a traumatic afternoon at the department store

2pm, Sunday, drifting time. Let's get lost. I’m laughing at a loaf of bread that costs 924 yen. That’s nearly £7. omg a free sample…I’ve just eaten £3 of free samples. Now, what’s that? nori seaweed sheets. Huh, 10,500 yen?!!! (£75). Isn’t it just a shitload of nori? Or does it hold magical powers? Who knows? Fake cake. Jaffa cake, fairy cake. I’m drifting around a mountain of salad.

There is nothing quite like the Japanese department store. It is something else. Maybe I just haven’t experienced such spaces back home…what about Harrods’ food hall? It isn’t quite like this though…I’m sure. England is just so crappy. England is a collection of half arsed attempts that never get completed. I really hate it.

Actually

This place (E.g. every department store in Japan, nay, the world) is hell. An anarchist’s nightmare. This space is meaningless. imagine centuries and aeons before when the department store didn’t exist, Shinjuku wasn’t anything. It didn’t have a name. Perhaps it was a glade. Or a beautiful windswept moor or rice paddies or a tiny, smoky village by a dewy forest or maybe Shinjuku was just a barren wilderness. If that’s the case, well then maybe nothing’s changed.

It is an impossible feeling to describe. Pain rushing through my fingers because if you weren’t there I would be completely stranded. Watching you spend £200 on biscuits and crackers. When I watch you doing that, I just want to disappear. I feel sad for you, that I haven’t yet disappeared. I know that you aren’t responsible for me: that nobody is responsible for me. But right now, I am completely dependent on you. And that when I go home I won’t be able to afford dinner. That the only reason I’ll get home is because you paid for my ticket. And I have to smother the little voice in my head that says ‘hungry’ or ‘want to go there’ or ‘need toothpaste.’ I can’t afford to listen to that little voice now. I soothe it by reminding myself that I haven't yet gone hungry and my teeth are all still intact.

It makes going to the department store easier, because when faced with infinite consumer choices remember that you only have one: take nothing. Oh, and feel sorry that you ever tried to imagine what it would be like otherwise.

I’ve never felt this disempowered and useless. I’ve never wanted to get the hell out of my own life more than I do right now.
It makes drinks hard to swallow, food hard to swallow. Tears are hard to control, when everything else is so brutally restrained. Fear is only half a heartbeat away; the fear that something might happen, and then I’d be completely fucked. I’m drifting through Tokyo knowing that there is no money and there is no backup and that I am completely alone in this barren wilderness.