Food and the City
I’m collecting places like bruises. My plan is to swallow Kumamoto whole. I want its bars, its noodle shops, its grease-stained counters. I want every damn corner of this city that smells like soy and sweat. I want sushi with my hands, ramen burning my tongue, pizza in alleys that look like everyone forgot they were alleys. I want it messy, I want it cheap, I want it at 2 a.m. when only ghosts and drunk boys are awake. Neon-lit karaoke rooms where someone’s always crying into a mic. Dark izakayas where salarymen tell the same story again and again. Host clubs with smiles made of plastic and eyes like black tea. Coffee shops with maids, with books, with silence thick like syrup.
I’ll go. I’ll sit. I’ll eat. Whether it’s the city center pulsing like a neon heart, or out near the edge where the streets aren’t even part of a map. Morning, noon, dusk, night. I don’t care. Just give me someone beside me. Someone local, someone who knows the places that don’t exist online. They take me there. And I pay in conversation. I pay in time. I give them stories. I give them laughter, a little light. Like that one night with her. We found a hot pot joint downtown. The broth was boiling like we were. Meat, mushrooms, vegetables drowned in soy. We fished them out with chopsticks like tiny survivors. Robot waiters mercilessly rolled around with fake smiles and real pudding.
There’s no better way to know a place than to eat it. No better way to belong than to chew on its streets and sip its secrets. I don’t want the tourist version. I want the version with stains. The version with whispers. I want every bite, every bar, every brokenhearted song in a tavern at midnight. I want Kumamoto to feed me until I forget why I ever came here in the first place. And while the sauce stained our fingers and the sky got darker, we made quiet plans for what came next. Places we haven’t touched yet. Nights we still want to break open. There was this feeling, buzzing just under my ribs, that maybe we’re not just consuming, surviving here. Maybe we’re building something.