the post-pcs diary Author's Note: After a cumulative seven years in a foreign country, you'll have to give some kind of tribute to the place where you did most of the growing up. (If I sound preachy, please shoot me.) Since January of this year, 2008, I've written many tributes to Japan, the country and the people and the memories, and this poem is among the first few that spluttered out of my tiny system. I have taken miles of road and tried to shorten them: laid my blush-flushed memories down on pavement, hastily hid road signs with my face: DON'T GO THIS WAY, TURN AROUND, STAY THERE, WHERE I CAN FIND YOU. I have established a long-distance phone line; hooked it up to the earrings of pavement lovers. I tell them, I AM YOUR WOMAN OF TIME ZONES. You are six o'clock, he is nine AM, and over here it is much too early, or much too late-- I cannot tell, anymore. I just call. During the last week of December I attempted to cram an entire country into a camera, my mouth, my tiny bundles of nerve cells pumping sloppily into my system: THIS IS WHAT MISSING PEOPLE FEELS LIKE, SUCK IT UP. But I choose not to suck anything up: this is sadism in out-of-country form. I am starting to hurt, from my tiny fist-sized organ outward: I am starting to bleed MISS YOUs, CALL YOUs and MY PHONE CARD IS RUNNING OUT OF MINUTESs. I buy minutes for my phone card. I waste saliva trying to speak too fast. I put my grades in danger and write letters that I will never send. ("DEAR FRIENDS: DO YOU KNOW WHY I AM FAILING THIS CLASS!?") I have taken chunks of ocean and inhaled them in a wild attempt to bring us closer together, because I have bought these feelings and they are still fresh--do not salt my wound. Do not salt it: I'll lick it, instead, and call you this weekend, and the weekend after next, until the ocean in my voice dries out and the posters of my face on the road peel off, from too much exposure to the sun. back