After kicking my partner’s ass at Scrabble on Facebook this evening, I googled the name of a former college friend–now a hated, pudgy, pasty, short excuse for a fag–and found an email the little elf had written shortly after 9/11.  I was so very happy to have stumbled upon it and even happier once I started to read it, aloud and in a fey, Big Gay Al voice.

At first, my partner said, “Would you stop.”  But after the first paragraph, we were both laughing uncontrollably.  I want to stress that I wasn’t laughing at the events that occurred that day (I’m not a monster).  I was laughing at this little man’s attempt to put himself at the center of it all.  The email was supposed to be very “It’s all about US!” but read more like “It’s all about ME!”  It was an easy laugh, and yes, pathetic on my part.

So my partner went off to bed and I was left alone to finish the one nightly drink I now limit myself to, a scotch with one cube.  After ten minutes of googling old friends and old boyfriends, I started to get bored and more than a little nostalgic.  I took the last sips of my scotch out to the balcony for some fresh air.

Tokyo summer afternoons are intolerable but these late summer nights are warm, breezy and offer a hint of the cooler weather soon to come.  I stared out at the trees of the small park across the street, the people getting ready for bed in the apartment buildings near mine.  I saw people come and go out of the convenience store downstairs, heard the jazz drifting up from that new Hawaiian restaurant, gazed at the neon glow of Shibuya just beyond the buildings and the red blinking lights of the towers of Shinjuku just beyond that.  Then I looked inside my apartment through the shut sliding glass door.   It was still and inviting.