When I arrived, the blossoms were still dancing in the air.

The sky was wide and clear, that soft spring blue that always feels full of possibility. The sun warmed my skin.

I had landed right in the middle of Tokyo’s short, beautiful season, where everything feels suspended for a moment.

One night soon after I arrived, I found myself at the smoke-filled yakitori store I’ve come to nearly every day since.

In just two weeks, I had slipped in like a regular.

The staff call out my name and greet me with a smile; the regulars give me a few winks, like I’ve always been here.

Some nights, I talked with a tired salaryman, half-laughing, half-serious, as he vented about Trump and the looming rice shortages.

Other nights, it was two pro golfers, talking about their summer house in California and asking about Australia like it was some faraway rumour.

There was the married couple too, my close friends who, between rounds of beer and grilled beef heart and chicken skin, theorised what the pyramids were really used for, our feverish conversation making the theories wilder the later it got.

Small, passing conversations but somehow they stuck.

Tonight, the rain is pouring down hard.

It drums against the roof and turns the streets into a surrealist mirror.

Tomorrow, I go back home back to my usual spots and I’ll disappear from here, just like I did before I came.

Life works like that sometimes: you slip into a place, make it yours for a little while, and then move on.

I’m reflecting tonight.

My relationship with Tokyo has always been complicated.

I act like a local, but I’m not.

I fit in, but I know I don’t belong.

Coming back here calms me in a way no other place can.

One day, I know I’ll live here again, I just don’t know when, or how.

I’ll wait and see.

Like the city itself, this trip has been layered, shifting slightly depending on where I stand and how I look at it.

And, like always, it ends just as it gets to the good part.

There was a moment, too, when my two worlds collided.

Friends from Melbourne were here at the same time, and for a few days we explored the city together, wandering through some streets I had never thought I would be sharing and talking about.

It felt strange, seeing Tokyo through their eyes while carrying my own version of it inside me.

For a while, it was as if the two parts of my life, the one I had built back home and the one I slip into here were crashing together, and as weird as it was, fuck, it felt good.

There were so many different parts to this trip.

It’s been a layered and slow burn.

It reminds me of being a kid,just when the night got fun, just when we didn’t want it to end, the parents would call us home.

I guess that feeling never really leaves.

It’s when I let go of expectations, when I stop trying to shape the moment, that the best things seem to happen.

And it’s always then that life steps in and says: Time’s up. Let’s move on.

“I don’t want to go home,” I told my friend yesterday.

But he reminded me that if this was my everyday, I wouldn’t feel the same way about it.

He’s right, I know he is, even if I don’t want to hear it.

My last day has been the most eventful.

It always hits me the hardest.

Why did I meet you on the last day?

Would it have felt different if we had more time?

Maybe it’s because it was short that it meant so much.

I might never even see you again, even though we say we will.

Whatever happens, that’s fine.

Earlier today, I sat by the lake in Inokashira Park.

The air was warm and heavy, the sky bruising with rain, the little paddle boats drifting by.

I sat there talking with you, who, like me, can see ghosts, comparing notes about what we’d glimpsed in the corners of our lives.

It felt strange, and fitting, like a conversation I was meant to have just once and then carry quietly with me.

I can’t imagine falling back into my routine, the same old streets, the same habits, but I know when I do, I’ll still love them, because I always have.

When I travel, I shake things up.

I break my routines.

I live differently for a while.

But I always bring little pieces of it back with me, the new ways of seeing, the small changes that stay.

Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe that’s what it’s all for.

The rain is still falling. My feet are soaked, I’m buzzed from the drinks and my fingers stink of tobacco but I don’t care. 

It’s time.

I’m ready to go home.