A Day That Didn’t Need to Happen
I arrived in Takamatsu
Shodoshima was there
—
ferries bobbing, tiled streets stretching toward hills I didn’t climb.
There was the option to go,
the island’s outline waiting across the sea like a suggestion I’d once made to myself.
But something in me said no.
Not out of fear. Not even fatigue.
Just… stillness.
The kind of stillness that tells you
whatever you’re chasing isn’t ahead of you today.
A grey stillness of the coming tsuyu, or rainy season,
just looming overhead for several days.
I wandered a bit.
Felt the edge of boredom. The soft ache of disconnection.
Nothing called out, not even the vending machines.
So I came home.
Not to Tokyo —
but to my grandmother’s house.
Where the walls are older than my ambitions.
Where rice still holds the warmth of hands.
Where silence feels earned.
Maybe that’s the real place I needed to go.
Not across the water.
But back, and inward.
Some journeys don’t look like movement.
But they shift something just the same.