in the blue of my oblivion

I think of the sea when I need comfort. Sometimes I'm looking out at it from the shoreline. Others, I am beneath a wave and gazing up, awash in blue. Rarer yet, I imagine being swept away by the tide.

Though I have loved Tokyo dutifully and intimately, it does not have easy access to the ocean. I have written extensively about all the little things I love about this city; I think I'm due to write about one that I don't. 

I know that it's not Tokyo's fault that this happened to me, and yet the city seems to oscillate between being a place that I love and a place of nightmares. It is at once a place where the environment is hostile and the people uncaring, but also a city of dreams and infinite possibilities. The truth (whatever that may be) of the matter is obscured by blood and tears. 

There's a distinct before and after, marked by the agonizing death of my belief that humans are intrinsically good. Where I used to be open and curious, I find an urge to be silent and withdrawn. As I go about my day, I look at the people around me and feel that they must all hate me, that they must wish me harm in ways horrible and inconceivable. And if I was not very careful, they would enact their cruelty the moment I turned my back. I never used to think like this. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I used to believe that people, on the whole, wished me well because that is how I naturally felt about them. With a mingled sense of sadness and rage, I mourn the end of what I had hoped was eternal optimism. 

I no longer feel that anyone will make the earnest effort to love me without hurting me. Such innocent and sincere intimacy seems like a wild fantasy. 

And so, I return to the sea in my mind, where the sun is warm on my face, and I feel safe. Nobody can hurt me here. Here, I am free from the expectations of the outer world. I am even free from my own burning desires to be loved and touched tenderly by a man. Are men even capable of such touch? Of tenderness without an ulterior motive? It disturbs me that my mind is even thinking in such absolutes; I'd always thought I was better than that, more intelligent than generalizations. But alas, I am not. 

I can only hope that time will put things back in their rightful place. 

I have changed, and I do not yet know if it's for the better.