I'm looking through my own eyes, they may as well be somebody else's, maybe it's a movie I've seen before, a blurry dream somewhere in my memory, disembodied from experience, and as I walk down the street, this vague familiarity reminds me of memories, or maybe dreams from when I was a child, the kind that blur with actual memory in such a way that you never really know what was a dream and what was lived experience. I remember sitting and playing with figurines on a very big windowsill in my childhood home, one of five, we moved around a lot. I viewed the world through a big colonial window in a small house, a prominent feature that looked onto the front lawn and across to my grade school, where all the little post-war, single-family homes were the same, entirely modest and only differing in the pastel colours in which they were painted, they contained a total humility in their character, predating the posture that came to dominate America later, a rare historical moment where America was still trying to reimagine the Greek polis, the home being the real mark of equality amongst men, and there was a pride in this equality, a sort of grace that allowed a man to look at his neighbor and experience a kind of mercy, knowing that he could have more, yet choosing restraint for the greater good, valuing his ethic above the diminishment that would come with any sense of superiority, or that's how I remember it, from a windowsill, and we left that house, we left every house, so maybe that's the dream part.
The dream returns as I walk through the streets of Roppongi, nothing about this place evokes my childhood, in fact, it stands utterly opposed in every way. I notice the little vignettes unfolding before me, snippets of conversations encapsulating moments of drama, love, grief, self-consciousness or a total lack of awareness, and it's in these brief moments that we have the opportunity to judge others and really, to judge ourselves, the endless projections and this sense that in every given moment and with every glance, we can know everything there is to know about a person, from the way they look at the ground when they walk to the shoes they wear or the way the cuff on their jacket is tailored a little bit short, so that the Audemars Piguet shows through and lets you know that they have endless disposable income and they want you to know about it, and somehow in judging others, my mind wanders back to the windowsill, to the man on the pastel street who could have had more and didn't take it, and I wonder which one I'm closer to now. How did I end up here?
Many of the women seem dressed for the male gaze, very petite with tight-fitting clothes and lots of makeup, and I notice that I'm the gaze, that I'm doing exactly what the clothes were made for, and I can't tell anymore if I'm judging them or myself. Everywhere the differences between men and women are emphasized, you go to eat unagi and you ask why there are five different dishes and get told that these sizes are for men and these sizes are for women, there are different sized chopsticks, but one woman at the store proudly declares that she uses the chopsticks for men, the longer ones, because she prefers those, and you can't help but wince a little at the sense of pride in her voice, this small act of rebellion, so mundane in its form that it feels totally alien, yet so touching, completely vulnerable.
I never felt at home anywhere. I'm looking through my own eyes. They may as well be somebody else's.