I’m becoming convinced there are certain songs I need to relegate to a certain period in my life. Or–only listen to them when I want to recall a certain period. I have heard The Eagles multiple times since childhood and the reaction I had in Okawachiyama was exceptionally strong given the contrast between rural Kyushu and the Texas Panhandle.
New Animal Crossing: New Horizons update came out. Crafted something for the first time in years and the crafting ‘sounds’ whipped me back to March 2020 so hard I had to just sit with it a while.
March 2020 sucked. And yet I felt only nostalgia thinking on it, a distant sense of pain. Almost, for a moment, wanting to go back. Maybe because I wish I could have done the past six years over in a lot of ways.
The Suika Game sequel (Suika Game Planet) also came out, and that piano theme that plays in the background whipped me back to 2023 so hard I was sitting in a daze remembering being in Yodobashi Camera in Hakata, late on a weekday night, watching an impromptu Suika Game tournament being held on one of the display TVs in an otherwise dead department store. This was not the first time I had played the game — it had gone viral just before I had left for Japan, and had played a lot of it back in California right before going. I played a lot in my apartment in Fukuoka late at night. It was still Yodobashi Hakata I was thrown back to. I had hardly played it in the time after. I am, as I type, undoing the force and clarity of that memory, sitting on the couch while my partner plays and getting the song back into my skull; something is being re-written, something is being lost. Not completely lost, but the force of recollection is no longer making me freeze.
The gentle smiles of the fruits are as the sakura*, the pastels as the morning frost.
As an aside: this did make me laugh out loud, which gets credit, even if it is a cheap laugh:
*Ephemeral. Mono no aware (物の哀れ), what have you.