The lover has been in Japan for three weeks and we have spoken little. No FaceTime, no talking on the phone, just a few messages on Messenger, and I never know when they’ll arrive. To be honest, we no longer even see the little green dot which confirms that it is online if it is. Monsieur has disconnected himself from almost everything, and I find that extraordinary.
I do my things, I don’t expect anything, and when I discover that he has left a new note in the messaging system – while I was going on Facebook simply to tell my friend Véro about my day in voice messages – I I have the impression of being transported to the steps of someone who received a letter from her husband in the 1940s.
(The difference is that I didn’t see the postman arriving on Gravelle Road.)
Well, OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, but the fact remains that letters are treasures. Because, when we give little news, we choose what we give.
I still allowed myself to distract him once, on Easter Day, with a cocoonery (mixture of cocoon, coconut and crap). I typed ” Good morning my coconut » in a translator I found on Google, and I sent him the resulting Japanese symbols. Monsieur may be on vacation, but he still has a brain (and access to Google).
A few minutes later, I received the first message in Japanese of my life:
富士山よりも高く君を愛している
All I had to do was copy and paste the text into the translator to discover this wonderful sentence: I love you higher than Mt. Fuji.
I laughed a lot.
***
We were never “boring” people in my family. Even the times when I was away from home for a long time when I was young, I have no memory of missing my mother to the point of tears, for example. And the latter, like me, never demanded that I give news at specific times. We respect everyone’s schedule and impulses. Not to mention that there is always something to do and that alone time also has its benefits and uses.
The people I love know it: no matter the distance, I rarely get bored. But I think about them constantly and they are in me.
My lover will in turn, in any case, have no choice but to think of me at least once a day, or at least when he goes to a restaurant. If he often made fun of my habit of asking guests to take off their shoes before entering my home, whether on a holiday or a normal day, he now has to do it there too!
“Always eat naked,” writes the man who now eats raw fish, rice and bamboo shoots even at lunch. And no shoes in the rented apartments either. Like I won’t be the only one anymore weirdoaccording to him, to have clothes reserved for the outside and others for the inside.
Nor the only one to eat as low as possible.
Would I be a Japanese at heart?
***
Halfway through, I asked him to name one thing he likes about his trip. He chose to speak to me about silence:
The one who reigns everywhere during the day.
Dead calm.
Japanese people don’t talk on the subway, not even on the phone. Nor in the street to go to work… No horns for cars, which are mainly electric or hybrid. Which means that at a busy intersection in the morning, you can’t hear anything.
Just the birds.
I don’t know Japanese birds and I don’t know if they are different from ours. But on the other side of the world, reading these words, I heard them. I saw the crossroads and I heard these birds.
And is there anything you don’t like?
I would say the lines on the ground.
They are everywhere in the metro and on public transport. There is meaning for everything.
No freedom of movement in these places where,
if you have the misfortune to contravene the meaning indicated or cut briefly
the rapid flow of travelers, the old gentlemen grumble.
If there is a line that takes you back to Quebec in the spring, I won’t complain. The cherry trees are usually only in bloom in May at the Botanical Gardens anyway.
When you listen carefully, and when you’re not on your cell phone, there are no birds or flowers to miss.
But if I see you take off your shoes and order me tea at the Café Olimpico, parixemp’.