Ephemeral Haven

During my junior year of high school, there were a bunch of Japanese students that came to visit my boarding school for a weekend. I was in my first year of Japanese instruction at the time, but was a total overachieving weeb, so my Japanese was probably the most conversational out of the group of students that were assigned to hosting them (which isn’t saying much… it was and is still pretty basic but it helped to create common ground much more quickly). They were visiting to help with and experience our school’s night of nations, and apparently a new group came every few years. The Japanese students knew English better than we knew Japanese for sure so it wasn’t too hard to communicate back and forth.

The student I spent my weekend with was an awesome guitarist named Do Hiroyuki or Hiro as I called him. The few days were in all honesty nothing to really write home about in the things that we ended up doing. We mostly followed the schedule of the events happening on campus over the weekend but the Saturday morning before anything had started, he wanted to go into downtown Andover to see more of the place. We ended up getting breakfast at this bagel place called Bruegger’s that was connected to the local Starbucks. We spent hours talking over good breakfast sandwiches and good coffee. Most of the talk was about our interests, mostly in the world and what we wanted to experience in it, but that obviously lead into talking about our interests in each other’s cultures and countries. Conversation was often slow and clunky as we were trying to convey more complicated and personal matters of opinion and experience to each other, but not for a second did I feel like either of us thought that it was too much of a hassle to figure out exactly what the other was trying to convey… and that feeling was much more profound than I guess I realized at the time.

Unfortunately, the time I spent with Hiro falls roughly into a period of depression where nothing really sticks out very clearly any more, as a muddled mess of days blurred together into one huge mess. As such I cant accurately recall very many of the details of conversation as it was also quite some time ago, but there was a section where we finally started talking about music an what music meant to us. At a base level the conversation was about our likes and dislikes (It was super funny when he called my taste in Jrock basically the japanese equivalent to underground or hipster rock with bands that weren’t actually very popular whereas he spent time naming off some of the most well known rock legends of the western world). However, there was this moment when we were talking about liking songs we didn’t necessarily understand in the other language, just from the sound of music and how sound could convey a message that was more or less accurate even before we looked up translations. We talked about how meanings seemed to always shine through for us in the things that we knew we loved regardless of how many people criticized us for it and it was that moment where I felt like we were genuinely two people on the same page. That a connection was formed through genuine interest, no matter how clumsily or long it took us, to form it, there was a genuine type of connection that was created that I felt like our interests and mindsets pushed us to want to form.

As I said, at the time, it was nothing more than a feeling and nothing really seemed to stop and hit me until he had to leave for his flight back to japan with his class. I was in class when this happened so we ended up saying goodbyes rather early, but one of my friends at the time was able to see Hiro one last time before he left our campus and Hiro gave her one of his guitar picks to give to me as a memento I received later that day along with a promise to maybe someday in the future to play guitar together no matter how clumsily or long it took us to do so.

Hiro and I haven’t talked much at all since he left. We kept up for a little bit through facebook and at least make sure to wish each other happy birthdays, but distance and the business of life definitely keeps our friendship stuck as more of a happy memory and the promise than anything more…