How to perform a meltdown, how to restart a life: the last weekend in the city

How uncanny to leave a city for good while it was wearing off all forms of life. It felt like as if no one was winning, and that even mornings looked like sunsets.

Tokyo was yellow beneath my last footsteps, a proof that my lonesome city was colorful even during goodbyes.


Just how do you pack four years in a box? Leave everything behind, and bring only the classics.


Goodbye, you say? Give me a kid in a park on a cool afternoon--- it is the farthest thing from goodbye. It is like as if nothing will change, like as if we really don't or can't leave each other, and that we're just going to spend an unusually loooong weekend apart.


During the last days, I took a thousand photos of sunsets all over the city: at the university in the morning, at Akihabara at mid-day, at Kanagawa in mid-afternoon, in O-okayama in the early evening. Funny how sunsets look all the same everywhere, yet feel so different everytime.


I remember now how I described Tokyo during my first days four years back. This time, when I left, it was a cold rainy Monday morning and Tokyo bled white all the same. As the limousine bus I took from Shibuya cut across the city on its way to Narita, I tried to collate a mental (instagrammed) pictures of all my favorite city fixtures every time we passed by one, especially of those I had been to once.

Behind the frosted glass of the bus window, the Tokyo Tower was ashen, and looked as commonplace as the other radio towers dotting the city. Has someone even noticed it this morning, I wondered. I take that perhaps, I was the only person in the world who took a photo of it that day, gracing my unmistakable departure, my sweetest goodbye to my most favorite city in the planet thus far.