Notes from Narita Airport transfer:

Tokyo now. Waiting to see if I can get on a flight. Surprised by the familiar feel: it’s all coming back to me. Anxious to get to Seoul. To see Dave. To sleep in my own bed.

In the land of skinny people of uniform feature. Women carry their cosmetics in a bag or box wholly separate from their luggage. Weird incarnations of English words distorted in stretch across women’s breasts.

Nothing to do in this cog. Keep walking around the perimeter like a person condemned to it for eternity. Will I get on the damn flight? This time the possibility of not getting on starts to sink in. It’s nearly midnight for me. After a night of fitful sleep, having not slept on the plane, what do I do, where do I go, if there is not a seat for me?

In the bathroom there is a choice between Western or squat toilets. The Western ones are always occupied. Is it the preferred choice or does using one make a person seem more worldly, Americanized?

The flight is overbooked by 150 in coach. Those people can’t afford an upgrade, right?

Despite business seating, I started to feel queasy and my legs began to ache by the seventh hour or so. Watched Zorro. Sat through Return to Paradise, which I saw with Tom earlier this year. Listened to music through the entirety of another movie -- some stupid family flick. Music grounded in the place I left. Thought I shouldn’t have brought it for I fully need to leave there. I am here now, at any rate, which is a nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Airport. Human Processing Center. Someone in another dimension is using my life as a metaphor, I am sure of it. Planes rotating earthward and skyward, which one will fall? Not mine, not this time. Airport. Receptacle for the forlorn. Give us your what? Poor, Tired, hungry? -- Fuck if I know how it goes. Give us not that but your money and valid ID.

I need hands to soothe this tired skin, these atrophied muscles. I am in good shape now but I am still huge compared to all these people. These stick figures.

I’m sitting in the bottom floor of the hub, at the Transfer Bus Gate the sign says. Upstairs is too crowded and hot with the odor of travelers. Cooler here: Doors open and close letting in the smell of Japan. It smells like Asia, like a place where I used to live, the place I know I won’t want to leave again for awhile. To see that sweet face again. Hop into a cab in darkness and listen to the language flow effortlessly from his foreign tongue.

My bags go on whether or not I do. No going back, but I may not go on.

Plane parked on the tarmac. I love that, disembarking onto a vast concrete plain. The wheels of the craft nearly as tall as me. I stepped down onto the hard flat and stared directly into the gaping mouth of one of the two jet engines hanging there, blades still revolving slowly. Onto a bus with so many others… No one sat next to me for a long while, even though the bus was crowded. Some things I’ve forgotten.

I’ve become the Westerner’s information booth here at the Bus Transfer Gate. People scurrying here or there, they see me and I look like them so they ask. But I know nothing; I am just faster at doing what they don’t do. Is this floor 2? I look at the sign: Yes, it is.

A gaggle of flight attendants down here waiting for the bus. Singapore Airlines. Long legs they have, these women from that region of the world. All of them have the same black luggage and gibbous black purses. Conformity.