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Tokyo was the train window. Like the ride from Narita, it was the motion that carried me from the doldrums that were everyday life into something beautiful, offbeat, and encompassing. What a rush.

I’m the kind of person that looks for the smallest details in things; right down to the way the shingles on the rooftops looked different, the way the colors popped, or what the people were wearing. It’s the amalgamation of minutiae that weave their way together into something organic and exhaustive at every crossing.

Tokyo was falling asleep with jeans on. I’m a creature of comfort and I’m at the point where if you round up my age it gets a whole lot closer to 30. I was like a child. I never knew where I was going (Sorry CAL), I never stopped walking, and I never slept.

Tokyo was the visceral connection of playing even the smallest of parts in stranger’s lives. The sights are gorgeous but buildings and scenery fade. The interactions with people are what embed themselves — you never forget the way people make you feel. Someone once told me that ‘if the sun can affect you, then what makes you doubt that a living breathing person cannot?’ Tokyo reaffirmed the belief that people can tap into your psyche in ways that other things fail to.

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There was a father and daughter on the monorail to Odaiba. We were inside the first train car and he was sitting on a front-facing bench with her on his lap. From the window, you could see Rainbow Bridge and she seemed as mesmerized to see it as I was to be halfway across the world. It was movie-esque. And I was there to catch that otherwise minor moment in that particular time and a place. And maybe my effect on it was nil but the imprint it had on me is something I will carry with me for a very long time.

My time there was undeniably one of those pivotal and formative moments of my adult life because, for one of the first times, I remembered what it felt like to feel as though I was moving — away from the norm, away from the stagnation and free to do what I wanted to do in that moment.

It was a space where I felt most quintessentially myself and I wanted to find a way to make that permanent.

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