This is gonna be a long one spanning two days so strap in.
Today’s reading reflects a bit of fear related to… it’s that thing I mentioned a while ago of not liking to brag about what I have because, among other things, it might alienate others.
Fitting since that was when the trip started.
It was the last day and to be honest I’ve done all the exploring one can reasonably do by foot in this area by now so I went straight to take pics with the girls.
…well, I lied, I did expand my walk a bit more and I actually found *gasp* a hole!
Surprisingly though, there was a tent at the other end of this one. And while it’s not like there were people there I’d rather not look weird by being near someone else’s tent, so I walked back to a slightly more familiar spot.
Things actually started pretty good!
Then…
Yup there’s the fog.
It’s not that the pics didn’t look nice with the effect, but the fogging escalates fast making it impossible to take anything decent.
So I set everything aside and gave the camera a few minutes to see if it defogged.
So I stood there, taking the chance to take some sun proper instead of being blasted incidentally while doing other stuff.
Around… half an hour or so later I wanna say? I started feeling very… anguished which was a sign that I was feeling exhausted.
It’s hard to explain, but whenever I start feeling dehydration or heat exhaustion I feel like how I feel when I feel like crying. Not the the actual tears welling up but more of that “Buhuhuhu….” feeling in my chest.
The camera was taking quite a bit to defog anyways so I returned to regroup myself and it proved prescient because it started suddenly raining a lot.
It was one of those Fox Wedding/Satan and La Sayona having a DBZ fight/whatever sorts of sunshowers but DAMN the shower was on full blast. At one point it was literally raining a lot on one block and dry on the next one.
With both the area and myself rehydrated I went back to the hole I went to the first time around, the one that cut my foot.
I definitely feel like I got a grasp on Aurora on this trip. With keeping in mind that she’s meant to be Luna and Sol’s unrealistically youthful mother, it makes more sense for her to be slightly more childish than her daughters, giving her that dimension of “she’s not a bad mom but you can see how the girls turned out so independent.”
I also feel like I discovered a bit more with Asagi. My original idea was to make her more of the big herbivore that’s less jumpy and more calm, but after this trip she feels more like… like those big animals in general that can and could fuck you up but don’t feel threatened so they don’t. Like there’s a hidden edge she doesn’t enforce nor is aware of.
Also I only noticed this time around that the highlight of her eyes is cat-shaped.
And one more to commemorate. Ironically Aurora’s pose was slightly trickier than usual because not having a soft chestpiece limits her movement ever so slightly… more specifically I can movethe shoulders forwards but the vinyl ends up pushing back into position.
Being done I decided to get Yakiniku but the place I was checking only had reservations starting from 9PM and with the Last Orders being at 9:30 and them closing at 10PM it was basically a tight fit, but I was alone so whatever.
I just walked a bit in the meantime, I had redownloaded Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Dragon Quest Walk so I entertained myself with that on top.
Eventually the time comes and I get the food. It was good! It was yakiniku on coal grills which isn’t something I can say I’ve done much of in general.
The drink was a particular highlight. Despite having the name Cola it’s not like coke of pepsi, in fact it had little to no sugar and was more cinammon-y. Very pleasant.
After this point is where the real highlight of the whole trip begins.
So I was in my room doing nothing. I packed everything so my laptop wasn’t out and I couldn’t sleep. And out of any number of things I could’ve done at that moment I thought “I have a sudden itch to play Pokemon Go”.
Pokemon Go is fine, it’s a thing I do when I walk and I walk a lot, but it’s not something I can much say I have itches or cravings to play specifically.
The streets were very dark and I didn’t venture too far from that thing I mentioned where I didn’t know if I’d trip on something.
I was feeling silly for dragging my ass out the room when I saw it.
The moon.
This picture doesn’t do it justice. Imagine one of those nights where the moon looks really damn big. But in the ocean, reflecting light like it was a sunset.
But when I saw it it was more like here.
Again, the iphone doesn’t convey the exact image because it overexposes the photo, but you can get the idea.
It was pitch black except for a set of clouds reflecting the yellowy light.
I rushed to a nearby parking lot and the moon then uncovered itself right as I did.
I was frozen in place. It was the most beautiful moon I’d ever seen. A literal sunless sunset at 1AM.
I wanted to capture it somehow. Take as much of it in to not forget every detail. I wondered if I should run back to my room to get the camera but it might be too late when I returned…
So I remembered rule number one of photography: The best camera is the one you have on you when you take the photo.
Something stirred in me, something that I was aware existed but that I tend to not feel in the rush of life, and to explain it, I need to go back to 2020.
Even before accounting for The Pandemic, 2020 was the culmination of a lot going in my life. I was stuck with an unsupportive support network, I was in the midst of the biggest burnout and crashout I’ve ever had…
I had moved to a bigger place and the realtor actually told me about Minoh Falls so that August I decided to try exploring it.
In hindsight, that was probably my first ever proper hike, and I was so… like… overwhelmed with emotion.
I was feeling things other than the eternal blur of anguish depression and burnout. Everything was so pretty, I wanted to convey that beauty, I wanted to express how it made me feel and how it made me feel in that specific moment.
In a bit of a manic episode I bought a sketchbook and colored pencils I never used but it was almost like I was trying to do something with everything the hike stirred on me.
And I was feeling that stirring once again.
I’m going to sound turbopretentious for a bit so excuse me about that, but at that moment, looking at the most Bloodborne ass moon I’d ever seen, I was reminded why I’m an artist.
You see, I like learning, I like learning so much that I like teaching (irony of ironies considering my mom’s warnings against the craft) because then I can help others do the thing I love doing which is learning.
I love discovering something and then trying to convey it to others in a hopefully digestible way so they too see or hear about the cool thing. It’s true for random useless trivia and it’s true for emotions.
And the “stirring” I’ve mentioned is basically the purest form of that. Where I’m not stuck trying to structure something from beginning to end but I just want to gather a bunch of people and go “HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT COOL THING I NEED TO TELL YOU ABOU HOW THE COOL THING IS MAKING ME FEEL”.
I was born to do this, I was born to experience this world and then tell others how I feel about the world. Not because I think my opinion is the best but because by experiencing things I learn, and when I learn I wanna tell others about the cool thing I learned so they can hopefully do the cool thing too.
And in that moment I wasn’t the business manager that left for an island in the sticks of the sticks to escape busywork, I wasn’t Big Name (Debatable) Game Developer Man too busy with management to make the game development thing. I wasn’t thinking about the people being snarky bitches about N1RV Ann-A, I wasn’t thinking about all of those professional woes.
I was just grinning like a madman, doing small jumps of joy as I took photos of the most beautiful moon I’d ever seen and thinking about who to send it afterwards while going “THAT WAS THE MOON THIS WAS AT 1AM!!!”. I was what I should always be, what I keep forgetting to be sometimes.
Just like I made sure to take in all of that moon, I made sure to take in that feeling and not forget it.
Almost as if in sync with my own mind, at one point the moon got covered in clouds and didn’t come out again. It didn’t even glow behind the clouds the same way.
I was left digesting all of this while my eyes got used to the dark again. The feeling was still fresh enough that with the euphoria gone I was able to put into perspective a lot about myself.
I constantly wonder “why do I bother?” and even certain things like “why do I wanna make smut so badly?” but with the feeling fresh in mind all of those matters felt… silly, obvious. It’s like wondering “Gee why is it so hot today?” while the sun is on full blast in the middle of summer.
You COULD try to go deeper, explain what a gas giant is, how the emanations reach the planet, the goldylocks zone… but also ultimately it’s hot because it’s summer and the sun is on full blast.
I just am, I don’t need a justification to be. I don’t need to justify why this blog exists, I can afford it and it’s fun to do. I don’t need to justify any project I make either, I’m just chasing that stirring that makes me grin like a maniac and hop like an excited girl.
The fact that my old buddy The Moon, the same moon that I felt was keeping me company or looking after me when I was a teenager and I was bored out of my mind hanging out with classmates feels extra fitting.
And you might think I’m done by now but NO. Because by this point my eyes got properly used to the dark and I start seeing more stars.
And more.
And more…
There’s this funny effect where your eyes get used to the dark, then they get used to the faint glow of the stars, then you start seeing more of them, and more, and then more on the edge of your vision.
You start looking back and forth because your eyes are just seeing more of them, at one point you don’t know anymore if there’s glows or just the many spots blurring together, but then you focus on a specific spot and the rest around it become less blurry and the cycle repeats.
I will give full credit to the iphone camera here. It might be a tad noisy with the ISO and exposure but the amount of stars it shows relative to the effort it takes to take the photo is insane.
Then I see something… weird.
A cloud? It kinda looks like a beam of light, but it’s not coming from any of the nearby hotels…
Then it dawns on me…
It’s the Milky Way…
That in turn triggers yet another Moment.
I’m doing something humans have been doing ever since we’ve been human, perhaps even before then.
We as a species have been aware of all the lights in the sky and found them pretty since forever. I’m communing with every single ancestor that led to my DNA being what it is today by looking upwards and just going “holy shit that’s so cool”.
And none of it is an original statement. Hell, nothing of what I’ve said really is. That’s why I said I was gonna be “Pretentious” because in my mind being pretentious means talking about something like you’re the first one to ever come up with that.
But it’s just that sometimes the statement finally clicks with you, it finally makes sense, it goes from being just words to being words with weight.
Honestly the only reason I stopped and went back to my room was because I’d been looking upwards for basically an hour and change and I was tired both from looking up and standing up.
Before leaving however, I did notice how four particularly shiny stars in the horizon had moved and had the double whammy of “oh right, the rock I’m in rotates…” and “OH RIGHT PEOPLE USED STARS TO NAVIGATE HUH…”.
I didn’t see or hear anyone move around while I was having all of those moments but I like to think if they saw me they’d see this.
Now, you might think this is where the entry would end but I couldn’t sleep and I had a flight so my day was still going.
The rest was a rushed blur, though.
First I dissociate until 6AM and then realize I had to wait until 7AM for the hotel’s front lobby to open so I could check out.
Then I go to the airport and I’m gonna be honest there was this worry in the back of my head that I would get the same dude that gave me all the missed calls the other day. Very unlikely but my luck loves to give me funny things to tell after everything passed.
Case in point, the one driver I did get was quiet for most of the trip but then on the traffic light before the airport his phone rings.
He looks at it.
Picks up the call without putting it to his ear.
Immediately shouts URUSAI!!!! and hangs up. No angry throwing of phone, the anger was contained exclusively in that shout.
The airport by the way is super small.
It did, however, have a neat observation deck that I made use of because even the security to come it opened later.
The flight was already fast but it went faster on account of me dozing off most of it.
Now comes the contrast to all the flowery talk I was doing earlier.
As you might remember from the start of the trip I didn’t know to get to Miyakojima I needed a flight, so instead of a transfer I had to go out and then go back in.
Everything was going smoothly, the luggage came in fast and I was making my way to the luggage check in lobby with effectively one hour to spare.
Then I go pay for the one extra bag… they didn’t take card and my paypay wasn’t enough.
Cut to Fer zooming through half an airport looking for an ATM. On the Peach Aviation lobby they told me second floor but there was no ATM on the second floor.
I start stomping all over the place, at one point I think I approached some airline’s thing and a lady with a very “you shouldn’t be here” face approached me and before she could say anything I asked her where the ATM was, she tells me first floor and I turn around before she said anything else.
I find the ONE Seven Eleven ATM where I could recharge my Paypay to pay for the extra luggage and there’s about 40 minutes to go… which would be 20 before the gates close.
And I had the absolute luck of having one chinese tourist and one Korean tourist unaware (understandably mind you) of the basic etiquette of “if your card gets rejected and there’s a line behind you, go to the back of the line before trying again”.
AND BOTH HAD THEIR CARDS REJECTED THE FIRST TIME AROUND FOR WHATEVER REASON.
The moment it’s my turns I had cash in hand, QR reader on standby, the moment I see the notification it was done I RUSH back aaaaand there’s a long ass line, but before I could curse to kingdom come I notice it’s a different line right besides Peach.
God bless the poor guy that had to deal with me and my rush in that moment. I wasn’t rude but I was… in a rush.
As I’m going down for the security check I hear that my flight will be closed in about 10 minutes and I breathe a sigh of relief.
The flight was bumpy as hell so sleeping wasn’t much of an option though believe you me I tried.
I finally landed back in Osaka and made my way back home, where, as usual whenever I leave for more than three days the mailbox was about to explode.
Normally I would fall asleep and crash until the next day, but there were some redeliveries and I was worried that they’d hit the “too much waiting, get fucked bozo” threshold so I entertained myself by looking for some papers I needed while I fought away sleepiness.
From all that philosophizing to nodding off while I waited for boxes to arrive. Life sure is full of contrasts sometimes.