You felt like a German Christmas…

 

I bought a cake and a coke for you tonight. A large coke with a little reindeer in the corner. Returning home, I remembered that I’m out of cigars. I wanted some big Cubans, but the cigar shop was already closed. I couldn’t bring myself to buy normal cigarettes. Returning home, I passed by an Italian pasta restaurant. On the window, I noticed some interesting packs of cigarettes. I went in and asked. Found a brand that said “Keith: Mild. Little Cigars. Caffe Late.” I turned the air con into sucking mode, to trick the three smoke detectors in my little Japanese apartment. I drank coke through a straw and smoked my little cigars. Past midnight. 12:50. I called your name three times, Holly, Holly, Holly, as if it was a rule of the Tradition of the Moon. Then I tried Loni and Brida, as if they were your past reincarnations. No answers came. “Stupid, silly modern men”, I thought, as I smoked my little cigars from the pasta shop and drunk coke from the straw. Will I ever go back?, I asked myself, for no reason.

“A German is coming in the spring”, our lab’s secretary words rose in my memory, “will you take care of her?”. I had looked at her with a confused look. “Take care? Are you asking me to murder her or sleep with her?”, I almost asked, but I knew something had been lost in translation, in that Wasei-eigo (和製英語) type of speaking.

“She doesn’t speak Japanese and I thought you can help her, especially since you also lived there”. I didn’t know how the two were related, but I said that I will do my best, if I’m still here. By early spring, I have to make a decision on the contract, but I know they don’t expect me to leave.

“Oh, it must be so hard for your mum, because you are the only son”, said Ai, the editor of Newton magazine, for which I wrote a small piece and she invited me to stay for a cup of coffee. “She must miss you badly. I wish you had another brother”. I wondered if there was something wrong with the way people were talking, the way they were putting words together, or if it was it just me. I felt a little bit like when Aomame went down the staircase  in Murakami’s 1Q84.

Anyway, tonight a drank coke for you. There was no gingerbread, roast goose red cabbage nor stollen cakes but still… you felt like Christmas…

Love always,

Maxtron Moon/*54745756836*/