Tiny hands

I’ve never been too conscious about bacteria and virus.

Covid made me a little more educated, as it happened most of us.

Though living in another culture, where rarely you come across with someone with mask since already long time, I had become even less conscious, compared to how things needed to be in my family.

This month, I frequented for a period of time in a place full of dust - from an old building, what brought in from “people”.

Going there, I become more and more conscious in the metro, how many people are wiping their nose, how many sneeze I hear.

During the day I could even “feel” the dusts, flying around in the air.

First time in my life I washed my hands every hour just because I felt like.

As I am no longer to frequent that place from tomorrow on, back in my small place, with the dust that I’m accustomed.

I managed to be at home when my son arrived from the daycare.

In front of the sink, I take his hand one by one and washes it.

So far he does not know that he is “washing” them, but happy to play with the water falling onto his hands.

It’s only this time around the day where I notice about his tiny fluffy hands.

I never really was a big fun of hand washing, but somehow I have changed.

The day when I was eating this.

A rainy day. So it starts like a rainy day.

Opend the 1kg Kimuchi bag, purchased at Frere Tang on the weekend. To mix with natto with rice.

It tasted just like what I tasted every single day when I was a student, in Tokyo. I used to purchase kimuchi in a small bin, in Don Quijote I think, because it as the cheapest.

It was when they said eating kimuch makes you skinnier. So without liking or not, I ate it. Natto, because I was not a big cook.

Now I taste it, it felt like the best thing in the world.

The memory and nostalgia adds such a value on whatever.

I wonder what will be what makes my son feel this way, years and years from now.

It will probably what he would invent himself, like me in that tiny apartment in Tokyo, away from my parents.

Another day of the sun.

The good thing about today was, so far, that there was a sun out.

It probably makes me such a poor boring person, that the only good thing she has is a sun out.

You could only empathise me if you live in the country where you are deprived of it for a couple of months of year, or, in addition, you are from a country where it is not the case.

In my memory, “winter sky” means a clear, blue sky.

Now it’s grey.

While doing my daily routine of a walk under the blue sky, I did not necessarily think about the blue sky like this in my childhood. But somehow I came to think about me, with a certain, clear realisation.

That how incomplete I am, as a parent. When I was looking up that blue winter sky, I did also look up my parents. I did not imagine that behind their figure, they had anything like this withheld.

It’s not only about being incomplete, but also knowing that I am incomplete, whereas it was not supposed to be the case in the world I knew.

Perhaps my folks had it better figured out. They had a family with 10 years younger at the age than me, my father had a steady job (or even his own little business), a car, later on even a house, etc etc.

It’s impossible to even imagine that they had something un-solide, ambiguous, unstable like I have as for “where am I”, “what I do”, “where I am going”.

The only thing that I am sure is that, I did not feel that from my parents, and now I have that now, while trying to look as much as I can, that everything is OK, in front of my son.

I wonder how he will go about it when he is older. Is he a more complete person, or he has a similar realisation one day, like me, when he become a parent.

And what kind of winter sky he would have, to look up?

One day I shall start.

It took me a while to get to this. To begin with, I am not sure what is the language that I feel the best with, to reach to how many people.

But I guess, none of it would matter unless I write it down.

So at least I got to this point.

I was not sure what is interesting to write about, worth the read. I don’t want to be too intimate in this website which serves more or less as “cyber business card”. I don’t want to pretend. But I also don’t want to lay out the trivial things as if it should mean somebody else, too.

But I guess, there are things to write otherwise.

So I guess I’ll just leave one good thing of the day.

Today, it got sunny just for a moment. I was out, feeling it on my eyelids. Someone used the words “Rayon de soleil”, which isn’t in my vocabulary but somehow it sounded the best it can be named. It sounded, just like what I saw and felt : the beam of lights, in mixture of yellow, green, and perhaps red.

And I talked to an English girl quite a bit. The words came out even almost faster than my brain could function, as if I am catching up with the breaths that I needed to be doing for a long time. I may not see her ever again, given that she lives just next stop from me but we hadn’t come across ever. Or we did, but we didn’t know the other existed, like all the others that came across on the day.

That was two good things of the day. I had a bonus today.