Boxers

I am twenty seven years old, an American male, stranded in Fukuoka, Japan, 2001, stuck in a business man hotel. Not the room where they slide you into the wall like a coffin, but not much bigger than this either. I don't have any money because last night I got so drunk that the last thing I remember is eating ramen noodles inside a corner store before walking through the streets past newspaper vending machines with cards of sexy Japanese girls and every guy I passed seemed to be yakuza, seemed to be staring me down, seemed to know just who and what I was.

I bite off my fingernails and then my toenails and make a pile next to a black book called The Teachings of Buddha. It along with green tea have been my only company since waking up at noon. The traffic and smog are an arms reach. There is no way I could fit through the window, but reading this book brings me to the idea that I am here forever and always has been.

I drop my nails nine floors down to the street below where the constant stream of cars and bicycles flow together like water. I wonder if I will ever get back to Korea. I wonder why my boss sent me over here without telling me how much a passport renewal would cost. I know that if nothing else happens that I will be a part of Japan forever.

There is a passage about what should happen to clothes, how once they are no longer suited for wearing they become something with which to do the dishes, and once the rag no longer suits the dishes it can be used to clean the floor, and once the shreds of cloth no longer suit that purpose, it can be used for lighting a fire or something else that I cannot recall.

I am forty-two years old. It is the year of my Uranian opposition and I am not sure exactly what this means. I am sitting in an airbnb that my girlfriend owns. Sometimes I think she is my fiancé. I am in New Orleans, Louisiana, the greatest city in the United States. Blocks away drunk people are running up and down Bourbon Street and inside the Penthouse Club there may be similar cards to those I found in Japan fifteen years ago.

I bend over to pick up my shirt and realize my boxer shorts have a hole that stretches from waist to where the legs meet. The patience needed to take this garment through its proper Buddhist procedure is not there. Still I think of the moment, alone, in that Japanese hotel. And I think of now, alone in this airbnb. And I think about how neither time was I alone, and I think I knew this then. I know that I know this now.

Tomorrow I will take these boxers to the house where I live. I will check on the two ducks that a friend just gave me because the boy duck was trying to fornicate with her hens. I will bury these boxers inside beneath what used to be a pile of compost. Time will pass. The ducks will cross back and forth inside this cordoned off space where I use what might otherwise be thrown away to give back to the soil that gave me my life.

Worms will feast. Worms that don't need any of us to see anything that they are doing. Worms will turn what once covered me and stopped drips of urine from showing on my pants, worms will turn this back into the nutrients that will sustain. The ducks may eat some of the worms. The worms will die and other worms will eat these worms. Then spiders will eat those worms. Then those spiders will die and worms will eat those spiders, and so on….

What I did not know that day I ran out of money in Japan: that all of death is life; that nature figured out all of this long before us; that waste is a man made idea; and that love is where you find it, be that inside a room alone or out on the street where the lights are glistening and lust is calling and my toenails are slowly decaying at the base of a cherry tree while the blossoms blow through the street like snow in fall.