At twenty months 5’s language explodes. She sings twinkle twinkle little star after hearing it a half dozen times. She says the abc’s and constantly makes small sentences. We are astonished onlookers.
We have no pride in her outbursts, only shock. I am often an open-mouthed observer of this person, so barely able and yet so clearly someone new. I watch her repeat things to me that I do not understand with a patience I still search for. Her grin when at last I catch on is full of pride, and of joy. The value of communication, after a year plus without, is clear from her face.
In the evenings we sit on the balcony and play with seeds, with shells, with rocks. She makes messes and picks them up, pours small objects from one flower pot to another, and asks for help finding rocks that have snuck out of reach under other objects. I lean against the glass of the sliding door and watch, eyes half on her and half on the harbor. These are the content moments, work done, evenings routines not yet upon us. We are happy here, not yet forty five and not yet two, and I try to watch carefully enough to remember.
Two weeks later she says “Yes please 5’s blow it” when offered hot food, and we are shocked but happy with the easy communication. She wanders the house saying “Mommy where are you?” when one of us is out of sight, the kind of comfortable exclamation that has been impossible the past twenty one months. She exhorts her Tita to take her to the bath house, a place that does not exist in this country. She asks for fizzy water and then for its transformation through fruit into lime soda with a clarity born of our own love for both. In between these moments she tells us how she misses her friends, reciting their names constantly. Soon she recites everyone’s names, including a friend’s new girlfriend.
Mostly we are not ready. The family words of scant months ago, of this same year, like ‘tato’, which she used to wander the house requesting, disappear into potato at a speed we did not prepare for.
These words, like the memory of these months, will drift out of our minds with exhaustion, with worry, with the progress of life. And so I try hard, on this Saturday in Tokyo, to write them down, to remember. Twenty one months now, and astonishing.
On Thursday we slip out, taking calls from the airport mid-day. By dinner we’re in Tokyo, eating sandwiches and milk on the Skyliner, holding on to the grip handles of the Yamanote, and wandering the little streets we know before bed. It’s a good way to start a long weekend. It’s exactly what we were hoping for.
On Friday the ladies visit the aquarium, a day out in the kind of chill rain Hong Kong never gets. It’s 5 C and we’re happy, wearing clothes we’d almost forgotten we owned. Winter feels like a long time ago, in our lives, and 5’s has never really felt one, only a few days on the east coast of the US last year. She says “rain” and “cold” as we wander, both relatively new words.
Mostly we enjoy the kind of simple empty life that is common in new places and rare in our homes. It’s rare to have weekends without schedule, without sports or birthdays, friends or planned gatherings. That’s good, because we live for the groups, for the sports and activities. We are who we share our lives with. Mostly. Other times it’s nice to take the tram to stations we have only seen from mapping apps and to explore new parks without larger ambition. We find castles this way, and a view of train lines. We find swings and slides and so many children. These are the parts of Tokyo we’d hoped to learn, entirely new areas. We have a new way of looking at a city we both love, through the eyes of a toddler searching for rocks, for seeds, and for playgrounds. The kid infrastructure here, like I tell my friend, is amazing, new kinds of play areas, castles with double decker slides.
In the evening we bathe together. The Japanese style shower before tub enables a certain kind of sharing, a certain family style, that’s hard to do otherwise, especially in the cold. Here it feels normal, and the weather makes 5’s clamor for bath a couple hours earlier than normal. It’s the kind of evening I hoped for, no tourist spot or life reason to be in Tokyo, just the quiet reality of being here, of living like this.
Twenty plus years later I still feel more comfortable here than most anywhere.
Later we go to dinner, a local place that caters to groups of young working folk, good food, big drinks, and not very expensive. I love it, the combination makes a perfect spot for our family. 5’s charms groups of ladies and we already know the staff. As we pack up a group of eight middle aged women come in to share a meal, a kind of social gathering that doesn’t feel so rare, here on the north side of Tokyo.
We walk home happy, a quick stop at the grocery store for yogurt and strawberries, and then read books and roll on the floor before bed.
“This is your twenty year old self’s dream,” a friend told me, back in October.
I’m not sure, any more. The twenty years between then and now are hard to see through.
I am happy though, here in Tokyo in twenty twenty four, exploring parks and buying groceries, taking baths and eating out. It’s a good break from the rest of our lives.
The scars on my side are ten years old. I pass the anniversary in San Francisco, and bike to Four Barrel at 7 am for a coffee to celebrate. Sitting outside in the chilly morning air, with my e-bike on hold next to me, I look around at how much has changed, and how much hasn’t. Just under ten years ago I spent 45 minutes walking the two blocks to this coffee shop, pausing on a fire hydrant to cry, uncertain of whether to continue or return home. I was in pain, and alone, out of reach of medicine or friends.
Ten years later the scars on my side are an afterthought. The double slashes of two chest tubes, done a week apart, are easy to miss. They aren’t the scars I notice in the mirror, dwarfed in visibility by the eight holes on the same shoulder, the remnants of twenty twenty’s reconstruction. And the shoulder scars aren’t even the most recent, themselves overshadowed in freshness by the three on my stomach from this January. Ten years has brought a lot of change, some of it good and some of it the gradual wear and tear of life, the slow abrasion and sudden breaks.
I haven’t forgotten everything, though. The second chest tube scar has faded, but the memory of the incision hasn’t. It remains the most painful experience of my life, an evening I hope not to top. The more recent scars, perhaps more invasive, were at least planned, and I was properly sedated. Our hospital list grows much faster than our emergency room list, for which I am grateful. I am grateful for so much, really. For medicine, for health insurance that spans countries, for friends who’ve given advice by phone and carried us home on their backs. For friends who’ve offered up sofas, and brought food. It’s a long list, and good to remember on anniversaries like this, even as I forget.
And so, biking across the city I used to live in on this chilly March morning, I try to be grateful for the distance, for the progress we’ve made since. Our ten year anniversary comes shortly after this less auspicious one. Our cat is almost twelve. Our daughter will be two in June. We’ve lived in Hong Kong more than half the decade since, something that would have been hard to predict. And we still love New York, planting good memories over and around the painful ones, as the years accumulate.