You only live twice.

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five


The first time I lived Monday, December 14, 2009, it began somewhere in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. My eyes absorbed the snaked neon of incomprehensible characters that comprised the world above and around me. Standing on the pavement and looking straight up, the buildings were so tall as to appear curved, like a serpent's teeth from the perspective of inside its jaws. The view of someone who can't escape. In so many ways, after over four months on the road, I didn't want to.

I can't tell you exactly where I began Monday, December 14, 2009 the second time I lived it. It was somewhere between cans of Kirin, 34,000 feet above the seemingly interminable Pacific Ocean. It was either during conversation or a well deserved sleep, not just after staying out all night and all day to close out my time in Tokyo, but after 146 days of distance between myself and Los Angeles. 146 sunrises away from home.

At 10 a.m. I was sitting next to Corey Irwin, driving back from the airport, inhaling some of my first breaths of Los Angeles air. But four hours later, at 2 p.m., I was thinking about how I had not seen anyone I knew (other than Kelly and Cory Santos) for nearly five full months. I was still anticipating how those first few handshakes and hugs would go, even though they had somehow already happened.

At noon I was eating a burger with Jenn at The Counter in Santa Monica, but at the same time I was also eating phenomenal sushi in the basement of the Seibu building in Tokyo. I was enjoying medium-rare beef, sweet potato fries, sweet shrimp nigiri, the greatest slice of raw toro I could imagine, washing all of this down with a Sprite Zero, with a crisp glass of Suntory Malts draft, exchanging glances with LA models, exchanging glances with Japanese cougars.

At 9 p.m. I was cramped in seat 41E talking to Vinnie, a sailor in the U.S. Navy who was going back home to Palm Springs to spend his two-week leave with his family. We were ordering more rounds of Kirin while talking about our various experiences in Tokyo, his time in Singapore, mine in Egypt. At 9 p.m. I was lounging in a leather chair at South, surrounded by friends I've known for months, years, and decades, sharing some of the same stories, but with a bigger smile on my face this time around.

Flux. The name for this paradox is flux. For 21 weeks I have lived a life that seemed impossible. So why not break the laws of physics, be in two places at the same time, and live forty-two hours on Monday, December 14, 2009 that embodied that surrealism.
At 9 a.m. I was standing in a queue at LAX, waiting to go through customs. I was filling out a landing card that asked me to list the countries I had been to on this visit and that provided two small lines of empty space for a response. All I wrote was "29."

At 9 a.m. I was standing on the grounds of the Zozo-ji Temple by Tokyo Tower, looking at rows of tiny memorial statues, lovingly tended to and dedicated to mizuko. I was meditating in front of the larger statue of Jizo, the Bodhisattva and protector of travelers. With emotions building, with gentle tears in my eyes for having to give up this life I had led for the past few months, I was doing the one last symbolic act I felt compelled to do to end my time not merely in Tokyo, or Japan, but on this trip entire.

In the theoretically complex modern-age-crossing of the international date line, he wasn't just about to safely guide me home. Even though I was standing on pebbles and blades of grass in Tokyo, he somehow already had.

And at 9 a.m. I was thanking him.


Tokyo:http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2119845&id=35804394&l=9cd01795b6