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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks I: Kofi Annan

Note: This piece begins a small series I’m calling “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” Political and public life are full of attempted returns. Leaders lose elections, wars, or moral arguments and then try to reclaim the stage. Most of these efforts fail. The moment has passed, the audience has moved on, and what once felt urgent has dissolved into what might be called moral fatigue. Yet every so often a different pattern appears. Occasionally someone loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for history itself to shift. When that happens, what first looked like defeat begins to resemble something closer to a delayed victory. Kofi Annan provides a particularly interesting case. His opposition to the Iraq War did not stop the invasion, and at the time it appeared that the argument had been decisively lost. Yet as the years passed and the consequences of the war became clearer, the moral judgment he articulated gained increasing weight.
In that sense, the story of Annan’s career suggests a useful distinction: some comebacks succeed not because the player reclaims the moment, but because the argument itself eventually catches up with history. Future pieces in this series will look at other figures—some who managed remarkable returns, and others whose comebacks never quite arrived.

Political life especially produces them in abundance. A leader loses a battle—an election, a war, a moral argument—and disappears into the quiet margins where yesterday’s figures slowly fade. The public moves on. The moral urgency of the moment dissolves into what might be called moral fatigue. Outrage that once seemed unstoppable becomes background noise. A new crisis appears, and the world’s attention shifts.

Once this fatigue sets in, comebacks are difficult. The audience that once cared has already drifted elsewhere. The stage has changed. Most players who attempt to return find that the moment that once belonged to them has passed.

Yet every so often a different pattern appears.

Occasionally a figure loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for the moral tide itself to turn. When that happens, what looked like defeat begins to resemble something else entirely.

Kofi Annan offers one of the most intriguing examples of this phenomenon.

In 2003 the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. The invasion was justified by a mixture of strategic arguments, intelligence claims, and moral rhetoric about tyranny and liberation. In Washington and London the momentum of the moment was overwhelming. The war was framed as both necessary and inevitable.

The United Nations, by contrast, found itself sidelined. Annan, then serving as Secretary-General, watched as the institution he led was bypassed by the coalition preparing for war. The moment belonged to the advocates of intervention—particularly the group of American policy thinkers who had spent years arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

At the time, it was not at all clear who would ultimately win the argument. What was clear was that the United Nations had lost the immediate struggle for influence. The invasion proceeded without explicit UN authorization, and the diplomatic machinery that Annan represented appeared powerless to prevent it.

The moral emergency that had animated the debate quickly hardened into geopolitical reality.

Then, in September 2004, Annan said something remarkable. In a BBC interview he stated plainly that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law.

It was an extraordinary declaration. Rarely does a sitting Secretary-General of the United Nations describe the actions of the world’s most powerful government in such blunt terms. Yet the statement did not produce the dramatic reversal one might imagine. The war continued. Washington and London dismissed the criticism. The machinery of global politics moved forward largely unchanged.

In the short term, Annan had lost the battle.

And the personal toll of that moment appears to have been considerable. In his biography there is a striking image from this period: Annan alone in his darkened living room, unable for a time to rise from the floor. The room itself reportedly kept in near darkness. It was not exactly depression, at least not in the clinical sense, but something close to exhaustion after a prolonged moral struggle that had failed to alter events.

It is a haunting scene. One of the most powerful diplomats in the world sitting on the floor of a dark room, confronting the limits of his influence.

At that moment, the story of Kofi Annan could easily have ended as the story of a failed comeback. A leader who tried to reassert the moral authority of international law and found that the world had already moved on.

But history has a way of rearranging the meaning of certain moments.

As the years passed, the Iraq War came to be widely regarded as a profound strategic and humanitarian mistake. The claims that had justified the invasion collapsed. The war itself destabilized the region and reshaped global politics in ways that few of its original advocates had anticipated.

Gradually, the moral argument that Annan had made—quietly but firmly—became the prevailing historical judgment.

After leaving the United Nations, Annan did not retreat entirely from public life. Instead he reappeared in a different role as a member of The Elders, a group of former statesmen attempting to exert moral influence outside formal political structures.

It was a curious transformation. No longer the head of the UN, Annan had less formal power than he once possessed. Yet his voice now carried a different kind of authority—the authority of someone who had remained in the arena long enough for events to vindicate his judgment.

By the end of his life, the moral verdict on the Iraq War had shifted decisively. Few serious observers still defended the intervention with the confidence that characterized the early years of the conflict. The consensus had moved, slowly but unmistakably, toward the position Annan had articulated when it mattered least.

In this sense, his career offers an unusual example in the history of comebacks.

He lost the battle.
But he may have won the argument.

That distinction matters.

Most political figures attempt comebacks by trying to reclaim the exact moment they once dominated. They want the same stage, the same audience, the same authority. When the moment has passed, the comeback fails.

Annan’s story suggests a different possibility. Sometimes the moral argument itself continues moving through history long after the political battle appears settled. If a leader remains present long enough, the tide may eventually turn.

Which leads to a simple but revealing observation about great players in any arena.

A truly great player is never entirely out of the game.

The moment may pass. The audience may drift away. But if the underlying argument proves sound, history itself has a way of reopening the field.

And when it does, the comeback is already underway.

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On the Song “Encounter at 3 AM”

Note: This piece sits at the intersection of music, memory, and atmosphere rather than narrative disclosure. It reflects on a late-night encounter whose emotional resonance exceeded its visible duration, while respecting the privacy of the people involved and the ambiguity that gives such moments their meaning.

The essay is less about what happened than about how certain hours alter perception — the thin, liminal spaces where experience feels lightly refracted and ordinary interaction carries unexpected depth. References to artists like Franz Wright, Clem Snide, and Steve Earle, function as interpretive companions rather than explanatory frameworks, illustrating how art often provides language for encounters that resist direct narration.

If the piece feels intentionally incomplete, that is by design. Some experiences are best preserved as atmospheres rather than stories — moments acknowledged without being fully claimed, interpreted without being resolved.

In that sense, this essay is not an account but a calibration: a quiet recognition that certain hours open briefly, rearrange something internal, and then close without explanation.

And that noticing, in itself, is enough.

A brief reflection on songs, hauntings, and the thin hour of the night

Epigraph
“All I wanted was a little money / All I needed was a week or two…”
— Steve Earle, What’s a Simple Man to Do? (2002)

I first learned the shape of this feeling not through Steve Earle, but through Clem Snide’s cover of Franz Wright — an artistic relay in which one voice carries another’s encounter across distance and time, transforming the original into something that feels simultaneously intimate and secondhand. That is often how hauntings arrive for me: sidelong, refracted, mediated by art before experience recognizes itself inside the echo.

A borrowed door into an original room.

And that is where the hour begins.

There exists a space late at night — or early in the morning, depending on temperament and life stage — when cognition thins and the world grows slightly porous. The clock reads 3 AM, but the number matters less than the condition: the hour when ordinary structures loosen their grip, when language quiets, when identity becomes less declarative and more receptive.

At that hour, the city changes character.

Sound carries differently.
Light softens into suggestion.
Distance feels compressed.
Time feels elastic.

Even familiar rooms acquire the faint strangeness of places visited in dreams. Furniture appears slightly displaced from its daytime certainty. Street sounds arrive as fragments rather than narratives. The mind, deprived of external reinforcement, becomes a receptive surface for impressions that would dissolve immediately under daylight scrutiny.

It is not mystical.
Not dangerous.
Not even especially dramatic.

Just thin.

I have had moments there — most of us have — when the boundary between witnessing and participating becomes ambiguous. One moment in particular remains lodged in memory like a quiet shoulder tap. There were real people involved, real conversation, real movement through space. And yet layered within the literal event was something harder to categorize: a presence that did not claim metaphysical authority but nonetheless altered the emotional pressure of the moment.

I cannot narrate specifics. Confidentiality holds the center, and the encounter was not fully mine to claim. But proximity alone can leave residue. Sometimes you do not own the story, yet the story alters you.

Earle’s character inhabits a world of visible stakes — border desperation, economic precarity, the sudden rearrangement of circumstance that forces moral improvisation. His question, What’s a simple man to do?, is less rhetorical than existential. It captures the sound of a human recognizing that the script he believed himself to be following has dissolved without warning.

Franz Wright’s terrain is quieter but no less destabilizing. His encounters are interior, structured around visitations that resist empirical verification yet exert undeniable psychological gravity. Wright’s presence is not law enforcement but the invisible: the sudden sense that one’s life has drifted subtly from its intended trajectory, that something unsummoned has stepped forward and is waiting for acknowledgment.

My hour lived somewhere between those poles.

Not danger.
Not mysticism.
A pressure change.

A moment when the ordinary surface of experience felt slightly displaced by depth — as if an unseen observer had entered the room and paused long enough for recognition without introduction. The encounter unfolded within the grammar of everyday interaction, yet its emotional register belonged to a different frequency.

Here is the calibration, because honesty matters more than narrative ownership:

I turned.

And what I saw was both literal and not literal at all. A person whose presence carried echoes beyond biography. A crossing of emotional currents that felt disproportionate to duration. A moment whose significance resided less in content than in atmosphere.

These encounters are rarely sustained. They appear, register, and dissolve before interpretation can fully assemble. But dissolution does not negate impact. Some experiences operate as quiet rearrangements — subtle shifts in perception that reveal themselves only through later reflection.

You do not leave with answers.
You leave with altered attention.

Music offers a framework for understanding this phenomenon. Covers, reinterpretations, and artistic relays mirror the structure of thin-hour encounters: one experience passing through another consciousness, reshaped without losing origin. Clem Snide’s refracted Wright, Wright’s visitation, Earle’s desperation — each functions as a mediated echo, a reminder that human experience rarely arrives unfiltered.

The encounter at 3 AM belongs to this lineage of mediation. It was not an event demanding explanation but an atmosphere demanding acknowledgment.

Afterward, the memory settles differently from ordinary recollection. It does not assert itself loudly or demand retelling. Instead, it persists as a quiet calibration tool — a reference point that subtly informs later perception. You find yourself recognizing similar atmospheric shifts more quickly, attuned to moments when reality thins and emotional depth approaches the surface.

Such experiences resist mythologizing not because they lack significance but because their significance depends on restraint. To narrate them too fully would distort their nature. They exist precisely in the space between explanation and silence.

You live with them quietly.

Without overclaiming.
Without dramatizing.
Without converting them into personal mythology.
Without pretending you earned, summoned, or deserved their arrival.

They came because certain hours open.

Most do not.

You do not chase these moments. Pursuit transforms them into performance. Instead, you cultivate a form of attention that allows recognition without grasping. When the next thin hour arrives — and it will, though unpredictably — the task is simply to remain receptive enough to notice.

The encounter does not require interpretation.
It requires witness.

And perhaps that is the deeper resonance linking Earle, Wright, and the thin-hour experience itself: each represents a moment when life’s ordinary narrative pauses just long enough to reveal underlying possibility. A reminder that identity is less fixed than assumed, that meaning often arrives indirectly, and that some of the most consequential experiences unfold without external spectacle.

They do not change your life in visible ways.
They change the way your life feels from within.

You return to ordinary routines — morning coffee, daylight conversations, the practicalities of schedule and obligation — carrying an unspoken awareness that certain hours remain portals rather than merely timestamps. The world resumes its solidity, but the memory of porosity lingers.

And so the encounter remains:

not a story,
not a revelation,
not a lesson,
but a quiet rearrangement.

A reminder that sometimes the world steps slightly closer without explanation, offering a glimpse of emotional depth that cannot be captured but can be carried.

You do not chase it.
You do not interpret it.
You do not claim it.

You simply remain awake enough to notice when the hour opens again.

Dedication
For the hour that opened.

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On the Cultural Field Around St.Georges School and Spokane, WA

Epigraph:

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, “Still a Cage”

I. — Launch vs. Escape

I didn’t understand Spokane’s sexual landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was secretly wild and not so secretly wild, a place where desire slipped between the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and everyone knew more than they admitted. St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving toward other things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s real wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. It was erotic energy humming under a conservative façade, the kind that starts as a pulse under the collar and ends in the kind of self-destruction people call “mistakes” years later. The city pretended to be a grid of churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, and Rotary breakfasts, but the truth lived in back booths, river pullouts, dim bars off Division, and the long shadows of marriages that weren’t working. People were hungry. Not for sin—Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that—but for escape, for intensity, for feeling anything sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a diet. And because the city couldn’t admit that hunger, it acted it out sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, private shame masked as judgment, the moral guardians always the ones who ran the hottest at night. And threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and then vanished for weeks, living with the kind of unashamed freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I only caught the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult investigator returning later, it became obvious: the cage wasn’t made of rules, it was made of denial. And denial is the most erotic fuel a city can generate.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it pretended to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge. I didn’t learn about Spokane from St. George’s; I learned about leaving from St. George’s. The city taught the rest. And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that used to feel like separate worlds, and I can see the seams of the place with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The old stories fall apart under scrutiny, but the architecture remains. The church parking lots. The dim bars. The hills where people walked off their secrets. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to investigate it. And once you see the truth of a place, you can’t unsee the way it shaped you—even after you’ve run as far as you can from the cage you didn’t know you were inside.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the big, cinematic pieces people imagine. It’s the little house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies — the kind of small domestic details that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t a fantasy; it was texture. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up. And those drives with my dad to Foothills — Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then it was still just Foothill Park — the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That’s the part that gets me now: how effortlessly belonging felt there. You didn’t have to explain yourself, or hide anything, or decode a system of silences. You just drove up into the hills and the world opened without consequence. Spokane had its wildness, but California had a kind of spaciousness that felt like permission. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. It’s not that I necessarily want to move back — it’s that a part of me never really left. California became the template for what openness feels like, the first geography that suggested freedom wasn’t an escape but a way of being.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college — me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, taking the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself. In the picture, Ian’s in front, already carrying that air of someone who had strong, fully-formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half-becoming himself. That version of me had no understanding of cages. He just assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line hits the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time — I heard it as geography. That’s Spokane for me: a place I ran from without realizing I was running, a system I slipped out of long before I understood the bars. It wasn’t trauma; it wasn’t exile. It was something quieter and stranger — a recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit. California taught me what openness felt like. Japan gave me the life I wanted. But Spokane shaped the part of me that investigates, the part that reads cities like case files, the part that knows desire and denial can live under the same roof for decades without ever breaking stride. When I hear “Still a Cage,” it’s not about being trapped. It’s about understanding, finally, the architecture of the place you outgrew — and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But the line only lands when you come back years later, driving those old streets like an investigator, realizing the cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you see the silence for what it was, the lock falls open, and you know for sure you’re never going back.

Epigraph

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, Still a Cage

I.

I didn’t understand Spokane’s emotional landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was a place where desire moved quietly through the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and where people knew more than they said aloud.

St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving towardother things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. Not theatrical or decadent, but quiet and unresolved, an erotic energy humming beneath a conservative façade. The city presented itself as orderly: churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, Rotary breakfasts. But the real emotional life lived in the margins—in dim bars off Division, in river pullouts, in the long shadows of marriages that had settled into routine.

People weren’t hungry for scandal. Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that. They were hungry for intensity, for escape, for moments that felt sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a daily diet. And because that hunger couldn’t be named directly, it surfaced sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, judgment masking private confusion, moral certainty coexisting with private longing.

Threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and vanished for weeks, living with a freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I caught only the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult returning later, the pattern became clearer: the cage wasn’t made of rules. It was made of denial. And denial, more than rebellion, is what gives a place its quiet erotic charge.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it seemed to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the broader ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge.

I didn’t learn Spokane from St. George’s; I learned leaving from St. George’s. The school offered direction without interpretation, preparation without excavation. The city supplied the rest.

And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that once felt like separate worlds, and the seams of the place become visible with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The stories shift, but the architecture remains. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to see it.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the cinematic version people imagine. It’s the small house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies—the quiet domestic textures that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t fantasy; it was atmosphere. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up.

And those drives with my dad to Foothills—Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then simply Foothill Park—the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That detail lands differently now: belonging there felt effortless. You didn’t have to decode silences or manage contradictions. You simply moved through the hills and the world opened without consequence.

Spokane had its wildness, but California offered spaciousness, a geography that suggested freedom didn’t need to be disguised. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. Not because I want to return permanently, but because a part of me never fully left. California became the first place that suggested openness wasn’t escape but orientation.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college—me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, riding the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself.

In the picture, Ian stands in front, already carrying that air of someone with strong, fully formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half becoming himself. That version of me had no concept of cages. He simply assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line lands the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time. I heard it as geography.

That’s Spokane for me: a place I left without fully understanding why, a system I slipped out of long before I could see its contours. It wasn’t trauma or exile. It was something quieter—the recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit.

California taught me openness. Japan gave me the life I wanted. Spokane shaped the investigator—the part of me that reads cities like case files, that sees how desire and denial can coexist for decades without ever openly colliding.

When I hear “Still a Cage,” it isn’t about entrapment. It’s about understanding the architecture of a place you outgrew and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But clarity arrives only later, when distance converts memory into interpretation.

The cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you recognize the silence for what it was, the lock falls open. Not with anger or triumph, but with quiet certainty. You understand that leaving was less an escape than a translation—and that some places shape you most profoundly precisely because you cannot return to them.

Dedication

For Brookie

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On Touts and Micro-Touts: Japan Observations

Note: This piece collects observations gathered across decades of nights out in Japan — moments that, taken individually, felt minor but over time revealed a coherent social pattern. The essay is not intended as a warning against nightlife, nor as an indictment of any particular place or person. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the subtle choreography that unfolds in urban night economies, where invitation, performance, and commerce intersect in ways that are rarely dramatic but often instructive.

The distinction between macro-touts and micro-touts emerged gradually. It reflects less a rigid taxonomy than a traveler’s growing sensitivity to atmosphere, tone, and the shifting boundaries between hospitality and transaction. Most encounters described here were neither dangerous nor traumatic; they were moments of mild disorientation that ultimately sharpened perception and deepened appreciation for the social intelligence required to navigate unfamiliar environments.

Japan remains one of the safest and most generous countries in the world to explore at night. The experiences recounted here are offered not as cautionary tales but as small pieces of ethnography — reminders that every city contains micro-economies of possibility, and that learning to read their signals is part of the quiet education that travel provides.

If there is a broader lesson, it is simply this: nightlife is built on invitations, and the skill of the traveler lies not in accepting or rejecting them categorically, but in recognizing the scripts they carry and choosing, with awareness, when to participate.

Part I — Kumamoto, Japan, Summer 1997

「どこの社長ですか？」

I was twenty-three and new to Japan — not just geographically new, but existentially new, the kind of new that leaves you unable to distinguish between hospitality and performance, sincerity and choreography. At that age you carry a quiet belief that experience will organize itself around you, that invitations are destiny, and that uncertainty is merely the prelude to belonging.

Kumamoto summer did nothing to challenge this illusion. The humidity hung in the air like a second shirt, streets shimmering with heat that seemed less meteorological than emotional. I met a couple of guys at a bar — friendly in that easy, late-night way where language fragments are enough and tone carries meaning. Half English, half Japanese, and entirely good-natured, they asked if I wanted to join their baseball team. I said yes immediately, not because I had any intention of playing, but because at twenty-three you rarely decline the promise of future identity.

The baseball team never materialized. But the invitation served its purpose. It opened the bridge.

They told me they wanted to show me real Japan. A phrase that should always raise questions but rarely does when you’re young and curious. “We know a place,” they said, the universal preface to experiences that exist somewhere between revelation and mild financial education.

That is how I entered my first hostess club.

It was not the neon spectacle I might have imagined. No polished decadence, no velvet rope theatrics. Instead: low lighting, carpet that seemed older than the Heisei era, and furniture whose best days had passed quietly without ceremony. Yet the room possessed its own gravitational pull, created not by décor but by orbit — women rotating from table to table with practiced ease, their presence transforming a modest environment into something that felt improbably expensive.

Mama-san presided with the quiet authority of someone who understood both mathematics and psychology. Her hair lacquered into permanence, her gaze sharp as accounting software, she functioned as conductor of a carefully orchestrated social economy. The women, each moving with subtle intentionality, carried scripts composed of compliments, curiosity, and gentle physical proximity.

Whisky mizuwari arrived with ritual precision, poured slowly as if time itself were being measured in diluted amber. The drink tasted ordinary. The price did not.

I was not uncomfortable — only aware of my own lack of schema. A foreigner equipped with politeness but not context, seated inside a room where intimacy operated as currency and identity functioned as flexible fiction. The women laughed easily, touched my arm, leaned close enough to suggest familiarity without commitment.

I did not interpret this as romance. I interpreted it as welcome.

Then came the line — delivered with effortless certainty and a smile that contained neither irony nor doubt:

「どこの社長ですか？」
Which company are you president of?

Not if.
Which.

Because the hostess club does not deal in biography. It deals in possibility. Within its walls, the boundaries of self dissolve gently. You arrive as yourself but are encouraged to inhabit a more generous narrative: company president, successful entrepreneur, patron of refined pleasures, bearer of an inexhaustible wallet. Identity becomes costume, worn lightly for the duration of the evening.

I understood that markup existed. What I did not yet understand was the degree to which markup could inhabit fantasy.

The bill arrived — perhaps thirty thousand yen. Not ruinous, not outrageous, but enough to sting the uninitiated and sharpen awareness. Before embarrassment could surface or negotiation begin, the friends who had invited me paid without ceremony. A wink, a casual next time, and the implicit understanding that this particular version of me — baseball player, future regular, provisional shachō — would remain confined to that evening.

I left lighter, though not poorer.

Not scammed.
Initiated.

The lesson did not arrive as resentment but as clarity:

Flattery has a price.
Fantasy carries a tab.
Sometimes you do not pay it directly — but you still learn the cost.

Part II — Kyoto: Rub-a-Dub and Bar Colors

Rub-a-Dub felt like oxygen.

A basement reggae bar where the air seemed shared rather than owned, bodies pressed into temporary community, music operating less as entertainment than as connective tissue. Tommy, as always, orbiting the jukebox with missionary zeal, attempting to convert the room to his playlist while flirting with the bar girl in ways that were equal parts hopeful and theatrical.

I stood with a Red Stripe, jacket discarded somewhere behind me, already drifting toward the kind of night where White Russians become plausible and conversation loosens into anecdote. Sweat, laughter, strangers whose names evaporate but whose presence remains — the familiar ingredients of third-place belonging.

Two men approached. One Jamaican, ponytail, voice thick with authority that seemed rooted in lived reggae culture rather than performance. The other younger, bilingual, improvising rap verses that moved seamlessly between Japanese and English with real talent. Not novelty talent — actual fluency. Conversation flowed easily. Fifteen, twenty minutes of exchange that lowered the drawbridge of suspicion.

Then the invitation:

“Let’s go to Bar Colors.”

I had seen the sign before. A reggae logo, unobtrusive, upstairs somewhere near Kiyamachi. Nothing alarming, nothing clandestine. Just another bar in a district defined by possibility.

We followed.

Three floors up — a vertical ascent that subtly altered the power geometry. Rub-a-Dub’s crowded warmth replaced by a smaller room with thinner oxygen. No dance floor, just music and seating. I chose the seat nearest the door, an instinctive habit that rarely announces itself consciously but persists nonetheless. Tommy relaxed into the environment with characteristic ease, while the rapper transitioned seamlessly into microphone performance, his skill functioning as social anesthesia.

We ordered beers — two each. Six hundred yen apiece. Simple arithmetic, comforting in its predictability. Safety often disguises itself as math.

Then came the disruption.

The Jamaican leaned in, tone shifting just enough to register as discordant:

“Who will pay the bill?”

The question felt misplaced. The wrong person asking, the wrong moment, the wrong authority. I responded with obvious clarity: we would pay for our drinks. He shook his head dramatically and launched into a loud, performative argument with the bartender — defending us against an unseen injustice, positioning himself as ally.

The performance was transparent once recognized. Theater designed to manufacture gratitude. Gratitude designed to justify inflated cost.

This is how micro-predation operates in Kyoto: not through threat but choreography.

When the bill arrived, it totaled five thousand yen. Double expectation. Not devastating, merely disorienting. Enough to create tension between principle and convenience.

I stood — full height, voice calm:

“I know what you’re doing. It’s bullshit. We came here in good faith.”

No escalation. No anger. Just refusal to participate in the narrative assigned.

We paid — not capitulation but calculation. Peace sometimes costs less than confrontation. Exit achieved without drama, wallets lighter but awareness sharpened.

Not victims.
Not victors.
Just awake.

The deeper lesson was not financial but perceptual: danger rarely announces itself loudly in Kyoto. It appears as suggestion, invitation, relational choreography. You do not need to be taken to understand the mechanics of being taken.

Rub-a-Dub had offered warmth.
Bar Colors offered clarity.

Some nights you dance.
Some nights you pay to leave.

Part III — The Kiyamachi Ecology of Micro-Touts

If Kumamoto introduced fantasy and Bar Colors revealed choreography, Kiyamachi provided taxonomy.

Kyoto’s nightlife economy operates differently from more overt red-light districts. There is little aggressive solicitation, no carnival barking, no theatrical insistence. Instead, micro-signals populate liminal spaces: a man standing slightly too still near a stairwell, a laminated menu with vague promises, a bilingual conversation that begins casually and ends directionally.

The micro-tout does not sell forcefully. He offers possibility.

And possibility is harder to refuse.

Micro-touting thrives in moments of uncertainty — the pause between bars, the lull between conversations, the question of where the night continues. The invitation arrives not as proposition but as continuity.

“Just one drink.”
“I know a place.”
“Special price.”
“Members bar but I can get you in.”

The language is intentionally thin. Curiosity performs the heavy lifting.

Unlike macro-touting, where spectacle clarifies the transaction, micro-touting relies on relational ambiguity. Trust precedes the offer. Conversation establishes provisional safety. Only then does the invitation appear.

You are not pressured.
You are positioned.

And positioning is the mechanism.

Part IV — Macro-Touts and Micro-Touts: A Taxonomy

Macro-touts belong to visible red-light economies. Their pitches are explicit, directional, and theatrical. Customers understand the transactional nature immediately. Kabukicho hosts calling from sidewalks, Osaka promoters guiding tourists toward neon staircases — these figures operate through spectacle.

Micro-touts function differently.

They blend into ordinary social environments: musicians, patrons, casual acquaintances, language exchange partners. Their authority derives from relational proximity rather than territorial control. They do not sell a product but offer narrative continuation.

Macro-touting relies on volume.
Micro-touting relies on timing.

Macro-touting demands attention.
Micro-touting waits for uncertainty.

Japan’s cultural emphasis on politeness and conflict avoidance creates fertile ground for micro-touting. The customer hesitates to confront, the operator anticipates this, and civility becomes economic leverage.

The genius of micro-touting lies in its invisibility. It rarely crosses legal boundaries and seldom escalates into overt harm. Instead, it extracts modest margins through social choreography.

Not robbery.
Repositioning.

Part V — The Ethics of Almost

What remains from these encounters is not resentment but recognition.

Both Kumamoto and Kyoto experiences share structural similarities: voluntary participation in constructed realities. The hostess club invites fantasy; the micro-tout offers narrative continuation. In each case, the individual is not coerced but positioned within an unfolding script.

The moment of realization rarely arrives as crisis. It appears as subtle awareness — a bill exceeding expectation, a tonal shift, a fragment of choreography revealing itself as performance.

Travel rarely educates through catastrophe. More often, it educates through near-misses — the ethics of almost.

You almost believed.
You almost overpaid.
You almost escalated.
You almost became the character the room was preparing.

Micro-touts teach attention rather than fear.

Part VI — Return to the Street

Kiyamachi after midnight remains a pedestrian theater of extraordinary subtlety. Music spills from doorways, cigarettes glow like punctuation, laughter dissolves into river air. Within this ordinary magic, micro-touts continue their quiet labor — neither villains nor heroes, simply participants in the nocturnal economy of possibility.

Nightlife is built on invitations.

Some lead to connection.
Some to illusion.
Some to modest financial education.

But all reveal the architecture of the city that issues them.

Kumamoto taught me fantasy has a tab.
Kyoto taught me ambiguity has a margin.

Neither felt like loss.
Both felt like tuition.

Because travel, like nightlife, is rarely about destinations. It is about learning to read the scripts unfolding around you — and recognizing that sometimes the most instructive figures in any city are the ones whose invitations you decline with gratitude.

Part I — Kumamoto, Japan, Summer 1997

「どこの社長ですか？」

I was twenty-three and new to Japan — not just geographically new, but existentially new, the kind of new that leaves you unable to distinguish between hospitality and performance, sincerity and choreography. At that age you carry a quiet belief that experience will organize itself around you, that invitations are destiny, and that uncertainty is merely the prelude to belonging.

Kumamoto summer did nothing to challenge this illusion. The humidity hung in the air like a second shirt, streets shimmering with heat that seemed less meteorological than emotional. I met a couple of guys at a bar — friendly in that easy, late-night way where language fragments are enough and tone carries meaning. Half English, half Japanese, and entirely good-natured, they asked if I wanted to join their baseball team. I said yes immediately, not because I had any intention of playing, but because at twenty-three you rarely decline the promise of future identity.

The baseball team never materialized. But the invitation served its purpose. It opened the bridge.

They told me they wanted to show me real Japan. A phrase that should always raise questions but rarely does when you’re young and curious. “We know a place,” they said, the universal preface to experiences that exist somewhere between revelation and mild financial education.

That is how I entered my first hostess club.

It was not the neon spectacle I might have imagined. No polished decadence, no velvet rope theatrics. Instead: low lighting, carpet that seemed older than the Heisei era, and furniture whose best days had passed quietly without ceremony. Yet the room possessed its own gravitational pull, created not by décor but by orbit — women rotating from table to table with practiced ease, their presence transforming a modest environment into something that felt improbably expensive.

Mama-san presided with the quiet authority of someone who understood both mathematics and psychology. Her hair lacquered into permanence, her gaze sharp as accounting software, she functioned as conductor of a carefully orchestrated social economy. The women, each moving with subtle intentionality, carried scripts composed of compliments, curiosity, and gentle physical proximity.

Whisky mizuwari arrived with ritual precision, poured slowly as if time itself were being measured in diluted amber. The drink tasted ordinary. The price did not.

I was not uncomfortable — only aware of my own lack of schema. A foreigner equipped with politeness but not context, seated inside a room where intimacy operated as currency and identity functioned as flexible fiction. The women laughed easily, touched my arm, leaned close enough to suggest familiarity without commitment.

I did not interpret this as romance. I interpreted it as welcome.

Then came the line — delivered with effortless certainty and a smile that contained neither irony nor doubt:

「どこの社長ですか？」
Which company are you president of?

Not if.
Which.

Because the hostess club does not deal in biography. It deals in possibility. Within its walls, the boundaries of self dissolve gently. You arrive as yourself but are encouraged to inhabit a more generous narrative: company president, successful entrepreneur, patron of refined pleasures, bearer of an inexhaustible wallet. Identity becomes costume, worn lightly for the duration of the evening.

I understood that markup existed. What I did not yet understand was the degree to which markup could inhabit fantasy.

The bill arrived — perhaps thirty thousand yen. Not ruinous, not outrageous, but enough to sting the uninitiated and sharpen awareness. Before embarrassment could surface or negotiation begin, the friends who had invited me paid without ceremony. A wink, a casual next time, and the implicit understanding that this particular version of me — baseball player, future regular, provisional shachō — would remain confined to that evening.

I left lighter, though not poorer.

Not scammed.
Initiated.

The lesson did not arrive as resentment but as clarity:

Flattery has a price.
Fantasy carries a tab.
Sometimes you do not pay it directly — but you still learn the cost.

Part II — Kyoto: Rub-a-Dub and Bar Colors

Rub-a-Dub felt like oxygen.

A basement reggae bar where the air seemed shared rather than owned, bodies pressed into temporary community, music operating less as entertainment than as connective tissue. Tommy, as always, orbiting the jukebox with missionary zeal, attempting to convert the room to his playlist while flirting with the bar girl in ways that were equal parts hopeful and theatrical.

I stood with a Red Stripe, jacket discarded somewhere behind me, already drifting toward the kind of night where White Russians become plausible and conversation loosens into anecdote. Sweat, laughter, strangers whose names evaporate but whose presence remains — the familiar ingredients of third-place belonging.

Two men approached. One Jamaican, ponytail, voice thick with authority that seemed rooted in lived reggae culture rather than performance. The other younger, bilingual, improvising rap verses that moved seamlessly between Japanese and English with real talent. Not novelty talent — actual fluency. Conversation flowed easily. Fifteen, twenty minutes of exchange that lowered the drawbridge of suspicion.

Then the invitation:

“Let’s go to Bar Colors.”

I had seen the sign before. A reggae logo, unobtrusive, upstairs somewhere near Kiyamachi. Nothing alarming, nothing clandestine. Just another bar in a district defined by possibility.

We followed.

Three floors up — a vertical ascent that subtly altered the power geometry. Rub-a-Dub’s crowded warmth replaced by a smaller room with thinner oxygen. No dance floor, just music and seating. I chose the seat nearest the door, an instinctive habit that rarely announces itself consciously but persists nonetheless. Tommy relaxed into the environment with characteristic ease, while the rapper transitioned seamlessly into microphone performance, his skill functioning as social anesthesia.

We ordered beers — two each. Six hundred yen apiece. Simple arithmetic, comforting in its predictability. Safety often disguises itself as math.

Then came the disruption.

The Jamaican leaned in, tone shifting just enough to register as discordant:

“Who will pay the bill?”

The question felt misplaced. The wrong person asking, the wrong moment, the wrong authority. I responded with obvious clarity: we would pay for our drinks. He shook his head dramatically and launched into a loud, performative argument with the bartender — defending us against an unseen injustice, positioning himself as ally.

The performance was transparent once recognized. Theater designed to manufacture gratitude. Gratitude designed to justify inflated cost.

This is how micro-predation operates in Kyoto: not through threat but choreography.

When the bill arrived, it totaled five thousand yen. Double expectation. Not devastating, merely disorienting. Enough to create tension between principle and convenience.

I stood — full height, voice calm:

“I know what you’re doing. It’s bullshit. We came here in good faith.”

No escalation. No anger. Just refusal to participate in the narrative assigned.

We paid — not capitulation but calculation. Peace sometimes costs less than confrontation. Exit achieved without drama, wallets lighter but awareness sharpened.

Not victims.
Not victors.
Just awake.

The deeper lesson was not financial but perceptual: danger rarely announces itself loudly in Kyoto. It appears as suggestion, invitation, relational choreography. You do not need to be taken to understand the mechanics of being taken.

Rub-a-Dub had offered warmth.
Bar Colors offered clarity.

Some nights you dance.
Some nights you pay to leave.

Part III — The Kiyamachi Ecology of Micro-Touts

If Kumamoto introduced fantasy and Bar Colors revealed choreography, Kiyamachi provided taxonomy.

Kyoto’s nightlife economy operates differently from more overt red-light districts. There is little aggressive solicitation, no carnival barking, no theatrical insistence. Instead, micro-signals populate liminal spaces: a man standing slightly too still near a stairwell, a laminated menu with vague promises, a bilingual conversation that begins casually and ends directionally.

The micro-tout does not sell forcefully. He offers possibility.

And possibility is harder to refuse.

Micro-touting thrives in moments of uncertainty — the pause between bars, the lull between conversations, the question of where the night continues. The invitation arrives not as proposition but as continuity.

“Just one drink.”
“I know a place.”
“Special price.”
“Members bar but I can get you in.”

The language is intentionally thin. Curiosity performs the heavy lifting.

Unlike macro-touting, where spectacle clarifies the transaction, micro-touting relies on relational ambiguity. Trust precedes the offer. Conversation establishes provisional safety. Only then does the invitation appear.

You are not pressured.
You are positioned.

And positioning is the mechanism.

Part IV — Macro-Touts and Micro-Touts: A Taxonomy

Macro-touts belong to visible red-light economies. Their pitches are explicit, directional, and theatrical. Customers understand the transactional nature immediately. Kabukicho hosts calling from sidewalks, Osaka promoters guiding tourists toward neon staircases — these figures operate through spectacle.

Micro-touts function differently.

They blend into ordinary social environments: musicians, patrons, casual acquaintances, language exchange partners. Their authority derives from relational proximity rather than territorial control. They do not sell a product but offer narrative continuation.

Macro-touting relies on volume.
Micro-touting relies on timing.

Macro-touting demands attention.
Micro-touting waits for uncertainty.

Japan’s cultural emphasis on politeness and conflict avoidance creates fertile ground for micro-touting. The customer hesitates to confront, the operator anticipates this, and civility becomes economic leverage.

The genius of micro-touting lies in its invisibility. It rarely crosses legal boundaries and seldom escalates into overt harm. Instead, it extracts modest margins through social choreography.

Not robbery.
Repositioning.

Part V — The Ethics of Almost

What remains from these encounters is not resentment but recognition.

Both Kumamoto and Kyoto experiences share structural similarities: voluntary participation in constructed realities. The hostess club invites fantasy; the micro-tout offers narrative continuation. In each case, the individual is not coerced but positioned within an unfolding script.

The moment of realization rarely arrives as crisis. It appears as subtle awareness — a bill exceeding expectation, a tonal shift, a fragment of choreography revealing itself as performance.

Travel rarely educates through catastrophe. More often, it educates through near-misses — the ethics of almost.

You almost believed.
You almost overpaid.
You almost escalated.
You almost became the character the room was preparing.

Micro-touts teach attention rather than fear.

Part VI — Return to the Street

Kiyamachi after midnight remains a pedestrian theater of extraordinary subtlety. Music spills from doorways, cigarettes glow like punctuation, laughter dissolves into river air. Within this ordinary magic, micro-touts continue their quiet labor — neither villains nor heroes, simply participants in the nocturnal economy of possibility.

Nightlife is built on invitations.

Some lead to connection.
Some to illusion.
Some to modest financial education.

But all reveal the architecture of the city that issues them.

Kumamoto taught me fantasy has a tab.
Kyoto taught me ambiguity has a margin.

Neither felt like loss.
Both felt like tuition.

Because travel, like nightlife, is rarely about destinations. It is about learning to read the scripts unfolding around you — and recognizing that sometimes the most instructive figures in any city are the ones whose invitations you decline with gratitude.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like “Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl.” You can find it here.

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On Transference in Artistic Collaboration

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
With the beat in now…
And your chest came out
’Cause you weren’t too scared.

Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”

There is transference.
There just is.

Matthew Thomas

I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal

It’s real because it’s grounded.
It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.

That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.

In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.

But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.

What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.

The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent.
It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive.
It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.

And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:

We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.

We remain in our own psyches.
We allow resonance without fusion.
We allow voltage without blur.
We allow openness without myth-making.

This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.

In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.

History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.

That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.

The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.

But the boundary holds.

Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.

Openness with form.
Exposure with spine.
Laid open, but not laid bare.

This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.

The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.

And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.

This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.

Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…

Openness is not the danger.
Losing oneself inside openness is.

This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:

Can I remain open without giving myself away?
Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny?
Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it?
Can I collaborate without collapsing?
Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?

The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.

Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.

Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.

The adult self leads.
The trio leads.
The work leads.

And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:

What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?

That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.

Dedication

For the collaborators:
the drifters,
the drop-ins,
the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.

You keep the corners loose
and the truth a little crooked.
My kind of people.

Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.

Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale
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On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part III: Aftermath

Note: This is the third of a three part series. Part I is here and Part II is here.

Epigraph I:

Oh my sentimental fool

Lloyd Cole

Epigraph II:

Was the risk I sent to you received?

Metric

Leaving Oxford / Returning to Japan

I walked the five minutes back to the hotel after the bus pulled away. My wife was going on to visit friends in Germany and I would have about five days alone in Kyoto after I got back to Japan. At the hotel I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I said a small prayer to the angels asking for grace to get through the day, showered, packed my things, and waited for the 8 AM car pickup.

I did not rush. Packing became a deliberate act, almost ritualistic in its pacing. I folded shirts one at a time, placed my notebook carefully into my bag, slipped the Tintin postcard between pages so it would not bend. Sue Tompkins went in next, followed by the charger, the toothbrush, the small practical objects that restore a sense of order after emotional disturbance. The room itself was modest — functional, forgettable in most respects — yet it felt oddly expanded, as if some invisible event had occurred there despite the absence of anything outwardly dramatic. Something had shifted in me, and the room seemed to hold the echo of that shift.

At the desk, I laid everything out for a moment, not to organize but simply to gather myself. The Mendoza Line was no longer playing, but the music had already done its work. The emotional charge it helped ignite remained present, circulating quietly beneath the surface. There was nothing to heighten or prolong; the effect was already internalized.

Around eight, the hire car arrived. The driver was polite, efficient, the kind of professional whose calm competence creates a reassuring neutrality. He helped with my bag, and we exchanged small talk as we pulled into traffic — London housing costs, wages, the persistent difficulty young people face in trying to establish themselves. On the radio, a news segment discussed the rising number of homeless families and children across the UK. Normally, such stories register as troubling but abstract statistics. That morning, however, the report landed differently. I found myself thinking about untethered lives, about how fragile the structures that hold people together can be, and how sometimes the tether itself is the only thing preventing a deeper psychological unraveling.

Traffic was light, and we arrived at the airport mid-morning. Inside, I purchased a simple breakfast — fruit, yogurt, coffee — and found a seat removed from the main flow of travelers. Airports are environments of constant movement, but solitude can still be carved out within them if one chooses carefully. I opened my Kindle and downloaded volumes four through six of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. It was not an act of escapism so much as orientation. I wanted narrative continuity, a long arc where identity unfolds gradually rather than collapsing under sudden pressure. Powell’s world offered lineage, structure, and a reassuring sense of temporal patience.

I texted Isobel. She responded almost immediately, and what followed was a long, bright thread of conversation carried across airport Wi-Fi. There was no sense of emotional comedown, no awkward reentry into ordinary distance — only continuation. The connection felt intact, natural, as if the meeting had established a channel that did not require reinforcement to remain open.

When boarding was called, the transition felt procedural rather than dramatic. The flight passed in a quiet blur of clouds, Molina songs, Powell’s prose, and intermittent thought. Beneath it all was a subtle ache under the ribs — not pain, not longing in any acute sense, but effect. A residual emotional state that did not demand resolution, only acknowledgment.

On the plane I read some Powell and listened to music. I remember playing “Two Suns in the Sunset” by Pink Floyd and being unexpectedly moved by it. I was in an emotional state — not overwhelmed, but open and exposed — and the flight passed quietly. I landed at Kansai Airport in the afternoon.

I landed in Japan first. My wife continued on to Germany to visit friends, and my son was in Australia on a school trip. I took the Haruka train back toward Kyoto. The wide seats and generous legroom made me feel welcomed back into my country of choice. Much as I had enjoyed England, I felt real relief in returning. There is a particular comfort in Japanese transit — the order, the space, the quiet efficiency — and my body recognized it immediately.

The house, when I entered it, was silent in a way that felt tangible. I carried that silence with unusual care, as if it were made of glass and might shatter if handled abruptly. Solitude is often restorative, but this solitude had an amplifying quality, heightening rather than settling internal experience.

That evening, I went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto. I ordered food and three craft beers and spoke casually with whoever happened to be nearby. Conversations were light, unstructured, yet I sensed an unusual responsiveness from people around me — as though I possessed a slightly elevated emotional voltage that others could detect without understanding its source. Even animals seemed to register it. Cats approached me with a familiarity that felt less coincidental than intuitive, as if some form of static had gathered on the soul.

I had no sense of impending crisis. No awareness that within three days I would walk into my principal’s office and offer my resignation

First Days Back

On my first full day back I did laundry and in the late afternoon went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto near Karasuma Oike. I don’t remember whether I texted or called Isobel that day, but I almost certainly did. At Takumiya I ordered sashimi and had a few craft beers from their rotating selection. I stayed longer than planned, talking lightly with whoever happened to be sitting nearby.

The next day was Tuesday and I went to work as scheduled. I checked the heat index readings as part of my summer administrative duties. Dr. Fox was on campus. Seeing him immediately shifted the emotional temperature of the day.

I have written elsewhere about my problems with Dr. Fox and I won’t revisit them in detail here. What matters for this story is that by that point I felt he had betrayed me and failed to show up when I most needed institutional support. Trust had already been damaged. Seeing him again after Oxford brought all of that to the surface at once.

We spoke briefly. Before I left, he asked me to come in the following day to help prepare a presentation he was scheduled to give to an alumni group. I had ghostwritten material for him many times before. Under normal circumstances I would have said yes without hesitation. This time I agreed anyway, even though I was already internally unstable and emotionally saturated.

It would not turn out well.

I returned to Takumiya each night that week. There was comfort in being present in public spaces while remaining largely anonymous. The balance allowed me to exist among others without the demands of deeper recognition. Meanwhile, at five in the evening Japan time — nine in the morning in London — Isobel and I spoke daily. The calls were not brief check-ins but sustained conversations lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half. Often she walked through a park while we spoke, and I imagined her surroundings as she described them, the geographical distance softened by conversational continuity.

During one of these calls, I told her that I wanted to write a book. Not about her specifically, but about the chain of experiences that led to meeting her and the clarity that encounter unexpectedly revealed. She understood immediately. More than that, she expressed a quiet appreciation for being part of that moment of ignition — not as subject matter but as catalyst.

At the same time, unresolved resentment toward Dr. Fox did not dissipate with distance. Instead, it sharpened. The baseball heatstroke issue lingered at the margins of thought, alongside a broader accumulation of professional frustrations: moments of perceived disrespect, ambiguous expectations, and a decade of service that increasingly felt like professionalism without true partnership. None of these tensions were new, but the emotional openness of the week amplified their weight. Background noise began to feel like pressure.

By Friday, when I walked into school, I was not consciously planning a decisive action, yet I sensed a degree of internal instability that made ordinary interactions feel precarious. When Dr. Fox called me into his office to request assistance with a presentation — a familiar pattern, a non-work day expectation framed as routine — the moment crystallized something that had been building long before Oxford. I resigned. The decision belonged to a larger narrative, but this story carries its immediate emotional context.

As the reality of resignation settled into my body, a quiet clarity followed. I knew I needed to speak with my wife. The conversation would not revolve around specifics — call durations, text counts, or the mechanics of connection — but around truth in its broader emotional sense.

She returned home Saturday night. With her presence, the house regained its weight: history, shared furniture, a past that possessed shape and gravity. We sat together without wine or any conversational buffer. The moment did not invite performance or gradual disclosure; it required directness.

“I quit,” I said. “And I met someone.”

She asked only one question.

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No.”

She nodded, her response quiet and measured.

“Okay. Have fun on the phone.”

Nothing fractured dramatically in that moment. There was no raised voice, no immediate emotional rupture. Yet something subtle shifted — an alteration not of structure but of atmosphere. The past remained intact, but the future carried a slightly different texture. Nothing broke, but nothing stayed exactly the same.

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday and Sunday arrived with a quietness that felt disproportionate to the events of the preceding week. For the first time in months, there was no alarm set for early administrative duties, no email requiring immediate response, no expectation of presence within the institutional rhythms that had long structured my days. I was off work — not merely for the weekend, but in a more consequential sense that I could not yet fully absorb. I would not return until 2022. The long-term ramifications of what had unfolded were already in motion, though at that moment they existed more as a distant horizon than as a lived reality whose contours could be clearly seen.

The weekend therefore carried a strange dual quality. On the surface, it resembled any other stretch of unstructured time: coffee in the morning, small household tasks, the slow pacing of hours unburdened by schedules. Beneath that surface, however, ran a persistent awareness that something fundamental had shifted. The scaffolding of daily life — work expectations, professional identity, habitual responsibilities — had loosened, and with its absence came both relief and a faint, almost disorienting spaciousness.

At five o’clock sharp Japan time, which was nine in the morning in the UK, I called Isobel. The timing became instinctive, a daily point of orientation that anchored the day before it fully began. She answered as she was waking, her voice carrying that soft mixture of sleep and recognition that collapses distance instantly. We picked up exactly where we had left off, as if conversation were a continuous thread rather than a sequence of separate exchanges. We talked and laughed easily, moving between subjects without effort — music, muses, love, the nature of intimacy, and the broader textures of life that surface when two people feel unexpectedly understood.

The calls possessed a quality that felt, at the time, almost transcendent. I experienced a heightened emotional state that bordered on euphoria, a sense of expansion difficult to articulate without risking exaggeration. There was an unmistakable feeling of being lifted beyond ordinary emotional gravity, as if the connection existed in a space slightly removed from daily constraint. For brief stretches, I felt powerful in a way that had little to do with control and everything to do with aliveness — the psychological equivalent of standing in clear light after months of muted color.

Yet even within that intensity, I carried a quiet awareness that such states are rarely sustainable. The experience felt too vivid, too precise in its timing, to belong to permanence. I understood, somewhere beneath the exhilaration, that what we were inhabiting was a moment granted rather than guaranteed. For the time being, however, there was a mutual permission to exist within that space without prematurely interrogating its future. We allowed the conversations to unfold fully, accepting their immediacy without insisting on outcome.

The rest of the weekend unfolded around those calls like a soft frame. I moved through ordinary activities — brief walks, small household routines, moments of shared quiet with my wife — with an undercurrent of emotional intensity that did not demand expression but remained unmistakably present. Silence felt less empty than suspended, as though the days themselves were pausing before the arrival of consequences not yet visible.

What remained most striking about that weekend was not any single event but the emotional totality it carried. The combination of resignation, solitude, reconnection, and emerging uncertainty produced a state that was both exhilarating and fragile. I was aware, even then, of the paradox inherent in the experience: the joy of discovery intertwined with the inevitability of complication, the brightness of connection shadowed by the knowledge of its precariousness.

That was the weekend. In its quiet span, I found myself inhabiting an emotional condition that was at once expansive and difficult, sustaining and destabilizing. I was, deeply and undeniably, in love — not in a settled or declarative sense, but in the raw, immediate way that accompanies sudden recognition. The feeling carried power and tenderness in equal measure, along with a subtle ache that suggested awareness of its limits even as it unfolded.

The Rest of September

The rest of September passed with a quality that is difficult to reconstruct in precise sequence. Days did not feel discrete or individually memorable; instead, they merged into a continuous emotional field in which time moved forward without the usual markers of routine. The absence of work removed one of the primary structures that normally segments experience, and without that scaffolding the month acquired a dreamlike texture. Moments were vivid while they occurred, yet quickly dissolved into the broader atmosphere of the period.

Isobel and I remained in frequent contact. We spoke most days and exchanged messages with a familiarity that no longer required initiation or explanation. The connection persisted, but the intensity that had defined the immediate aftermath of Oxford began, subtly, to dim. This was not a collapse or a dramatic withdrawal — rather, a gentle tapering, the natural adjustment that follows emotional peaks once they settle into the rhythm of distance and everyday life. The calls remained warm, often intimate, and still carried laughter and shared curiosity, but the sense of suspended transcendence that characterized the earlier weeks softened into something more ordinary.

My days were largely unstructured. Without professional obligations, I devoted time to my blog, experimenting with longer reflections and shorter fragments that attempted to capture the evolving emotional landscape. I also began broadcasting on Periscope, drawn to the immediacy of speaking into a space where audience and solitude coexist in curious balance. These activities did not replace work so much as fill the temporal vacuum it left behind, offering forms of expression that required presence without imposing rigid expectation.

Later in the month, I briefly reentered the professional sphere when I accompanied my senior students to a university fair at Canadian Academy. The experience felt almost surreal in its normalcy — a reminder of institutional rhythms that continued independently of my altered position within them. It was the only direct work engagement I undertook during that period, and its brevity reinforced the sense that September existed outside the usual professional narrative.

Toward the end of the month, I traveled for a significant assignment: serving as lead evaluator for the Diploma Programme at Western Academy of Beijing. The responsibility was substantial, and I approached it with an intention to perform at the level expected despite the internal shifts that characterized the preceding weeks. The visit, however, was complicated by dynamics within the evaluation team. The MYP leader’s preference for extended, often unfocused meetings created an atmosphere of fatigue, and Ashish, the Head from IB Singapore, lacked either the authority or inclination to redirect those discussions effectively. Evenings stretched late into the night. We ordered Indian food, reviewed documentation, and navigated the procedural demands of the evaluation with a professionalism that felt increasingly mechanical.

During one of those evenings, after the meetings had ended and the day’s formal responsibilities were complete, I called Isobel. We spoke at length, as had become our habit, but the conversation carried a different quality. She told me about a dream — one involving a fire and a cabin in the forest. In the dream, I was present. She mentioned that she had shared the dream with her therapist, a detail that suggested the experience held significance beyond casual narrative. Yet when I asked about it, she hesitated. She did not want to recount the dream in full. The partial disclosure introduced an ambiguity that I could not immediately interpret but nonetheless felt.

The moment did not register as conflict or withdrawal. There was no overt tension, no articulated concern. Yet something subtle shifted in the emotional atmosphere between us. The change was nearly imperceptible, detectable less through words than through absence — a slight alteration in tone, a new reticence where openness had previously been instinctive. It was not dramatic enough to prompt confrontation, but it carried the unmistakable sensation of movement beneath the surface.

As September drew to a close and October approached, our communication began to thin. Calls became less frequent, messages shorter, pauses between exchanges longer. The transition unfolded gradually, without a definitive turning point, but its trajectory felt clear. What had once been continuous conversation now required renewed initiation, and the ease that had defined our early exchanges gave way to a quieter, more tentative rhythm.

In retrospect, September stands as an interlude — a period suspended between ignition and resolution. The connection with Isobel remained meaningful and emotionally resonant, yet the conditions that had sustained its earlier intensity were shifting. October would bring both culmination and conclusion, the apex of the relationship’s emotional arc and, simultaneously, its quiet dissolution.

October

October arrived without ceremony, yet the emotional atmosphere surrounding it was markedly different from the suspended haze of September. I was not working at all during that month, and the absence of professional structure began to feel less like pause and more like rupture. Relations with my Principal, Dr. Fox, had deteriorated to an all-time low, and what had once been a strained but functional working relationship now carried open hostility.

We had two phone calls that month about university counseling, both of them angry and vitriolic. The topic itself — university advising — should have been procedural, collaborative, even routine. Instead, it became a flashpoint that exposed a deeper accumulation of mistrust and frustration. From my perspective, he was mishandling critical processes and creating unnecessary stress for students and staff alike, and I felt a growing sense of professional indignation that was difficult to contain. I shouted at him on the phone twice: once while walking along the river, my voice carrying across the water in a way that felt disproportionate to the setting, and once from a hotel bar in Osaka, where the contained intimacy of the space made the confrontation feel even more exposed. The bartenders glanced at me with a mixture of curiosity and quiet concern, clearly aware that they were witnessing a private eruption in a public place. Still, they allowed the moment to pass without interference, serving drinks and processing the bill with the practiced discretion that characterizes hospitality in Japan.

In mid-October, I traveled to Singapore for another IB training. This assignment positioned me as lead trainer for the Diploma Programme, with Duan Yorke serving as my deputy. Duan was excellent — steady, competent, and easy to work alongside — providing a professional counterbalance to the internal instability I carried with me. Yet despite the outward success of the training’s first day, something felt off internally. The emotional residue of the previous weeks, combined with the unresolved professional tensions, manifested as a quiet but unmistakable dissonance. On the second day, I found myself unable to maintain the expected level of engagement and withdrew temporarily to visit an esoteric healer. The visit itself belongs to another narrative thread, one that requires its own context, but its occurrence reflected the broader sense that I was searching for equilibrium in unconventional ways.

I returned and completed the training successfully, fulfilling my responsibilities with the professionalism the role demanded. Afterward, I remained in Singapore for an additional three days, using the time to decompress in a city that had long felt both familiar and emotionally neutral. The extended stay provided space for quiet reflection, casual wandering, and the gradual release of accumulated tension. Professionally, my obligations were minimal. I completed a handful of recommendation letters for early decision applicants — necessary work, given that our new counselor was struggling with the process — but beyond that, my professional identity remained largely suspended.

During this period, Isobel and I spoke only once. The call carried an unmistakable clarity: whatever had sustained the connection through September was no longer present. Whether the shift stemmed from the dream she had mentioned earlier, the simple realities of distance, or the natural fading that accompanies emotionally intense encounters, the result was the same. The spark had dissipated. What struck me most was the absence of dramatic heartbreak. I did not feel shattered or undone. Instead, I experienced a dull void — a quiet ache occupying the space where my love for her had briefly lived. It was less a wound than an absence, the emotional equivalent of a room that had been furnished and then emptied.

Singapore became the final location in which we spoke. After that call, the connection ended without formal closure, dissolving into silence rather than conflict.

When I returned to Japan, I settled back into writing and Periscoping with a renewed sense of creative urgency. Singapore itself had already played a role in that shift. In a billiards bar there, I drafted the first installment of The Thin Man, capturing fragments of narrative that would later expand into a larger project. The act of writing felt less like discipline and more like necessity — a way of metabolizing the preceding months and translating emotional experience into narrative form. Back in Japan, I continued this process through a series of essays that month, each exploring different facets of the transitional period.

October also introduced another unexpected connection. That month I met Mela, a woman from New York City in her thirties who was on medical leave from her work as a props assistant in film production. She was housesitting at the time and occupied her days in ways that mirrored my own state of suspended routine: scrolling Tinder, investigating potential matches with a mixture of curiosity and humor, and broadcasting extensively on Periscope. We connected easily, moving from initial interaction to Instagram texts and eventually long phone calls. Neither of us had pressing daily commitments, and the absence of structure created space for conversations that extended for hours — sometimes entire afternoons — ranging across music, film, personal history, and the broader philosophical questions that surface when time is abundant and emotional stakes feel low.

Months later, in December, I would meet her in person during a museum visit in Queens. The day unfolded quietly: exploring exhibits, browsing the bookstore, and sharing soup in the café. At one point, descending a staircase, she leaned into me in a way that felt intentional — a brief physical gesture that carried a hint of performative vulnerability. She said, “you saved me,” a remark delivered with ambiguity that allowed interpretation without demanding it. The moment marked the closest we came to flirtation, and even that remained understated, more symbolic than consequential.

Yet the defining emotional endpoint of October remained tied to Isobel. Singapore had been the final setting of our conversation, and with its conclusion, that chapter closed without spectacle. The month that began with professional conflict and emotional residue ended in creative ignition, quiet acceptance, and the emergence of new but less charged connections. October stood as both apex and dissolution — the culmination of an emotional arc that had begun in Oxford and the gentle fading that followed its brief, luminous peak.

Conclusion

Looking back on it now, the question that naturally arises is what, if anything, can be concluded from the experience. Memory has a way of smoothing edges while preserving emotional truths, and the passage of time introduces perspective without necessarily dissolving ambiguity. What remains is not a tidy narrative with a clear moral, but a series of impressions that continue to carry meaning long after the events themselves have receded.

Was I in love with Isobel? The answer, for me, is uncomplicated. Yes — absolutely. The feeling was immediate, powerful, and unmistakable in its emotional clarity. It was not rooted in fantasy or projection so much as in recognition: the sudden awareness that another person had seen and engaged parts of me that often remain peripheral or unarticulated. The connection possessed both intellectual and emotional intimacy, creating a sense of alignment that felt rare and therefore significant.

Whether she was in love with me is less certain. That question remains open, and perhaps necessarily so. Love does not always manifest symmetrically, nor does it require identical emotional timelines. What I do believe is that she was deeply drawn to me — enamored with qualities she named explicitly: my maturity, my openness, my willingness to explore symbolic and esoteric frameworks such as astrology, and what she described as my confirmed oddness. These were not superficial points of attraction but aspects of identity that shape how one moves through the world and forms connection. In response, she opened herself in ways that felt unprecedented in my experience with other women. The openness was emotional, conversational, and psychological, revealing vulnerabilities and reflections that suggested a level of trust both genuine and meaningful.

Yet that openness stopped short of the one dimension that often defines romantic relationships in conventional terms. Physical consummation never occurred. And still, I remain convinced that it might have — that the night of the red dress, that Wednesday evening suspended in quiet possibility, carried the potential for that final step had I not withdrawn. The decision to pull back was not rooted in lack of desire but in an instinctive recognition of complexity and consequence, a moment where restraint felt simultaneously protective and destabilizing.

At the beginning of this narrative, I wrote the line: “I did not sleep with her, so I had to quit my job.” On its surface, the statement reads as paradoxical or even absurd. Yet in a literal and emotional sense, it reflects the truth as I experienced it. Something that transpired between us disrupted my internal equilibrium in a way that extended far beyond the boundaries of romantic encounter. The experience did not create professional dissatisfaction where none existed; rather, it crystallized tensions that had long been present but insufficiently confronted. In the altered emotional state that followed Oxford, I could no longer compartmentalize or tolerate dynamics that had gradually eroded trust and professional fulfillment. The decision to resign emerged not as a reaction to Isobel but as a response made possible by the clarity her presence inadvertently catalyzed.

What, then, did Isobel have to do with that decision? It is a question without a definitive answer, and perhaps one that resists definitive resolution. Objectively, professional circumstances and romantic encounter belong to separate domains, each governed by distinct motivations and consequences. Yet subjective experience does not always honor such boundaries. In my mind and in my heart, the two remain inextricably linked. The emotional awakening precipitated by our connection illuminated aspects of my life that had grown untenable, accelerating a reckoning that might otherwise have unfolded more gradually.

In this sense, Isobel did not cause the decision but revealed the conditions that made it inevitable. The encounter functioned as catalyst rather than origin, exposing fractures already present and clarifying the need for change. The love I felt for her, whether reciprocated in equal measure or not, became intertwined with a broader transformation — one that encompassed identity, professional alignment, and creative direction.

Ultimately, the experience resists reduction to a singular meaning. It was neither tragedy nor triumph, neither mistake nor destiny. It was an encounter marked by intensity, ambiguity, and consequence, leaving behind a residue of insight rather than closure. If anything can be said with certainty, it is that the connection altered the trajectory of my life in subtle but enduring ways. The emotional truth of that alteration persists, even as the specifics of the relationship have receded into memory.

And perhaps that is the most accurate conclusion available: that some relationships are defined not by duration or outcome but by the clarity they introduce, the decisions they precipitate, and the self-recognition they make possible. In that sense, Isobel remains both part of my past and part of the internal landscape through which I continue to move — a presence whose significance lies less in what occurred than in what it revealed.

Coda

What remains, after the noise has faded and the chronology has settled into memory, is not regret but recognition. Isobel was never meant to be a permanent figure in my life; she was a moment of ignition, a flare that illuminated terrain I had been walking blindly for years. Loving her did not undo me — it clarified me. It revealed fault lines in my professional life, deepened my awareness of emotional possibility, and reminded me that connection can arrive without warning and depart without resolution while still altering everything that follows. Some encounters are not chapters but catalysts, and their power lies precisely in their brevity. I did not leave Oxford with a lover, but I left with a truth that could no longer be ignored, and that truth reshaped the decisions that defined the months and years ahead.

So the story does not end with loss but with transformation. The quiet house in Kyoto, the late-night calls across time zones, the resignation spoken into an office heavy with history, the essays written in the wake of confusion and clarity — all of it forms a single arc whose meaning resides not in permanence but in awakening. Isobel remains a presence not because of what we became, but because of what her existence made visible: that love, even when fleeting, carries the capacity to reorder a life. And in that sense, the experience stands complete. Not a tragedy, not a triumph, but a moment of rare and incandescent alignment — a brief crossing of paths that left behind warmth, ache, and an enduring knowledge that sometimes the most consequential relationships are the ones that arrive, burn bright, and quietly pass into memory while continuing to shape the person who remembers them.

Note: If you linked this piece, you may also like my short story Simona below.

Simona
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On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part II

Oh sister when I come to lie in your arms

Please don’t treat me like a stranger

Boy Dylan

Note: This is Part II of the series on my week with Isobel. Part I is here, and left off with my decision not to sleep with her, come what may.

PART II — Thursday → Saturday, Early Morning

Thursday

I woke up Thursday a little shook to be honest. Things had progressed so far, so fast, and although my feet seemed under me, it was hard to be sure. The fact that she had made a hard pass at me the day before was on my mind. In any case, we met by appointment in the morning . It went the same as before; we walked over to Pret again, but this time she ordered lightly and barely ate. As it turned out this was a sign of things to come. I finished my sandwich and coffee, and we walked back to campus, side by side, talking easily but underneath it something had shifted. We were no longer orbiting — we were a dyad, openly.

Back in the garden, same bench, same proximity. We weren’t spying on sessions anymore. We weren’t even pretending to. We talked all morning like our lives depended on it. And in a way, they did. We covered the history of thought, we recovered our careers, and I told her all about the various ups and downs I had had over the last several years at my school. We talked about astrology and she voiced some of her doubts. I told her I wasn’t a “believer” per se, but that the study fascinated me. We left it open.

After the morning break, we reconvened at a bench in the courtyard, this time in public. I was in a bit of a dilemma, you see my wife was scheduled to come to town that very night, and she would attend the dinner gala, the final dinner for the week. Somehow, I had to get ahead of this situation; I had to lower the temperature. So, I did what I often do in a difficult situation, I leaned on Dylan, specifically the quote from “Oh Sister” off of the album Desire.

I told her, “I feel like we should be like brother and sister.” Containment disguised as poetry. It was the best I could do. This took her aback a bit, and then I explained that my wife would be arriving, in a matter of six or seven hours. She didn’t say much, just took it in. She already knew I was married. She didn’t know my wife would be in Oxford. Whole different deal.

This revelation changed something in her body, and something in mine. We went to lunch — Indian again. Normally I ate fully, and she usually ate less, but that day we both pushed food around the plates. She couldn’t eat a bite; her appetite had totally shut down. Mine was not much better, and I picked at the curry to try to make it look decent. We paid and left. The epiphany of Tuesday had tipped into cognitive and bodily overload by Thursday.

During the afternoon, we talked as before but because the sessions were winding down I think we actually went to a session. I also browsed the bookstore, which was really cool. It was a big table in the common area and it was run by a bookseller who had his own astrology bookshop somewhere in the south. I had switched from the Mendoza Line to Dylan and was playing “Red River Shore” and “Mississippi” in addition to Oh Sister.

Evening arrived. My wife arrived at the hostel two minutes from campus. I went to meet her and walked her back to FAS. She met Isobel and Maddy before dinner — brief, surface-level. My wife complimented Isobel’s shoes. I could barely hold in a laugh for some reason. After all, she couldn’t have known what she was stepping into.

We ate in the dining hall — I sat with my wife and the one Japanese woman there, switching English and Japanese. Isobel sat elsewhere with Mystery and her daughter. There was a collection for the tutors — I took the box table to table, people applauding, giving money. My wife later said I was performing. Maybe I was. I was also alive.

After dinner my wife was tired from travel and wanted to sleep. I walked her to the hostel, kissed goodnight, then went back to the courtyard. Wine, tutors, Maddy, Isobel. A lighter night between us — more social, less fused — but the thread held. We probably stayed until one.

I slept well.


The finish line was visible.

Friday

We met again in the morning — Pret. This time she made a scene of helping me pick breakfast. My appetite returned. She still didn’t eat. We walked fifteen minutes to a large park, quiet, green, open.

She was struggling — not with me, but with everything. Engagement, career, identity, meaning. We sat on a bench. “Don’t sit too close to me,” she said.

“OK, how close is good?”

“Right here,” she said, indicating a space about one inch to her right. We talked about our situation–there was nothing else to talk about. We named it outright.

Then she got up and walked to a small arched bridge over a narrow river and said, She stood there for a bit, and then said in a loud declarative voice:“This is my bridge.”

I said, your bridge absolutely.

She stayed there a long time, twenty minutes maybe. I sat on a bench farther back. Eventually she came back to sit beside me — to my left again, shoulders touching. Then, she began to collapse onto me. Shoulders low, breath shallow. I half carried her back to campus. Ambulances and sirens on the street — not symbolic, actual. The world felt like an emergency. We moved slowly. It took almost 40 minutes.

At this same time, I was thinking, obviously. I came up with a name for what Isobel and I were experiencing. I called it the “catalyzed emergency,” just instinctively. I knew at once what I meant, and I also knew one day I would write this story.

We got back to campus and she went to look for Claire Martin, the tutor from day one. She ended up finding Claire, who was free, and Claire held space for her for ninety minutes. No charge. A private grace from a wonderful soul.

I went to the bookshop again. I talked to another Dylan fan and we had such a good chat that I pulled up Dylan’s Red River Shore and played it to him on my phone. He didn’t know it, but loved it. He did a moment chart on his phone and we talked about Dylan’s chart.

At the bookstore I met Melanie Reinhart, for the first time in person. Melanie was the first astrologer I reached out to in 2012 when I was first getting deep into the subject, and it was she who referred me to Darby Costello. So this was a fortunate meeting indeed.

We talked for nearly an hour about her childhood in Africa and her longing to return. I bought Sue Tompkins — Aspects in Astrology because Melanie said another author, who had a book on the charts of musicians, wasn’t a real astrologer. I couldn’t lose face in front of Melanie so I chose Tompkins, but although it’s a great book, I suspect the other one was more my speed.

Melanie asked me up to her room to help carry her bags down the three flights of strips. When we got to the room, she finished packing, and I carried her bags down from her third-floor suite and said goodbye at the gate.

Afterward I found Isobel again, near the entrance. She was steadier, post-Claire. We pushed through the crowd in the quad and slipped to the chapel to say goodbye privately. We spoke plainly — never forget, life-changing, go back to our lives. I told her I wanted to know her as an old woman. She agreed. We exchanged WhatsApp.

She left campus.

I said goodbye to Maddy later in the quad. I said goodbye to Jim, the dream tutor whose session Isobel and I attended and I left out of this story. “You’re a funny guy,” I said. “Takes one to know one,” he answered. The Exeter gate closed behind me, and I walked to the hotel my wife and I were to stay at alone.

My wife was in London at the Sherlock Holmes Museum. I wandered Exeter, then went to the Tolkien exhibition — letters to his children, original sketches, it was a really moving experience. Afterward a stationery shop — a single Tintin postcard. Dinner at the hotel restaurant — bouillabaisse and red wine. Then I texted Isobel. One message became a hundred.

I sent her “Leave the City” by Jason Molina and Red River Shore. She listened and cried. She said she wouldn’t go home to her fiancé that night — too flooded — she would stay at a hotel instead. We planned how we would keep in touch.

I slept next to my wife in a new bed, and in a new world.

Saturday, Early Morning

My wife had returned somewhat late from London and she was tired and slept early. She had an early flight, and a bus pickup 5:15 AM.

When the morning came I walked her to the stop. Street quiet, air washed and pale.

We hugged, kissed briefly, light and familiar, and she boarded the bus.

I stood there watching it pull away.
Not knowing yet what I had broken open.
Not knowing yet what I had kept intact.

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On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part I

Subtitle: I didn’t sleep with her so I had to quit my job.

Mistakes were made tonight

The Mendoza Line

Note: This piece is about a single week in my life that reordered things for good. At a minimum it’s an interesting story; at maximum it is the hinge between two versions of myself. I do not pretend to be the hero of it, and I take full responsibility for everything contained here.

It begins with a dream I had in Bali at the very end of July 2018. I was the lead trainer for the IB Asia Pacific workshop leader and school visitor training — my first time in that role after five years of apprenticeship. At the same time I was working at Ritsumeikan Uji as shukan, a kind of junior administrator. By mid-2018 I was burnt out: long days, multiple roles stacked on top of one another, and, most of all, a boss I no longer trusted. I was scheduled to go to the Faculty of Astrological Studies (FAS) at Exeter College, Oxford at the end of August, and in the meantime I would attend John Innes’s wedding to his fiancee Kristi. All this occurred, and here is that dream.

PROLOGUE: DREAM I

7/29/2018:

The dream starts with an image of a large whisky bottle. The bottle is very fat and also ceremic. So in fact it looks nothing like a normal whisky bottle.  It is perhaps of Suntory brand. I know before I know that a story of some kind will unfold inside the bottle. I am reminded somehow of a ship inside a bottle.  Suddenly I am inside the bottle itself. There is a whole word here and all sorts of people in a cityscape. I come to understand that everyone lives in relative fear of a species or group of overlords. 

The overlords are both omni-present and also very distant. They rule by fear and have the power to rub out anyone at any time. Sort of. When a person is marked for removal their status is updated. Their status is displayed on a kind of glowing chip in their shoulder.  There are basically three types of statuses. First is “needing to have the life wrung out of them.”  There are marked people and their time is limited. Apparently they are political criminals, thought criminals. Oddly, even when marked these people continue to circulate and take part in oppositional activity. I never actually see one of them removed, although their actions do take on a greater sense of urgency. 

The second category is another worded status. This one is more ellitipcal and I forget the wording. Though safer than the  first, this is still a status to be avoided if possible. 

Third is a number.  A voice tells the city that statuses will be updated and that anything under 40000 is a safe score. I check my update with bated breath, fearing the dreaded worded status. My number is 49500.  Not bad I think—although not under 40000 this is perhaps for young people. 49500 seems reasonable for my age. 

Suddenly the view shifts and I can see into the bottle from the outside.  All of the people and various creatures and scrambling for the mouth of the body. The bottle begins to approach a wall into which is will soon merge. Here, the entrance to the bottle will be sealed. The I character in the dream is also scrambling for the exit although he doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance.  Creatures spill over one another and one baby creature somewhere between a human baby and a little mouse slips through the mouth of the bottle to the other side of the wall. The bottle snaps closed and I am once again staring at the large ceremony bottle from the beginning of the dream. I feel a sense of relief that the perfect creature has escaped. End of dream. 

This dream is about reincarnation. 

(The me on the treadmill does not survive. Dream group says whisky is a spirit which takes 50 years to mature.  That gives me a book deadline I guess-49.5 the book and the end of the provisional personality.)

PART I — Sunday → Wednesday

Sunday, late August 2018

I flew into London from Osaka and took a pre-arranged bus to Oxford, then walked to Exeter College. Check-in, dorm keys, linens. The halls smelled like old plaster and a little like soap — an old building. I carried my bag upstairs, opened the door to the room that would be mine for the week, and sat on the bed for a moment to locate myself. New country, new rhythm, no context yet.

I walked the campus — stone walls, grass cut low, shaded paths. The quad had that contained feeling of a place that already had its stories. I didn’t know I was about to enter one.

I went to dinner at a taco place just outside campus and had a beer or two. Back in the room I read a little astrology to warm up for the week and listened to the band The Mendoza Line. Little did I know they would end up playing a surprisingly large role in what followed.

Around 10 PM the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the building stumbled outside in pajamas and stood around talking for a few minutes. Odd, but fitting — a small communal disturbance to start the week off.

Monday

I woke up, showered and dressed and grabbed my notebook for the astrology sessions. At this time I was fully committed to attending sessions and making the most of them. Breakfast opened early and I liked that — fruit, eggs, strong coffee. The hall had a low hum, people still new to each other. I walked to the first seminar which was given by Ms. Claire Martin. Claire was in her 70s, and a very comforting presence. She’d been doing astrology forever and has a couple of books which are helpful. The seminar was on the first floor, window onto one of the gardens. The air had that mild, hopeful tone of a first session.

Claire spoke on the 1890s — fields of meaning, ectoplasm, etc. I offered something Jung-coded because that’s where my mind goes when the border between psyche and symbol starts to move. I didn’t know she was in the room yet, Isobel (not her real name), though she already was.

At one point Claire mentioned an Aries Moon. I said, simply, “I’m an Aries Moon.” Nothing loaded, nothing aimed. Lecture ended, chairs moved, and she came to me from the back of the room.

“I am an Aries Moon too.”

We walked to the next session together. That was it — no delay, no drift. We sat side-by-side for the rest of the day. Chatting between sessions, coffee break close but not touching, her chart in her bag. She showed me her own chart print-outs — hers and her fiancé’s — and we compared placements. Similarities everywhere.

Lunch in the dining hall. More sessions in the afternoon. Light talk, no electricity announced but already there. Monday night we ate with a group — tutors, a few new friends. We were beside each other the whole time, not hiding it. Later we drifted to the courtyard bar, opened wine bottles, and someone lit a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked more than a dozen cigarettes in sixteen years, but I took one with her, and then another. Not ceremony, more like instinct, more like inevitable.

We ended the night late. I walked back to the dorm alone and put on The Mendoza Line again. I already knew I was in trouble so in addition to “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)” I was listening over and over again to “Mistakes Were Made” from which the epigraph comes. Sometimes you just know.

Tuesday

We had planned to have breakfast together, not at Exeter but at Pret, about an eight minute walk away. We both ate and she helped me pick my breakfast. We were acting like a couple already. We attended the morning sessions, seated right next to each other and then the day started to open. In the afternoon we did not attend sessions, instead we spent the time in one of the beautiful gardens. We sat close on the bench by the open window, listening to the session through the gap. I talked about muses and how I work best with one. She talked about photography, stalled career energy, her family, and Swiss-Russian split. Russian women, I reflected not for the first time, are a problem, and I knew deep down I was already in trouble.

Tuesday night the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus was scheduled to play Oxford, and I had a ticket, but she canceled. Instead we went out for dinner, just the two of us, at an Indian restaurant near campus. We were already deep into our relationship, and everything came easy; I could feel it inside ten minutes. This was one of the best meals I have ever had for reasons bigger than taste. I told her about my two epiphanies, one when I was four years old and one when I was seventeen. The whole evening felt like a third epiphany.

Back at campus everyone was drinking in the courtyard again. There was Mystery and her daughter, tutors, people rotating. We stayed late, drank wine, smoked, and flirted like teenagers. I went to my room around 1:30 AM, playing The Mendoza Line over my headphones again. I was seeking their counsel, essentially, and they are a great band.

Wednesday

I woke up and this day we had breakfast at the dining hall. By this time, people were noticing us. Comments here and there, sideways smiles. Morning and lunch blurred into one long conversation — the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We were finishing each other’s thoughts, and I was in deeper than I had ever been. We didn’t attend much of anything. Afternoon break she went to change. I went back to my room and put on Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She came back later and said, without shame, that she’d pleasured herself during the break — just stated it directly. This was a complication.

For dinner that night she changed again — a red dress, short but not careless. Stunning. Whispering at the table, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knew by then. After dinner was wine again, talking with the tutors, including the lovely Rod Chang and Mystery the long courtyard. I met Darby Costello in person for the first time. Darby is my astrologer and we had already had a number of phone consultations by this point. She was fully alive drinking wine, and talking like someone who knows how to hold a room. I was so happy that she was my astrologer. Isobel and I stayed late once more, and cleared the courtyard. Around two in the morning we parted, cheeks touched, no bedroom, no act.

Back in my room, lights low, I lay on the narrow bed with Mendoza Line in my ears. I knew exactly where I was standing:

I would keep going. I would see where this led. But I would not sleep with her. I couldn’t.

That was the shape. That was the decision. Wednesday ended on that line.

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The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position

Note: This is the fifth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. Our fourth position is about what we consider the inequitable banning of clove cigarettes by President Obama in 2009.

I. Starting Point — Dignity, Not Debate

Trans people exist. This is not a trend or a modern invention. Gender variance appears across cultures and across history, long before the vocabulary we use today existed. Whatever complexities emerge in policy, youth development, or medicine, one thing is foundational:

Trans people are owed human dignity.
No conditions, no asterisks. Just dignity.

Everything else follows from that moral floor.

II. Adults — Full Citizenship and Recognition

For adults, the ethical picture is straightforward. Trans adults should be able to live, work, love, and move through the world without harassment or discrimination. This includes:

  • The ability to legally transition through a fair, transparent process
  • Access to transition-related healthcare under informed consent
  • Workplace and housing protections that include gender identity and expression
  • Access to military service and civil participation under the same standards as any other adult

At the adult level, the question is not whether trans people exist or deserve rights — they do. The challenge is implementation, not justification.

III. Youth — Compassion and Caution, Not Panic

Young people need something slightly different from adults. They need care, patience. Youth — Listening First, Care Without Panic

Young people do not need slogans or pressure; they need adults who are willing to listen carefully and stay present over time. Before policy, before pathways, before decisions, there is a more basic responsibility: to take a young person’s experience seriously, without rushing to explain it away or lock it in.

For some youth, feelings about gender are clear, persistent, and deeply rooted. For others, gender exploration may be tentative, fluid, or intertwined with anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, social stress, or the ordinary turbulence of adolescence. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and none of them invalidate a young person’s distress or self-understanding.

A healthy response begins with attentive listening — not as a procedural step, but as an ethical practice in its own right. Children and adolescents deserve to be heard in their own words, at their own pace, without the expectation that every question must immediately produce an answer. Parents and caregivers are allowed to say, honestly and without shame, “I don’t know yet.” Uncertainty, when paired with care, is not neglect; it is often wisdom.

Exploration itself is not harm. Questioning gender assumptions, trying out names or pronouns, or experimenting with presentation can be a way for young people to understand themselves more clearly. When such exploration reduces distress and helps a young person feel safer or more coherent, it should not be treated as dangerous or pathological.

At the same time, adults have a responsibility to protect young people from both kinds of harm: the harm of being dismissed or unheard, and the harm of being rushed into irreversible decisions before they are ready. A balanced, compassionate approach includes:

  • Making space for reversible forms of social exploration when they ease distress
  • Offering non-judgmental counseling that supports understanding rather than steering toward predetermined outcomes
  • Thoughtful screening for co-occurring factors — such as anxiety, depression, trauma, or neurodivergence — without stigma or presumption
  • Treating medical interventions for minors as decisions that require time, persistence of dysphoria, multidisciplinary evaluation, and informed consent

The goal is harm reduction in both directions: reducing the risk of long-term, untreated dysphoria while also minimizing regret from irreversible interventions made too early. Compassion and caution are not opposites; they are partners.

Most importantly, young people should never feel that they must perform certainty in order to be taken seriously. Listening does not require immediate resolution. Care does not require panic. What children need most is the assurance that the adults around them are paying attention, taking them seriously, and willing to walk with them — even when the destination is not yet clear.

IV. Language and Pronouns — Respect Without Fear

Using someone’s chosen name and pronouns is simply respect — no different from honoring a nickname or a married name. It is not complicated on a human level.

Our stance:

  • Respect is the default
  • Mistakes are human and correctable without punishment
  • Deliberate misgendering is disrespect, but ordinary errors are not crimes
  • Institutions should model inclusive language, not create environments where people feel terrified to speak

Respect should enlarge conversation, not freeze it.

V. Sports — Inclusion and Fairness, Context by Context

Sports are not a single system — they exist on a spectrum with different purposes and stakes at each level. Because of that, one rule for everything doesn’t work.

At the youth or school level, sport is primarily about identity formation, belonging, and joy. Stakes are low, development is ongoing. In these settings, inclusion should be maximized and kids should generally be able to play on the teams aligned with their gender identity.

In adult amateur or recreational sport, flexibility should continue. Local leagues and organizations can experiment with mixed teams, open categories, or self-organizing solutions based on context and community. These spaces are more about health and community than lifetime opportunity.

However, college athletics, scholarship competition, and pathways into professional sport introduce real material consequences — scholarships, visibility, and career access. In these spaces, fairness and inclusion must be balanced, and physiological advantage has to be considered. Trans participation is possible within a framework that takes development, hormone levels, and evidence seriously.

At the professional, elite, and Olympic level, physiology cannot be ignored. These competitions involve prize money, legacy, and national representation. Rules here should be science-informed and sport-specific. In some cases that may mean time-based hormone requirements; in some cases, open categories or structural alternatives might emerge. The goal is not exclusion — the goal is competitive integrity that respects all athletes.

In summary:
In everyday sport, inclusion is the natural priority.
In elite sport, fairness and physiology matter more strongly.
Different contexts call for different solutions.

VI. Women’s Spaces (Prisons, Shelters, Spas, Bathrooms) —

A Category We Are Listening To

Not every issue in the trans conversation is equally simple. Spaces involving privacy, trauma history, and safety — such as domestic-violence shelters, prisons, changing facilities, and spas — require deeper listening and care. Women’s vulnerability and trans women’s vulnerability both matter, and overlapping fears cannot be solved by declaration alone.

Rather than issue a premature stance, we hold this position:

We are listening.
We are learning.
We are not ready to speak in absolutes.

Refusing to claim certainty where uncertainty exists is not weakness — it is honesty.

VII. Our Tone Moving Forward

We choose nuance rather than slogan, discussion rather than trench warfare. We reject cruelty toward trans people and we also reject moral panic. We value evidence where policy is needed, care where identity is forming, and the courage to say “we’re not sure yet” where complexity remains.

In short:

Trans people deserve dignity.
Where rights are clear, we affirm them.
Where questions are hard, we move with care.

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My Time At Northern Arizona University Interlude and Part V: Return to Japan and Year II Term I

Interlude — Return to Japan, Winter 1999

I flew back to Japan in early December ’99, eleven months after Flagstaff, twenty six years ago today.

My girlfriend — soon to be my wife — met me in Kumamoto and before we went anywhere near a city office we took a bus tour of Kyushu. One of those packaged trips where the landscape is real but the schedule isn’t — temples, viewpoints, souvenir shops engineered into the route because somebody is getting a cut. I’ve never liked bus tours. Too passive. Too commercial. A landscape you watch instead of inhabit.

The first night in the hotel we were intimate for the first time in a year. It was good enough — tentative, self-conscious on my part, like we were remembering choreography rather than improvising. It would all come back pretty quickly.

After the tour we stayed with her parents in Uto City — small house, tatami floors, her childhood bedroom upstairs. We shared a single futon where she had slept alone as a girl. I remember the narrowness of it, two adults lying in a past built for one. The walls thin, the air still, her parents downstairs, in their own world.

.We went to the city office the first week of December and signed the papers — no ceremony, no white dress, no crowd, just bureaucracy, and permanence I suppose. A moment small in appearance and enormous in consequence. One pen stroke and we weren’t dating across continents anymore — we were married.

I flew back to Arizona before the semester resumed. I was a married man. Small ring. Big life. My cold room waiting.

That was the hinge — Japan in winter, Flagstaff in spring, and me between two homes that I didn’t yet know they would trade places for good.

NAU Year Two — Term One

I flew back to Spokane that winter the same way I had the year before — no plan except back to NAU and see what I could do. The red Toyota pickup was waiting for me, still running, still mine, connecting Washington and Arizona. I drove south again — long highways, cheap motels, maps instead of GPS, how I knew what I was doing I have no idea.

Flagstaff was colder that winter, or maybe I had just forgotten what dry cold felt like. I didn’t keep the old room near campus, and I didn’t want to. I spent two nights in a budget hotel, stretching my graduate-tutor income across meals and rent in my head. Still — I was back, and that is what mattered.

A classmate pointed me toward a woman named Bev who had a room for rent. She lived twelve minutes from campus. She has a big house — divorce settlement money, and a shoo downtown that sold wood furniture she built by hand. The furniture was bad, and she told had sold exactly zero pieces. That alone told me she was operating on a different financial zone than the rest of us.

I moved in. My own room, my own bathroom, access to the kitchen, $700 a month. Not luxury, not struggle — just workable. I drove to campus every day, which meant less drinking, more structure. Only once did I drive home drunk, and it scared me enough to make sure it stayed a single incident. Mostly, I left the truck downtown and taxied home, or I didn’t drink at all.

Academically, the rhythm was set — Said, Ray Huang’s 1587, Braudel, Portelli, more Bourdieu when I could manage it. The hardest class was Bob Baron’s Marx seminar. Everything else felt manageable, maybe even easy when I had momentum. My friendship with Mandiola deepened that semester — sharper, closer, more real — the two outsiders orbiting the same department.

That was also when I noticed Sonia. First as a presence — around campus, then behind the counter at the organic market I could barely afford. The book van outside sold $1 paperbacks, and I bought more of those than groceries. We exchanged looks — recognition, curiosity — but nothing more. Later I realized she was an undergrad in the Post-War German History class I lectured in. That alone helped keep the boundary clean.

By late fall the loneliness was real. I was married, but alone. She missed me. I missed her. She was thriving at work — promoted to Head Nurse at 24 — and still, distance was beginning to feel like erosion rather than opportunity. So we made a plan:

So in the Fall of 2000 my wife would come to Flagstaff and take part-time English classes. We would be in the same place again.

Around that same time the last of my Hamilton debt — $17,000 — was paid off by her or by her mother. I’m still not certain which. Either way, relief arrived quietly. I would repay it not as a transaction but by building a life — covering everything from 2002 onward.

And that was the first term of year two. Cold roads, heavy reading, a quiet spark at the edge of ethics, and the decision that distance had served its purpose.

My wife would come next term.