3` "What was that?"

As I meandered toward the buses stationed at the outer Narita gate, thoughts twirled and jived in the folds of my brain to an audience that was reluctant to watch. Like printing personal currency, the dance number taking place in my head was a completely useless process with an even more useless result. After several hundred meters of distracted walking, I realized that my frolicking thoughts were crowding out the Tokyo that I'd come to see. After all, even if it was an airport, I figured I'd better take in as much of the place as I could.

I told the hyper dancers up top to quit their mind-numbing rehearsals and focused all my attention on the ground, the ceiling, the windows and, of course, the people.

You could tell this was an international airport. Its many veins and arteries were pumping with incongruous crowds of nationalities and ethnicities, bespeckled with faces that seemed to exist as living confirmations of the much touted proverb "everybody's different." My pace grinded nearly to a halt as I felt my visage morph to fit the many faces that floated in and out of my field of vision. I had never realized that I was so competent a metamorpher. Calvin & Hobbes' Transmogrifier through and through.

I felt the contours of my face. Unchanged. They must morph only when I don't pay attention, I mused. But I must be changing. How could I not be?

After another few hundred meters, which seemed like far less because of those affable escalator-type walkways that line the massive hallways of most airports, I reached the gate marked “Exit.” Well, not that I could understand what was written, but I could tell by the picture – and as such, a very symbolic exit. Try as I may, I could not convince myself that this was merely one more step in the pavement-shattering trek on which I'd embarked, that I was merely planting another degree-bending foot forward. This was surely a leap; or maybe a step over the realistically nonexistent border between two countries that are on opposite ends of the earth -- an environmental shift that even the least observant of walkers would be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice.

The airport, and all that it stood for, dissolved behind me. With a mere few inches of movement, my entire several-hundred meter walk was erased from existence. The ancient proverb I had recollected earlier was suddenly engulfed by a massive wave and dragged out to sea to idle about until I would return ten days later. My face stopped transforming, but not because it was incapable but because it could find nothing new to mimic. The dancers up top finally stopped dancing somewhere in a distant stage. The world suddenly shrunk, the heterogeneous shake that it once was suddenly congealed into pure and solid milk, and I was peering directly into it, thirsty but restricted. No matter how much my visage tried to perfect its imitation of the milk, I was still an orange peel floating on its surface. Not appetizing, to say the least. Without warning, my face went blank again. Suddenly, I felt alone again. An orange peel in milk. But still, I felt the liquid seeping into me as I began to sink; maybe I wasn’t so alone, after all.

4` A Cold Door >>