city lights

♛ japan

CHAPTER TWO

            ✈ ✈ ✈ JAPAN

            When you get lost in people, you get hurt; but when you get lost in cities, you get an adventure. I've given up on people a long time ago, probably because they've long since given up on me, so there's only one thing I live for now: Adventure.

You've got this whole treasure map right in front of you. You've got all these roads that lead to secret waterfalls (hipster cafes), underground oases (thrift shops), snake pits (school), and jungles (malls), but the big question, the gigantic enigma of life, is what's the treasure? Where's the X marks the spot?

I don't know. I've devoted my entire life to find out, so there's no rush here, but it would be nice if people would stop raining on my parade.

I met a pirate once. He took the form of my Advanced English teacher named Mr. Edgar. He had this nervous twitch in his left eye and a bad knee that made him limp around the classroom like he had a wooden peg as a leg. His head was balding with age, which in my opinion gave him more of a reason to wear a pirate hat to school. He would have been less of a jack-ass if he did. He even had a parrot, and his name was Stephen – he sat in the front row, right in front of Mr. Edgar's desk, and repeated everything that Mr. Edgar said. He said get your books. He said quiet. He said this and he said that, I swear there was more than one occasion where I would have loved to shove a cracker in his mouth just to make polly shut up. In this case, Stephen was literally the teacher's pet. Mr. Edgar's penmanship was also really bad, like if someone had a hook as a hand and had to hold a pen, that was what his handwriting would have looked like. I never could understand the comments he put on my papers, but what I do know is that they were never the good kind of comments. They were always discouraging and mean and that's what made Mr. Edgar a pirate – he stole my dreams of being a writer like they were his treasure and hoarded it all to himself, like he was the only one capable of being able to write well or something. I wouldn't even be surprised if he had this treasure chest filled with children's dreams or something.

My mom and dad also says I can't be a writer, but for different reasons. My mom's a lawyer, so she thinks writing is a waste of my photographic memory, which I've already said repeatedly isn't all that photographic; I just happen to remember things easier than most people do, but it's nowhere near perfect. My dad, who's an Economics professor, says writers don't make a lot of money these days. I did say that those things didn't matter because I wanted to do what I loved to do, but they just said, “Son, someday you'll realize that not everything you want to do is what you need to do, and not everything you love is what you need.”

And they were right. I mean, we like to think parents are never right, but in this case, they were right. They were right because when I started my freshman year in college I lost an arm – my right arm, my writing arm, my dominant arm. And just like that, what I wanted to do wasn't what I needed to do, and what I loved wasn't what I needed. Just like that.

It's hard to be a freak. It's hard to suddenly be something that you never were. It's hard to re-learn how to live and do everything with just one arm. But the hardest part is the people. You get sympathy points for a while, because aw look at that poor kid he's got an arm chopped off, but after a while the sympathy turns into ew look at that poor kid he's got an arm chopped off.

You can see why I gave up on the people.

I didn't let my arm getting chopped off turn me into a pirate like Mr. Edgar, though. I didn't want to turn into a grouchy, bitter, old man like him just because life didn't treat me the way I wanted it to. I mean at first, yeah, it was pretty crappy. But I'm just glad I'm alive, because I could have died. I could have, but I didn't, and somehow that small fact makes everything around me seem a little bit more amazing. It's what made me realize that we've got an adventure in our hands and we're wasting it all by being some kind of clueless fish in the vast ocean that go everywhere and nowhere all at once. No, I didn't let myself be a pirate. I don't want to steal children's dreams. I want to be that child who had that dream that a pirate would be drooling all over to steal, that one big dream that made every other dream seem like a speck of stardust in the endless galaxy.