After Tokyo

Hannah’s back from Tokyo and there’s this energy about her, five weeks away and suddenly she’s got strong opinions about everything—vending machines, the architecture, the food that doesn’t translate anywhere else. I was merciless with the teasing, all the standard jokes about people who come back from Asia too good for German bread, and she took it with a kind of grim determination, promised to become exactly that insufferable person just to spite me. I think she means it.

There’s always this strange moment when someone gets back from traveling that far. They’re different in small ways, caught between the person who left and the person who came back, still translating everything through what they’ve just experienced. She’s carrying this whole backlog of moments—photos, videos, stories that go on forever. And meanwhile there are exams coming up, reviews due, the regular machinery of life that didn’t pause while she was halfway around the world. The gap between those two things is hard to cross.

I found a video for her, something to ease the transition. Ikimono Gakari, a Japanese band, nothing revolutionary, just something that sounds like where she’s been. Not a recommendation exactly, just something to hold onto during the adjustment, something to listen to when Germany feels too small and she’s remembering what those streets felt like.