she said, "it's getting a little frayed around the edges..."

1. my second-hand bike is propped up against a temple older than my country, and the sun is shining on the empty asphalt road that slithers through the glassy rice fields that led me here. i don't know where i am or what i'm looking at.

2. two friends from opposite sides of an ocean are sitting together on a concrete embankment bordering a river that feeds into a different ocean, drinking beer, sometimes talking, sometimes only listening to the gentle lap of water around their ankles or an occasional car driving over the distant bridge. the moon is low, the mosquitoes are out.

3. at around 3 a.m. in tokyo on a saturday night, an american is sitting in a chair by his desk on the top floor of a shabby, post-war dormitory building, staring into canopy terrorized by wind and rain outside his window, lost in memories of being in love with someone back home in an unconscious effort not to acknowledge a storm of anxiety and loneliness brought on by being foreign in a strange place.

4. i went with my friend and her mother to go see the fireflies in an area of town i'd never been. we parked on the road underneath a weak blue-gray street lamp, the only source of light other than dozens of twinkling, soft specks floating somewhere between us and the inscrutable blackness of the forest. we took our time, hovering, like the fireflies, from light source to light source in disconnected silence.