Cutscene: Passenger
Oh, honey.
When things get complicated, I always do this. I start these letters to you. Usually I never finish them. I almost certainly never send them. I know that we didn't leave things on the best of terms and I wouldn't want to be so cruel as to try and explain that in a letter. I prefer to do that face to face. But here I am... here we are?
Life in China was a drag. I may have been cured of my attraction to older men, which is as catastrophic a development as I could ever imagine happening. He was chubby and jowly. He barely had eyebrows, and it was like furrowed rolls of fat that little black beads peeked out from under... He didn't even shave his ass crack, which is the height of human barbarity and something that almost makes me believe in the concept of "sin." He was the most exhausting kind of scumbag, the one who'd gone straight without actually doing anything. You know... sanctimonious. He used to be something or other and then he became a music publisher, and made his money off of idol groups, or whatever they called them there. Bossing around young girls, a specialty. Ha. Ha.
I'll spare you the gruesome details. He made fun of my scars. He said I wasn't even fun to choke because it was like pressing his thumbs to a beat-up leather jacket. I might send this, after all, and I don't want to incriminate myself... But afterwards, his wife let us go in a panic. Bad enough to explain to the police, you know... Add on top of that three girls... She gave us the drugs he'd kept in reserve, I guess as kind of a two birds with one stone kind of thing, and told us to go. So we went. We stuck together for a little bit and then the other two died. Bad drugs, I guess. You can never be sure what some people will put in your shit...
I'm writing in Germany, now. I remember a while back, a trip I took, and I had some good times here. I thought about going to Spain, or England, but I didn't have enough money to get that far. I sold all the drugs to pay for my false papers and transportation. I spent entire train rides sweating and puking and wanting to die. You used to accuse me of being so selfish... funny, huh?
Germany is nice, though. At night, Berlin looks like a movie... The way the car lights whizz down the highways, the perpendicular lines the buildings make with the roads... the mise-en-scene is too good to be true, it feels like... Everyone seems to speak English, too. But I've been working on my German, and it's getting better. They say there's nothing like dropping yourself into the middle of something to teach you.
Speaking of that... I feel like I'm evading the real reason I want to write to you. Would you even want to know? I'm writing because I don't know the answer to that question. I can hear your voice, I can guess, but the way you sound is distant, and fuzzy. I feel like I'm losing track of you. I cried the other day, thinking about that. I've been having trouble keeping my emotions in check. It's terrible. Being sober is a breeze compared to that.
When I got to Germany, I didn't have much money left. So I bounced around from squat to squat while I picked up the language. I'm nice and legal here, just so you know. Even if they think my name is something else. Should I even put that in a letter? What if Big Brother is watching? Ha. Ha. Ha. But trying to get real work would risk people finding out about things, so I had to keep it low key and under the table. I sing in a nightclub some nights. It makes me think about my cafe... I wonder how it's doing. My voice is still rough... but the people call it "smoky" or "husky"... they like it. I'm good at the songs that are about heartbreak, and love that's bad for you, and that stuff. But I'll probably have to stop singing soon, because I won't be able to get up on stage...
I think about you often. I bet you don't think about me. That's sad.
Since I got the nightclub gig I've met a bunch of guys, but the German guys are too much like vampires, and after China... I don't know. I don't even want to fuck women anymore, let alone men. Sex with another human being seems like the most lonely, desperate thing someone can do. It's what you'd do if you were stranded on Mars and the spaceship went back home without you... And now... I don't even remember their names. It's a blur. Even without drinking, even without smack. Did you know Billie Holiday did a lot of smack? I wonder if you heard me sing, whose singing you'd like more...
But I probably can't stay here like this. I read about home on the Internet. I might come back. I saw a list, it said Inaba was one of the top five places to raise a child.
Love always,
Mariko
