#0030 | sometimes, getting lost

Submitted by Patrick in Denver, Colorado.

Here’s Patrick’s story:

“When I was in Tokyo a couple years ago, I did a lot of wandering. I made my way through most of the major parts of the city, hopping subway trains like a drifter, picking a station that looked interesting, and exploring wherever I was spit out. I saw all the glass-and-chrome skyscrapers and the waves of neon lights that flow at night between them.

But what left maybe the biggest impression on me were the simple, unaffected parts of the city, where nothing was trying to project itself or say anything to me.

I spent an afternoon wandering the fashionable Harajuku district, but in my ambling and my gawking I veered off in some arbitrary direction and found myself completely lost. I ended up in a residential neighborhood, the closest thing I encountered to suburbia while in Tokyo. I was walking down narrow pathways between houses, and could see into some of them, mostly through back doors. The tiny back yards were littered with clotheslines and brightly-colored toys. People rode by quietly, happily, on bicycles, the occasional car made its way slowly through the narrow street, and no one gave me–an awkward foreigner–a second glance.

Everything was so quiet and peaceful and completely unalien, even though I haven’t felt that way in America for years, since I was a kid.

I wandered for an hour or two through those labyrinthine neighborhoods, but I didn’t get bored or tired. I didn’t take photographs like a foreigner, didn’t try to check a map. I just walked. Eventually I surfaced somewhere in Aoyama and found a recognizable subway entrance, found myself on the map.

But for the rest of the day, I missed being aimless and lost.”