from the old bike onto it and cleaning it up. The chain is loose and it needs to be tuned better, but I thought whatever I should have paid for it, something closer to £20 maybe, the extra money would be a kind of indulgence, given to this man or the man he stole it from or someone. 

I rode it to work and felt that same sense that I felt in Fukuoka, when you are leaned back on a bike and not pushing forward. You can go leisurely, slowly. You can wear a suit. Yoko said it was cute and when I said it made me happy, she said, It's good that there are good things, insinuating that I'm miserable all the time.

I'm not sure how long this bike will last, but it's a sanctifying bike. One that is not quite what I want yet, but a bike that has the potential to become what I want. It's a simpler bike with fewer moving parts to go wrong. I can replace all the bits, bit by bit, so when the karma catches up with me, I can say, I assumed it was stolen, but isn't everything stolen. I did my best with it; I took care of it. Take it back now, man behind the house in the alley. It was yours all along anyway. 

Making weight

The last two times I have tried to give platelets, something has gone wrong, and the return, the part of the process where they give you back your red blood cells and some anticoagulant, fails. The machine alarms in a worrying way and someone rushes, in the way nurses rush when they don't want to frighten anyone, and take you off the machine. You're bruising, they have to stop for now. Don't worry, emphasising that you shouldn't worry, making you think, perhaps there is something I should be worried about.

On Tuesday, I climbed onto the scale and there it was, the last number I had been looking for, seventy five, the real ending of my weight loss from the summer, all my sins of drinking with my father-in-law and all the bread and butter paid for. I got off the scale and didn't know what to do. What do you do. You certainly can't suddenly start eating. I checked my e-mail and ate what I would normally eat, and got back to my writing. There is a lot to write now, five things I counted, with the first two due at the end of the month. Something about metaphor.

Making weight is something that you can't explain to someone who hasn't done it before. They assume you must be happy and you are, but it's an uneasy happiness because you aren't sure what to do next, really. You certainly aren't done thinking about your weight. You certainly can't suddenly start eating all the things you have been trying to avoid. You just sit there, thin and confused, struggling to make sense of it for someone else. There is nothing worse than trying to make sense of something for someone else, when you can't even make sense of it for yourself.

But I got up and ran and then ran again this morning, and coming into Birmingham on the canal this morning, the sun shining, and I felt it: that elusive feeling that you feel when you want to run and where running makes sense and whatever reason you run for is clear, at least for a moment, when the sun, the early morning sun, hits the water and the path in front of you is straight and flat, at least for as far as you can see.

The autumn

The autumn has been knocking since the middle of July and then yesterday, it was there, raining because rain is really the beginning of autumn. I got up at 4AM, not sleeping again and weighed myself. I was seventy five kilogrammes even, seventeen point four percent fat. I spent more time looking in the mirror than I normally would. I heard the rain outside and opened the window to the toilet, the bathroom, and looked out at it.