saturday nights in neon lights -

...ah, Hiroshima. You feel old, you feel young, you feel new and unfamiliar and yet the closest to home I've found on this island. Friendly in a way Tokyo isn't, chill in a fashion utterly unknown in Kyoto... oh, you're a strange city - so new and so quietly hopeful and your backstreets rival Asakusa's for quirky shops and a laidback style. I have to wonder about the number of hair salons per capita, though - it's got to be something ridiculous.

You're beautiful, really; I should see you in the summer, green long before your seventy-five year sentence has passed, but you are haunting and angular in the winter ( car horns and peacebells blending in sound noise cacophony life); children laugh and teenagers flirt on teetering heels, pulling their collars up and hair down as the wind pierces even the covered arcades.

I saw a mother and daughter race hand in hand across one of your streets today, laughing as they went; black hair and white jackets not angelic but human and that's maybe the point. Gather and remember but live. Whether in the okonomiyaki villages stacked tight and close, the hands entwined to ward off the chill, the - oh, there's not a name for it, so the vibe for lack of a better - this city has known war and death and worse, despair, but... today it stands and looks both outwards and back.

It's pompous to say "may you always," Hiroshima, but I'm hoping you do anyway.


we're everything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)


...because e e cummings says it best. Take care. ♥