health

Avoiding the unavoidable

We are all pretending to uniqueness, I think. In the winter of twenty five I am sick for much of three months. Slow coughs that do not fade, light headaches, stuffed noses, the occasional mysterious fever; each symptom of illness sweeps across me from the direction of our daughter to the direction of my partner. None of us appreciate this pathway, and the months of excellent Hong Kong weather past mostly with sniffles and discontent. We are, in many ways, exhausted, unable to compel our bodies to simply endure.

These are the struggles of toddler-hood, friends assure us. It’ll get better as she gets older.

“We were all sick the whole year our daughter started school,” I hear, which does not carry the reassurance it might, given that we have not yet begun to plan for that next step.

“The winter is the worst,” we are told, as though the season will not come again next year.

We try flu shots, staying indoors, playing outdoors, eating fresh fruit, traveling more, traveling less. We largely fail at the thing that would help most, sleeping more than 3 hours at a stretch. The thin walls, the lack of doors, the uncomfortable plane seats, the strange beds, the late work calls, the early work calls, the toddler, the world, something always prevents a deeper rest, and we pay a knowingly high price.

Fitness suffers, and yet we work out between calls, between travel, between other commitments, such that fitness retains it’s place as the third pillar of our life, after child and work.

We snuggle and hold hands furtively, across her sleeping form on long haul flights, briefly while she naps, or before we start another tough series of calls. We try to grant each other strength we do not feel through willpower alone, and sometimes succeed. In the early evenings we walk through the park to find the children and celebrate the beauty of Hong Kong, of this perfect weather, familiar to those relocated from San Francisco. The tones between 12 and 18 C are our home, and we relish their return, finding hoodies and pants we’d forgotten in Hong Kong’s extended summer sweat. As the sky shifts colors to evening we remind each other how lucky we are to be this tired, to be here and alive, to be parents to this growing human and partners to each other. We celebrate the world and the beauty we have found, even in our partial health, together.

Thus the winter passes.

What reverberates

The view from Toranomon Hospital towards Akasaka as the sun sets

Time with people. Even though they will all be dead soon too, even though the world is on fire, even though our lives are transient and brief. What matters is our time together, regardless of circumstance. Financial capabilities matter only in the service of our friendships, of the time we spend together.

This is to say we’ve spent thousands on plane tickets to weddings.

There’s no where else we would be, nothing else we would really want to do anyway. Our highest ambitions are to spend more time in more places with more people. Sometimes, of course, with just each other. Rarely. Usually with someone we met somewhere else, in a third place that itself contains so many good memories. Be it Houston’s bars and the BMX long board rides to them, be it Denver pick ups in Fits, be it knocks on doors in early San Francisco mornings, or be it odd Hong Kong evenings scouting the server’s pants at a local bar.

They’re all the moments we travel for, the moments we save and work and grind and learn and think and grow for. They’re the moments we live in if not for.

All too often now my photos remind me of friends I can no longer call. Of people I can no longer email. Of humans our daughter will never meet.

I can’t say good things about those moments, other than that I am lucky to have met so many people, here or gone, in the country I was born to or in those I no longer live in. In countries I never have. For each of those memories I am lucky, and for all the memories we’ve already made that I am not yet so poignantly attached to. May I not be for quite a while more.

Walking towards Toranomon Hospital from a business hotel in Shimbashi at eight am on a Sunday I am grateful. I am finally certain of release, and that this hospital will be just one more story, one more odd memory. I am grateful to be here, then, in the July sunshine, in Tokyo, in the early morning summer not-yet-heat. I am grateful for my partner, for our daughter, for the friends we saw here, for the friends we missed seeing here. For my roommate, more than twenty years ago now, who came down from Tochigi to go for a long walk with each of us, give us a break from our own worries. I’m grateful for the friends who messaged, who looked after our cat, and who share their own worries.

I’m grateful to be human and alive, for however long it lasts. It’s wonderful to know so many people in so many ways. No matter where we may be.