“Doesn’t react immediately to actions in his vicinity.”

This always stuck with me.

I thought of my response weeks later:

Well yeah, just bc this fool doesn’t overwhelmingly affirm every damn thing you do like you woke organizer fucks be doing.

Doesn’t obviously support every stance you take on this or that endlessly complicated, nuanced, inescapably dual-sided issue we, as Americans—eating off the system, whether explicitly ‘supporting’ it or not—are complicit in.

That understated, observant, withholding social mode might, could possibly be, some Japanese shit you just don’t get.

When I was first running out of weed bands, spring after I came out to Philly, my uncle N, Mama’s bro, who lived in Tokyo still with my baba, hit me and my sisters with that quick $5K bundle, an advance on whatever inheritance he would throw us when he passed (he unmarried and childless).

It came outta the blue, and we didn’t know why, were slightly worried he had some medical condition he wasn’t telling us about.

Even my mama, she didn’t know.

“Baba won’t say what happened. I think they got into some fight.”

“What about Uncle N? You talk to him?”

“Ha. Seanie. We don’t talk.”

This always baffled me. I never understood why they didn’t.

“Seanie, you know Baba. She doesn’t like to talk about stuff like that. Doesn’t like to admit anything is wrong. When she fell and broke her hip, she just lay there. Didn’t call anyone. Till N finally got back from work late that night.”

“Did she have a phone? You gotta get her a phone.”

“We got her a phone,” my mama said.

She then diverted from the fact she hadn’t, since leaving Japan in her twenties, ever had a conversational relationship with her brother. She told me about a book on World War Two she was reading. How Baba reiterated what the book said when my mama told her that, even after the first bomb dropped, first week of August 1945, the government was rallying the women and children, telling them to get whatever bamboo sticks they could find. To keep fighting.

“Bamboo sticks!” my mama said. “When what they were dealing with was another atomic bomb. No one even knew.

“Till that second week of August, when the second one hit.

“But that’s the Japanese way: put your head down, erase your feelings, and keep pushing to the bitter end.”

Later that week I remember I linked with ex bae.

This weeks before that call in which she told me she was done.

We were at the Green Line on Baltimore, reading together like we used to at that Green Line before I walked.

Sitting across from each other, footsying, maybe splitting earbuds.

Going in on our own, but next to each other.

Content with silence in lieu of each other’s presence.