how to describe an indescribable journey

174.98 miles on foot,

29 train rides,

62 journal pages,

21 rolls of film,

and 1 life experience I’ll never forget.

I burned incense at temples, visited countless art museums, ate charred chicken gizzards on sticks, and meditated in lush forests. I soaked my aching muscles in bubbling sulfuric hot springs and hiked miles up an active volcano. I ate fresh oysters the size of my hands, slurped down hearty bowls of miso ramen in tiny bars, and dipped thin slices of succulent pork into boiling stews. Along the way, I met many wonderful strangers while also spending time alone to cultivate my inner voice, something I neglect when life gets “too busy.” I even got lost several times but always discovered something profoundly precious on the unconventional route home — a hidden shrine, a local’s bar, a stunning sunset.

I’ve been back in Tokyo for a week now, and I’ve been struggling with how to fully describe my 21-day journey around Japan. No words in the 62 frenetic pages of my journal can truly do the trip justice. None of my photos — neither digital nor film — can really capture what it felt like to see, smell, hear, and feel the world from where I stood. I’m coming down from the high of exploration and no matter how many times I write and rewrite these words, they sound like a stale facsimile of the real thing.

For the past three days, I’ve been experiencing what I like to refer to as an “insomniac’s bender.” No, it doesn’t involve heavy drinking or intoxication of any sort — except for the hyper-efficient mania your brain enters when sleep-deprived . As someone who’s dealt with insomnia since high-school, I’ve learned to channel the intense firehose energy into my most ambitious projects; and so I’ve been rabidly digesting and recording my journal entries, printing copies of my developed film, and trying to output 20 blog posts for every day of travel I’ve left unpublished. I had just completed page 5 of my six-page to-do list this morning when I hit a realization:

Why am I trying to describe everything?

There’s something comforting about sharing your travels with others. When I experience something beautiful, or profoundly life-changing, I’m always driven to share it with the people I love. And yet I realize now that transcribing every errant thought scribbled during a late-night train to my next destination is not the way to do it. Dissecting and pulling apart the threads of every memory I’ve made on this journey destroys the cohesion of my experience. I hyper-analyze my word choice in retrospect. It’s an easy thing to do once you’ve gained the distance of time and your memories have faded a little.

Another reason why I’ve been obsessed with digitizing my journal entries as blog posts: because I fear “losing” my memories. Left in physical form, my words will rot away over time, or burn to a crisp, or get lost in some dusty bookshelf back home. What will I do when I lose my notebook? Yet this morning, as my cramped fingers slaved away on page 48 out of 62, I realized with resounding clarity the futility of my actions. Why reproduce something so natural, so tender, so sacred, in such a sterile form? It’s time for me to accept my journal entries for what they are: flawed, physical, and fully present. No bland sans-serif font can fully capture the ink squiggles caused by the jolting of the train, the accidental coffee stain, the crumpled museum ticket stuck between the pages. Not everything can be preserved — nor does everything need preserving. I can and will let my words fade away over time, perish in a fire, die a water-logged death. Maybe one day some speech-generating AI, in true type-writing monkey fashion, will replicate the exact sequence of words in my journal entry for a split second and this is how the universe remembers my thoughts. But for now, let them stay transient and on paper.

That’s not to say I won’t be writing about my experiences — I’m simply paring down, and accepting that not everything needs to be recorded in hyper-fine detail. Sometimes life is more alluring when you leave something to the imagination.

views from the Tokyo apartment

(it feels good to be home)

 

today’s ephemera

I’m listening to: Slow Mover by Angie McMahon. It is the collective voice of all uncertain lovers — not ready to fall in love, not ready to commit to anything but the present, moving slowly to the beat of their own hearts.

I’m reading: “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion, from her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

I’m drinking: a warm cup of oolong tea.