notes from september: my suffering followed me to japan

I’ve been looking forward to a break since the weather got warmer, well, actually since my health took a nose dive this spring. My boyfriend and I had talked of visiting Japan together since we first met in 2021. I visited the country with my aunt in 2018. I loved being in Japan, but the trip demanded a redo.

Anyway, I spent the beginning of September in Japan and finished the month in New York on stage in a play that I’ve been quietly rehearsing all summer.

Here are my notes from September:

• Being on a plane makes me think a lot about my mixed racial identity, like how the white part of me is the type of white person who claps when the plane lands.

• I didn’t sleep the whole flight to Tokyo, mostly because the guy sitting across from me had the most potent armpit smell of all time. Record breaking. The smell he was emitting wasn’t fully bad, but it kept changing over the hours in ways that kept me up as if an alarm clock had just gone off. I tried to distract myself with the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm on the in-flight entertainment, but nothing could really break my focus from the smell. I did wonder if he could smell it too and was having one of those deodorant inner monologues oh shit, today of all days huh, but he was quite sporty so I was nervous to make attempts at plane-talk like I usually do.