holding your weather in my palm

there are seasons for love and seasons for being alone

I know it is summer in Tokyo because of course it is, but I also know because of the constant buzz of the cicadas, my ravenous and intense craving for ice cream and cold, slimy bowls of noodles, for sweet amazake before bed and mostly, because every time I step outside I think what the fuck is this even though I know what it is.

It is summer in Tokyo.

It is proof the earth is becoming hotter.

It is proof, to me, that humans are hanging on by a thread.

I think about it a lot. The fact that many of us alive on earth right now may not have the pleasure of comfortably making it to old age. I know it may not seem like it, but I mean this in a non-dramatic, mostly optimistic way.

Take the trip! Buy the dress! Say no to the dude who is wasting your time! Eat a whole pizza on a Tuesday night! Do the things you’ve always wanted to do! The earth will survive, but will we?! It’s all up for grabs! Why not take a chance while you still can!

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I’ve always been a weather person.

The weather app on my phone is a strange and constant source of comfort for me.

I not only have the weather of my current location loaded, neatly tucked away, but the weather of the cities all my favourite people live in. There’s Tokyo and Osaka, Sydney and Melbourne. My home town. Theres New York and Copenhagen. Theres California and Paris too, a thin thread connecting me to studio members who live all over the world. I check the weather app at least once a day. Criss-crossing timezones in my head, planning classes, scheduling appointments, feverishly hoping I haven’t made a mistake, yet again.

When I taught yoga in studios and tall office buildings, I was not hyper-vigilant about timezones, but google maps. Sometimes I would take six different forms of public transport in a day. Buses were always late, or didn’t turn up at all. I’d leave at least thirty spare minutes for every scheduled class. I listened to podcasts, scrolled instagram, wrote poetry and planned sequences in the notes app of my phone. I fantasised about a life of not being in constant motion all the time. When I arrived at that place however, I hardly acknowledged it. I beat myself up for being lazy and unproductive with all that extra time. For not growing my business at breakneck speed now I had the privilege of working from home instead of the back of the 370 bus or the yoga studio floor.

When someone I love moves to a new place, or travels to a new location, I add their weather to my app. I never collected pokemon cards, but I’ve collected the places of all the people I’ve ever loved. All the places from where they’ve asked me about my day as I was getting into bed. All the streets they sent voice notes from. When I make a travel plan, I do the same. I’ve never not had the Tokyo weather loaded onto my phone. Sometimes I wonder if this is why I ended up here. It wasn’t the hard work and the dreaming and the striving, it was the fact that every time I opened my phone to check if I might need an extra layer, an umbrella in my bag, I had a glimpse of Tokyo, a whisper from my future home.

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Earlier this year, I was sitting across from a man I dated for a couple of months, back when it was still cold.